neurotranscendence

neurotranscendence 2.0 —>

2007-09-03T18:33:00.001-07:00

Hey, I have a fancy-schmancy new dedicated domain for this here blog, and since the hardest part of moving is leaving friends behind, I’m really, really hoping you’ll visit me at my new location:

www.neurotranscendence.com

Best friends forever—

Scout

about those goats…

2007-08-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

I make kind of a lousy sister, which distresses me not least because I’ve always harbored fantasies about how different my life might have been had my parents produced exclusively X chromosomes. A sister wouldn’t have intimated to me, just after our 1972 move, that our house’s former occupants, a family of four just like us, had all been murdered in my new bedroom. A sister wouldn’t have confined me in a padlocked homemade coffin until she could no longer hear my panicked hollering, later blithely noting that so long as I was able to shout she knew I still had oxygen. A sister would never have seized my clip-on bear collection and demanded the king’s ransom of two weeks’ allowance for its safe return.

Those of you with sisters may disagree with any or all of the above. Still, even if a blood-relative American sister could turn out to be a sadist just as easily as my blood-relative American brother, my Rwandan sister would never be so cruel, a certainty that makes me feel so much the worse that Veneranda Nyiahabimana, my first Women for Women International sister match, received neither correspondence nor goats as a result of my sponsorship.

It’s conceivable that Veneranda, given the option, simply didn’t care for any livestock at this time. Had I bothered to write, I might have gleaned more about her attitude toward goats by offering up my own goat anecdotes. I could have told her about the time, when I was in junior high, that a goat in the petting zoo at Knott’s Berry Farm—"America’s 1st theme park!"—cost me what felt at the time like a small fortune by eating the unlimited ride pass hanging from my belt loop, forcing me to buy another or face a rideless future—the future being the succeeding six hours or so. Then maybe I would have explained the U.S. concept of theme parks and why American children would want to go somewhere and pet goats.

I kept meaning to write. WFWI urges that sponsored women benefit as much from kind words as from material support. But the best intentions stretched before me until, finally, I received notice in late July informing me that Ms. Nyiahabimana had graduated from the 12-month program. (All sponsorship matches are limited to one year, at which time program participants are encouraged to put any acquired job skills and micro-enterprise financing to work, and sponsors are encouraged to make peace with the idea that while they may feel they’ve made a forever sister, their material support will henceforth be transferred to a spanky new sister.) I was delighted to see that Veneranda had provided her address for future correspondence, indicating that it’s never too late to right a wrong—provided I can locate someone versed in Kinyarwanda, because WFWI furnishes translation services only for active sponsorship relationships.

Despite my lax correspondence, I was eager to learn how Veneranda felt she had benefited from the program. And while I was disappointed that her exit interview didn’t address her lack of enthusiasm for goats, I was pleased that she noted improvements in her general housing conditions, health, self-confidence, and awareness of civil rights. And if I was at first chagrined that she listed knitting as her sole field of skills training undertaken, I quickly gathered that Rwandan women approach the craft with far less irony than do any of my stateside knitting friends.

Unemployed when our partnership began last year, Veneranda now identifies as self-employed in a nonagricultural (i.e., goat-disinterested) activity. She still struggles in raising five children, two of whom are hers by birth. The other three, she says, are nieces and nephews whose mothers, her sisters, are dead, as are her own parents. She has no husband.

Veneranda was around 15 at the time of the Rwandan genocide, and her living situation practically maps its ongoing social repercussions: Around 10% of Rwanda’s citizens were killed during that three-month period in 1994, leaving hundreds of thousands of orphans in the care of a population that was, when the dust settled, 70% female, thousands of whom were pregnant as a result of rape by militia men. Compounding mass rape with Rwandan laws forbidding abortion under any circumstance, the country now counts as many as 5,000 enfants mauvais souvenir (“children of bad memory”).

Despite such souvenirs, Rwanda’s women have been pressed to put their bad memories behind them. Veneranda, in her brief letters to me, wrote only of the importance of family, her faith in Jesus and prayer, and her gratitude for my sponsorship. “God bless you,” she wrote, or at least that’s how her translator interpreted her handwritten Kinyarwanda. She wondered about my family and living situation; and she requested pictures, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. And that’s where I ran aground in my commitment as Veneranda’s sister.

The money’s easy enough, autodebited monthly from my account such that I hardly even miss it. But interpersonal matters are more complicated. Though I’m anything but closeted in my daily life—and could seriously give a flip how I’m perceived by folks who disapprove of “my lifestyle”—I’ve been at loose ends over just how honestly to describe my family to Veneranda.

“I have a female life partner and we’ve been together for nearly 13 years,” I might write, “which reminds me, how do you feel about President Kagame’s desire to update Rwanda’s penal code by criminalizing consensual same-sex relations?”

Or how about, “I’m pleased to hear that you take solace in your spiritual beliefs, though I don’t myself believe in God.”

Veneranda certainly isn’t in the minority in Rwanda, where 90% of citizens identify as Christian—and only 2% claim no religious affiliation. Roman Catholics account for roughly two thirds of the Christian majority, with the lion’s share of the rest falling to the Anglican Communion, the 77 million–member worldwide religious body currently engaged in a war of wills with the U.S. Episcopal Church, (presently) a province within the Communion that Anglican archbishop and primate (seriously, that’s the term for Anglican grand poobah types) Peter Akinola, who leads the African council of provinces, threatens to excommunicate en masse if the American body won’t stop treating the goddam gays as legitimate folk, a “plunge into unrighteousness” epitomized by the 2003 consecration of openly gay—and noncelibate—V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. Go, ’piscies!

Do not underestimate the vexation felt by Archbishop Akinola over the homo problem: “As we are rightly concerned by the depletion of the ozone layer, so should we be concerned by the practice of homosexuality.”

I’ve been called many things in my life, but this is almost certainly the first time I’ve been likened to a greenhouse gas.

As for Team Roman Catholic, Pope Benedict XVI’s views on homosexuality differ from Archbishop Akinola’s only in tone, and are more influential, articulated as they are from the throne of the head bully of the largest bully pulpit in the world: “[Homosexuality] is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder...”

Now, I know that our affiliations don’t define us. Nor can we each be held accountable for the views and statements of our leaders, religious or otherwise. I would hope, after all, that Veneranda doesn’t collapse my worldview with that of the current U.S. administration. But the words and attitudes of perceived authorities bear influence that doesn’t always confine itself to the philosophical sphere. For instance, according to FBI statistics, hate crime incidents against sexual minorities—gays, lesbians, transgender individuals—spiked by double-digit percentage points during President Bush the Younger’s first term, throughout which he campaigned feverishly for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Lest that spike be confused with some kind of overall trend, violent crime on the whole saw steady decline during those same years.

Rhetoric kills. Rwandan propagandists’ violent exhortations to kill all Tutsis were broadcast on a popular radio station that blended music programming with hysterically pitched political talk shows. The shows' hosts sowed hatred and disgust for Tutsis while convincing rural Hutus that they would face genocide themselves if they failed to eradicate the other—along with any fellow Hutus who refused to join in the slaughter. Such motivations and actions seem far beneath the murkiest depths of human reason, especially as delivered through an entertainment medium, but I don't have to strain very hard to hear Bill O’Reilly’s or Rush Limbaugh’s voice urging listeners to wreak violence and destruction on all who are not like them.

So, what has all this to do with Verneranda? Well, I suppose I wonder if she might be predisposed to hate me. I wonder if Veneranda has been taught to love antigay Rwandan president Paul Kagame, and what he stands for, because his political party’s rise to power ended the genocide—even if it’s widely believed that his party was also responsible for the assassinations and ethnic tensions that led to the genocide in the first place.

Hey, here’s President Kagame with President Bush!

I think my reluctance to write Veneranda hinges on the fact that I know how easy it is to judge someone in the abstract. For instance, I know that there are complicated, thoughtful, open-minded Christians who view Scripture in relative terms and unreservedly accept me, until proven otherwise, as a worthy human being, and one whose sexuality is not pathology. But if all I know about a person is that he or she is a devout Christian, because of my own anecdotal and statistical knowledge, I may not anticipate such generosity of spirit.

Then again, if I fail to casually mention my female life partner and my spiritual disbelief, just as a heterosexual Christian would unreservedly speak of her husband and faith, how is anyone lacking such prior acquaintance to know that gay atheists can actually be pretty OK people?

So, Veneranda, how awesome is it that WFWI brought together two such disparate souls? You, with your unshakable faith in God, despite about a thousand reasons to doubt his presence in your life. Me, with my wary skepticism of the world’s dominant mythologies, despite any number of advantages for which I might offer thanks to some entity larger than myself. You, with your five children, those you’ve borne and those for whom you care because someone must. Me, with my constant nagging, however psychic, about goats—like you need any more “kids.” But even as you reject the goat husbandry lifestyle, I trust that you accept it as a valid way of life, maybe even one that’s “in the blood” for certain folks. Despite our own differences, I hope that we can still be forever sisters, because we actually do have quite a lot in common. We both live in a world where the human appetite for violence is unfathomable, where sexuality is too often weaponized, and where women are often charged with rebuilding what men have destroyed.

I’ll keep your address on hand in hopes of one day finding a translator, but it may be a while; while Kinyarwanda is the dominant language in your country, fluency in same is rare here. I do know someone who can translate my letter into flawless French, and it may be far easier for you to locate a French-Kinyarwanda translator than for either of us to find someone fluent in each of our own languages. That idea, I know, veers perilously close to an actual I Love Lucy plot. Has Lucy ever been translated into Kinyarwanda?

While we sort out our language barrier, I hope it won’t make you feel too much like a test-sister if I go ahead and write to my new sister, Halima Uwimana. I think you would like her. She, too, is a single mother of five, one of whom she bore herself, and she writes that she enjoys praying with her family. She asks after my husband and children and requests a picture—if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I’m sensing a trend here. At any rate, I think I’m ready to address Halima’s questions, and I’ve received a mysterious sign that she’s ready to hear the answers: It may simply be a mistake in translation, but I prefer to think my sister Halima is speaking directly to me when she begins her letter “Dear brother…”

shifting gears

2007-07-16T16:37:00.000-07:00

“Hey, do you guys fix and sell bikes?” a passerby stopped to ask one Sunday as Sporks and I tinkered with our bicycles in the garage.

At first it seemed like a random question, but then I took an objective look at our garage, noting the shop stand; the shelves full of spare pedals, saddles, and other bike parts; two bikes in various states of undress, their tires propped against the fence; and three other bikes hanging about.

“No, sorry,” I said. “We just really like them.”

After a brief discussion about where she might find a cheap used beach cruiser, she went on her way, not realizing, I’m sure, the tribute she had paid me. Imagine me, a bicycle mechanic!

If you’re like me, you seldom appreciate the talents you have, instead eyeing with envy skills you lack. I, for instance, have not as yet revealed anything in the way of musical aptitude. As much as I love music and covet the ability to make it, notes and chords and…stuff aren’t at all intuitive to me. I can poke at keys on a piano or strum something vaguely recognizable on a guitar, but only by rote and not at all soulfully. If only my parents had pushed me to be a well-rounded child, I’ve thought poutily, then I might have developed my musical gifts early, when our skill sets are elastic. And if such had been the case, the reasoning continues, I would undoubtedly be making my living as a singer-songwriter today.

Instead, I make my living as a copy editor. I’m pretty good at it. Give me a muddled manuscript and I can bully it into making sense. I may even be able to make it sing, manipulating the words—mostly the author’s, some my own—and orchestrating the commas and their poorer punctuatorial relations into some kind of musical flow. On especially rare occasions, I’m even artful enough to get away with making up words, like punctuatorial.

But in my continuing quest to decide what I want to be when I grow up, I’ve lately flirted with the idea of going to school to become a bicycle mechanic. Not hard flirting, mind you, rather the kind of flirting one might engage in while already in a committed relationship.

While I’ll admit that, for me, a major industry attractant is the wardrobe, there are others: I enjoy hanging around bike shops, tools are cool, bikes are sexy, and basic bicycle technology—not the quality of components or frame materials but the way a bike works mechanically—has remained static for about a hundred years. That can’t be said of cars, which in a single generation have morphed from the family sedans our dads tinkered with on weekends into vehicles with engine cavities so inscrutable those same dads can only stare forlornly at the tightly packed network of housings and hoses, wishing they could tell us why our goddam “check engine” lights keep flashing.

I got my first taste of wrenching at a hands-on “advanced bicycle maintenance” seminar offered at a local bike shop. I was the only one who showed up, resulting in plenty of personal attention—as well as an earful of sensitive information. My instructor, let’s call him “Dave,” had become a certified mechanic, he said, in response to his fiancée’s demand that he relinquish his former career as a host at swingers’ parties in Chicago. Dave’s was a niche market: He served as a “fluffer” at gatherings of white heterosexual couples who fantasized about having three-ways with black men, he being one such man. Dave didn’t actually have sex with anyone. Rather, his job was to, (a) entertain couples who indulged in the fantasy aspect alone, and (b) prime couples who might be inclined to contract with a hustler, should one happen to be available, coincidentally, at that very same party. Dave may also have appeared in one or two erotic videos, but if he did, he stressed, he didn’t engage in sexual contact—rather, he (may have) played the porn trope of the third-party voyeur, that ubiquitous fellow who stumbles on a couple having sex in, say, the copier room, he being there maybe to fix said copier, and gets so turned on by their naughty public display that he must then remove his own pants and play with his pee-pee. Anyway, his fiancée, a corporate attorney, thought maybe they should move away from Chicago and that maybe, once a couple thousand miles away from his networking circle—in which he operated under a pseudonym connoting meatlike properties—he could do something…else. And he loved her, so he went to bicycle mechanics school.

Dave inspires me, not for the obvious reasons but because when I think about the almost total lack of overlap between his former skill set and that required of a certified bike mechanic, I imagine that my own transition would be a breeze. After all, wrenching is wrenching, whether fixing broken drive trains or clunky sentences. If you want your wheels (subject) to move, you need to pedal (a verb), but if your chain (subject-verb agreement) is broken, your trajectory (sentence) will stall. With all other parts in harmony, your journey (idea) will ramble beyond control should your brakes (punctuation) fail. If you want to move not merely forward but toward a specific destination (direct object), you’ll need to pedal and steer (a predicate), as opposed to merely pedaling (an intransitive verb).

Of course, just as experienced copy editors can spot disagreeable text without diagramming sentences, competent mechanics are able to localize a bike’s problem without having to think through how bicycles work. And just as enthusiasm for reading doesn’t necessarily equip a person to edit what he or she reads—though we all occasionally want to chuck a book or magazine across the room because the person who is being paid to write but is not therefore a writer is incoherent, predictable, annoying, abstruse, contrary, or plainly inept in directing their story—riding a bicycle gives me no particular talent for fixing one.

Thanks to Dave’s instruction, I can do more than clean a chain and fix a flat, though my efforts at adjusting derailleurs and truing wheels are amateur at best. Happily, I don’t let that stop me from hiking my bike up on a shop stand and performing a professional pantomime, turning cranks and shifting gears as I watch the chain’s motion and listen for disagreement. As with language, there’s a certain music to all components working in harmony (and as with music, my overambitious manipulation of said components often results in discord).

Still, I can sling my guitar or drape a mechanic’s shirt over my shoulders and fool casual passersby into thinking I am what I am not, and for just a moment I’m not what I am: a comma jockey, wielding no instruments or tools but a dictionary and corrective pens. Not that I think my skill set is unimportant. A poorly punctuated maintenance manual results in confusion at best and mechanical breakdown at worst. And I do so wish that Joan Osborne had asked, “What if God were one of us?” even as I recognize that though Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” might inspire images of an egg-retentive hen, “Lie Lady Lie” just isn’t…musical.

So we all, or most of us—I can’t speak for retired fluffers or Bush administration appointees—stick to what we do best, happy in the knowledge that there are others out there ready to do for us what we suck at most. But don’t think for a moment that I’m therefore willing to concede my guitar or my mechanic’s shirts, because the one thing in which we all excel on common par is dreaming.

elopement risk

2007-06-20T17:06:00.001-07:00

Scout, the sweetest, cutest dog in the whole wide world™, and among the most industrious, has been crafting his own dog doors from which to exit our yard.

First, a dog-size hole appeared in the side gate. It wasn’t a dog-shaped hole as seen in cartoons—that would have been really cool—just a ragged security breach. We thought it was a fluke at the time. After all, that gate had consisted basically of long-since-rotten particleboard an ambitious kitten could have destroyed. Still, it came as a surprise: We’ve had at least one dog for all but about six dark days since we bought our house, and none before had expressed the slightest interest in escaping the confines of our admittedly dystopic yard.

The day of hole #1, Sporks called me at work to tell me the dogs had gleefully met her in the front yard when she arrived home. My heart jumped half a rib in my chest, because I immediately went to what-if land: What if they’d run away? What if I had forgotten to put Scout’s collar back on that morning—the collar I’ve been removing at night because I’m a sucker for a dog with mournful eyes that plead It burns! as he paws pitifully at the silky fabric draped about his neck? What if they’d run out into the street, each of them having the car sense of newborn bunnies, to become two more casualties of the NASCAR drivers-in-training who live in our neighborhood?

But such worry was entirely retrospective because, as Sporks told me, there they were in our only partially fenced front yard, happy as clams at high tide to be able to greet her TWO WHOLE SECONDS sooner than they might any other day, when they have to wait forever for her to get out of her car and cover the five long strides from the driveway to our backyard gate.

The next escape incident occurred several days later, when the dogs were separated for a full half day while Biscuit visited the groomer for her summer cut. A bereft Scout, who has surpassed mere cordial cohabitation with Biscuit to form a near-pathological attachment to his MENTOR, put a neglectfully convenient ladder to use and jumped the fence into the front yard. When Sporks returned home with Biscuit, Scout was lying on the front porch, no doubt exhausted from all that fretting. He seemed to harbor no inclination to go beyond the front yard; he was just bored in Biscuit's absence and, in all likelihood, wanted to change up his scenery.

I can relate.

You may remember my mentioning back in February a brief stint in the mental hospital. It was, readers, an experience so lacking in stimuli I was inclined to attend everything on the daily grid, even nonmandatory groups addressing avenues far outside my personal experience. One can never really know too much about probationary meds-compliance issues for drug offenders. Then, in addition to the mandatory group therapy sessions and psychiatric consults, there were the optional occupational therapy classes: crafts (I finished only half my basket, leaving me nothing to show for the effort; completed crafts are kept in the contraband cabinet—yarn hangings, though undoubtedly rare, remain a concern—and the half-baked works of discharged patients are unraveled and recycled); sing-alongs (what happens in the psych hospital stays in the psych hospital, or so I warned my discordant fellow inmates); and “exercise.” The physical activities on offer were pitiful: either supervised time in the gym (a couple of stationary bikes and some free weights, the latter's presence striking me as queer in a population denied shoelaces) or a supervised outside walk—neither of which option exceeded 30 minutes per day.

I don’t think one need be a mathematician to calculate that a population of folks fed six times daily (three "square meals" of fatty institutional food, plus three snacks), the vast majority of whom are on one or more prescription meds with weight-gain and/or metabolism-slowing side effects, really need at least the option of more than 30 minutes of exercise daily. Still, that was what was offered, and I jumped at every opportunity. During my scant four days inpatient, the gym was opened an even scanter once; on the other three days, we went for a walk.

The walk occurred on hospital grounds in the staff parking lot, but still, it was outside! We got to leave the sameness of the hospital halls and dayrooms and nurses' stations to pass through the doors alluringly marked with cautionary “Elopement Risk” signs (which never failed to provoke an image in my head of patients running off to Las Vegas for a quickie wedding, taking their vows in pajama pants and unlaced shoes). I remember thinking how strange it was to so enjoy a walk through a parking lot—just to smell new smells, however tinged by the whiff of asphalt tar, and see the world immediately outside those elopement doors—and at the same time not want to go any farther. After all, I hadn't committed myself on a lark, and the world beyond the parking lot was uncertain.

When Sporks called the dogs in from the backyard on a recent Saturday morning, only Biscuit responded. She called several more times before she ran to tell me that Scout seemed to have gone missing. She went out front and called his name loud and long, while I went to investigate hidden places in our backyard that might yield a somnolent dog. Scouring the nooks and overgrown hedges, I missed the obvious: a slat in our six-foot wood fence whose middle had gone missing. Before I even noticed the broken fence, Scout wormed back through the hole from the outside in and came bounding through the backyard, wagging his tail as if to say, “Look, I made the fence better!”

Sporks generously offered to go to Home Depot while I kept the dogs in the house. She returned with four new planks, three of which we put to immediate use: We replaced the plank Scout broke, another that was on its last wooden leg, and the one next to the latter because it was so warped we couldn’t fit the new plank in without removing it. Scout looked on with a wounded expression, as if he had presented us with a craft he made—like, say, a half-finished basket woven from dark brown yarn—and there we were, blithely unraveling his effort.

I felt for the little guy. After all, the yard may be big and full of diversions, but how many holes can you dig, how many relics can you excavate, how many times can you bark at the same dumb neighbors doing the same dumb things before you need a change of scenery? I was in country for just four days and the sameness of them seriously threatened whatever sanity I had brought to the party. Still, I have to be the mom here, not to mention the dad, nailing up the holes and keeping him safe, and that’s no fun at all.

Sporks and I have been planning to landscape the backyard for some time, and this year we're committed to actually doing it, especially given that Scout has an unfortunate tendency to bite the heads off weeds—cute with dandelions, not so much with foxtails. He’s aggressive toward other plants as well, as evidenced by our diminished birds of paradise, our no-longer-viable Brazil plant, several upended and de-potted aloes, and the climbing mandevilla that one day permanently ascended. Any colorful border flowerbeds or precious little vegetable gardens would quickly lose a war of attrition with the little yellow dog. And who are we to stop him? We may pay the mortgage, but the dogs put in the most yard time and squatters’ rights do apply. That’s why I’m thinking we may want to go in a different direction and make the backyard so enticing only a fool would want to escape it.

And while I'm at it, may I propose that bounce houses would make a mighty fine (and inexpensive!) addition to psychiatric hospitals.

Ho yeah! The only problem with this padded room may lie in getting patients to leave it! Until such time, consider me an elopement risk, but don't worry—I’m like as not to confine my meanderings to the front yard.

going offline, kinda

2007-04-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

One of my primary goals here has been to exercise my writing voice after many years of sloth. After about 15 months in the blog business I feel ready to see what I can do in the long form. Some say my blog entries are already novel-length, but my longest post to date was only around 2,000 words, which would amount to approximately eight print pages. Most publishers are more amenable to novels in the neighborhood of 80,000 words, and truth told, they'd prefer that at least some of those words reference topics of more universal concern than my boob(s), my hair, my dog, my neuroses, etc. In fact, it would probably be best if I abstained from first-person pronouns completely, but that would be impossible for me.

So I've been writing lately, though I haven't so much been blogging, and I feel neglectful of my little blip on the Internet, so I thought I at least owed it a gone-fishin' sign to acknowledge my awareness of that neglect. All of this is not to say that I've retired to my study and please quiet the children as I mustn't be bothered. I'll still be posting here. I'm just freeing myself of blog guilt so that when I do post, I'm doing so for all the right reasons, up to and including my desire to talk about and your need to know about my boob(s), my hair, my dog, and my neuroses.

Until we chat again, be well.

a birthday haiku

2007-03-23T11:41:00.000-07:00

For Sporks

Thirty-nine candles blaze
Burning bright, oh, dazzling sight!
Mind, don't lose the cake

meet me in el monte

2007-03-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

RePete wasn’t the dog we went to see. He was on our list, but pretty far down—maybe seventh—and I honestly didn’t expect to get past number 1. I had constructed a full-figured fantasy around number 1, “Lenny,” in the 24 hours since I had first seen his picture at the Beagles & Buddies Web site.

Lenny, the rescue organization’s site said, is a beagle–Australian shepherd mix, only two of my favorite dog breeds ever! ~~His description also noted that he’s an extremely high-energy dog.~~ And doesn’t it seem that his one blue eye can see right into your soul? He could be my people filter, warning me off the baddies! I had called to ensure that Lenny was still available—he was—and inquire what his adoption donation would be: $150, the bottom end of their scale. What a steal! I shopped him by Sporks and we decided to go meet him over the weekend.

B & B is located in the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte, the kind of town where smoking toddlers in diapers play in the street unsupervised. We were a little queasy about the n’hood when we drove up, but we got over it. After all, we’re not so fancy ourselves, and it’s not like swank types are clamoring for dog rescues to lay chain-link within their city limits. Besides, my little Lenny was in there; we needed to bust him out so that he could come home with us and be my best friend forever.

At the entrance gate we handed over our application, which I had downloaded and filled out before we arrived, and which a rescue volunteer prescreened to ensure our worthiness as potential parents. Good thing it wasn’t one of those born-again Christian rescues. The only Scripture in this joint was the “Caring for Your New Dog” pamphlets furnished by the makers of Pedigree dog food, who, by the way, have the right food for your dog at every stage of his life.

(Speaking of which, the proliferation of pet food varieties must stop, because I’m a notoriously indecisive shopper capable of entering full-blown catatonia when confronted with too many choices. I understand that today’s range of pet nutrition represents a vast improvement over olden times, when we fed our cats Purina Cat Chow and our dogs Purina Dog Chow. But under the Hill’s Science Diet brand alone, 34 different varieties of dog food are sold, not counting the Prescription Diet line, under the banner of which 39 additional products are offered, including a potato and venison formula, because dogs love them some taters and deer, and—I shit you not—an anorexia-recovery formula. Maybe dogs are hunger-striking because we’re feeding them POTATOES AND VENISON. Seriously, pet food makers, enough with the choices—unless you can come up with a food that makes dogs stop craving cat shit.)

We passed muster and through the gates into a little courtyard area where greeter dogs sniffed us and La Diabla, whom we had brought along for vetting. Lenny was not among the greeter dogs but in the kennels out back. We followed the din of barking and baying until we reached kennel seven, where I saw that solitary soul-seeing eye reflecting the high sun in a moment of halcyon stillness…just before Lenny’s turbulent psyche vomited forth.

This will shock and amaze you, readers, but Lenny turned out to be a very high-energy dog! Like, bowing-out-the-walls-of-his-chain-link-enclosure, on-crack high-energy. That furtive glance at his single blue eye set off his crazy bell and he barked me into the next kennel.

But maybe he was just nervous on first meeting. I decided to wander a bit, give him some time to realize I’m the BFF he’s always wanted but dared not dream possible. In the meantime I’d flirt with some other dogs, maybe make him jealous for my affection.

The first dog to activate my aww reflex was a reserved-looking lemon beagle. As instructed by those who know such things, I took care to introduce myself properly, with relaxed body language, no direct eye contact, and the back of one hand extended ever so casually for sniffing. The little gal approached shyly and sat quietly on the other side of the fence, wagging her tail. So far, so good. I inched my hand a bit closer, whereupon she lunged, gave it a quick nip, and ran away, barking ferociously to alert the others that something wicked their way came.

Put off the lemon beagle’s scent, I sidestepped back over toward Lenny to give him another shot at recognizing our love match. Results were consistent with initial findings.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you again—don’t you know I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt? Fool me three times, and I’ll call you Chelsea.

As I said, we had jotted down a few other dogs we liked from the Web site, just in case Lenny turned out to be, well, Lenny. But we quickly dispatched the list: Midnight the whippet mix was doing vertical flips in her run; Jake the basset mix didn’t have enough energy to keep La Diabla and her ADHD company; Jolie the coonhound mix, we were told, “just isn’t ready to meet people yet”; and Rosie the beagle, it turned out, had revealed a talent for climbing six-foot fences without breaking a pant.

The last dogs on our list were littermates Pete and RePete the mixed-breed mixes. Pete had been adopted that morning, but his bro RePete was still there.

RePete evokes for me generic dogdom, the sum of all dogs, every breed and no breed at once. I thought I had a dog aesthetic—a visual one—that forbade terribly ordinary-looking earth-tone dogs, but as I got to know RePete, he seemed perfect. He and La Diabla took to each other like Dick and Jane. He was curious, calm, and playful—and kind of beta without being a pushover. And that face, that black-spotted tongue, those soft floppy ears, those winsome eyebrows, and look at the way he sits sidesaddle!

Anyone who reads Sporks’ blog knows that we brought RePete home a couple of weeks ago: I’m a little behind on the blogging front. And since then we’ve been trying to suss out his heritage.

Shepherd, for sure, but certainly bred with smaller sorts—Chihuahua? And there’s that black-spotted tongue, so maybe we can throw some chow in. Sporks suggested shar-pei as a possibility.

Then she said something I’d been quietly thinking myself, that the way his forehead wrinkles and his tail curls is suggestive of the devil breed: basenji, as in “destructo the wonder dog” Carter and her nervous bladder.

Did saying it aloud make it more real? He barks, so how much basenji—“the barkless dog”—could he really have in him? There are some folks, Sporks noted, who breed basenjis and Chihuahuas together: Maybe he has a bahuahua parent?

I like this notion of mashing names together such that every dog, however mixed, has a breed identity. The American Canine Hybrid Club lists dozens of them: the giant schnoodle (giant schnauzer/standard poodle), the dorkie (dachshund/Yorkshire terrier), the bagle hound (basset hound/beagle).

So I have to be ready, when approached at the dog park by fascinated onlookers who want to know all about my beautiful boy, to say, without a hitch, “Oh, yes, he’s a bahuashepchowpei. It’s a rare breed, especially in this earth-tone variety.”

RePete is now “Scout,” which I know may be confusing, that being my blog nick and all. It’s the name I chose for my child, girl or boy—should I ever have one—after I read To Kill a Mockingbird in junior high. It’s so coolly androgynous, with implications of both daring individualism and ethical humanity—the kind of child, or dog, I’d be proud to call my own.

Maybe I should change my name here. But there are a couple of folks who link to me who find it tiresome to type “neurotranscendence”—I can’t say as I blame them—and therefore link to me as “scout,” so changing my blog name to, say, “myrtle” would be confusing to new visitors, whom I don’t want to alienate. (Shout-out to new visitors!) Then again, visitors reading future posts who are unfamiliar with all the fascinating details of my life may think I’m referring to myself in the third person when I mention Scout, which can be not only irritating to readers but embarrassing to me should I write something along the lines of, “Scout’s been eating cat shit again.” Clearly the name problem is not something I’ll resolve in this post.

At any rate, I am completely smitten with my boy. I think about him at work, I can’t wait to see him when I get home, and everything he does further goes to prove that he is—objectively—the sweetest, smartest, cutest dog in the whole wide world. Even his penis is cute!

So, no, Scout isn’t the kind of dog you go to see. He’s the dog who romps into your life when you’re pretty sure you’ve struck out. My best relationships have always found me, and always when I’ve least expected them.

about a dog

2007-03-01T14:58:00.000-08:00

Her name was Chelsea. Not my favorite name, too post-Clintonian trendy, Gen Y’s “Lisa.” I briefly changed her name to Scout—need I say a name I’m fond of?—going so far as to make a tag for “Scout” with our address and phone number, thinking, of course, that she would be our dog in the long term. Funny how quickly animals can worm into our lives and seem absolutely right for us, even when they’re absolutely wrong.

I’ve always considered myself more of a cat person, though I think such distinctions are overrated as predictors of human personality. I gather I’ve been what you call a “cat person” all these years largely due to my exposure to such piss-poor models of the caninus family, from the antisocial dogs of my youth to the curly tailed terror visited upon me by my life partner, Sporks, who 12 years ago came into my life bundled with “Carter,” a destructive overachiever given to fits of separation anxiety most explicitly expressed via nervous bladder. I’ll never again be able to look at basenjis without wincing.

After Carter’s death, and not by my hand, we took in Sporks’ parents’ Welsh springer spaniel “Red.” Red was nice enough, but he came to us in declining health, with eight years under his coat, and ours was more an assisted-living relationship than a lesbians’ best friend kind of thing.

Soon after Red died came Biscuit, a magical entity inasmuch as she’s the dog who made me love dogs. She’s a cocker mix from the south central L.A. shelter, and while she fails factorially short of the “perfect dog” appellation thrust upon her by Sporks—via phone from the shelter, seeking my approval to go ahead with her adoption—she is preternaturally cute, proving a timeworn principle: The cuter you are, the more crap you can get away with. La Diabla, née Biscuit, is the least well-behaved member of our household, but she loves us, and she really works that cute angle.

Perhaps La Diabla’s greatest fault is that she’s cat-aggressive. Being a “cat person,” I have two feline space heaters—not counting the strays who live in our yard being that kibble is known to spring magically from a well on our property twice daily. La Diabla chases all equally, the outdoorsy types from their font of food, the indoorsy types from wherever they are. My eldest has grown accustomed to such dogergy and barely reacts anymore, which bores La Diabla, consequently diverting more of her restless energy toward Halo, our mutant five-year-old calico who, at six pounds, is as close to a perpetual kitten as nature allows. Both her teeny size and her fear of La Diabla make her just about the funnest quarry ever!

It may surprise you to learn that we were surprised by the cat aggression. Neither of us had ever experienced anything but mixed-use dog and cat households—without incident—though we do both know, abstractly, that dogs chase cats: See Spike the Bulldog and Chester the Terrier, Sylvester’s Looney Tunes nemeses:

On the other hand, our childhood was rife with examples to the contrary: See Marc Antony and Pussyfoot:

Or how about Chance, Sassy, and Shadow:

To bottom-line it, dogs who get along with cats and cats who warm to dogs are more winsome mammals for their harmony.

We’ve made every effort to break La Diabla’s habit of chasing Halo on sight, and to both her and Halo’s credit, they’ve managed occasionally to settle territory within several feet of one another for dozens of seconds at a time, like Israel and Palestine, though La Diabla hums like a power cut all the while, twitching with the readiness of a soldier at her checkpoint, ever ready to fire.

So it was that last weekend, while watching a Dog Whisperer episode in which Cesar Millan recommended and procured a second (perfect!) dog for a family whose first dog was out of control, I casually mentioned my own openness to the concept.

“Now, I don’t want you calling me Monday saying you’ve found the perfect second dog,” I clarified. “Let’s take this slow.” Sporks tends to get a bit ~~obsessed with~~ focused on fun new projects, and she doesn’t always think through the consequences. Meanwhile, I’m the sensible one who positively obsesses over consequences, and I worry about the expense of a second dog, not so much in terms of food as in boarding fees, vet bills, and net destruction to the household (i.e., unforeseen damages should we adopt a chewer, a scratcher, a digger, or a nervous urinater).

“Monday’s Presidents’ Day,” Sporks reminded me. “The shelters won’t even be open.”

That was Saturday. On Sunday we were driving by a park where, it happened, the L.A. city shelter was having an adoption fair. I impulsively suggested we stop.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Sporks asked. “They bring their most adoptable dogs to these kinds of things.”

“Yeah, let’s just have a look,” I said.

When I first started chatting up the shelter folks, they said they figured Chelsea was three or four: good teeth, no gray on her muzzle. A little later they offered as how she might be five-ish, and they mentioned that she had been surrendered by owners who claimed she was “human aggressive.” Hah! People will say anything to allay their guilt when surrendering a family pet to the shelter. Look at this sweet face and tell me there’s an aggressive bone in her body!

Chelsea proved her former caretakers wrong again and again, suffering attacks on all sides by adults, children, and other dogs. If you had a free hand to pet her, she was yours for the stroking. How could her people have been so cruel to saddle her with the taint of “human aggression”? Didn’t they know that was tantamount to a death sentence for a dog? She’s lucky to live in Los Angeles, where animal shelters citywide are working toward achieving a “no-kill by 2008” goal, the only way a three- to four- to five-year-old mutt suspected of human aggression would be allowed a second chance.

Make that a third chance. On closer inspection staffers found paperwork showing that Chelsea had been surrendered earlier by another owner, in 1999, when she was two, making her 10 years old today. Reason given: “human aggression.”

My therapist is fond of saying that all those red flags I see aren’t there to cheer me to the finish line.

By this time I had already spent several hours with Chelsea. We were resonating, she and I. Senior dogs need love too! And re: aggression, she had been misunderstood, or mistreated, or they just flat-out had the wrong dog. Maybe she’d been set up by some no-account presa canario friend.

In the meantime Sporks had fetched La Diabla to see how they got on—well—and I had taken Chelsea through the cat area to see if any aroused her ire—they did not.

We adopted Chelsea.

Two hours later she bit Sporks’ forearm. Hard. Like, chomped down and shook her head back and forth. It was an unprovoked attack that required an emergency room visit, seven stitches, and a tetanus shot.

When we got home several hours later I slipped a leash over Chelsea’s head and we took her back to the shelter. We didn’t feel we had much choice, but in bringing her back I felt that I acquired a taint of my own: the surrendering owner, a burden on the system, the kind of person who buys a cute little baby bunny for Easter only to cast it aside by Administrative Professionals’ Day. At least I had Sporks’ bruised and bandaged forearm to back up my story.

The shelter officer took down my information as I stood there with Chelsea, who was busy looking all doe-eyed and docile. We emphasized to the officer that all of our animal companions had come from L.A. shelters (we’re good people, really!) and that every one, until now, had become a permanent family member, practically living a life of luxury in our benevolent home! The shelter officer was kind but disinterested. She noted that our adoption fee was transferable to another animal within 10 days. I told her we were probably a little gun-shy to adopt again within 10 days; consider it a donation.

I went to bed Sunday night feeling embarrassed both at my impulsiveness and poor taste in animal companions. I was sad for Chelsea—I really wanted to give the old girl a better life—and also sad for myself, that my first foray into dogdom had ended so miserably. Maybe I was a cat person after all.

Coming soon: “About Another Dog”

damn that britney spears!

2007-02-20T17:31:00.000-08:00

Bitch is always copying me, like the annoying, aping little sister I never had. Does she see me going after K-Fed or dangling babies? No. I suppose she thinks she one-upped me by checking in and out of rehab and getting all those tattoos the same weekend. But check it out, toxic trash, my scalp is still shapelier than yours.

i'm too sexy for (my) hair

2007-02-11T10:54:00.001-08:00

Due to a confluence of recent events I found it deeply necessary to shave my head. Again. This marks the second such episode in my life. Let's call them my Otter Periods. OPs arise during times of suicidal depression, and I've found that mine is not such a unique response to that most perilous mood swing. In chatting with my friends at the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance forums, plenty of women have come forward to say, "You get urges to shave your head when you're depressed? Me too!" and more than a few (straight women, at that) have also obeyed the urge. It's both disarming and illuminating to discover that something I've always thought a personal quirk is in truth fairly common.

Where I may claim some diversion is in the aftermath. Many women who shave their heads during depressive periods say they do so out of an urge to self-mutilate; and isn't it better to attack dead cell filaments than flesh? Afterward most say they found themselves ugly, and few choose to maintain the look.

My first head-shearing urge came over me in my mid 20s. I awoke one morning with a wicked compulsion to shave my head and, as if under hypnosis, I got dressed, walked to my local Rite-Aid, bought clippers, and returned home to do the deed. Under all that hair I found that I have quite a shapely scalp, and for the first time in my life I thought I looked kind of extraordinary, in a good way. I kept it buzzed for two years. Some people (friends, girlfriends) loved it; others (my mom) hated it.

I was waiting tables at the time and my tips went through the roof, the result, I think, of altered expectations. I looked serious and a bit mean, and when I proved to be a friendly sort I was rewarded just for being me—there was no change in my personality, just a shift in societal perception.

(Note: A brief period of hairlessness occurred between my first OP and this last, but because it was motivated not so much by intense depression as by a bad haircut it cannot be considered a clinical OP.)

Fifteen years on the urge made itself known again. This time I knew a couple of things in advance, namely that (1) shaving my head has vast potential to lift my spirits, and (2) I have a shapely scalp. So it should have been a gimme, yes? Well, not entirely. It's not that I feel particularly old at 39, but I certainly feel older than I did at 25, and I had an attack of self-doubt that I could still pull this look off. Maybe folks would attribute my aesthetic choice not so much to youthful freedom as to midlife crisis. Or cancer.

I resisted the urge for several months.

Here's where the aforementioned confluence of events comes in. I've recently emerged from a short stay in a psychiatric hospital, about which I'll write more later. It was my first such commitment, and I expect and hope that it will be my last. I made a pact with myself that when I was released I would pull out all the stops to fight that bully in my psyche who taunts and torments me until I feel that I can no longer accept responsibility for keeping myself safe.

It's difficult to articulate why shaving my head is for me such a powerful antidepressant. I do like the way I look, but it isn't a simple matter of self-esteem. It's an expression of personal freedom, a letting go of concerns over what people think, what my mother thinks. In making myself less conventionally attractive I make explicit the idea that I seek no one's approval but my own. And there's a powerful sense of light and calm that washes over me when I remember to live first for myself, second for those who accept me as I am, and not another moment for those who do not.

Here I am, four days on. (My hair grows like a weed.)

no one ever said he was sane

2007-01-16T13:09:00.000-08:00

“Let me tell you a little about myself so you know where I'm coming from,” said my psychiatrist, five minutes into my appointment with him last week. It was the beginning of the end of our doctor-patient relationship.

I was in a bit of a state. My mood had headed south several weeks before and had been stuck in its inexorable downward trajectory ever since. I needed something more than a pep talk but short of a ride to the care unit—the thought of hospitalization depresses me. Even more.

A meds tweak maybe? Childhood regression therapy? Another, heretofore undisclosed treatment option? I was ready to follow the good pill doc's advice because I trusted him. He had come recommended to me as more “holistic” than most in his profession: e.g., he's pharmaceutically conservative and therefore unlikely to dope his patients beyond recognition. True to his reputation, he’s pulled me through a number of crises over the past few years with minimal damage to my overall personality. I'm just as snarky as I've ever been, and if my mind is a bit duller, I blame it on the neuro issues, not my psychotropical cocktail.

“How are you doing today?” he asked, once I was seated in his office.

And I told him. I spoke for what is, to me, an interminable stretch—four, maybe five minutes solid—about feeling crushed under a pall of hopelessness. I know intellectually that this state is nothing more than funky brain chemicals, I told him, but it's vampiric. It sucks at my life force and fucks with my sense of self until I'm ready to do anything to make it stop. I just haven't yet figured out a way to kill the parasite without snuffing its host.

Look, baby animals! They'll lighten any mood.

It was in response to my tragedian soliloquy that the good doctor thought he’d share out a bit himself. He's a Spiritist, he told me, and therefore believes that we are each perfect, eternal, godlike souls. “Death” is not to be feared but rather eagerly anticipated as a beautiful and peaceful place where we shed our physical and psychological burdens to exist in serenity. Our lives are but series of lessons we must learn in order to achieve our highest level of being, akin to Jesus or Buddha, and we are reincarnated again and again to take on our assigned course loads, eventually attaining perfection.

Well, that’s lovely, I thought, nodding in appreciation as he explained Spiritism’s core philosophy. It doesn’t so much resonate with me, but bully for him for finding peace in a belief system he can buy into.

Then it got weird, at least from a professional angle.

He said the difficulties I'm experiencing indicate that I’ve charted an ambitious lesson plan in this life and that my failure to complete what I’ve laid out for myself does me no dishonor. He said there's no shame in suicide, and that as an eternal being the only consequence of an early checkout would be that I won't have learned the necessary lessons of this life and would therefore have to repeat them in the next. Then in a withering tone he said he would of course prefer that I choose life, but should I choose death, he assured me, I would simply continue on to my next life—no harm, no foul. He ended the appointment by upping the dosage on one of my meds.

I drove home in a bit of a daze. Had my psychiatrist really just given me the green light to follow my instincts, the instincts that are presently corrupted utterly by depression? I wondered whether his counsel would have been different had I told him I’d lately felt as though suicide were being marketed directly to me, first as a post-holiday book recommendation from Amazon—Kay Redfield Jamison’s Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, under the banner “Get Yourself a Little Something!”—then as a recurring commercial in the dystopian film Children of Men, in which the world has become so unrelentingly miserable suicide is not only condoned but actively marketed in the form of a product called Quietus. Its slogan: “You decide when.”

Maybe I had just encountered reverse psychology? Was his blasé eternal being picking a fight with my anxious quiver of universal nothingness?

I didn’t counter-share my own belief system, which is that we’re happenstance creatures evolved of primordial ooze and when we’re done the lights go out forever. It’s a cheery philosophy, I know, though it’s one that keeps me relatively tethered inasmuch as what I really crave in the big sleep is a sense of relief, which is unattainable in a “religion” that denies postmortem sense and emotion. Au contraire, Spiritism holds that we not only shed our earthly burdens but pass our between-lives interstices in a state of bliss unimaginable to us corporeal types. If I could choose a belief system, I’d take the bliss, thanksverymuch, but I can’t choose to believe in an afterlife any more than I can choose to be reborn as a so-cute-she-makes-your-fillings-hurt baby leopard.

When I got home I Googled “Spiritism,” because how could I not? As an organized movement it’s been around only about 150 years, but adherents consider it a purer form of Christianity. They say its teachings are based directly on the Gospels of Christ and are therefore uncorrupted by ulterior human motives, unlike those "biblical" teachings contrived in the early centuries to discourage unsavory pagan rituals and traditions.

Spiritists have a fairly liberal outlook (their antigay woman-completes-man stance notwithstanding). They encourage rational scrutiny, they respect all other religions, and they do not endorse evangelizing. They have no churches or clergy, though they attend meetings together. But to be a true Spiritist is to endorse a doctrine that includes the following:

• There is life on other planets, some more evolved and some less evolved than that found on earth.
• Both incarnate (material) and discarnate (immaterial) spirits exist side by side on multiple planets.
• We are rewarded for our goodness in this life—and punished for our transgressions—in future lives (indicating that I've been very, very bad in past lives).
• Certain human spirits [see Allison DuBois] are born with the gift of mediumship, and only these incarnate spirits may communicate with discarnate spirits.

In short, my soon-to-be ex-psychiatrist believes in aliens and ghosts.

I also found these folks when I Googled Spiritism:

As a married Spiritist couple, they’re a force to be reckoned with, if you believe in that sort of thing. You see, they’re both gifted mediums. He channels Jesus. She used to channel Mary Magdalene, whom you’ll be pleased to know married and regularly enjoys coitus with Jesus in heaven. Now, in addition to channeling John Lennon and George Harrison (who have collaborated on a new song!), she channels Alura, a talk show personality on their daily YouTube show Here’s Jesus!

He’s also a self-taught artist. As is she! Christ, I hope my soon-to-be ex-psychiatrist wasn’t self-taught.

I’m not out to ridicule anyone’s religion. Hell, I often wish I had faith in something other than the bleak existential void that fills that part of my brain like some kind of inert gas. I can’t not recommend my philosophy vehemently enough. And yet, if I believed in an afterlife of everlasting bliss, I’d have broken on through to the other side a long time ago, preferably before I met anyone who would have ever loved or missed me.

In the absence of such eternal promise I’m forced to find meaning in the now, something that makes life worth a treacherous journey lacking any known destination. Baby animals are an excellent start, and I suppose the rest goes something like this: We’re all in this thing together. We may as well love one another and make the best of it.

Thanks to www.babyanimalz.com for the great animal pics!

you’re welcome!

2007-01-03T14:43:00.000-08:00

In a recent post blogger Weese bemoaned the fact that she had not yet procured a 2007 calendar and therefore could make no plans for her future. Though she gamely shrugged off her plight, I sensed her pain, the note of desperation that told me she was simply too overwhelmed by the myriad choices—even among the culled post–New Year's Day, 50%-off herd—to select just the right calendar to see her through to 2008. Being a giver at heart, I combed through the more than 6,000 titles available at Calendars.com and hand-picked my top 10 choices to see Weese through the coming year. In ascending order:

10. They beg for your fries, they poop on your car, they remind you of dental appointments.

9. Take that, Anne Geddes. You aren't the only photographer who can make perfectly nice babies really unappealing to look at.

8. Cold, dead fish. Month after glorious month.

7. Bimbos and guns. Somebody pinch me.

6. Gimme an M! Gimme an O! Gimme an N! Gimme a D-A-Y!

5. Bimbos and cold, dead fish. Somebody pinch me again.

4. Call me sentimental, but unbagged dog poop reminds me of a simpler time. Please note typo at bottom.

3. For those who like their chickens on the flashy, Vegas showgirl side.

2. A dream is a wish your heart makes.

1. Nuns are funny!

who paints your world?

2006-12-29T15:11:00.000-08:00

In the Amy Correia song “Stranded” there’s a rhyming couplet that tends to reverberate in my head for hours after I’ve heard it:

“This town is on the rocks
Looks like a painting by Hieronymous Bosch”

It conjures such an arresting image—choose from any among Bosch’s many visions of hell—and I know exactly what she means, succinctly and elegantly, in the lines that immediately follow:

“All the souls are tied up in knots
Sometimes I think I’m gonna drown”

Whenever I hear that song I’m jealous that I didn’t write it, but I guess I’ll eventually get over it.

The song makes me think about which artists best express the world as I see it. Sometimes Bosch’s soulscapes are all too familiar, on those days when my psyche can’t see past the ugliness and cruelty of life. Maybe that mindset is better expressed by this charming 15th-century ditty, The Fall of the Damned, by Dieric Bouts the Elder.

It isn’t always so dark in there, though the beacon that is Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light® hasn’t yet found an exploitable breach in my grey matter.

I think the world I live in is best expressed by Edward Hopper: blunt, stark, realistic landscapes marked by melancholy. Behold Eleven a.m.

When I look at a Hopper painting I feel a psychic camaraderie, and even if the artist himself rose from the grave to deny it, I’d swear he was a fellow traveler: My ability to pick depressives out of a crowd is spot-on. Though when pressed I’d probably admit that I don’t much believe in reincarnation, it’s worth noting that Hopper died only a few months before I was born.

All of this reminds me of the “people’s art” created by Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, who in the mid 1990s set out to create America’s most wanted and least wanted paintings—based entirely on market research surveys. Respondents were asked dozens of questions concerning what they most liked and disliked in art. The resulting “most wanted” piece is a bit busy but not completely embarrassing, being a richly colored landscape with some deer, a family, and—of course—George Washington. Still, I don’t see anyone I know hanging it above their couch.

So I’m wondering, people I know, which artist or artists color your world? Or whom would you commission if you had your choice?

walk, goddammit!

2006-12-22T12:05:00.000-08:00

Hello?

Does anyone bother to check this site anymore for updates? Am I whistling in the dark? Oh, wait, I'm supposed to be writing for myself, so it matters not whether anyone reads it. (Total, complete bullshit. Attention is oxygen.)

Will you please excuse Scout's absence if she tells you she's been in traction? Only for 20 minutes per week, but still, you know, she's shameless—anything to win back your love.

When last we talked my right leg had gone all pouty on me, acting out in response to my rude presumption that it would interminably take up the slack of its slower companion. (It hates being taken for granted—who knew?) The pain was such that I had taken to sleeping in my zero-gravity chair to displace stress from the pressure points.

Nothing has changed, except that I've gained a physical therapist. Her name is Eriny.

Eriny has theories about the origin of said pain. Of sciatica, bursitis of the hip, and piriformis syndrome, which bundles sciatica and bursitis into one convenient package, she's pretty sure it's the latter—which she notes is often caused by gait disorders, the fancy term for my drunken-sailor walk. At any rate, she needed to treat it from a couple of different angles to be certain.

I couldn't have been more delighted that first day I saw her—the morning of my 39th birthday—to hear her say the words “deep-tissue massage.” Free spa treatment! Happy birthday, me!

I knew what a deep-tissue massage felt like; I had, after all, paid $135 for one at the Mandalay Bay spa, more properly called “Spa Mandalay Bay,” in Las Vegas. And to think I would be getting one now for only a $15 copay! Oh, sure, Kaiser Permanente's Occupational and Physical Therapy Unit, perhaps more properly called “Unit OPT Kaiser Permanente,” lacks some of the fancy trappings of Spa Mandalay Bay: the preliminary relaxation session in the eucalyptus steam room, the ploofy robe, your choice of stink-pretty essential oils, indirect lighting faded just-so, soft plinky-plonky music, the clog-shod massage therapist seductively whispering, “How's that pressure for you?” But listen, for the $120 difference, I'll accept Kaiser's sheet-draped exam table in a beige room under fluorescent assault. And if Eriny doesn't exactly whisper in my ear, neither does she shout at me.

As it turns out, Spa Mandalay Bay's “deep-tissue massage” was just so much bullshit. Though it featured a tap more pressure than the Swedish massage to which I had treated myself during a previous trip to Vegas, overall it was a perfectly pleasant experience—as I suppose any spa treatment ought to be. Eriny's $15 job, on the other hand, amounted to outright abuse. Ho yeah, there were tears. I only just managed to keep from leaping off the table and ~~running~~ limping away.

So I was feeling a little cringy when I went back to see her for my next appointment. But once we agreed that there had been only slight, not profound, improvement, she said she wanted to try pelvic traction. It sounded intriguing, as do many medieval tortures, but mostly I was just pleased to duck out of my scheduled “massage.”

Eriny led me to a treatment room outfitted with an execution gurney. She harnessed my midsection in an institutional corset before I got horizontal, and once I was on the gurney she pulled my arms through another harness and buckled it around my chest, then she went about cinching all the straps until I was immobilized to her satisfaction.

Are you turned on? No, I wasn't either. There are few venues less sexy than a medical treatment room, especially when your bondage top is wearing a medallion with a full-color rendering of an agonized Jesus bleeding under his crown of thorns. Not. Sexy.

After 20 minutes of having my spine pulled like taffy by a machine exerting between 30 and 70 pounds of pressure in alternating 30-second intervals, a surprisingly not unpleasant experience, I was released from my bonds and given these parting words: “This is a long-term treatment, so don't expect any miracles overnight.”

Friend S. was throwing herself a 40th-birthday party the following day and had rented a roller rink. I had told her that I was having physical therapy the day before in hopes of being able to skate. I was kidding, of course. Anyone who's witnessed my walk of late, a highly adaptive drunken lurch, my legs only grudgingly responding to my brain's commands, would laugh at a mental image of me skating. But the following morning I felt less calcified than I have in months, and I remained loose the whole day.

Readers, I skated.

I didn't skate well, mind you, but that was much more a result of 20 years having passed since I last set wheeled-foot in a rink than any physical limitations. And just as S. promised, I felt like a teenager again, albeit with less self-consciousness. It was kind of a miracle—both the skating and the not caring whether anyone was watching or laughing at me.

I stiffened up about 36 hours later, but it was great while it lasted, and I figured, hey, maybe I could count on 48 hours of happy body—which would be two days more per week than I could hope for before—every time I had my spine yanked. And Eriny said it would only get better with further treatment! It will come as no surprise that I priced in-home pelvic traction kits through online medical suppliers. Because, you know, if 20 minutes of traction results in 48 hours of mobility, imagine what an hour would do…or a whole day!

As it turns out, there is no magic bullet (except the kind they put in sex toys to make them vibrate—or so I've heard). I've had four more traction sessions since, with none having yielded the 48-hour miracle of the first. In fact, with the second treatment I felt significant pain at my immobilization points for several days afterward. And this morning, my fourth treatment, I walked in all zippity-do-dah and walked out stiff.

Still, I remain hopeful, and I have a little theory of my own. You see, Eriny hasn't worn her bleeding Jesus medallion since that first treatment, and Jesus was way into healing the lame—even if neither he nor his biographers much cottoned to people-first language. And even Peter, just about the coolest apostle ever, got into the miracle racket, pointing at a random beggar and commanding, “In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene—walk!” And the man obediently leapt to his feet and danced like a sideshow freak at a Christian circus. The Bible notes that this particular convert had been lame since birth, working his alms racket at that same location for 35 years, but hey, beggars can't be choosers. And if the ungrateful bastard wants to complain about his lot, may he meet the Philistine who's walked about her whole life in terribly uncomfortable strappy heels from Payless.

My point is that Eriny could wear the goddamn medallion again. I'd make a handsome vessel for a modern Christian miracle, and the Good News would not be lost on me. Really.

In the meantime, Happy Birthday, Jesus, you studmuffin. You don't look a day over 33!

(God, I hope that didn't seem overly solicitous. I'm being totally sincere.)

greetings, madam president

2006-11-09T12:25:00.000-08:00

Who seems more presidential in this photo?

save the kittens!

2006-11-06T15:34:00.000-08:00

an office of one’s own redux

2006-10-25T17:40:00.000-07:00

I come to you today from a joyful place—namely, my own office. Wait a sec, didn’t I already write about getting an office months ago? I did, but then I was recubicled, and now I’ve been reofficed, and this time it’s new and improved, bigger and better than ever. Also, it seems to have come with a mysterious box of “emergency food”—the only nonfurniture item left here by the previous tenant. (Should I tell someone about it?)

My former office was understood to be temporary all along, you see, a shimmering vision of what could be in my otherwise gray cubicle existence. A tease, really.

Then came the move. The building that had long housed our Gay Agenda™ cell had been mightily spiffed up since being purchased several years back by the TV Guide company (whose magazine’s continued success in the TiVo age is a bafflement to me). Those TV Guide people in their business-casual attire—they thought they were so hot. They couldn’t wait for our long-term lease to expire this fall so they could kick our blue jean–clad asses to the curb and get themselves some real tenants, a company able to pay its rent in gold bullion rendered from unclaimed Daytime Emmys, a company with respectable employees who don’t discuss their faggoty, rabble-rousing business on the elevators. At least that’s how I imagine it went down. It’s possible that our company decided to move simply to fuck with our commutes; we cubicle dwellers, even if temporarily stored in offices, aren’t consulted on such matters.

For months our corporate deciders—folks I’ve heard of but never met—sought for us a new workspace, a building where we might be less conspicuous in our mission to corrupt, convert, and redecorate the nation. In late September we moved into our new base of operations, one we share with the Los Angeles Israeli Consulate.

The operations manager could not emphasize enough how super secure this building is—were we, you know, in any way concerned about possible anti-Israel sentiment. She also told me that I would be situated in “a really nice cubicle,” and to be fair, the cubicles are perfectly pleasant in appearance, once you get past their essential cubicleness: that they lack ceilings and doors and therefore privacy of an even minimally human sort. I found a site online offering cubicle “doors.” I was kind of excited about the concept until I saw them. This is the CubeSmart® CubeDoor Classic:

Or, for you true-blue cornfeds, the CubeBanner:

Neither is quite what I had hoped for. I was thinking more along the lines of the Get Smart Cone of Silence:

Our new cubicles have slate-blue textured fabric “walls” and come equipped standard with built-in shelving and plenty of storage files, one tower of which rolls around on castors and is padded for use as an ottoman or occasional seating! In a compound adjective: fancy-schmancy.

I tried to make it work, truly I did, but I just don’t think as well as I used to. I have trouble following narratives of TV shows with plots any more complicated than, say, America’s Next Top Model. My brain isn’t so much broken as it is unfocused. I was put through a battery of tests following my blackout episodes in 2004, after which my neuropsychologist pronounced me sound but slow. Disregarding time, she said I tested in the above average to superior range (!), but my processing speed tested somewhat south, in below average to impaired territory (!?!). While my partner is happy to fill me in on the machinations of CSI and The Wire, I’m afraid I’m on my own at work.

So it is that I found myself drowning in the new environment, a sea of cubicles ringed by the offices of editors and art directors and photo coordinators, people who must routinely interact and were accustomed to having cross-office conversations in our old floor plan, where departments were more partitioned and the copy editors, though stored in cubicles, occupied their own suite. Here, the copy editors have been placed at the very center of the beehive, surrounded by worker bees and drones alike, including individuals of special note: Mr. No Inside Voice and Princess Cell Phone. By the end of two weeks my grasp on sane functionality was tenuous.

And then, The Straw. You know the straw I’m talkin’ about: that last one, the one that broke the camel’s back?

The operations manager, standing near my cubicle while discussing important operations stuff with HR, invoked the dichotomous rubric of “office people” and “cubicle people” to describe the office population.

There are some things up with which I simply will not put.

There I was, stuffing earplugs deep into my canals, wearing wonky, old-school, over-the-ear headphones, trying in vain to become functional in a dysfunctional environment, only to be labeled a “cubicle person.” That was approximately when I decided I would have to do something antithetical to my worldview: I would have to ask for what I needed.

No, seriously, this is a breakthrough in my cognitive-behavioral universe, because I have always thought that the best way to be liked—and maybe even eventually rewarded—is to not ask for much, not make waves, and be the most agreeable girl in all the land. Having followed this strategy to little end for several decades now, I’m ready to admit that it doesn’t work. As it turns out, people aren’t psychic, not even the ones who love me, and certainly not the ones who employ me.

I appealed to HR, citing the complications of a scrambled brain, and she took me on a tour of available cubicles. I spent time in each of them, trying to get a feel for the environment, and in no case did it take longer than 45 seconds to identify those in the area who lack inside voices. I acknowledged that in moving I would merely be jumping out of the frying pan into an adjacent frying pan—on a burner less convenient to my department—and resolved to give it another go, to try to reconfigure my working process, which is a bit like thinking I can tell myself I’m a butterfly and that I will soon levitate as a result. It didn’t work. Spectacularly.

Plan B was to say, No, really, I’m serious, I can’t work under these conditions. “A job I love is making me miserable,” I said.

Two days later I moved into my fab new workspace, an official medical accommodation. Finally, all the weirdness of the past two years has paid a dividend!

By the way, don’t feel sorry for the guy they evicted to make room for me. He’s an intern who works here exactly two days a week. And that, my friends, is how lowly we copy editors are regarded: Part-time interns get offices while we’re reduced to begging.

My first day in the new digs, an IT guy pointed out to me a design flaw in the door that enables anyone who so desires to lock me in from the outside, but I was far too preoccupied with the concept of even having a door to worry about anyone wanting to imprison me. And, really, can he possibly think I’m threatened by the idea of isolation? Ha! Whatever, dude. I’ll just put on a little Coltrane and crack me open a brick of that emergency food.

on not thriving

2006-10-16T11:12:00.000-07:00

I’ve been sleeping in a chair most nights for the past couple of weeks. It’s a really nice chair, one of those Relax the Back zero-gravity numbers—in green suede—but, you know, it’s still a chair. The first time I resorted to its embrace was during a sleepless night, several weeks ago, in which I was unable to find a single position where I wasn’t tempted to amputate my right leg at the hip joint, such was the pain that radiated through it for reasons unknown. (For those of you keeping score, my right side, which hosts my right leg, would be my heretofore non-gimpy side.) It seemed like such an extreme measure back then, sleeping in a chair, but it’s become routine, just another option: Hmm, bed or chair tonight?

A friend said it sounded like a sciatic nerve flare-up and suggested that my partner try to beat it into submission. My girl didn’t seem eager to pummel my ass at first, but after a few hesitant warm-up taps she got all Fists of Fury on me. (I haven’t dared ask whether she had a particular incident or quarrel in mind during our uncharacteristically antagonistic encounter.) At any rate, the therapy did not a lick of good.

My primary care doctor didn’t so much take my pain complaint seriously: After he manipulated my leg this way and that and saw nothing obviously wrong, Dr. Devil-May-Care told me to feel free to exceed Advil’s label-recommended dosage, breezily adding that I could take “as many as four at a time”—just in case I was thinking more along the lines of, say, 18.

Does my HMO hate me?

It’s not such a ridiculous question. I’ve lately been collecting ailments as if they’re exotic butterflies, and my current primary care doc would be only the most recent in a long line of doctors to get all Billy Mumy on my ass and wish me into the cornfield. And if any perceived abuse of my HMO’s resources isn’t enough to get me shit-listed, there’s also this matter of a letter I wrote them years ago—before they became my HMO—to rant at them on behalf of my grandfather.

My father, who has called me exactly twice in my adult life, rang me up one day in 1999. “Your grandpa’s in the hospital,” he said. “He tried to kill himself.”

Let me just say here that my grandfather as I remembered him was a bit of a bastard. I say “as I remembered him” because we had been estranged for 15 years. Nevertheless, the dutiful daughter called in sick to work and headed south on the 101, toward Orange County and family.

I went with my parents to visit my grandfather at the “care unit,” which seemed more like an assisted living facility than a mental hospital and where my grandfather was eating chocolate ice cream and flirting with a nurse one third his age.

“It was those [HMO] bastards,” he said, after some adjustment time during which we established that yes, it had been 15 years since we saw each other, and yes, I was an adult now. He went on to say that he had told his doctors over and over that his medications weren’t working and that he couldn’t stand to live in constant pain anymore. In addition to the standard assortment of elderly gentlemen’s aches, he had had problems with his feet and legs for decades. And, yeah, of course, all of this was very likely exacerbated by the big D. Melancholia runs in my paternal line; we’re one big unhappy family.

After one too many copays, one too many aloof doctors, one too many changes into a gown to wait around in a freezing exam room only to be sent away with instructions to get plenty of rest and to moderate activities and to pay attention to those dietary needs, Grandpa went out and bought himself a handgun. He endured California’s “goddamn” 10-day waiting period, he groused, then he drove to an isolated area and stood in the middle of a field with his new firearm at his temple—cocked—until he realized he couldn’t summon the will to pull the trigger.

My dad, who had not been estranged from his father during that period, nevertheless didn’t know about the gun until a policeman told him he had found it—loaded—under the driver’s seat of my grandfather’s unlocked Camry, in the parking lot of a local Motel 6 where he had booked what he presumably thought would be his scene fin. I can’t imagine very many more depressing spaces in which to bid my last than a suburban budget motel room, but I guess it’s appropriate to the hopelessness of the act—hell, it may even be reassuring to think that polyester-blend bedspreads and factory-direct art belong only to the living. As my grandfather told it, he didn’t want anyone to have to “find him.” In this case, “anyone” should be understood to exclude the Motel 6 housekeeping staff.

The gun, “not having been discharged in the commission of a crime,” had to be taken into custody by a family member, the policeman told my dad. It wasn’t acceptable to leave it in the car, loaded or not. “I don’t want the damn thing,” my dad told me as we drove to my grandfather’s townhouse to get him some pajamas and a change of underclothes. Once at his place, eerily unchanged since his wife had died fully 20 years prior, I laughed for the first time all day upon seeing, on his nightstand, a library copy of Final Exit atop Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back. My librarian friend Slangred once told me, shortly after assuming her post at a large central city library, that both of her branch’s circulation copies of Final Exit were past due—quite.

It was from Final Exit, he said, that he gleaned the tip to pull a bag over his head after he overdosed—that way, once he passed out he could asphyxiate in peace, and he wouldn’t have to worry about whether he had taken enough pills, whether he might succeed in killing his brain only to be survived by his more rote biological systems.

Was it a sincere attempt? That’s the first question people ask after establishing the basics: Is he OK, how did he do it, and why? Cynicism, and perhaps denial, makes us doubt the commitment of those who don’t cut deep enough, take too few pills, jump just five stories instead of the recommended 10. Was my grandfather’s attempt sincere? He said he left the motel room because his mouth felt like it was lined with cotton—a side effect he hadn’t anticipated—and he couldn’t stand it anymore; he knew there was a Jack in the Box across the street, so he thought he’d get himself a soda. (Why didn’t he just drink some tap water? Delirium? Or second thoughts?) A fellow Motel 6’er knew something wasn’t right with him as she watched him try to cross the street; she called 911 before he hit the asphalt, and his plan was thwarted by a round of stomach pumping and a couple of weeks under the watchful care of “son-of-a-bitch doctors” and flirt-worthy nurses.

The concept of sincerity came up in my letter to [HMO], particularly in terms of its efficacy in their then–advertising slogan: “Peace of mind.” I threw the slogan back at them repeatedly, castigating their neglect of my grandfather’s most basic stated need: relief, however fleeting, from constant pain. The letter, I’m sure, wasn’t my best work. Still, I received a response from the vice president of blameless apologies, sympathizing with my concerns in that very passive corporate way: We’re sorry that this experience has been so very frustrating for you, and it’s unfortunate that your grandfather has been unable to find relief from his pain, and if you have any further needs please feel free to contact the director of lunatic relations at…

Sincerity’s tough to come by these days.

My grandfather lasted another seven years—a period I like to think of as “How Grandpa Got His Groove Back”—over the course of which I saw him many more times. After he was discharged from the mental hospital he was assigned a new primary care doctor who made it his mission to solve the pain issues—no doubt an imperative issued from above—and inside of six months he was feeling markedly better physically and, perhaps as a result, mentally. The onetime bastard underwent some kind of personalityectomy to become an oddly lovable old man, one who, so far as anyone knows, never attempted suicide again. And none of us questioned his decision to refuse treatment when he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2005. He had resolved to live the remainder of his days, finite at last, as he wished.

Slangred will be pleased to know that the aforementioned copy of Final Exit was returned to the library. And my grandfather’s handgun sleeps with the fishes, ceremoniously dropped to the bottom of the Pacific by my uncle while on a fishing trip, making me wonder how many firearms not discharged during the commission of a crime lie corroding on the ocean floor.

I, meanwhile, am now a card-carrying member of [HMO], and I’d like to know what it takes, short of a “suicidal gesture,” to get just one doctor to say, sincerely, that he or she understands my frustrations and won’t give up on me. Will someone at [HMO] please help me to, as their current ad slogan promises with such elegant brevity, “thrive.”

One does not thrive while sleeping in a chair.

the book of scout

2006-09-28T17:45:00.000-07:00

A certain blogger recently spake her desire for a new Bible, not a new copy of the KJV, mind you, but a newly written Bible. Never one to ignore a gauntlet thrown, I offer my contribution.

The Book of Halo, as Witnessed by Scout

And a calico kitten of unblemished coat came unto Scout and spake unto her, imploring her mew be heard and heeded, for she was the one called Halo, spokeskitten of all the creatures of the land and sea, and it was she who beheld the keychain to the kingdom of peace, though the key be lost, last seen in the tabernacle of the congregation, where she smote it with her right paw and it did sail across the linoleum of the kitchen of the tabernacle of the congregation to points unknown. And verily the calico kitten sayeth unto Scout that, lo, all the creatures of the land and sea may cherish thy gods, whosoever they shall be, and cleave to thy beliefs, for those are they that speed some through thy day. And Scout was pleased, for she had rent her garments at the coming of the chosen kitten, quaking amid believers and unbelievers all of a piece, with foreboding that thus was not so. And the calico kitten did soothe the worried brow of thy messenger, and Scout, daughter of Beverly, the second begotten of Edith from the fertile plain of Iowa, did implore of the calico kitten, daughter of the feral one, whether the creatures of the land and sea should smite one another over cherished gods not of one but of many, apropos of which the calico kitten mewed a proverb of peace, and so it was delivered unto Scout, daughter of Beverly, second begotten of Edith from the fertile plain of Iowa:

Whosoever shall smite her neighbor over this or that cherished god, she shall behold in the pall of night a vessel bereft of fatted kibble.

So sayeth the calico kitten to all the creatures of the land and sea. As it is written, so it was told unto Scout, daughter of Beverly, second begotten of Edith from the fertile plain of Iowa.

demography killed the country radio star

2006-09-22T23:00:00.000-07:00

L.A.’s last country music radio station, after 25 years serving that market, switched formats August 17. If I seem a little slow on the uptake on this one, it’s only because I had no idea anything of the sort had transpired until Saturday, when I went for a haircut and was filled in on the news by my gay black West Hollywood hairdresser, who’s despondent over the loss.

“When I went out for coffee the other day I heard strains of Carrie Underwood and started following the SUV she was coming from,” he said, doing a little Frankenstein monster walk to illustrate his blind desperation.

When I asked what format the station had switched to, he spat, “Hip-hop R&B crap,” then he joked that his “people” were after him, that they’d heard about some black guy listening to KZLA and just wouldn’t stand for it.

My hairdresser certainly isn’t the only one in distress. “I almost threw up, I was so upset,” said longtime KZLA listener Ruth Rogers, according to the Los Angeles Times. “I think it’s racist.”

Really, Ms. Rogers? What kind of racism would that be? The 53-year-old Orange County resident continued, “This is becoming a nation of minorities. I’m not going to turn on my radio anymore. Country music promotes patriotism and family values, and they’ve replaced it with something that just promotes money and hate.”

Oh, that kind of racism.

I’m not what I would call a country music fan, though I do like country music. I’m sure you get the distinction. The appellation “country music fan” just has too much baggage, an unpretty, jingoistic, Republican, NASCAR vibe. A Ms. Rogers, not-my-demographic vibe. So while I have a fair amount of classic country and country-influenced singer-songwriters in my music library, I hesitate to tell anyone that I like country music.

In truth, I was raised on the stuff, back when Southern California had any number of stations to choose from. My mom leaned toward KFOX, which played a mix of contemporary and classic country, and our radio was always on. Always—even when everybody was watching TV. It was all I knew for years. Very much like Chinese food in China is just “food,” country music to me was “music,” and as a kid I loved calling the radio station with special requests, first asking Mom what she wanted to hear then ringing them up. I was put on the air a few times, probably because the DJ thought it both disturbing and cute that a kid was asking for songs with titles like “Barrooms to Bedrooms” (among my mother’s souvenirs there’s a cassette tape of me requesting this very song, recorded straight off the radio with my boxy portable cassette player).

Through both subliminal and active processing, I absorbed quite a lot, and I can sing you a startling number of 1970s country songs, a talent on display this weekend as my partner witnessed the full extent of my childhood inculcation into the country music fold.

“You don’t remember ‘Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man’? Conway and Loretta?” I asked, with the proper amount of shock, then tried to jog her memory by singing the hook.

“Hey! Looziana woman, Mississippi man
We get together any time we can
Mississippi River can’t keep us apart
There’s too much love in this Mississippi heart
Too much love in this Looziana heart.”

Blank expression.

We were in her Little Blue Truck™, leaving a local shoppertainment center. Before lunch we had gone to one of my favorite previously owned CD stores to search for the latest Hem album and a decent George Jones & Tammy Wynette hits package. Hem was swiftly located—and bargain-priced because the young people who work at the store have no idea who Hem is—but the only George & Tammy collection they had was a three-CD set, which I passed on. I’m not sure anyone needs that much G & T. After lunch I drifted into Tower Records, located at the aforementioned shoppertainment complex, in search of same. There were no George & Tammy CDs to be had, but I did emerge with hits collections from Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton and Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn. (Country convention demands that the man’s name be cited first.)

My present fixation with country music duets was sparked by the recent Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris album All the Roadrunning. It’s been in my car’s CD deck for months, spinning down only on rare occasions, when even I have to admit that it’s becoming the aural equivalent of wallpaper. I’m a longtime Harris fan, so I was destined to like the collaboration—inasmuch as anything she touches rates somewhere between pleasant and transcendent on my very subjective scale of liking. As an Associated Press reviewer noted, “Emmylou Harris would sound good matched with a singing hinge.” He went on to dismiss the album as lacking chemistry. I couldn’t disagree more.

All the Roadrunning is one of those albums that took a few listens before I embraced it with ferocity, then I was surprised at how much I liked Knopfler’s songs—all originals—and vocals (his fretwork always being unassailable). But the way they came together with alternating sincerity and playfulness is what really won me, and their interplay reminded me of some of the great country duet partnerships.

Whatever happened to country music power couples anyway?

Through the 1970s, country radio was lousy with duets, and they weren’t isolated tracks from otherwise solo albums, they were from dedicated duet albums, from superstar singing partners who were often dating or married—making their songs of love and loss that much more resonant.

Remember?

If you don’t, you have something in common with my partner.

“How about George & Tammy’s ‘Two Story House’?” I asked, quoting its bouncy refrain: “ ‘How sad it is we now live in a two-story house.’ ”

“Why is it sad that they live in a two-story house?” she asked flatly.

“Because there’s no love about,” I said, solemnly. “They strove so hard for success, they had no time for each other and they fell out of love.” Then I broke into song again:

“I’ve got my story
And I’ve got mine too
How sad it is
We now live in a two-story house.”

Silence.

“You see,” I said helpfully, “they each have their own story about what went wrong, and they also each have their own story.”

“Yeah, I get the complicated layers of meaning,” she said, with no small amount of sarcasm. “But no, I’ve never heard the song.”

“ ‘Golden Ring’?” I offered, not even pausing this time before singing the final chorus.

“Golden ring (golden ring) with one tiny little stone
Cast aside (cast aside) like the love that’s dead and gone
By itself (by itself) it’s just a cold metallic thing
Only love can make a golden wedding ring.”

I studied her face for a glimmer of recognition and found none.

“Sweetie, I didn’t grow up in your mother’s house,” she said.

For years I had been under the delusion that these songs were ubiquitous, part of our collective American experience, our national fabric. Come to find out, not everyone grew up under the unrelenting influence of country radio. Weird.

Weirder still, I had failed to notice the long, slow death of country radio in my own hometown.

“The Los Angeles radio market is basically 40% Hispanic, 11% Asian, and 8% black, and country fans are about 98% Caucasian,” said Rick Cummings, a top executive at KZLA’s parent company, Emmis Communications Corp., according to the Times. “My job is to attract as large an audience as possible.”

And so it was that immediately following rush hour on the morning now known unironically as “Black Thursday” by KZLA listeners—who call themselves KZLAnation—the morning drive show DJ was reportedly told to segue from the Keith Urban track he was playing to a Black Eyed Peas song, after which he and his fellow staff members were let go.

I know from experience that format changes are as a rule executed unceremoniously. For three golden years, 1994–1997, 101.9 KSCA played an “adult album alternative” format that won my heart. For the first time since high school I felt like a radio station “got” me, that I was part of a recognized demographic who liked singer-songwriters and artists who blended elements of rock and folk and pop and soul and jazz and country into music that sometimes defied categorization and almost always ducked the top 40. Then one day I turned the ignition in my car and Spanish-language programming filled my interior; my little bright spot on the dial was gone forever.

While I understand that my piddling singer-songwriter demographic isn’t an advertising magnet, the death of country radio is more curious. Los Angeles reportedly accounts for 3% of all country music sales nationwide, making it the number 1 sales market in the genre for most major record labels. The very night KZLA crooned its last, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw played their first of three sold-out nights at the Staples Center: capacity 20,000. That’s a lot of cowboy boots for a supposedly urban market. Sure, on any one of those three nights I could likely have rolled a bowling ball from one end of the arena to the other without hitting a Democrat, but still, those folks deserve a radio station too. It placates them.

“What will all the Republicans listen to?” I asked my hairdresser.

“Now, now,” said my demographic-defying friend. “They’re not all like that.”

I couldn’t help but notice that when he talked about KZLA listeners and country music fans, he said “they,” not “we.”

Country music is appealing, I think, in a broader way than it’s marketed. The audience doesn’t have to be 98% Caucasion, nor should anyone who likes country be made to feel like an outsider for being black or gay or Democratic or antiwar—or for not appreciating a goddamn car race.

I don’t miss KZLA, whose play list was dominated by your Tim McGraws, your Brad Paisleys, your Gretchen Wilsons—whoever was hot at any given moment. Even my mom had stopped listening to the radio long before the death of KZLA, her taste having gone completely retro. She’s resorted to a mail-order catalog (with no Web presence—that old-school) called Country Music Memories, where she can purchase Boxcar Willie, Stanley Brothers, and Ferlin Husky CDs with abandon.

Me, I prefer your Donna Fargos, your Loretta Lynns, your Bobbie Gentrys, and to Tammy Wynette I guess I’d have to say, Tammy why not? So I do miss country radio, at least in theory. I miss the radio of my youth, when it was just “music.”

By the way, if anyone knows a gay country music lover in SoCal who’s available, my hairdresser is tall, fit, and handsome. He does a mean two-step, and he’s a Democrat.

playing by the rules

2006-09-08T09:54:00.000-07:00

In my capacity as an operative for the Gay Agenda™ I must sometimes perform tasks that I find disagreeable. Should any representatives of the totally agenda-free, just-trying-to-save-your-eternal-soul-ma’am religious right be reading, I’m not talking about propagandizing and recruiting your children: I haven’t yet achieved that clearance level. No, what I’m doing is far more insidious; indeed, it may be counterproductive to the cause: I’m editing the coming-out story of a piss-poor role model.

The Gay Agenda™, while whimsically characterized by televangelists and sundry Republicans as almost irresistibly powerful, is really rather desperate, and as such we’ll pretty much accept any new recruits who come our way. It’s like a giant game of Red Rover, except that substitutes are almost invariably sent in place of the recruits we call for. For instance, we call, “Red rover, red rover, send Cher right over!” and over charges Chastity to join our team. At first we think, Hey, that’s not who— But then we shrug and go, “Yay, the more the merrier!” Then sometimes we call out, say, “Kevin Spacey!” and they send the right guy, and we cheer him on as he comes running over, but when he reaches us he angrily denies that he’s gay, breaking our spirit. Per the rules of the game, any opponent who breaks our team’s spirit not only returns to his own team but takes a member of our team back with him, which is what happened to Anne Heche.

Clearly our recruiting strategies are flawed, and I have to think that the weakness of our educational materials looms large in our failure to surpass the 10% market saturation we achieved decades ago. While the heterosexuals advertise their “lifestyle” in the Bible, the best-selling book in America, we long ago realized that, given our budget constraints, the only venue in which we could truly access nationwide crossover market reach is the PennySaver. And compared to straight advertising, our own material lacks a certain kickiness: “Did you know homosexuality has been decriminalized and declassified as a mental disorder? Give it a try—if you can get past that societally ingrained ‘ick’ factor.”

With recruitment materials that underwhelming, we can’t afford to be choosy, which is why we’ve offered open enrollment since the mid 1950s (following a politically embarrassing “sexual purity” movement among extremists agitating to restrict membership to Kinsey fives and up). And since homosexuality is a tough sell based on its historical image, we increasingly rely on contemporary spokesmodels to represent our brand. Heterosexuality, while harboring its fair share of losers, is hawked by a dazzling array of celebrities. Even fringe sects like Christian fundamentalism and Scientology are endorsed, respectively, by Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise. And us? Now, let me be crystal-clear: I’m not dissing Ellen—we all love her; she’s cool people—but I think we can all agree that upon her shoulders are not empires built. Plus, there are a lot of would-be lesbians who just don’t think they would look good in a suit and sneakers; we lose that demographic before we even get a chance to highlight the more alluring perks of our benefits package: potentially shared wardrobes, no more accidental procreation, etc.

So we take what we can get. Thus I’ve spent the last couple of days tracking down articles and sources to verify facts in a top-secret, exclusive coming-out story—a rare glimpse into the personal life of…well, a person who won’t exactly cover the Gay Agenda™ in glory, and for this I apologize to my teammates in advance. But we called “Red rover!” and this is who the straights sent over, and that’s the way the game is played.

what you don’t know can hurt you

2006-09-03T11:59:00.000-07:00

I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I certainly didn’t realize it at the time. I actually felt well rested and pleasant enough upon awakening, knowing as I did that for the next few days I would be free of my labors: the nudging around of commas and such. Let misplaced punctuation flourish throughout the land this Labor Day, for I care not. What I do care about, among several other things, are reference books, and no one can make me give them up, not even on a weekend during which I’m encouraged to eschew the tools of my trade.

Ever seen the Hepburn-Tracy film Desk Set? Kate is the head of the reference department at a television network and Spence is an efficiency expert hired to assess where his newly developed supercomputer can replace employees and save the company a few bucks in payroll. I’ve watched the movie at least a dozen times, never giving a flying fig about the inevitable romantic sparks between go-getter working gal Hepburn and her perceived archenemy Tracy. I’m in it for the scenes during which Kate and her team field inquiries ranging from the total weight of the earth to the names of Santa’s eight reindeer, sometimes answering off the tops of their heads but more often searching out answers in their glorious stacks, an upstairs loft with thousands of books collectively containing all the information any of the various employees of a TV network could ever need to know.

A teenager when I first saw the film, I suddenly knew what I wanted to be when I grew up: Hepburn’s fast-talking, whip-smart human encyclopedia, without the messy romantic entanglements. Why did she have to moon after Gig Young or fall for Spence when she had the greatest life ever—a single woman with a head full of steam and a roomful of knowledge?

Years later I would at last locate my sexuality and understand the complications therein, though I still found no appeal in Gig or Spence. How great it would be if Kate instead fell for her coworker Joan Blondell and they forged a life together, two books unbound, swapping fascinating bits of information amid winks and smiles—it is a 1957 film, after all; adult relations are merely hinted at through the symbology of bathrobes.

I did eventually grow up to assume a career in which facts and figures figure prominently, though most of the data I need can be gleaned more quickly via Spence’s cursed computer than through the thousands of books that make up our research department. Still, there’s great appeal in physical volumes, their relative weight often indicative of their information wealth, their indices irresistibly inviting the reader in multiple directions at once. God help me when I have to look something up in a real book, because on my path to whatever I was looking for I’m liable to engage with some other entry and forget what I was supposed to be doing. If you ever happen to lose me in a bookstore, before having me paged like an errant child, check the reference section for my glassy-eyed self, hypnotized by the visage of so many compendiums of information, sorted and ordered for my tidy, systematic gratification.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a home without an encyclopedia. I know, I know. But there’s nothing we can do about that now; we can only shoulder on when faced with such retrospective adversity. It’s not that my parents couldn’t afford such—we always had shoes in the wintertime—they just didn’t particularly see the point in spending all that money on a stack of books they figured would ultimately serve only to collect dust. Besides, we had a branch library well within biking distance; I could go pet their encyclopedias whenever the mood struck.

So this morning I was flipping through my Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, ’cause that’s the way I roll. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just, you know, flipping. This is the second copy I’ve purchased of Robert Hendrickson’s 800-word tome, having bought the first during the 2004 holidays as a gift for my therapist, who had only weeks before asked if I could recommend a good book about the etymology of idioms. My therapist had not only asked me for information, she had asked me for information regarding a volume of information—somebody pinch me! I did my research and settled on the Hendrickson volume, then I wrapped it in holiday-nonspecific paper—she’s coy when I try to discover her belief system—slid it into a manila envelope, just in case my HMO forbade gifts between doctors and clients, and left it with her secretary.

When I came for my appointment the following week she told me the book was precisely what she had in mind and that she adored it, so much so that she bought a second copy for her father and a third for the office staff: When she showed them her copy they were reportedly loathe to give it back. For weeks afterward, upon arrival for my appointment, her receptionist would regale me with reportage: “According to the book ‘happy as a clam’ comes from ‘happy as a clam at high tide,’ because clams were dug at low tide, so, you know, they would be happier at high tide. I never thought about it, but ‘happy as a clam’ doesn’t really make sense, not without the tide part.” Truly it doesn’t. (This is why copy editors often excise hackneyed expressions from the work of writers who have slipped into autopilot mode—commonly heard idioms become furniture in the American lexicon, to such a degree that our brains no longer bother to process the words or their [potential lack of] meaning.)

I later bought a copy for myself, because how could I have lived this long without one? And as I glanced through it this morning I noticed the entry for “getting up on the wrong side of the bed.” In keeping with the age-old superstition that the left is sinister and unlucky, Romans, particularly Augustus Caesar, always got out of bed on the right side to ensure good health and humor.

Good to know: The left is the wrong side of the bed. This explains so much. You see, my partner and I, we have our sides, and mine is the left—always has been—which means that for close to 12 years I’ve been getting up on the wrong goddamn side of the bed!

Why didn’t anyone tell me this before? Has my partner known all along? After all, she’s my Hepburn, retaining every shred of information she’s ever gathered, ready to spit it out on demand. Me? I often can’t remember my phone number; I’m Joan Blondell, always having to climb up into the stacks to ferret out my answers.

She’s left me to languish in the ill health and humor of the wrong side of the bed for over a decade—and she claims she can’t keep a secret! Sporks, you are officially busted. Starting tomorrow morning I’ll be getting out of the right side of the bed, thank you very much—and don’t think I won’t be rolling over your ass to get there.

springtime in van nuys

2006-08-27T19:13:00.000-07:00

I have a lyric loop bouncing around in my head, the refrain from an air freshener commercial that proclaims, “Spring is in the air!” sung to the tune of “Love Is in the Air,” and I wonder whether my mad itch to revive the backyard is motivated by the song, or maybe the song loop has been triggered by my efforts at renewal—I can’t remember which came first. I prefer to think the latter, because I don’t want to be the kind of person who’s spurred to action by a commercial jingle—that gives Madison Avenue conjurers way too much power, even if I didn’t buy, and can’t even specify, the brand of air freshener in question.

I don’t want to be that neighbor: the one who lets her yard go native and never cleans her house’s exterior and whose property eventually comes to resemble an extremely unintriguing around-the-clock rummage sale. I want to be part of the “improving” neighborhood we moved into, not the albatross that makes fellow homeowners shake their heads as they pass, lamenting, “If it weren’t for those lesbians, our Zip code would be unstoppable.”

Happily, ours isn’t the least-kempt house in the neighborhood; it’s not even in the top 10. Hell, the corner house at the opposite end of our block looks like the set of Sanford and Son, so we have a long way to slide before we’re property value–enemy number 1 in this quarter. Still, don’t encourage us.

To be fair, and I think I can extend that courtesy to myself in my blog, our backyard was dead when we bought the house, so no harm, no foul there. And while the front yard at first appeared ripe with brilliant green promise, it was merely a lawn gesture, a costume the yard had donned for “curb appeal”—the sellers had installed full-sun sod, a groundcover that didn’t stand a chance of thriving in a yard 80% shaded by four mature trees. (The sellers’ bad decisions didn’t stop there: They also installed white wall-to-wall carpet, which would be practical only if we enforced a strict no-shoes policy and carried our pets at all times.)

I was initially determined to make the backyard hospitable for outdoor grilling and dining; maybe we would even have a house-warming party (though we've never hosted a get-together of more than six people, ourselves included). And as it happened my mom and dad were simultaneously preparing for a move themselves, so Mother’s extensive inventory of plants came up for grabs. (The county farm bureau once called her to pitch membership in their organization; based upon the amounts of fertilizer and gardening supplies she bought, she had been flagged as a commercial farmer.)

I couldn’t take on any of her hundreds of varieties of fuschias—her “farming” specialty—since they couldn’t withstand the heat of the valley, but we loaded up on begonias, brugmansia, clivia, sego palms, and the like. She even entrusted to me her mother’s amaryllis, which had been confined to pots since the day my mother dug them up in 1980, when Grandma was moving to a seniors’ village and was determined to take them with her. The flowers did poorly at Grandma’s new place and Mom took them home to her own yard to coax them back to health, an endeavor that took on added significance after Grandma died. I’m still not sure why my mother decided to hand them over to me, as by that point they had taken on the significance of heirloom, but they seemed happy to at last shake off their confining pots and spread their bulbous roots in limitless soil.

The next chapter in the life of our yard wasn’t so bright. After tending the plants assiduously for about a year I slid into an emotional fissure that enveloped all in a pall of meaninglessness, my efforts most of all. To say that I stood idly by and watched our yard die would indicate a presence of mind I didn’t possess. I sleepwalked through the next couple of years while our property, despite my partner’s desperate efforts to the contrary, went native.

Flashing forward to the present, I feel that I have my depression more under control than ever before, and I’m emerging from an 18-month-long energy slump concurrent with an until-recently undiagnosed condition that’s also feeling more under control these days. In short, spring is in the fucking air!

If I’ve learned anything in therapy, it’s that we can’t coax much new growth without clearing out all the dead branches and detritus begat by neglect, the kind of stuff that, if we squint, can fool us into thinking that it is life. It gives a woman pause, cutting all that crap out, because the process really is an acknowledgement of death—the end of that life cycle—and an expression of readiness to exit the static fallow phase and move on to the next cycle, with all the thoughtful and anxious attention that fragile new growth requires.

Nevertheless, I’ve been darting about the yard from one project to the next, grooming and pruning and clearing whatever and wherever necessary. I understand that my efforts are off-season, but what the hell, Southern California doesn’t much observe seasons anyhow, and something tells me that anything managing to live thus far in this backyard—birds of paradise, I think, could survive the nuclear option—is hardy enough to recalibrate to the demands of my psyche.

Some plants are so stricken they have to be cut back flush with the ground to be, with any luck, wholly reincarnated. Others are leggy and overgrown and are cut back to resemble mere sticks emerging at jaunty angles from the earth. Spent branches are laid to rest in our big green recycling container to be hauled away by the city and rendered as mulch, achieving relevance at last in another life cycle.

I visit with the most vulnerable plants daily, testing for hydration as my mother taught me, by inserting one knuckle into the soil, so as to avoid over-watering my charges. With the largest plants and trees I’ve left the hose to drip overnight, moving it to a new host each morning, reassuring each in turn that it’s safe to grow, that any tendrils ventured will be met with all due nourishment. I’m not talking to them exactly—at least not by speaking aloud—but there has been communion. I feel like I’m performing a kind of penance for my past neglect, and I like to think the plants understand that I need them to come back as badly as they need me to feed them.

I remembered noticing some time ago that Starbucks promotes the use of spent coffee grounds as compost and fertilizer for acid-loving plants, an idea confirmed by enough organic gardening sites that I’ve begun sprinkling my daily grind around the camellias. I brew for one, so the grounds barely season the soil. Still, it’s cool to find new ways to repurpose, and any acid-loving, coffee-drinking plant is surely a friend of mine.

My partner has been, understandably, a little anxious about my ministry. She acknowledges that the yard desperately needs help but fears that I’ve been a pinch overzealous in what she calls my “scorched-earth policy.” And I admit that I’m prone to extremes: I tackle projects full-bore or not at all. I also admit that the “yard” I’m paying such precious attention to really does resemble nothing more than dirt and sticks in the big picture.

But when I squint I see the little shoots poking out of the ground, the tiny sprouts along the sticks, and I know that we’ve begun a new chapter together.

grammar for anti-dummies

2006-08-23T13:42:00.000-07:00

Once we leave high school, our composition skills are unlikely to see further instruction. Sad, that. Even we English majors seldom see significant improvement in our core knowledge of sentence structure and grammar post–K-12. Sure, we exit college with a wicked ability to talk smack about Joseph Conrad’s use of symbol and TS Eliot’s meter, but the actual verbiage of our essays? Strictly high school.

The miracle of e-mail distanced us further still from our practice of composition in that even as it encourages greater and more frequent communication, it also prompts faster, less structured missives, its deconstruction of language aided and abetted by the shorthand adopted by users of Internet discussion boards and text-messaging.

But just as the Internet taketh away, the Internet giveth back: Enter blogging, the 21st-century savior of written language. If that seems like an overstatement, consider this: Other than a blog entry, what’s the last thing you wrote that qualified as a composition, with a main idea, reasonably formal sentence and paragraph structure, and a general sense of wholeness? Blogging is good for you!

Sure, there are bloggers who post word vomit, but I don’t read their blogs and I suspect that you don’t either. You’re a discerning reader, a well-versed blogger, and a better person for your attention to detail. It’s that attention to detail I hope to engage here.

I thought it might be fun to occasionally write about something other than myself, but I can make just about anything about me, other than subjects I don't know anything about like nuclear physics or golf, and who wants to hear the pontifications of someone who lacks any authority on the subject under discussion—other than Bill O'Reilly's estimated 2.5 million daily viewers?

Hey, I thought, with a snap of my fingers, maybe I should natter on about instances of grammatical misuse that are so prevalent they have very nearly overtaken correct usage, the kinds of mistakes I routinely encounter among not just casual but professional writers.

Presenting the inaugural entry in what I hope will be continuing series, a sort of Grammar for Anti-Dummies. Read forth and be edified, then flaunt your correctitude proudly. And please don’t fret over whether you’ve personally made the kinds of mistakes cited. In the case of today’s subject, misuse is as epidemic as that crystal meth I hear so much about. And even if you have made such a mistake, no one noticed except the odd English teacher or copy editor, and, really, how many of those types regularly read your blog?

Without further ado, I present today’s lesson:

When using the phrase “more important” or “most important” to give weight to an item in a list, reject the common instinct to write “importantly.”

The boring English-teacher reason is that “important” is an adjective and is used to modify nouns, of which your list items are almost certainly composed. “Importantly” is an adverb and is therefore properly used as a modifier of action and circumstance.

Take the following:

The primary tools of my trade are a computer, a red pen, and, most important, a good dictionary.

While “most importantly” might sound correct in this instance, the subtle addition of that “ly” would imply thought or action on the dictionary’s part, and while dictionaries are important (sayeth the copy editor), they cannot think or do anything—though if they could, they would certainly do it in a self-important manner.

Also note that if you reframe the sentence*, it wouldn’t make sense to say, “A good dictionary is most importantly to my trade.”

*This is a handy tool when questioning usage in your own writing (especially when you don’t have an English teacher or grammar handbook nearby): Try reversing noun and verb order in your head to see whether your sentence still makes sense.

In general, an introductory “more” or “most” will call for the adjective “important.”

Reserve the word “importantly” to color a character:

President Bush strides importantly about the room, knowing as he does that Jesus is on his side.

Take out the word “importantly” and the tone of the sentence is ambiguous, leaving it up to the reader to decide whether the author means to characterize Bush as heroic or arrogant. Inserting the word solidifies the tone as dryly sarcastic and disparaging, a tone one should always employ when discussing the current administration. Instances are few in which you might describe a person as acting “importantly” without conveying mockery.

The adverb form can also color the significance of an action or perception:

Sexy CSI Sara Sidle kicked open the door to the crack den and noted, importantly, that the abandoned warehouse smelled uncharacteristically of bleach and cleaning agents.

Sure, Jorja Fox is a total lesbionic babe, but the more important point of the sentence is that her character has perceived something amiss in the crack den (even more amiss than are crack dens’ general wont).

Pretty simple stuff, this “important” vs. “importantly” distinction. If you’ve read this far, I hope it was worth your time, and, more important, I hope you feel like a total grammar stud. Blog fierce!

(OK, that should properly be “Blog fiercely,” but the proper form just doesn’t have the rat-a-tat cadence I want. Secondary lesson of the day: Never let boring old rules get in the way of your self-expression.)

you want a piece of me?

2006-08-16T18:00:00.000-07:00

This may be the most important blog entry you’ll ever read.

I received an e-mail message Monday from a gentleman named Andrey Vladimirovich Popov. Rather, it was forwarded to me by a friend whose hard heart blinded him to the purity of Mr. Popov’s motives in pleading for financial assistance to save his little niece Elina’s life. Elina, he says, suffers from tetarado fallo, a rare and fatal congenital heart disease.

A bit of a skeptic myself—it’s the human condition, I’m afraid—I Googled Elina’s illness only to find Mr. Popov’s claim to be absolutely true: Tetarado fallo is in fact so rare the search query returns not a single hit on Google! Poor Elina, who is too young to understand, in Mr. Popov’s words, “that her life can be stopped suddenly in the absence of money.” (Mr. Popov’s awkward, foreigner’s grasp of English isn’t the least of his charms!)

Sure, I could have sent Mr. Popov the $1, $10, or $100 he requested—whatever I’m comfortable sending, his humble hat-in-hand tone conveyed. But, as is so often the case, I found myself wanting to do more than could be achieved with my own humble finances.

In a moment of pure inspiration I hooked Mr. Popov up with Dr. Bisi Odum, a Nigerian friend (pen pal? How are we to refer to letter friends in the age of e-mail?) I’ve been corresponding with for some months. Dr. Odum is in contact with someone in the employ of a government official who desperately needs help in transferring a great fortune he acquired while helping a disgraced dignitary to flee the country. When I first heard from Dr. Odum in June 2005, I wondered why on earth someone so remote and with such riches to share would contact me, and now I finally have my answer: because I was fated to act the catalyst for two needful men, one in need of a fortune and the other in need of someone (with a bank account) with whom to share his fortune. Serendipity, thy name is Scout!

I share with you this heartwarming tale to illustrate my sincere belief in the awesome power of humankind when united toward a common goal. Together we can do anything, from saving little Elina’s life through the largesse of opportunistic Nigerian government officials to enabling each other to actualize the greatness we harbor within, which brings me to my own humble story.

When you visit your local bookstore you may ask yourself, What do all these published authors have that Scout doesn’t have? More talent? More drive? People skills? Better ideas? Interesting lives? Connections? Agents? A contract? All are respectable answers, dear readers, but each fail to address the core issue: financial freedom.

Friends tell me, “Say, Scout, that Nicole Richie published a book, and she’s a complete moron. How come you don’t write a book?”

Well, Nicole Richie doesn’t spend eight hours a day fixing other people’s writing, does she? No. Her family is wealthy, because her dad was a Commodore and still gets residuals every time you hear “Three Times a Lady,” and I think he also had a solo career, and she therefore has plenty of money and plenty of time to write a novel, the content of which someone like me must fix in order to make her appear literate. Do you see how unfair the world is? Just because my father worked at an oil refinery instead of joining the Commodores—and my dad totally could have rocked “Brick House”—my voice is silenced.

You may be tempted to minimize my plight by insisting that I can write in my off hours. If such rationale makes you better able to ignore the sound of my soul screaming, that’s your demon to wrestle, but I would be remiss in not telling you that patrons of the arts sit at the right hand of God in heaven. (Unfortunately, everybody nowadays claims God promised him or her a seat at his right hand. To accommodate the influx of do-gooders, individual seats have been torn out and replaced with Astroturf for a “festival seating” atmosphere. Left-hand-of-God seating is still available, with preference given to American Express cardholders. God apologizes for any inconvenience or seating arrangements otherwise implied.)

When I come home from work I’m bone-tired. Some speak of “desk jobs” as though we office workers are just a bunch of lazy clock-watchers. Ha! Until they sit a spell in my ergonomic desk chair they simply can’t appreciate the challenge of reading sentence after clumsily executed sentence, a red pen poised just above the page, ready to correct any offending text. And as if that isn’t stressful enough, I often must contact informants to ensure that they’re represented accurately and that their names are spelled correctly and such, and those informants aren’t always cooperative with us journalistic types; sometimes they don’t want their names spelled correctly, but I press on in the service of accuracy.

As far as my weekends go, there’s so much to catch up on: laundry and grocery shopping and petting my animal companions, plus watching quality television like Meerkat Manor and Intervention. In other words, it’s simply impossible to write the great, great novel that lurks within me while working a full-time job. And that’s where you come in.

For a limited time, I’m offering readers of my blog the opportunity to support me in the lifestyle to which I aspire as I make the leap from anonymous copy editor to renowned author. Before you say “yes!” to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, read what the critics have been saying about Scout:

“As with real gems, I find myself not so much thinking, as just feeling dazzled.” —hopskipjump

“Can I get an ‘AMEN’?” —slangred

“Orgazzzzzzzzmic.” —eb

“The more I learn about you, the more fascinating you are.” —wordsrock

“God, I'm so turned on.” —wenwhit

Convinced? Don’t commit yet; here’s what you’ll get with your sponsorship:

• Lifetime membership in Scout’s fan club
• A personally inscribed copy of the novel you finance (impersonally autographed copies available on request for enterprising sorts who wish to sell theirs for big bucks on eBay)
• One or more characters in said novel named after you
• One insertion in said novel of something—an item, place, person, etc.—personally meaningful to you, so long as your requested insertion does not alter the plot. For instance, a request to incorporate your dachshund, a favorite café, or Cheetos® would be cheerfully granted, whereas a request to insert the poem you’ve written about your dachshund, favorite café, or Cheetos® may be refused if said novel is not amenable to a poet character
• Bragging rights
• Everlasting self-satisfaction for having enabled art to flourish

Ready to commit? Well, hold on to your girdles, because you haven’t heard the best part: All of this is available to you at the introductory Founders Circle™ rate of just $10,000! Not only that, but for every Founders Circle™ sponsorship sold, I will donate $1 in that member’s name to Elina Popov. This offer is strictly limited to those who accept it; once Founders Circle™ sponsorships have been issued to all who respond, there will be no more sold. Act now by sending your personal bank account information to neurotranscendence@gmail.com.

Remember: The greater the number of readers who respond to this unbelievable offer, the better my lifestyle will be.

cleavage crossing

2006-08-13T22:00:00.000-07:00

It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be—nor was it as "bad" as I thought it would be, like, you know, bad in a good way. I had put it off for years, always making excuses when confronted with the issue: "Oh, I have other plans" or "I can't afford it today" or "I'd love to, but I've given up food."

Nevertheless, I knew that one day I would have to go to Hooters.

Working for the Gay Agenda™ as I do, one might expect that it would be all too easy for me to enjoy a Hooters-free lifestyle. Au contraire! Ever since the chain opened a Hollywood Boulevard location, just steps from my office building, I've been under enormous pressure to submit to the traffic-cone-orange NASCAR-dadness of it all.

My gay male coworkers, it seems, can't get enough of the joint—and the Hooters Girls can't get enough of them. The gay boys wink at the HGs conspiratorially: We get it, they seem to communicate telepathically, we can appreciate the irony and campy theatricality of the situation. And we will wildy overtip you.

But the scenario is far more charged for a lesbian since many, though not all, straight women believe that all lesbians want them, and these women, the ones who think lesbians indiscriminately lust after all women, seem alternately fascinated and repulsed by the idea of being an object of lust for women, even if they've gone out of their way to objectify themselves to the world at large.

So when I walk into Hooters—as I was compelled to do Friday when my very best work friend chose to celebrate his final day at the company with a heaping plate of hot wings—my whole demeanor has to say, "I'm so not here for the scenery," which isn't hard for me, because Hooters Girls are so not my type*.

*A word on "my type": A coworker of mine used to constantly bring magazines to my desk to show me "hot" girls, trying to suss out what he must have judged my unfathomably peculiar taste in women. I would shake my head and send him away every time, thinking that he'd one day realize he wasn't going to find my dream girl in the pages of Maxim, but the dear boy kept trying, for all his effort managing only to further delineate the difference between gay male and lesbian ideals of womanhood. (For the record I'll state here that I have on more than one occasion admired a dyke from afar only to realize on closer inspection, and with a fair amount of chagrin, that I'm sizing up a boy—and one who might be underage at that.) Suffice to say that my type, inasmuch as I'll cop to having one, would not be invited back for a second interview at the Hooters hiring fair.

Once seated, though, I thought Hooters seemed like almost any other noisy, gimmicky chain restaurant, the main difference being that the wait staff was far less dispirited than the typical white-shirted and aproned college kids who might inhabit the Planet Hollywood galaxy. Our server, Danetra, was friendly and enthusiastic, and three other Hooters Girls who stopped by—it's a sort of tradition, I gather, that HGs visit parties outside their own stations to spread the love, signing your table ticket while they mingle—were equally bubbly, and not in an airheaded way. I imagine we might have collected more HG autographs had we been a party of businessmen instead of three gay guys and two women, but we were shown quite enough attention for my taste, and the attention was kind, not teasing or demeaning—to us or to the HGs in question.

At the end of the day I was left to question why I had stood my anti-Hooters ground so fervently.

Could be that I was brought up in a family atmosphere where any display of female sexuality was characterized as exploitative and demeaning. Watching movies with my mom as a kid, I dreaded any hint of female nudity. A single exposed breast would turn her mood dark, her sudden, palpable anger throwing the whole family in to a state of discomfort. And need I note that she had absolutely no tolerance for the idea that a man really might read Playboy for the articles?

I remember being in the car with her once, I was maybe 13, when she spotted a nasty magazine lying in the middle of a busy street. She wheeled the car around and approached it as slowly as she could given the traffic—maybe 15 mph—and she instructed me to open the car door and pick it up as we passed over it. You have to hand it to her precision driving—she positioned the car perfectly so that I could open the door and scoop up the offending literature without a hitch.

Imagine our surprise when we saw that the flesh she had spotted from a moving car belonged to a fully erect man and that the magazine was Honcho, a gay men's skin mag. We laughed as she sped away, feeling conspiratorial, like we had not only performed an important anti-smut service but were being a little naughty ourselves in the bargain. On our way home we drove through the alley behind a grocery store to dispose of the magazine in their gigantic garbage bin—she didn't want any neighbors to find it in our trash—but we furtively flipped through its pages before tossing it away, embarrassed and thrilled by its contents.

During my brief, brilliant career as a copywriter in gay male erotica, I found myself equivocating: Men are exhibitionists, I reasoned, and there's nothing exploitative in providing an arena for their exhibitionism. But it strikes me now that defining displays of male sexuality as mutually agreed upon exhibitionism and female displays as exploitation is terribly anti-feminist. It discredits any female who cares to exhibit her sexuality, and doubly objectifies women who participate in erotica—or work at Hooters—by discounting their free will. Women are too complicated to be sorted into my mother's absolute categories of saints, whores, and victims.

I actually like Hooters of America's coy "Who, us?" corporate stance on their image, as taken from the "about" section on their official site: "The chain acknowledges that many consider 'Hooters' a slang term for a portion of the female anatomy. Hooters does have an owl inside its logo and uses an owl theme sufficiently to allow debate to occur over the meaning's intent. The chain enjoys and benefits from this debate."

Despite any grudging slack I've extended toward Hooters since my fateful Friday lunch, I'm not sure I'd ever be inclined to go back. The food was ordinary and overpriced, like almost any other noisy, gimmicky chain restaurant, and I had a tough time finding menu items that weren't deep-fried. But Hooters Girls, while still not my type, are another story entirely. I think I'd be happy to hang out with just about any of them anytime. And if they promise not to jump to any unfounded conclusions about my trying to get inside their little orange shorts, I promise to give full faith and credit to their judicious exercise of free will.

on the couch, on the porch

2006-08-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

"No one in our family takes meds," my mother-in-law told me. "Not voluntary meds, anyway."

We were sitting on the porch at the beach house, rocking actually, a couple of nights in to our vacation. She had just paid me a great compliment, in my estimation, noting that I'm a welcome even keel amid an often turbulent family, the dynamic of which can best be described as...competitive? Contentious even? She had tsked some wholly unnecessary tension that had lately occurred, and I joked that everybody just needed better meds, which begat the above statement.

I suppose the meds I take could be described as "voluntary," inasmuch as I chose to begin taking them rather than following through with plans to end my life. Still, the statement hit me funny, especially since it followed an observation that had my in-laws chosen to take psychotropic medications, sure, they might be more even-tempered, but they would also likely be less ambitious and accomplished.

I've fought feelings of inadequacy throughout much of my relationship. I'm a blue-collar girl who married into a blue-blooded family, and I have frequently felt like a fish out of water--I'm not even sure the land mammals any longer expect me to adapt. "This is our daughter's partner, Scout," they may say. "Please try to ignore the gills."

But since going on meds I've felt less and less pressure to fit in and ever more freedom to be myself. Time with my in-laws no longer casts a thoroughly opaque shroud over my personality. Upcoming visits no longer fill me with quite so much dread that I'll never be worthy of their hospitality--or their daughter.

Whenever my therapist catches me stigmatizing myself for my reliance on meds--such a difficult habit to break from within when it's constantly reinforced from without--she reminds me that meds haven't shut me off from the world, they allow me to make myself available to it.

Depression that first expresses itself in chronic sadness acquires a hard patina when the misery becomes too much to bear, leaving the soul a numb void that can no longer be touched--for good or for ill. Once I realized I no longer found joy in anything that had previously given my life meaning, I knew I'd have to get help or get out. I got help.

I think it's good that I found my mother-in-law's remark about "voluntary meds" jarring. A lack of surprise may have indicated an unwanted level of agreement, some acknowledgement on my part that I am weak, "less than," for choosing the easy road. I hope I don't sound like a T-shirt when I say that what I have chosen is life, and anyone who thinks that's an easy road simply hasn't met me on a fair playing field.

jesus is my barista

2006-07-31T10:17:00.000-07:00

I come to you today from Latte Litchfield in South Carolina, where the partner and I vacation with her parents annually. We're not actually vacationing at the coffee house but at a beach house about a half mile from here, a house that, as it turns out, has Internet access--sadly, that feature wasn't advertised in the brochure, so we didn't bring our laptop. Question: Had you a beach house to rent, which features would you highlight in addition to the obvious, i.e. oceanfront beach access, A/C, and the like? For instance, if it had an elevator and wireless Internet, would you gloss those amenities and instead use your precious brochure space to talk up the plantation shutters?

That being said, Internet access is only 10 cents per minute here at Latte Litchfield, and I get to sip a delicious java chip blended mocha as I blog, so all is well. Besides, last year the rental computers were located smack underneath two giant Ten Commandments tablets mounted on the wall. The tablets are still here, but the computers have been moved across the room. Still, I'll do my best to post morally. What would Jesus write?

While Jesus, with a hard e, is certainly at home here in S.C., Hay-suse is not. Yesterday at the Piggly Wiggly I asked the deli ladies where I could find tortillas. "You mean chips?" asked one of them. "No, tortillas, like for burritos and stuff." The ladies furrowed their brows and shook their heads at each other, like I had asked for something as rare and unappetizing as cow spit.

We did eventually find a small Mexi-Asian section, the cuisines being very similar, you know, and against our better judgement bought a package of pillowy Old El Paso flour tortillas (the only option available), the kind that are so processed they never really expire, like Twinkies. So anathema to a girl born and raised in Southern California.

On the drive out (we generally fly into the in-laws' home city then drive to the coast) we once again interacted with the lawmen of Springfield, about 100 miles from the coast, where I was pulled over for speeding last year. This time it was a routine driver's license checkpoint, which nevertheless resulted in a fair amount of knee-slapping over the fact that we had come all this way to go to the beach. "You took yourselves a wrong turn somewhere!" said one of the officers.

My California license saved me a ticket last year. "California!" the officer who pulled me over exclaimed when I handed it over, then asked, "If I give you a ticket, will you promise to pay it?" That "if I give you a ticket" part made it seem optional to me, so I answered, "Well, officer, I would prefer not to get the ticket." He slapped my registration and license against his wrist and, to my everlasting surprise, handed it back to me with an admonition to "Take it easy from here on out." I thought I was all cute, having charmed my way out of a ticket, until my partner told me that the officer was weighing whether to arrest me to ensure payment.

So, no trouble with the law, and the swimsuit is performing like a champ: The mastectomy suit is the single greatest invention since seamless undiepants. Ooh, and we swam with dolphins yesterday! Or rather dolphins passed by roughly 25 feet from where we were swimming. And even I'm not too jaded to squeal with delight when dolphins leap through the ocean within my spitting distance--you know, if I were a whale, with a blow hole in my skull.

Three days passed. Four to go. Hope to check in again soon.

boob(s)

2006-07-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

Via Salon's Broadsheet blog, which was itself citing a New York Times article, I learned this summer that Lands' End had introduced a revolutionary new swim line promising suits “thoughtfully designed to fit real women and flatter every figure.” Every figure? Really, Lands' End, are you sure you want to make that claim?

I'm shaped, roughly, like a refrigerator, with identical hip and bust measurements, without a heck of a lot of contour in between. Oh, and I have only one boob—just born that way, or developed that way at any rate. And no amount of one-armed pull-ups during my teenage years did a lick of good, as my horrified pubescent self gamely tried to help the stunted hemisphere catch up with its mate.

Go for it, Lands' End, show me the suit of my dreams.

I visited the online site and called up their virtual model, where a girl can plug in her own ghastly stats and try suits on her CGI doppelgänger. I had big ideas about giving my CGI self a makeover, with a crew cut and glasses and a less vacant look, but I couldn't even get the thing to accept my measurements, not because it didn't believe such a figure existed but because the application didn't like Safari. Nor did it like Explorer. And I'm not going to download a new browser for any goddamn swimsuit model. So my virtual model defaulted to something like the actress Anne Archer, which isn't terrible, as CGI selves go, but she wasn't going to be very illustrative of me without considerable imagination.

Lands' End offers a variety of ways to shop: by “anxiety zone” (my brain?), body shape, suit type, bra style, and…omigod, they have mastectomy suits with built-in pockets for prostheses! This really is revolutionary! Though in the past I've installed my own fake-boob pocket—a deconstructed sock sewn into the suit's “breast shelf”—my fix has always left me wanting. For starters, I think I look reasonably lopsided even with my gelatinous friend in place. Then there's the whole fear about it falling overboard whenever I'm hit by a wave, causing me to grope at it anxiously and often—at which time its stress-ball-like properties come in handy. (Ha! Get it?)

I've been kluging my own solutions for so long it never occurred to me that there might be more “manufactured” options. A mastectomy suit would be almost as momentous a leap forward for me as when I switched to silicone from foam, which lacked natural movement and absorbed water. Yep, that girl you saw so many years ago wringing out her boob as she emerged from the Big Sur River—that was me.

My breast(s) and I, we have an uneasy relationship.

Have you ever been to Frederick's of Hollywood with your mother? I have, and I can't say as I recommend it. This was back in the day, in Orange County, and Frederick's may as well have been the moon—if the moon were populated entirely by things you never, ever wanted to see in the presence of your mother, like panties whose crotches were decorated with feathers and googly eyes. But my imbalance—the fleshy, not chemical, one—was becoming obvious as I transitioned from a “B” to a “C” cup in early teenagehood, and my mother had heard Frederick's sold “breast enhancers.”

If there are two things my mother can't stand, and certainly there are many more than two, they would be slutty women and “showboaty” types. Frederick's is the five-and-dime of sluts and showboats, the twin groups' needs converging in an NC-17 miasma of hot pink, lace, and fake animal skin. And it was into this world that I was led—past the fur-lined bondage cuffs and edible undies, my mother disgustedly tsking all the way to the counter—to solve my “problem.”

A very friendly woman who was statistically likely to be named “Brandi” took me into a dressing room and nonchalantly sized me up, then she sold us a couple of sets of nylon-encased foam boobs. To “Brandi” the purchase was as controversial as soap, but we couldn't get out of there fast enough. We paused only long enough to scout our position before stepping out of the store and back into the mall, thus ensuring that a neighbor didn't happen upon us and get the wrong idea. This wouldn't be my last lesson in shame.

Now a “D” cup (nature's cruel joke on me), I'm frustrated to find that the mastectomy suits at Lands' End all seem to top out at “C.” Are bountiful breasted cancer survivors SOL?

Never fear. Lands' End offers live chat help, and no sooner had I entered my name and requested a chat session than a little window popped up and representative “Karen” asked how she could help.

“Hey, Karen,” I typed, then, because I'm not accustomed to using chat, I hit return to skip a line, at which time “Hey, Karen,” popped up as my complete reply, as though I were greeting my very best friend.

“Hello,” Karen typed, “How can I help you?” It sounded terse in my head, though I'm sure she didn't mean it that way. That's just not who “Karen” is.

I type, “I'm what your catalogue calls a 'rectangle shape' (Oh, stop it with the sweet nothings, Lands' End, you're embarrassing me!), and I need a mastectomy suit that accommodates a 'D' cup.”

*pause*

“Hold on,” Karen replied. “Let me check with our Shoppers.”

“Thanks!” I typed, hoping she was going to check not with actual customers but with someone whose official job title is “Shopper.”

*pause*

“Sorry,” Karen replied. “We don't have any 'D' cup mastectomy suits.”

“Shoot,” I typed, hoping to charm her with my quaint word choice, then I waited patiently for her to offer some alternative advice. I'm not sure what kind of advice I expected from “Karen” exactly. I'd exhausted the whole “buy a regular suit and make it your own” thing. I was looking for something more sophisticated this time. Something along the lines of, “Maybe you could just cut the other one off?” which, believe me, has occurred more than once.

“Is there anything else I can help you with?” Karen asked, a bit lamely, from my consumerist standpoint.

“No,” I replied, wondering if she could sense my disappointment in the type. “Thanks anyway.” Our chat session ended with a thud, the little window vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.

Better put an asterisk after that “flatter every figure” promise, you silver-tongued devil. It's not nice to get a girl's hopes up like that.

Looking back, fear of being found out wasn't the only reason (perhaps not even the main one) I was shy about boyfriends groping my breasts. But at the time it seemed like such a momentous announcement—maybe even a deal-breaker: “By the way, before you feel me up, I should tell you not to be put off by a certain sponginess on my right side.” Since I didn't much date guys I couldn't take in a bar fight, most of them took it well enough, though they more or less avoided my little underachiever from then on.

Lesbians, you may have heard, are of a different breed entirely, and the girls have by and large found my stunted member compelling, if not downright fetish-worthy. From girlfriend number 1, the littlest mammary has enjoyed acceptance and affection, and girlfriend number 6 suggested that we go so far as to celebrate it with a unilateral piercing. This wasn't long after I had first seen—in a feminist bookstore, natch—the “Tree” poster of a topless Deena Metzger, her arms spread wide in joyful tribute to her tattooed mastectomy site.

I became fascinated by the idea of turning a potential source of shame into a focal point. “Let's do it,” I said, and just for the asking I was shirtless in a gynecological exam chair, a heavily pierced and tattooed dyke asking me where I wanted it. “My right,” I said, losing my bra. The piercer smiled and nodded at the dwarfish one. “Cool,” she purred, and got to work.

If there's enough call for the term acrotomophiles—folks sexually attracted to people with missing limbs—surely there's a tiny kingdom in which I and my fellow uniboobs would be worshipped by dint of what's not there, and methinks it would be populated largely, if not entirely, by lesbians. God bless 'em.

I ordered a mastectomy “tankini” in a “C” cup, and upon receipt I was delighted to find its built-in “soft-cup bra” just generous enough that I could pour myself ever so gently into its smallish confines. (You're not off the hook, Lands' End—see to those generously endowed cancer survivors PDQ!)

Still, I see a little breastwork in my near future: I think I'm gonna let 'em cut the other one off. I know that this imperils my status as an object of worship, but the imbalance is almost certainly exacerbating my spinal arthritis, and at this point I measure relief by the inch, not the yard. I hope to get it lopped off in the next year or so, thus achieving the boy-girl body of my dreams. (Is it too late to become a supermodel?)

At any rate, my left side has seen quite enough attention lavished on the right, and she's felt more than a little slighted: Imagine for a moment that you're a conjoined twin—no, really, imagine it—and that your dwarf sister, who was for many years considered grotesque and weird in comparison to you, because, you know, though you had a dwarf growing out of your side you had developed in a more expected way, is now continually fêted because, after all, isn't she just as cute as a button? And come to think of it, who ever said bigger was better, Jolly Green Giant? Yeah, you'd be pissed, too. And maybe it's about time ol' lefty meets the brief, white-hot pain of a piercing needle and joins the ranks of her much-venerated sister. She's been in exile so long, my left breast, the prodigal daughter led astray by punky hormones all those many years ago, and she's ready to come home at last.

not about boobs

2006-07-21T18:00:00.000-07:00

I was asked recently what my favorite element of punctuation is. Really, copy editors are asked these kinds of things, and good golly are they glad anyone cares! OK, in truth, it was my partner who asked, but when I replied she asked me to flesh out my answer for possible use in a language course aimed at adorable little freshmen. Pretty cool, huh? Since writing about my favorite punctuation derailed me from writing the blog entry I was planning—which, by the way, might've been about boobs!—I've decided to instead post my punctuation piece. Punctuation, boobs: It's all good, right?

This is an em dash: —. Isn’t she beautiful? While her uses are many—introducing attributions, signifying interruptions in quoted speech, setting off lists (as used here)—her most heroic function lies in eliminating confusion in long or complex sentences, particularly when a writer wants to signal to readers a shift in thought, tone, or pace. Take the following:

1(a). When asked to name her favorite element of punctuation, the copy editor thoughtfully considered parentheses, the semicolon, the colon, at once deftly delineating and joining sentences, complete and otherwise, and the em dash, fairy godmother to the overworked Cinderella of punctuation, the comma.

Decipherable, perhaps, but such sentences cause readers to stumble or even reread them in trying to understand their meaning. A confused reader is an unhappy one—of this you can be sure—so the primary aim of good writing is always clarity, whether ideas are expressed in simple or complex sentences. In the sentence cited, a simple set of em dashes accomplishes that aim:

1(b). When asked to name her favorite element of punctuation, the copy editor thoughtfully considered parentheses, the semicolon, the colon—at once deftly delineating and joining sentences, complete and otherwise—and the em dash, fairy godmother to the overworked Cinderella of punctuation: the comma.

Replacing a set of commas with a set of em dashes not only breaks the monotony of example 1(a) but signals a shift in emphasis between the main idea of the sentence—a list of favorite punctuation elements—and the secondary information contained therein—an aside about the particular appeal of the colon (perhaps honoring its runner-up status?).

In the sentence just above I used em dashes to emphasize detail—signaling that the phrases contained within are meant to illustrate the points made in the body of the sentence—and parentheses to deemphasize a tangential thought (an aside that may otherwise serve only to confuse the reader). Setting such details off instead with commas creates minor chaos:

2. Replacing a set of commas with a set of em dashes not only breaks the monotony of example 1(a) but signals a shift in emphasis between the main idea of the sentence, a list of favorite punctuation elements, and the secondary information contained therein, an aside about the particular appeal of the colon, perhaps honoring its runner-up status.

Looking back at example 1(b) for a moment, bonus points for anyone who noticed one other minor change: the replacement of the final comma with a colon, lending more emphasis to the phrase “the comma” than it might have enjoyed were it set off by, well, a comma.

The comma’s greatest strength is its versatility, which also, sadly, can be its most frustrating weakness. Just because the comma can be used doesn’t mean it should be used, not when written language is so rich with options: Adopt a couple of neglected but eager parentheses. Employ an out-of-work colon. Dust off a pair of em dashes. Go crazy! But not too crazy—keep this rule in mind:

In general, em dashes emphasize content while parentheses deemphasize content, with commas steadfastly maintaining the middle ground. Thus, choose your punctuation with care.

It would be silly, for instance, to write:

3(a). It would be silly—for instance—to write this.

Though it would be sillier still to write:

3(b). It would be silly (for instance) to write this.

Save em dashes for clauses you wish to highlight—at which time they’ll spring forth as eagerly as a puppy, ready to lend energy and character to your writing—and let parentheses serve in their own parenthetical way (though they’ve been known to grouse, with a sigh, “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride”).

And don’t assume that em dashes must occur in pairs (though, for your readers’ sake, please don’t open a parenthetical statement without ensuring that it is properly closed). Employing a single em dash in a sentence commands your readers’ attention, enticing them forward—c’mon, readers, let’s go see what’s over here! It can also lend particular force to a short, terminal phrase—really, it will!

Steve Martin wrote an essay for The New Yorker in 1997 in which he announced a worldwide shortage of periods and, indeed, used only one period in the entire essay, resulting in a knuckle-cracking demonstration of skill with alternative punctuation.

Were a comma shortage afoot, how would you do your part to conserve? If you say, “Use more em dashes, of course!” thanks for listening, but I’m not so biased toward her seductively long sweep that I would forsake other useful elements of punctuation.

My best advice for fellow writers is this: “Listen” to what you read and write, and train yourself to “hear” the flow of the language. Clear, concise writing flows swiftly, while confusing, unnecessarily complex verbiage stammers and leads readers aground. We rarely notice when language is wielded with precision—it’s the jarring jangle of the wrong that gets our attention: That’s good! Notice the wrong in everything you read, and then ask yourself, Why did that sentence make me stop reading midway, sending me back to the beginning as though it’s MY fault it was constructed poorly? If it was in fact your fault, fix it! If not, fix it anyway! Sharpen your punctuation skills to a steely point and unleash your sense of all that is elegant and fine on a disorganized world. If you’re not part of the punctuation solution, you’re part of the problem.

a wonderlier® bowl of one's own

2006-07-17T17:30:00.000-07:00

Forty-five people were expected at my parents' ranchito Saturday for an extended family reunion, so naturally my mother had made enough scalloped potatoes for 100. Actual head count: 30. The low turnout was attributed to a variety of reasons, many of which impugned the character of those not in attendance, but I thought it perfectly acceptable to avoid the California high desert during fire season—with blazes actively flanking my parents' property to the north and the south—on a day that promised, and delivered, a high of 106 degrees. But maybe my cousin was just using her daughter's asthma as an excuse.

My aunt was pouring the leftover scalloped potatoes into a very large ceramic bowl that was long past heaping. She kept pausing to glower at the volume, willing the thick glop of creamy potatoes to somehow settle and make room for more.

“I could take some off your hands,” I suggested. I *heart* my mother's scalloped potatoes, and she only makes them on special occasions, like, to celebrate fire season.

“Oh, good idea,” my mom said, then, assessing the overflow, exclaimed, “And I have just the container!” With that, she hurried out the door of the kitchen and crossed the yard to The Shed™. (No offense to certain readers of this blog who may have quite handsome sheds of their own, sheds that serve their sheddy utilities very well at that, but this is no ordinary shed. Were one to amuse The Shed™—an act I didn't think possible until recently—it wouldn't so much snicker as explode in paroxysms of mirth.) Mom returned with a plastic clamshell container, the kind one would get when ordering, say, a quart of macaroni salad at the grocery store deli counter. These are the sorts of things for which one apparently needs a gigantesque shed.

In light of our utterly bizarre weather of late—humidity in California?—no doubt signaling the death knell of a planet at last defeated by our timeless quest for convenience and transient gratification, my mother's frugality has become something of an asset. Disposability is in the eye of the beholder, and neither squares of aluminum foil nor plastic forks are squandered at the ranchito until they're utterly spent.

During my childhood my family's thrift was a source of embarrassment. Also confusion, as demonstrated by the dreaded shell game "Which margarine container in the refrigerator actually contains margarine?" Ungrateful at the time for the ascetic ideals I would later value, I selfishly yearned for Tupperware.

Tupperware was rarely sold at yard sales, from whence came most of our household goods and clothing. When it did pop up, it was generally warped beyond use—or stinky. And even when perfectly good Tupperware appeared, my mother, for her own arcane reasons, refused to buy it. “You don't know what people have been doing with that,” she fairly spat, though, curiously, she had no compunctions about buying used bed sheets and bath towels. Wanting to understand the distinction I pushed for details, but she couldn't come up with any specific scenarios to illustrate her fears. I knew from experience, though, that urine figured prominently in her distrust of strangers.

I grew up in a part of Orange County that was, during my youth, one part residential to three parts agricultural. And while we loved going to local fruit and vegetable stands for our produce, my mother admonished me never to eat so much as a strawberry until we got home, where it could be properly washed. I thought she was concerned about dirt, something I had eaten a fair amount of in my childhood, until she told me that the immigrants who worked in the fields relieved themselves on the fruit to “get back at whitey.” And lest I think this was aberrant behavior, she also advised me never to send food back at restaurants. (Having worked for a number of years in a restaurant with an all-immigrant kitchen staff, I can say with some certainty that line cooks in general exercise no such urine vendetta against diners, even picky ones, but pissing off waiters is a total crapshoot.)

No one wants Tupperware that's been used to collect or distribute urine—for which vessels suburban needs are myriad. And no one's fool enough to pay retail for new pieces when our lives are so very rich with empty margarine tubs and plastic clamshell deli containers, especially when The Shed™ is there to store an airplane hangar's worth of storage containers—and, good God, how we Americans love storage: One need only observe the checkout aisles at Target, with all those shoppers buying coffin-size plastic bins, to witness our zeal for stuff and the putting away of it.

Logic against such profligacy aside, I grew up with a platonic fetish for genuine Tupperware. (Rubbermaid knockoffs just aren't the same.) But it took many years of adulthood and financial independence before I treated myself to a few pieces. Old notions die hard, and in my world Tupperware was for those with more disposable income—and far less monetary sense.

In short, I was a sitting duck when Phranc came to my workplace to host an afternoon party—working as I do to further the Gay Agenda™, my company's HR goddess thought it the ideal office event—demonstrating the wondrous wares of Earl Tupper. The überbutch lesbian folksinger and latter-day Tupperware Lady has elevated the classic home sales party to the level of performance art—and she brings her guitar to strum out a ditty about the miraculous burping plastics.

Who could resist her androgynous wile? Besides, I gave Phranc absolutely no reason to pee on anything I purchased from her.

And so it is that I finally have Tupperware of my own. The phabulous Phranc sold me two CrystalWave™ soup mugs. The little red nubbins let steam escape when microwaving!

Two sandwich keepers, for the sound use of which I must caution you to buy squarish loaves of bread, not the pillow-size loaves that are increasingly the norm:

Your classic Wonderlier® bowl:

And a neat-o cake decorating set that Tupperware International seems to have discontinued, making it a comparative rarity that just makes it more special.

But we didn't stop there, my partner and I. We've since acquired a round cake taker, which, alarmingly, we bought at a yard sale. (Only a barbarian would pee in a cake taker.)

A Jel-Ring® mold, allowing us to make fabulously retro desserts:

And a snack cup set, for your peanuts and cottage cheese and what have you. These little guys compete with the CrystalWave™ soup mugs for Most-Used Tupperware status:

I still covet a Spin 'N Save™ salad spinner, one of the pricier items in the Tupperware catalog. It would be perfect for rinsing the urine from my farmers' market greens, and if I had one, I would eat salad every single day for the rest of my life.

Can a shed really be so far behind?

notes on camp

2006-07-12T16:00:00.000-07:00

Heh heh, look, a lesbian roasting wieners.

This was the funnest camping trip ever! Funner even than the time a horse dumped me on my head at Girl Scout camp. Funner even than when my whole extended family convinced me that my mother had gone missing in the woods.

Come to think of it, why do I even like camping?

It’s 1976. I’m 9 years old and crying inconsolably in the living room of a rented cabin in Coffee Creek, a wilderness area in Northern California. That afternoon I had been riding shotgun in my uncle Merlyn’s camper when we passed my mom and her two sisters walking along the road. They had been out picking blackberries and were heading back to our cabin. When they saw Merlyn’s camper they jokingly stuck out their thumbs to hitch a ride. Merlyn answered the joke with his own, yelling out the window, “Sorry, ladies, I don’t pick up strangers,” then sped down the road. I laughed along with him because the cabin wasn’t very far down the road, and also because he was the grown-up. It’s best to laugh along with grown-ups.

Hours later my mom and her sisters still haven't arrived back at the cabin and I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach: I have to remind myself to breathe. As time drags on I can’t believe my father and uncles haven’t gone out to look for them. Instead they drink beer and tell stories about their dingbat wives and their terrible sense of direction. Merlyn says he hopes they haven’t fallen into the river, adding that the current is running strong. Uncle Gordon says he saw a bear not far from the cabin that afternoon.

As they banter back and forth I’m certain that I’ll never see my mother alive again, and I think about how sorry the men will be when they hear the bad news, whether their wives have been eaten alive by animals or kidnapped and killed by terrible men. I know about terrible men. My mother had prepared me for this world by telling me all about serial killers and rapists, “sickos” who get their “jollies” by torturing and murdering innocent girls and women. When she was alive—back before this camping trip—she used to put newspaper articles next my cereal dish, and along with my Honey Nut Cheerios I digested details of the latest local killings—nipples twisted off with locking pliers, desecrated vaginas, faces brutalized beyond recognition.

I angrily put on my jacket and head for the cabin door, not because I feel that I can do anything about my mother’s fate but because I can’t listen to my father and uncles anymore. Before I reach the door Merlyn, failing to stifle his laughter at my undoubtedly red and pouty face, says, “OK, kiddo, hold on. Your mom’s around back; she’s been there the whole time.” I race out the door and run around to the back of the cabin, where my mother and her sisters are sitting in folding chairs, chatting casually and eating blackberries. I should feel relieved. Instead I feel confused and humiliated. I turn around and walk into the woods, thinking that I might just disappear forever, teach my mom and dad a lesson, but I soon get scared and go back.

Years later I’ll recount the experience to my mother as one of the most unsettling moments of my life, but she won’t remember it.

My favorite camping activity is river-walking, stepping from stone to stone—and into the drink when necessary—navigating my way to some far-flung boulder, my own personal island, where I can lose myself amid the white noise of rushing water. River-walking was limited on this trip, in part due to the icy conditions that chilled my feet and made the riverbed feel like a field of broken glass, and not least due to my partner’s pleas for caution. A ranger told us on the way in that a “young girl”—hard to say whether he meant a girl or a woman—had disappeared while swimming in the river a few days earlier. He warned us that the current was particularly strong—late thaw this year—and a Sequoia National Park bulletin appealed to campers to keep an eye out for her body.

I heeded my partner’s concerns and stuck close to shore, though I was hell-bent on finding a silky-smooth river rock for her work desk, a multitasking souvenir to remind her of the trip and maybe pin down a few loose papers all at once. I picked up and rejected rock after rock, staring into the water and trying in vain to train my eyes to flicker at the same frequency as the current so as to bring the riverbed into sharper focus. I finally settled on a couple of candidates. As I climbed up the riverbank I retrieved the rocks from my pockets with a witty reference to Virginia Woolf’s suicide, a bit of gallows humor that maybe didn’t play so well given the missing, presumed-dead girl.

It’s 1979. I’m in the mounted unit of a Girl Scout camp in San Bernardino, Calif., and I’ve acquired the nickname “Noose,” a nod to my singular talent for making them out of the clothesline we were all instructed to bring. Most of the other girls think I’m weird, but they’re curiously drawn to my art: A couple of them ask me to make nooses for them, and I oblige. I’m soon approached by the head counselor, who says that the nooses are inappropriate and that I’m scaring the other girls, and she asks whether I can’t put my energies into something more artistic or productive, like macramé. Sure, I tell her. No problem. Instead I sulk in my bunk, reading some horror novel I had brought along.

The only counselor I really like, a solid woman named Deb who swaggers around camp and winks at me with kind understanding, is taken away by ambulance after a horse falls on her and crushes her leg during our second week. We later hear she’ll be in traction for at least two months. The other counselors won’t tell us which horse had injured her. I decide it must have been my horse, who had reared up and bucked me off just a few days earlier. I can’t help being nervous around him now, no matter how many times the counselors tell me horses can “smell” fear.

I fake sick one morning to get out of the pre-lunch trail ride, and I hike into some nearby woods to make my nooses in peace. I lose track of time and I’m discovered by one of my fellow campers, now back from the morning ride. When I look up she turns and runs back toward camp.

A short time later I trudge back into camp myself, and it quickly becomes clear that the snooper has been telling stories about me to all the other girls. I can smell their fear.

We didn’t find the dead girl. Maybe she’s not dead after all. Maybe she found a nice boulder in the middle of the rushing river and can’t bring herself to abandon it. Or maybe she’s out in the woods, hiding from her family, practicing some dark art the rest of us can’t understand, and wondering how long it will take before someone comes out to find her.

this morning at starbucks

2006-07-07T11:28:00.000-07:00

“My” Starbucks is busy, especially now that tourist season is in full swing. Most mornings, a line extends out the door and onto the patio at the Hollywood and Highland complex. So it was that I was standing in such a line a bit before 9 this morning, alternately being charmed by the singsong cadence of “my” Starbucks’ newest employee, a Brit who surely took diction and etiquette lessons from Miss Julie Andrews herself, and wondering who the heck thought it necessary in 2006 to cover “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden,” which was merrily jangling through the speakers at me:

“You'd better look before you leap still waters run deep
And there won't always be someone there to pull you out
And you know what I'm talking about
So smile for a while and let's be jolly; love shouldn't be so melancholy
Come along and share the good times while we can”

The guilty party is Martina McBride, and she lays it down without a trace of the irony with which you or I would surely smother the song were we to get drunk in a karaoke bar.

You know how it works when lines extend through doors—most notably at concerts, during intermission, when 5,000 women have 15 minutes and five bathroom stalls in which to pee—there are the people inside the establishment and the people outside the establishment, and then there’s the doorstop: the poor schmuck stuck holding the door open so that the people outside can see what’s going on inside. If the door isn’t held open, one or more people behind you are liable to get all antsy and think you’re just idly standing in front of a closed door, or that maybe you don’t know how to open it. (I’m reminded to be grateful that humans don’t come standard with horns—the loud kind, not the ramming kind, though those would be dangerous as well—because they’d be honking them all the livelong day.)

Just as the guy in front of me at Starbucks was due to assume doorstop duty, he pulled up a chair and sat down just to the right of the entrance, out of the line of the door and in the shade. “Man, this wait is crazy,” he said, then, looking at me, added, “I’ll catch up with you.”

Catching the door as the former doorstop squirted inside, I thought, He can’t possibly mean that I’m supposed to hold his place in line for him, that he’s going to sit there until I make it to the counter and then, like a dear old buddy pal of mine, slip inside to give my beautiful Mary Poppins his order. I decided that he didn’t expect that, that the scenario was so impossibly rude anyone with common decency would be embarrassed to attempt it.

For the record, I believe in extending common courtesy to others. I’ll hold the door for anyone, young or old, man or woman. I’ll hold it longer for a senior or a physically challenged person. And I don’t mind being thanked or acknowledged for doing so, because I think if I’ve taken the time to notice and accommodate someone, they can find the time to nod, smile, or even say thanks. I sometimes wonder if young, able-bodied men who blow through doors I’m holding open without so much as a wink in my direction suppose they’re doing feminism a favor? That would be the more charitable explanation.

Indeed, as I approached the counter, Mr. Sitonhisass popped through the door and slid into line in front of me without a glance or a word in my direction.

Had he asked me to hold his place in line, I would have. But three human traits I find particularly galling are arrogance, selfishness, and presumptuousness, and he managed to nail all three in one gesture. I so often find myself speechless in the presence of louts like him, but then I hang on to the psychic angst they generate far longer than I should.

Tell me, am I taking the decline of Western civilization too personally?

I’m trying to think of ways to let go of the negative energy I unwittingly glean as I move about society. Maybe I could take a cue from soccer and carry around yellow and red flashcards to signal violations of generally accepted manners. Just stoically hold the appropriate card in the offender’s face for a couple of seconds, then move on. They may have no idea what had just happened, but I could walk on in peace, leaving the toxicity behind to be reabsorbed by its source.

not so fucking scary

2006-07-04T15:30:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you get a haircut, and sometimes the haircut gets you.

Last week I was just itching to shave my head, not because I had head lice but because I was in San Francisco, and being there reminded me of a time when I shaved my head but not my legs—an attitude that horrified most hets and a few homos too. Ah, glorious baby dykedom.

About 10 years ago I ran into a college classmate at the West Hollywood Gauntlet. I didn't recognize her at first. Now a professional piercer covered in tats, she had been an unassuming sports dyke—a shot putter on full scholarship—when we had an autobiography seminar in common. When she recognized me I remembered her immediately. She and her track buddy used to sit across the room from me, and we never spoke even though it was clear that we were all sisters. I told her I had always wanted to break the ice with them but that they seemed unapproachable.

"Are you kidding me?" she asked. "You were fucking scary."

It tickled me to think this mammoth alpha butch was once intimidated by me, though I wasn't actually cultivating "scary" back in the day. While I first buzzed my head in a dark mood, I maintained it more out of utility than anything: I rode a motorcycle to school and I hate helmet hair.

Shaving my head served another important utility: My mother never again complained about the length of my hair, as long as I had some.

My partner reminded me last week that our South Carolina beach week is coming up and that now might not be the best time to revisit my lost youth, what with gay-bashing on the rise and all. So I split the difference and asked my hairdresser for a "soft" crew cut. God love a West Hollywood hairdresser: My boy's not afraid to get out the clippers when I say "summer cut."

I don't spend much time on the motorcycle these days, but I do bicycle—a pursuit for which I gladly shave my legs—and I still hate helmet hair. With this cut, when a shower isn't readily available, the sweat generated on a ride is generally enough to revamp and restyle.

the gospel according to dierdre

2006-07-03T16:35:00.000-07:00

“By the way,” said a disheveled 52-year-old runner I had met just moments before, “you’re an old soul. You’ve led 36 lives. I’m very psychic.”

It was a jarring non sequitur.

The disheveled woman in question, whose name turned out to be Dierdre, had flagged me down on the Sepulveda Basin bike path. She looked distressed, and I figured she needed to use my cell phone, probably to call her husband for a pickup—the valley heat had crested 100 degrees on this Saturday morning. I veered off the smooth pavement and managed to stop just at the edge of an unevenly bricked area; weenie racing tires and rough surfaces don’t mix well.

“Oh, thank you for stopping,” she said breathlessly, her face splotchy with broken capillaries and her dyed black hair dripping sweat. “You look like a good person to ask: How do I buy a bicycle?”

Not what I was expecting, but I was ready to take a break from the heat myself. I was a couple of hours into a ride that had taken me across the valley and back, with a rest stop at Jamba Juice for a big protein-fortified fruit slushy. Not that I have to ride across the valley to get to a Jamba Juice—there were undoubtedly three or four along the way—but I’m trying to build my stamina back up after many months of energy-sapping physiological and psychological weirdness that kept me and my bike parked indoors, on a stationary trainer in front of the TV. A trainer can mimic road resistance and keep you pedaling—and will even keep you up to speed on Law & Order reruns—but it won’t re-create the brain-frying dispirit of riding into a strong hot wind. For that, you need the great outdoors, which is why I was on the path, counting the miles in my own personal Tour de Bonk, and was all too willing to stop when Dierdre caught my attention.

She apologized for interrupting my ride, but in truth the only thing bike geeks like more than riding bikes is talking about bikes. Also, talking about riding bikes. And since bike talk is so terribly scintillating for people who don’t give a crap about bikes, it’s exciting to encounter someone who actually wants to talk about them.

I asked her what she felt like she was in the market for. She said she didn’t know, that she had blown out her feet running and needed to find another way to stay in shape, then, she said, she saw me and thought, Bicycling!

I don’t have a terribly prescriptive personality, so the idea of sizing a stranger up and telling her what she needs makes me uncomfortable. (My partner probably shot milk through her nose laughing at the concept of me not liking to tell people what to do, such is the yawning gulf between her perception and my own.) So it was that I began to tell Dierdre everything I know about cycling. Maybe she was just trying to change the subject when she told me about my old-soul status.

“Ancient Egypt, Samaria, the French Revolution, you’ve seen it all,” she said. “And the old souls are being awakened now because the world needs them.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

“My teachers warn me to be careful with my talent. My psychic eye is very strong, and not everyone is ready to hear what I have to tell them, but you have a strong spirit and you know you’re here for a greater purpose.”

Goodness, am I that transparent? I have always thought that I’m here for a greater purpose. I mean, maybe not a great purpose, but, for instance, when I was still waiting tables four years out of college, I thought then that perhaps there might be something better in store for me. Ditto when I worked, briefly, for a publisher of gay male erotica. Indeed, I shouldered through the colorless depression that practically consumed my post-college life with the gilded hope that an unknowable purpose was yet to come, and here was confirmation that my purpose is extant!

And while I don’t remember much from my Egyptian and Samaritan lives, I’m pretty sure that during the French Revolution I was Marie (Madame) Tussaud. How else to explain my sick fascination with wax museums? I remember as though it was just yesterday: I (Tussaud) had been a friend of the court and was consequently arrested by the Jacobins on suspicion of royalist sympathies. I was to be executed, and my head was shaved in preparation for the guillotine, but on the eve of my doom I managed to save my neck by consenting to root through the decapitated heads of my friends and make death masks of them for posterity. In my present life, too, I have shaven my head during dark times, and I used to enjoy pulling the heads off Barbies. Coincidence? I think not. Besides, the resemblance is uncanny, as shown here in a waxwork I made of myself:

Dierdre continued to extol my virtues, which included but were not limited to: my powerful insight, my compassionate nature, my valuing of the human over the material, my patience, and, oh, the list just goes on and on.

In sum, I am awake, and I am here to help heal a world in peril, as is Dierdre. (How could she know how special I am were she not equally special herself?)

Oh, and she’s probably going to get a hybrid bicycle, with a more relaxed, comfortable geometry, though she’s considering a racing bike like mine.

scout says “nope” to dope

2006-06-30T16:15:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make. I find this very, very sexy:

I’ll surrender my lesbian card to the proper authorities if such lust sullies my integrity, but I can’t help myself.

The Tour de France begins tomorrow. Yay! And also, boo!

A doping scandal implicating a Spanish doctor and several superstar cyclists has cast a pall over pro cycling on the eve of its signature event. Incredibly, not one of the three riders who stood atop the podium at the conclusion of the 2005 Tour will race this year. Lance retired, and the second- and third-place finishers, Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich, respectively, were implicated in the doping dragnet. Just last month the thoroughly adorable and charming Basso won the Giro d’Italia, arguably the second-most important grand tour on the circuit. He dedicated his win, now tainted, to his recently deceased mother.

I understand the desire to take performance-enhancing drugs. Pro cycling is a brutal sport that requires long hours in the saddle and, as a result, a massively high pain threshold. The average person may be able to fold himself into the classic racing crouch, but holding it for five hours while pedaling at an average speed of 30 mph? That takes a special kind of determination and training. Your classic performance enhancers don’t so much give you a leg up on race day as they allow you to train longer and harder with less pain—they make you superhuman.

There are days on my bike when I feel bionic, and it’s an amazing feeling, like I could ride straight up a mountain and dance around on top. But most days I feel very, very human, with all the pain that entails. And it’s that essential humanness that makes us look upon professional athletes with awe, even idolatry. They seem heroic because they show us what the human body is capable of when pushed to its very limit, which is why it can be utterly heartbreaking to discover they weren’t so very human after all.

Cyclists who don’t use performance enhancers are harmed threefold: They’ve been denied an even playing field in past races by any number of dopers; every cyclist implicated for drug use casts doubt on the integrity of every other cyclist; and to further the insult, the eventual 2006 winner, a man who will have spent about 85 hours in the saddle to ride 2,261 miles over the course of 20 race days, will have a win with a mental asterisk denoting that he didn’t face the “real” competition—never mind that those guys cheated their way to past wins. And in a devastating turn, at least one leading contender who is innocent of drug use won’t be riding in the Tour because of the scandal: Alexandre Vinokourov won’t be allowed to compete because so many other riders on his team have been disqualified they don’t have enough men to field a regulation squad.

I’ll still be watching the TdF, mind you, and there are still plenty of well-toned calves that haven’t been disqualified to keep me happy, but the Tour is tainted for fans as well as riders. We’re so utterly human, and we thrive on success stories because they illustrate the art of the possible. But for heroes we’d best look to ourselves. Even if our “possible” doesn’t take us high into the Alps or sprinting through throngs of adoring fans, at least we know our victories are real.

*The calves featured in this entry belong to Levi Leipheimer and are in no way implicated in the doping scandal.

road food

2006-06-28T18:05:00.000-07:00

Don’t stop at the Denny’s in Buttonwillow.

Just because you remember a time when Denny’s was the last fork-and-knife sign for about a hundred miles of the most mind-numbingly boring stretch of Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco doesn’t mean that will be the case this trip. Remember, you thrive on mystery. Besides, people get killed at Denny’s. Also, Denny’s promotes the covering and smothering of perfectly innocent hash browns, an idea made even more horrifying by the fact that they stole it from the Waffle House. Stealing terrible ideas from other terrible restaurants sullies your cred, Denny’s. You can only coast on your Moons Over My Hammy® laurels for so long.

Just because you’re all proud of yourself for not stopping at Denny’s doesn’t mean you can let your guard down. Resist with all your might the urge to stop at restaurants that make alluring promises on their signs, even if the gambit paid off at Max’s, where many, if not all, of the foods I’ve always wanted to eat were prepared tastefully. (What did "always" ever do to anybody to deserve its lowly uncapped status?)

It’s not fun to eat at Scrambl’z, not even if your tireless copyediting hard drive can spin down long enough to forgive the ambiguous ’z.

It’s not fun at all, and you’ll leave feeling like you may never want to eat again. But then you’ll remember that you bought some saltwater taffy at Casa de Fruta and decide that you may be able to choke down a piece or two.

Always stop at Andersen’s, and don’t order anything but the Hungry Traveler’s Special.

You’ll be tempted to step outside the warm embrace of pea soup, but the pea soup is canon—you’re at Pea Soup Andersen’s, silly—and if the first bowl leaves you wanting, the HTS is all about the refill. My limit is generally one and a half bowls, with practically a whole loaf of unstingily buttered pumpernickel. Mmm. Your HTS comes complete with beverage, and some otherwise sane adults may be tempted to order a milkshake just because they can. However fondly I remember the sweet and savory and altogether creamy delight of vanilla-milkshake-and-pea-soup goodness I enjoyed as I child, I’m cognizant of having failed to recapture that same bliss the last time I ordered a milkshake with my HTS, sometime in my 20s (I mature[d] slowly). If you have a full set of adult teeth, you’ll want to stick with a soda or hot beverage.

Finally, when you make it to San Francisco, go to Citizen Cake, or its little sister Citizen Cupcake, and get the Lovers’ Cake. Oh. My. God.

gone to the dogs

2006-06-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

The lesbian-killing dogs have come for us.

Just when we thought our neighborhood couldn’t get much seedier—what with our being regulars on the city’s graffiti-cleanup service—backyard dog breeders have moved in next door. We’re one cockfighting den, crystal meth lab, and hand basket away from the breaking loose of all hell.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We moved into a neighborhood which, while not glamorous, was characterized by optimistic Realtors as “improving.” Sure, our no-nonsense lesbian real estate agent warned us that a house abutting an apartment building and lacking a sidewalk invited a vague sort of trouble, not to mention lower-than-average property values for the Zip code. But it was precisely that crippled property value that brought the house within our financial reach, and given that we were then ourselves apartment dwellers we were willing to give the unpropertied the benefit of the doubt regarding their ability to live side-by-side with sophisticates like us.

Trouble of a less vague sort has arrived not in the form of apartment tenants but homeowners, or at the very least home dwellers, the kind who bark, bark, bark the night away, and presumably the day as well since their ire is particularly roused by our animal companion, Biscuit, who spends her days in the backyard, whimpering. This is Biscuit in happier times:

The next-door dogs moved in two weeks ago, into the backyard of a house that had been vacant since Mrs. Friend died six months ago. (We were charmed by the idea of a next-door neighbor named Mrs. Friend until we found her to be sour, demanding, and ungrateful; when we rebuilt the falling-down fence separating our two properties—a project for which we could have asked her to share the $1,200 expense but didn’t—her only comment was, “It’s about time.”) When we saw a U-Haul truck in her driveway two weekends ago we hoped for the best; the chances of our new neighbors being more personable than Mrs. Friend were at least 85%. I thought maybe I should take some cookies over and introduce myself, get things off on the right foot, but the thought, as so many others, failed to result in action. Now it’s two weeks after the U-Haul sighting and we still haven’t seen our new neighbors—none of the hominid variety anyway.

Our spectral neighbors’ first act of aggression was the clearing, via hired help, of Mrs. Friend’s bougainvillea, which had formerly climbed her back wall to a height of well over 10 feet. The impressive spray of purple flowers once camouflaged the concertina razor wire that rims the property line of the apartment building behind us: Whether it’s there to keep the tenants in or others out, the aesthetic smacks of prison yard. The yard crew also tore out a couple of small fruit trees.

But any palpable absence was forgotten once chain-link became visible over our fence line, and it didn’t take long to intuit that our new anti-foliage neighbors had built a kennel of some scope: Any pack of confined, agitated dogs can tell you that, and if we had been, by some miracle, able to ignore them, Biscuit would surely have alerted us.

The chain-link is an eyesore, and the incessant barking is a nuisance, but we would soon discover something far more insidious about the next-door dogs. When my partner peered over the fence to see just how many dogs had moved in, she saw three adults, one of whom is pregnant, and they aren’t just any dogs: They're Presa Canarios. This is what one looks like:

You may remember this once obscure breed from a 2001 wrongful death case. In January of that year two Presa Canarios had lunged at Diane Whipple, a 33-year-old athlete, trapping her in the doorway of the San Francisco apartment she shared with her girlfriend, and the larger of the two dogs, a 123-pound unneutered male named “Bane,” mauled her to death as a caretaker for the dogs, neighbor Majorie Knoller, reportedly stood by.

Knoller and her husband, Robert Noel, both of whom were then defense lawyers, were keeping the dogs on behalf of two Aryan Brotherhood prison inmates, Paul “Cornfed” Schneider and Dale Bretches, who, despite the inconvenience of serving life sentences without parole, were running a backyard breeding business, reportedly intending to supply the Mexican Mafia with fighters and guard dogs for meth labs and such. Bane was one of eight breeding Presa Canarios owned by the inmates, who farmed the care of the dogs out to various intermediaries. Knoller and Noel had taken in Bane and Hera—the second dog involved in the attack on Whipple—when another woman who had been caring for them complained that Bane was vicious and should be destroyed.

After the attack, Knoller and Noel might have had misgivings about ever getting involved in this mess, musing, How did two nice Jewish lawyers like ourselves get involved with an Aryan Brotherhood attack-dog racket that resulted in the death of a neighbor? As my therapist is fond of saying, “Those red flags you see aren’t there to cheer you to the finish line.” But where we see red flags, the Knoller-Noels saw an opportunity to bond: Three days after Whipple’s death, the couple adopted inmate–dog breeder Cornfed Schneider. He was 38.

Did I mention the bestiality? Cornfed reportedly circulated pics in prison of “Mom” in compromising positions with Bane, while “Dad” was said to have orally copulated with the dog. Unfortunately, any such evidence was barred from trial as irrelevant. The prosecution had to make do with their 30 witnesses who testified to having had terrifying encounters with Bane and Hera; in fact, had the victim been anyone but Whipple, she might have testified as well: Bane had bitten her before.

Despite the obvious charisma of the defendants, after 11 hours of deliberation the jury stoically delivered a guilty verdict. Noel, who wasn’t present during the attack, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Knoller was convicted of second-degree murder (this being only the third time in U.S. history a jury had handed down a murder conviction in a dog-mauling case), but the murder conviction was later thrown out and she served half of a four-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter. Both are now out on parole, perhaps living next door to us! Bane and Hera were destroyed in the wake of the attack, but their snarling progeny live on, no doubt seeking to avenge their wronged parents. Perhaps they’ve found their mark.

I’m not saying Presa Canario appetites are limited to lesbians, though the Knoller-Noels went for a Hail Mary and blamed the victim, saying the dogs may have been provoked by hormones or pheromones peculiar to Whipple. They might as well have claimed Whipple conjured the dogs’ ire through Voodoo. And the next-door dogs probably aren't kin to Bane and Hera after all. The popularity of the breed soared following the publicity surrounding the court case. Who wouldn’t want, as one breeder put it, “a pit bull on steroids”?

Well, I don’t. Nor do I want a pack of them living next door, which is to say nothing of Biscuit’s preferences. You see, Biscuit, while a very brave dog in the house, is a total sub bottom in the presence of other dogs. So while she knows in her heart that it’s her dog job to assert ownership over the backyard, and before the invasion of the next-door dogs she was as fierce as could be about enforcing her authority—by barking her little spaniel head off—whenever strangers loomed near, she now cowers and whimpers and tucks her tail whenever the other dogs bark, which is whenever she’s in the yard. As a result she’s become too anxious to do just about anything in her backyard: play ball, chase squirrels, eat, pee, etc. Again, here's Biscuit:

And here's a Presa:

So, to recap, Biscuit no longer has any fun in her backyard, and she’s courting kidney damage. And we would prefer not to be mauled.

So I’m dedicating myself to finding ways to get the dogs gone: noise ordinances, a maximum-dog-limit violation, owner negligence, anything. Maybe a nice, nice animal control officer, once summoned, can find illegal fight training implements or evidence of other mischief, like cockfighting, or a meth lab, or some of that legendary Presa-human canoodling. I officially don’t care. And if none of that works, perhaps puppies might enjoy an amuse-bouche of Snausage with shaved white truffle and antifreeze zest?*

*I would never harm an animal, ever, no matter how mean and snarly it is. This line is for comedic purposes only.

electoral college flunkies

2006-06-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

“I think we should volunteer as poll workers for the next election,” I announced to my partner Tuesday night after we voted* in the California primary.

*Or maybe we didn't vote. No, we definitely voted. But our votes might not count, contrary to the popular slogan.

For the first time in my 20 years as a registered voter, I seem to have fallen through the cracks, the cavernous faults, in the system—my partner too, the both of us. Neither of our names were anywhere to be found on the roster at our polling place, the same polling place that has received us for every other election in the four years since we moved into our house, which also seems to have been sucked into a time-space vortex: Our address couldn't be located on the Roster of Last Resort, where poll workers can do a reverse lookup to try to match an eligible precinct property with its disappeared residents. But even our house wasn't eligible to vote; our address was within the precinct boundaries, but it may as well have been in Yazoo City, Mississippi.

Funny, that, because the Democratic Party certainly knows where we live. We've been wallpapered with mail urging us to vote this way then that in the ridiculously close gubernatorial primary. We also received our sample ballots, complete with the address of our polling place in the Twilight Zone, an otherwise bland elementary school auditorium. The Dems know our phone number too. Assemblywoman and state senate hopeful Cindy Montañez's minions called so many times I was ready to tell them that even though I had long ago decided to vote for her, if they called one more time, I would break ranks and join the Peace and Freedom Party—because they have the nicest logo.

So, what happened? We got all the mailings and fielded all the phone calls, but we were unlisted come election day. Did Bush manage to pass some last-minute secret legislation barring the gays from voting? Imagine the scramble to scrub all those names from the rolls. And what of closeted people? Ferreting all those folks out would demand a level of forensic aptitude similar to that of the hanging-chad posse. When I mentioned my Bushwhacked theory to a bisexual friend she asked whether her vote would only be counted as half, or maybe it would count fully, but only when dating a man—or, presumably, thinking lustily after one.

We voted “provisionally,” which made me feel like a bad voter, like I had let my subscription to Democracy lapse or something. I kept telling poll workers—who numbered 10 at my precinct, fully two of whom were working in any meaningful way—that this had never happened to me, that I had always been on the roster before. I grew especially defensive when asked whether I had voted in the last election. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I pride myself on coming back again and again, bravely voting for the candidates who never win. When I fall off a horse, I climb back on immediately—or maybe a couple years later when the next election calls, once my internal bleeding has stopped and my scars have begun to tan and my therapist tells me it's safe to feel hope again.

We had pink ballots, and pink envelopes to put them in, lending credence to the antigay idea—all those pink envelopes going straight to the shredder. Confused about what to do with them in the meantime, the poll worker who accepted ours tossed them onto a messy pile atop the table—not a pile of other pink envelopes, mind you, just a pile of random crap. Near the pile of crap sat a woman working the roster; she seemed deeply confused by the alphabet, smiling as voters said their names then blankly leafing through her log as if it were a picture book. While we were there, not a single voter's name was located without their intensive assistance—“Go back a page. Go back another page. There, I'm three from the top…there [pointing at name].” Another man sitting at the table was charged with presenting to each voter his or her partisan ballot. Though he had only five possibilities in front of him and the vast majority of voters identified more narrowly as Democrat or Republican, he was vexed by the presence of Green, Libertarian, and Peace and Freedom Party ballots. He kept handing them to people, hoping to get lucky.

Early morning confusion? Nah. We voted after work; it was 7 p.m. And the polling place wasn't busy either. California posted a voter turnout of around 30%. (Has W. been nothing if not a cautionary tale about the consequences of electoral complacency?)

Worried about the future of our pink ballots, we sought the most competent poll worker in the room and asked if our envelopes, having been tossed onto a table, had been handled properly. She rolled her eyes, clearly not for the first time that day, and retrieved them, assuring us that she would take care of them. She gave us slips of paper with a number we could call in 30 days to make sure our vote was counted. It's not clear what, if anything, could be done at that 30-day mark if we found that our ballots had been thrown out, but she seemed like a good cookie, so we entrusted our pinks to her and left the precinct.

“That was a fiasco,” I said to my partner as we were leaving.

“Yeah, but they made damn sure I got my 'I Voted' sticker,” she grumbled.

Come to think of it, poll workers do seem awfully focused on sticker-giving. Is that emphasized in poll-worker training? Maybe Democracy is a sham and we're being bought off with penny stickers to think we're somehow participants in this thing.

I know that polling places are manned by volunteers, and that precinct crews are cobbled together from a coalition of the willing, but is it so much to ask that they also be a coalition of the able?

Polling places used to be run, it seemed, entirely by retirees, and while our elders often exhibited, say, a lack of urgency about their duties—and sometimes a dash of officiousness since, after all, it had been years since anyone had actually listened to them when told what to do—they usually knew what their duties were by the time we were an hour or so into the morning hours. I miss the olds! They were cute in their little red-white-and-blue-banded Styrofoam boaters, sitting behind card tables with patriotic bunting. And they volunteered, I imagined, because it seemed to them important and fun at the same time.

By contrast, Tuesday's poll workers acted as though they had pulled short straws and had gone on intellectual strike to protest their lot. Why else would someone pretend not to know the alphabet? I wonder how many tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of votes are mishandled and invalidated in elections because poll workers don't know what they're doing. Or don't care. Maybe Election 2000 wasn't so fluky after all.

I bristle a little bit whenever I hear someone joke that juries are made up of 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty. I think jury duty is important and I really don't mind doing it, and I don't think that makes me stupid. Maybe it's time I felt the same way about working the polls. Elections, however sparsely attended in the U.S., are important: Do I really want my vote handled by someone who can't pick a Democratic ballot out of a lineup?

The Election Assistance Commission, whose slogan is “Making every vote count”—all this emphasis on our votes “counting” raises a red flag or two for me—lists Chris Walker at the Office of the Secretary of State, (916) 653-7244, as my contact should I want to pursue becoming a poll worker in California. Following his contact information are the words “Languages Needed: None.” It's all coming clear to me now.

rantacular

2006-06-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

In my last entry I freely admitted that I suck for failing to discuss with my EEG tech, “Misty,” the immediate dangers of greenhouse gasses, despite Al Gore’s well-reasoned entreaties to help spread the word. Then Friday morning I bore witness to the awfulness that is this billboard at fourfour.

I want to be part of the solution. Really, I do. Which is why I now realize I can no longer keep silent about a social ill that has recently seeped into my consciousness: Insulair™ Coffee Cups To Go!

OK, this just pisses me off. I understand that we’re a go-go society, that we have meetings to catch and deadlines to meet, that the habit of drinking a cup of coffee while skimming the morning paper died when I Love Lucy went off the air. I get it.

I also came to understand long ago that coffee mugs don’t travel well. This when my mother, apparently after years of psychic torture, let slip a whiff of displeasure at my father’s habit of microwaving a cup of Yuban instant for the road then driving to their destination at a steady crawl of 10 miles an hour to avoid spillage. One night as Dad watched the carousel turn round and round, waiting for the ding of doneness, my mother hissed at me through gritted teeth, “He knows we’re late for bowling.”

Finally, I understand all too well that a daily Starbucks stop can get pricey. I’ve lately been weighing the financial pros and cons of taking mass transit to work. I save $70 per month in payroll parking deductions, plus another $40 or more in gas for my relatively fuel-efficient coupe. But subtract $52 for my monthly Metro pass and another $50 in Starbucks expenses (because I can’t bring food or drink on the bus and the coffee brewed at my workplace is soul-destroyingly weak) and I’m saving a grand total of eight bucks. Plus that whole ozone thingy, which brings me back to my point.

Travel mugs, people! They’re nice. They keep our coffee warmer longer. Hell, I’ve been known to drink from mine all morning, break for lunch, and revisit it afterward—only to find my coffee still retaining heat! (My partner thinks I'm courting bacterial distress since I drink my brew with milk, but so far, so good.)

I can understand why folks who buy their morning fix at the coffee house might balk at the idea of carrying a travel mug to and from work—though Starbucks’ll hit you with a 10-cent cup-saver discount if you do! But thinking back to the days when I wasn’t considered too damaged to drive and was decanting a home brew strong enough to slough my stomach lining, I can’t imagine a circumstance under which I would have wanted faux café cups—unless maybe I knew my property was being eyed for the next city landfill and I naïvely thought there were sweet, sweet profits to be made.

Given that most regular readers of my blog are far better people than I when it comes to thinking globally, I know I’m hitting the wrong demographic here, just as Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is likely to be seen overwhelmingly by greenish Democratics for whom the 2000 election decision was at least as bitter a defeat as it was for Gore himself. But what surprises me most about faux café cups is that it’s not just the environmentally insensitive big-box stores selling these things: I saw Insulair™ 10-packs this week at Whole Foods, right next to the Planet green cleaning products.

Before we start a letter-writing campaign to ask Whole Foods to stop carrying Insulair™ Coffee Cups To Go! let’s give the product literature a chance to make its case:

“Drink Through Dome Lid provides leak-resistant secure fit.”

My Cup™ has a secure lid too, vacuum-sealed even. (On a copyediting note, they could afford a hyphen in “leak-resistant” but not “Drink Through”?)

“Triple Wall Cup for extra strength and sturdiness to-go.”

My Cup™ is sturdy, so sturdy that it doesn’t have to be thrown away after one use. (“To-go” doesn’t even need a hyphen here and they still deprived “Triple Wall” of one.)

“Channels of Air provide insulation to keep drinks hot and protect hands.”

I’ve never known air to keep anything hot.

“Paper Construction creates a true coffee house experience, and it's disposable.”

Well, I’m all for disposable coffee house experiences, but I think we’re putting a lot of pressure on these cups if we’re looking to them to provide plushy seats and pretentious patrons too. They do come with Wi-Fi, right?

“Tapered Base easily fits into car cup holders.”

This is listed under “patented features.” Does My Cup™ know it’s in violation of a patent?

“No cup sleeve to get in the way!”

I never knew cup sleeves to be a pox on humanity. At any rate, My Cup™ doesn’t have or need one either.

Only one reason remains why coffee drinkers may prefer the Insulair™ Coffee Cups To Go! to My Cup™: infantilization. The classic paper-and-plastic assemblage we’ve been sucking on since the dawn of the latter coffee house boom of the ’90s has become as comforting to us as a mother’s teat, a bona fide adult sippy cup. No wonder we can’t let go.

Step away from the seductive Drink Through Dome Lid. Liberate yourselves from the culture of disposability. The young sippy-cup sippers of the world thank you in advance for your efforts.

Whew! That really took a load off my conscience. Now back to my regularly scheduled programming of tiresome self-obsession.

do try this at home

2006-06-01T14:35:00.000-07:00

I look spectacularly silly right now. Like I’ve been made up—by grade-schoolers—to play a character with a massive head injury in a school play. I’m not sure what kind of elementary school pageant would call for a character with a massive head injury. Maybe I’m playing a Sikh.

I’m in the midst of my continuous EEG, which, thank Jesus, is being conducted in the comfort of my home. It turns out Kaiser has a “to go” option, so I went in yesterday afternoon to get wired up by a bubbly tech we’ll call “Misty.”

Misty knows lesbians! She told me about them after I used the word “partner” and the pronoun “she” in the same sentence. From then on much of what I had to say drew inevitable comparisons to Misty’s lesbian neighbors, with whom I didn’t feel much simpatico, at least from what Misty had to say about them.

I liked Misty, even though we didn't seem to share much common-ground acreage ourselves. When she asked me what I had done over the Memorial Day weekend I told her that I had seen the Al Gore movie.

“Oh, yeah, how was that?” she asked, marking my scalp for electrode placement.

“Not exactly the feel-good hit of the summer, but definitely worth seeing,” I said. “You know, if you don’t mind adding global warming to your list of worries.”

“It’s a different world out there now, isn’t it,” she said, shaking her head.

Actually, the primary point of the film is that we are and always have been our own worst enemies, that our boogeymen du jour merely divert attention from our ongoing self-destruction. But I wasn’t sure I needed to have a potentially distracting conversation with someone who was now attaching electrodes to my head. (See, I’m already failing to live up to my responsibility—articulated during the end credits of the film—to talk to everyone I know about the immediate dangers of global warming. I suck.)

When I say she was “attaching” electrodes to my head, I’m talking about capital-A Attachment. For my first EEG I had some putty-like stuff on my scalp, but this time Misty was adding a layer of adhesive—after assuring me that my hair wouldn’t be ripped out during removal—that smelled like model cement and made my eyes burn.

“Do you ever worry that you’re doing permanent damage to yourself by working with that stuff all day?” I asked.

“I kinda do,” she said casually. “I’ve read reports that claim it’s totally safe, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not. I don’t think you need to worry about one application, though.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about myself,” I insisted. “But you don’t want to become one of your own patients.”

“That’s for sure,” she said. (Hey!) “Close your eyes for a minute while I do the front ones.”

She didn’t need to tell me twice. I shut my eyes tight. “Of course, if you look at it another way, you get to huff on the job,” I joked, inhaling a little myself.

When I said I smelled like a nail salon Misty said, “No joke. They used to use acetone to get it off, so if I leave any glue behind tomorrow, you can totally use nail polish remover to clean yourself up.”

Ah, the low-tech fix.

After about an hour of placing electrodes and shellacking my scalp, Misty said it was time to wrap me up. As she winched gauze tightly around my head I told her that when Jayne Brooke was having a continuous EEG on Grey’s Anatomy she got to wear a stylish black skullcap over her electrodes. Misty snorted in response and added more gauze.

It’s now T minus 30 minutes to removal, or at least my ride to removal. My partner had to attend commencement today, leaving me mighty afeard I might have to ride the bus to the hospital, but my friend S generously offered to take the afternoon off work to give me a ride. I’m not sure I can express how very grateful I am for this, both because it’s just plain nice to be treated with such kindness and because I was having visions of my freaky self on the bus with my head full of electrodes and gauze, looking for all the world like a patient gone AWOL—you know, blending with my fellow passengers.

So I’m off to see Misty, and when I return I’ll no longer look like a post-op neurosurgery patient. And I'll no longer have to carry around my bulky brain-wave recorder. And I can take a shower! All good things.

caps off

2006-05-23T16:30:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm just this geeky: One of my favorite discoveries of late is You Don't Say, the blog of John McIntyre, manager of the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun and former president of the American Copy Editors Society. Yup, we have our own society, one in which sensibly attired men and women meet annually to guffaw over misplaced modifiers and such. The society even runs an online discussion board, but I can't bring myself to post there for fear that I'll make a grammatical error and become the forum goat. I'm strictly a bush-leaguer in the copyediting ranks, and I can only aspire to the speed and grace with which ACES types can turn around flawless copy. I bow at their temple.

But I like McIntyre's take on copyediting precisely because he's damn near democratic in the exercise of his craft. He never insists upon a rule of usage simply because it's a rule, and he's given to a fair amount of flexibility when it comes to our evolving language and conventions. Sure, he wears a bow tie, but he's not a stuffed shirt: In a recent entry he says, “Copy editors tend to be strongly binary. Everything in usage should be reducible to a rule. But experience is messy, and language mirrors experience. In reaching for precision, it is easy to overreach.”

How great is that? It reminds me of the day I realized math could be creative: It's not like I then ran out and changed my major, but my worldview shifted slightly and resettled in a more pleasing manner.

An evolving language is necessary to keep up with the speed of invention. Our copy chief only recently gave over to "blog" as an acceptable, stand-alone term in place of Web log. “Web log” itself wasn't such a cumbersome term to use, but the outlawing of “blog” made “blogging” and “blogger” verboten as well. “The blogger blogged to her blog” became “The writer of the online journal added an entry to her Web log.” As ridiculous as the former sentence sounds, the latter is downright stiff. And we copy editors are always on the defensive about that s word.

I am pretty rigid, as my partner would no doubt attest, and the most difficult lesson I've had to learn and am still learning on my job is when to exercise restraint. I came to copyediting from a creative writing background, and despite that word creative, I had definite ideas about how words should “flow.” How to convince me, then, that a sentence that reads like an out-and-out dog's breakfast to me could seem positively poetic to its writer? That that could be the one sentence the author reads in the finished magazine that makes him say, “Hey, that's not the way I wrote it!”

(I've wanted to employ the phrase “dog's breakfast” ever since I first noticed its entry in my desk dictionary. I was intrigued enough then to stop and read its definition, and it's one of those words I always notice as I flip through the pages. It's evocative in the way British slang so often is—meaning “confused mess,” just as you might expect—and I'm pleased to have been able to deploy it here. Thank you for indulging me.)

Books and articles I edited early in my copyediting career were awash in red ink, and I was secretly pleased with myself for having made them bleed. If I were being paid by the correction, I could have taken an early retirement. But I'm mellowing with experience, even if to hear my partner tell it I'm an inky tyrant. This weekend she asked me to look over the c.v. and cover letter she's submitting to apply for the job she already has: She's hoping to get that pesky “interim” excised from her title. I was making my way through her pages of degrees, publications, and honors—the kind of academic cred I'd be hard-pressed to fill a single page with myself—when she looked over my shoulder and said, “Oh, my God! Is it that bad?”

I didn't think it was bad in the least, though when I looked at the page before me there were quite a few red marks. “That's just punctuation stuff,” I said.

“But I've been showing that to people!” she said, a little panicked.

“Believe me,” I assured her. “This is the kind of stuff only a copy editor would notice.”

That's the thing about copyediting: It must be a labor of love, because the work is invisible to all but a handful of people. A book I worked on about a year ago just won an award, and I had a quiet moment during which I patted myself on the back, but I don't expect to be thanked by the author. If I do my job well, the author won't see my footprints: When she reads the final draft she recognizes every word as her own, every sentence just as she arranged it, and that's as it should be.

So we fight the good fight quietly, because what it would take for copy editors to get noticed is unconscionable: putting our pens on strike and flooding the world with the typos, gaffes, and confusing punctuation of a nation too proud to proofread and too rushed to care. The horror…the horror…

Besides, you have only to read McIntyre's You Don't Say, or Capital Idea, by Nicole Stockdale of The Dallas Morning News, or Blogslot, by The Washington Post's Bill Walsh, to understand that these folks do what they like and like what they do, and is there really anything more life-affirming than that?

Hey, kids, want to make your own bogus newspaper clipping? Click here. It's way superfun!

the third rail

2006-05-16T19:12:00.000-07:00

My driving privileges have been revoked. Again.

They were revoked last year as well, after my first blackout (a.k.a. “the precipitating event”), though only for a few days. “Standard protocol,” my neurologist said. Doctors are required to instruct patients not to drive and to report them to the DMV after any unexplained loss of consciousness—pending diagnosis. Happily an EEG was scheduled lickety-split and I received my results the following day, after which I was free to drive all the way to China if I so chose. Sure, the loss of consciousness remained unexplained, but the EEG pronounced my brain sound, so…

I went almost a year without another loss of consciousness, then I had a minor lapse in February. No big whoop. I was hungry, I thought, and tired. Then one morning a few weeks ago I entered a kind of catatonic state, eyes wide open, muscles tensed—or so I'm told. My partner reported that I seemed to startle awake then lapse back to my lights-on-nobody-home status. I remember dreaming, but I don’t know what about, nor do I recall coming to at any time during the episode. I fell asleep afterward and slept hard for hours; when I awoke I felt as heavy as I’ve ever felt, as though I were sewn to the mattress.

My GP thought this last episode sounded more seizure-like than the blackouts I’d previously described to him, prompting him to think the other episodes were also seizures. So off I was sent to the neurologist, another one this time. My GP thought I was entitled to a fresh perspective after having spent the better part of last year visiting with a neurologist who did his level best to convince me I’m a head case.

I saw a lovely doctor last Wednesday who put me through the neurological paces then said she was referring me for a 24-hour EEG.

The first EEG I had was the regular snapshot variety, with only about 30 minutes of monitoring. They tried to provoke my brain into doing loopy things by making me stay awake for 30 hours prior to my appointment, but, resentful at having its integrity called into question, my despotic encephalon saw right through their tricks and held steady, bitterly asserting its soundness.

This time they’ll check me into the hospital and get a 24-hour reading, which I at first took to mean that I would be hooked up for 24 hours then discharged, but when I Googled “24-hour EEG” I was alarmed to discover that the “24-hour” part merely connotes continuous monitoring, with average hospital stays in the three-day zone. Oh. Sounds like something I’ll want to clarify when we set up my appointment.

I haven’t been scheduled yet, and if I don’t hear from someone soon, I’ll start agitating, ’cause, you know, I can’t drive in the meantime, which is inconvenient for a person with a full-time job and such, especially in Los Angeles. You’ll remember Dale Bozzio singing “Nobody walks in L.A.” That’s not strictly true. Mentally ill homeless folks—thank you, Ronald Reagan—they walk in L.A. As do recent immigrants, seniors whose declining eyesight or mental faculties have triggered their delicensure, truant gang-kids-in-training, repeat DUI offenders, and I: We all walk in L.A. Later in the song the lyric becomes “Only a nobody walks in L.A.,” and we’re all pretty much nobodies, my aforementioned pedestrian friends and I, at least through the eyes of those who would oppositionally define themselves as somebodies.

I’ve been taking advantage of L.A.’s limited subway system and its “improving” bus system. I’ve also been taking advantage of my partner, whose shuttle services are timely, friendly, and free. As I waited for her on Wednesday night to pick me up at the Universal City subway station a coworker came up behind me. “I didn’t know you rode the train to work,” he said. “I don’t normally,” I said, “but my driving privileges have been temporarily revoked.” He grinned and asked conspiratorially, “Wow, what’d ya do?”

While riding public transportation has its advantages—I’m catching up on unread back issues of The New Yorker and arriving at work in a state that’s downright Zen compared to the defensive stance required of morning commuters—its disadvantages are many and loud. A day or two of bus riding supplies colorful stories with which to entertain my partner, “The Moaning Man” and “The California Hater” being two recent favorites. But the genres wear thin, so a story about a man who from the origin of the subway line to my stop relentlessly shout-performs an extended profanity-laced monologue about, say, his dislike of police officers, well, it just seems tiredly derivative of my California-hater story.

So I’m hoping for an end to my public-transportation adventure before my stories become stale, and I know that my partner would appreciate same. I mean, she loves me and means it, but a tiny part of her must fear that I can collect only so many anecdotes about Metro Rail lunatics before my stories resemble the very rants I lampoon. And that fear is prudent. Crazed Metro passengers are not born—they are made.

rhodas, meet your mary

2006-05-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

We met a neighbor!

It was Wednesday night, “garb night”—which is short for “Ugh, we have to gather all our little trash receptacles and empty them into the big trash receptacles, then lug it all out to the curb for pickup tomorrow morning.” It’s really not such a trial, but we whine about it anyway because it robs us of valuable TV-viewing time, which is in short supply on Wednesday night, what with The Amazing Race, America’s Next Top Model, Top Chef, and Lost all vying for our attention. Before anyone starts tsking, I know that my television taste is pedestrian, but I learn things from reality television, valuable things. Just this week I learned, courtesy of Jade on America’s Next Top Model, that elephants are descended from dinosaurs. I also learned, courtesy of Top Chef, what the hell truffles are. Actually, Top Chef didn’t teach me anything, but because the delicacy was the subject of a culinary showdown I finally asked my partner, six short years after truffles first entered my consciousness at a friend’s cocktail party—what is that in the cheese?—where they come from. She was kind enough to look it up on something called the Internet and tell me that they’re “round, warty fungi” that grow underground adjacent to the roots of specific trees. Yum!

So we were wheeling our color-coded city trashcans out to the curb when a woman called out to me from across the street. I’m in the habit of pretending I don’t hear such things since in general nothing good comes of being yelled at by strangers, but she seemed in some distress, and we had only moments before ignored some loud violent noises, so I acknowledged her and she scurried over.

“Did you hear those noises?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “They were pretty loud.”

“Did it sound like gunfire to you?” she asked, petting her pregnant tummy.

“No,” my partner said. “Just some guy having a temper tantrum.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He was shouting and hitting something, but not someone. It sounded like he was whaling on his car…or maybe his girlfriend’s car.”

She introduced herself and told us she lived across the street and that she was home alone. And that she was pregnant, which we had gathered. We introduced ourselves and remarked that we liked her house, after which she told us how she and her husband came to choose red as its exterior color, then she made a joke about neighbors maybe thinking she was either running an elementary school or a whorehouse.

“I work from home,” she said. “I saw the boys who tagged your fence and I ran after them, but then I thought, I’m pregnant. I shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Oh, thanks,” my partner said. “The fence gets tagged a lot. But the city paints it, so don’t worry too much about it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t put yourself at risk on our fence’s account.”

“I know,” she said. “But it just makes me so mad.”

I wanted to tell her to attack with vigor if someone tagged our garage door again, to weaponize her pregnant belly if need be, but instead I said, “It’s nice to know you’re home and looking out for us. Feel free to knock on our door whenever you need some company.”

Just like that, after over three years in our house, we made a neighbor friend. Over the tops of our trashcans, no less. I’m glad we didn’t have stinky trash, like the time we threw away a dead possum that had been left—in a box, with a dirty diaper—in our front yard. (The dirty diaper wasn’t on the dead possum, which would have been extra extraordinary.) In the absence of stinky trash, and presumably anything else that would have struck her as offensive—suggesting that lesbians in their pseudo-jammies are inoffensive enough—she offered that she and her husband should have us over, and we countered that we should have them over, and while nothing was hammered out on the spot, I think we all meant it.

To be fair, we have met a couple of other neighbors. We’re not shut-ins, for chrissake. There was a woman who introduced herself as Linda Rose, and reintroduced herself to me every time she saw me as if we had never met, who dropped by shortly after we moved in to tell us she was the neighborhood watch captain and that her husband was an electrician should we ever need work of that nature—like, for instance, if we wanted to install lights in our front yard so that more people like herself might drop by. At one point she noticed some trash in our yard and mused that in Mexico there are no trashcans, the implication being, if I understand her correctly, that recent immigrants are to blame for any instances of littering. (Or maybe it was simply an unfortunately timed non sequitur.) Then she regaled us with the news that our overachieving oleander around the side of the house is a favored tryst site for gay hustlers turning tricks. If Linda Rose was right, the boys are either not playing safe or they’re the tidiest hustlers ever: While the oleander sees its fair share of garbage, I’ve never seen a shred of telltale condom detritus lying about.

Linda Rose moved about a year ago, presumably to a neighborhood populated entirely by people who grew up knowing what trashcans are and how to use them.

There’s also this Swedish woman. While we haven’t properly met, she certainly knows who I am. She thinks I'm gunning for her and her dog. I was backing out of the garage one morning when she strode across our driveway like she owned it. (That’s something we’ve had to accept in our hearts, that since we live on a corner lot, lazy Americans—including immigrants from lands with and without trashcans—will cut across our property to save the three extra steps it would take to navigate its perimeter.) I hit my brakes as she scooped up her little yippy dog, glaring at me and muttering something in her native tongue. Another time I backed out and stopped in the driveway to mess with a CD or something. Then, admittedly without looking, I hit the remote to close the garage door. I glanced up just in time to see her rear away from the garage. She had been rounding the corner via the sex oleander and apparently felt in danger of being crushed by the descending door. I rolled down my window to say I was sorry, that I hadn’t seen her, to which she replied, “Every time!” OK, (a) twice does not qualify as “every time,” (b) when a car is idling in a driveway, the closing of a garage door is imminent, and (c) if you’re cutting across my property such that you’re walking within crushing distance of my garage door, you’re so on my property in such an uninvited and annoying way.

There’s also a high school kid and her mom who walk a little white dog so often that my partner and I suspect the dog has psychic power over them. The girl is really nice and always says hello. Her mom doesn’t speak English but often smiles at us. Meanwhile the dog looks at us in a knowing way, warning us with his eyes not to meddle in his business lest he teach our dog his supersecret mind-control tricks.

Those being the neighbors we know, you can understand our delight at meeting a friendly woman who paints her house red and chases taggers—while pregnant! And she owns this amazing company that sells hand-stitched greeting cards made by women in her native Armenia.

Pretty cool, huh? Makes me want to have a great big gay wedding so that I can order up a custom batch. And register for gifts.

In the meantime, it’s just nice to know there’s someone we can wave to when we catch each other outside, maybe even trot across the street to visit with. We could borrow a cup of sugar from her should the need arise, watch each other’s houses for suspicious activity, or just chitchat over the garbage. Do they have trashcans in Armenia?

it is english we speak here

2006-05-02T17:21:00.000-07:00

Images of yesterday’s Day Without Immigrants demonstrations in Los Angeles made me proud to be a human being, though commentary I’ve read this morning on the Internet threatens to make me ashamed of same. It’s alarming sometimes to realize just how out of touch I am with national sentiment.

I was positively giddy at the idea that half a million people turned out to voice their presence and flex their economic muscle, and that they did so peacefully in a city that was paralyzed by rioting less than 15 years ago. Hell, a Lakers championship causes more upset in this city than yesterday’s demonstrations did. According to the Los Angeles Times, the LAPD, a force often beset by controversy, reported few problems, and I would argue that the officers can count themselves among those who made a powerful May Day statement: It would have taken only a handful of reactionary boys in blue to incite pockets of violence and generate arrests.

Successes aside, never underestimate the propensity of the populace to feel, well, put upon. Before I unleash the concerns of an insane nation, I’d like to quote a “typical” Angeleno cited in today’s Times: "Are we supposed to see what it's like without immigrants?" asked Kim Kelly of Porter Ranch [a suburban district on the edge of Los Angeles populated almost entirely by gated communities of million-dollar-plus single-family homes]. "Because nothing seems different today for me." The city picked up her trash on schedule in the morning, she said. "But," she added. "I'm wondering if the gardeners will come."

And now, my tribute to “the people,” those salt-of-the-earth honest-to-god legal born-here Americans who make our country great. The following essay is made up entirely of single sentences—no more than one from each patriot—culled from responses to the front-page Times article regarding the aforementioned peaceful demonstrations. I have resisted the urge to copyedit for grammer, speling, and puncturation.

Who the hell are these people come in to our country illegally, breaks rules and now what?? raising there voice? Causing problems? THEY HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER OUR CONSTITUATION! We need to secure our boarders and get these people in line (back of the line). Stop letting these people in. The Irish , Italians, Polish, Russian, French, etc. plus the "Indian" have an important stake in this country. It is English we speak here and pay taxes and do not expect free medical and education.

While we do need some immigrants to do jobs that dont pay very well, do we really need all of the immigrants that we have? NO! What will happen when the current group of illegals get their papers and no longer will work for cash or low wages? Then the next group of illegals will come to take their place!

They're just like the Borg- Resistance Is Futile, and they refuse to assimilate to US ways and customs. Even if you do conquer us as you say you'll destroy it and turn it into a third world cesspool. For once in your lives..learn to speak english..and clean your front yard. and please dont park on your lawn..u make the neighborhood look like crap. I'm appalled at the gaul of these people.

All you guys do is pay are store taxes, not property taxes, income tax etc. Drugs like the meth that the illegals brought up have addicted our kids and it will only get worse now that Mexico has legalized cocaine and heroin. Then, to get a job, they need to use a Social Security # that doesn't belong to them, committing identity theft, the fastest-growing CRIME in America today. Also the anchor baby scam needs to be stopped.

The terrorists can learn a thing or two about infiltrating the borders from mexicans...in fact, the terrorists mind as well hire them cause they always looking for jobs anyways.

America, she is a beautiful country.

Special thanks to aerotheque for the beautiful photo of the march as it approached City Hall in downtown L.A.

riding the rails

2006-04-28T16:21:00.000-07:00

This week I'm just a little less crazy than I was last, thanks to a diagnosis that in three not-so-short words moves me swiftly from the psychosomatic column to the realm of medical legitimacy. The words are cervical spondylotic myelopathy, and while their ramifications don't thrill me, I may as well have a name for the symptoms that have clearly set up camp. Hell, they've pitched a tent, raised their little troop flag, built a fire in the pit of my stomach, and started to roast wienies—all very much without my consent. Which is why it has sucked so much wind for the past 13 months to be told I'm a head case.

Cervical spondylotic myelopathy is a fancy-schmancy way of saying I have spinal arthritis with neurological complications. I have bone spurs at C5 and C6, as well as a bulging disc, all of which cause swelling of spinal ligaments when agitated. The swelling of the ligaments narrows my spinal canal, which compresses nerves and disrupts their signals to the rest of my body, explaining the drunken-sailor walk, the slowing of my responses, and the numbness in my limbs—as well as the waxing and waning of said features. The narrowed canal also impedes blood flow to my brain, causing the dizziness, fatigue, and blackouts I've been experiencing. In fact, I had a blackout just yesterday morning to celebrate the diagnosis.

So, to recap, I've had a head CT, three MRIs (one of the brain and two of the cervical spine—both soft tissue and skeletal), a lumbar puncture (euphemism for the dreaded words spinal tap, a procedure I let the neurologist talk me into trying without anesthetic since he said it's easier that way to “hit the target”), a nerve-conduction test, eight hours of neuropsychological testing (after which I was pronounced cogent but "slow"), a sleep-deprived EEG (for which I had to pull my first all-nighter since college—total awake time prior to test: 30 hours), Holter heart monitoring (24 hours during which I was wired and saddled with enough equipment to make me look a little pregnant), an echocardiogram, and enough blood drawn to film the prom scene in Carrie.

At various times I've been told my symptoms were the result of panic, psychomotor retardation (a slowing of motor skills due to prolonged depression), and conversion disorder (in which emotional issues are avoided or resolved through physical disabilities).

We might have come close to answering the puzzle months ago, when my GP noted my positive blood tests for antinuclear antibodies and rheumatoid factor and sent me to a rheumatologist. But the rose-colored-bespectacled specialist felt up my finger, elbow, and knee joints and, finding no obvious swelling, dismissed my GP's concerns. My 5% chance of having a positive ANA in the absence of disease being exponentially decreased by the simultaneous likelihood that my RF reading is a false-positive, his careless dismissal of my case seems unconscionable to me now.

I didn't want this to turn into a rant, but I guess that worm has already turned.

When other explanations don't come easily, I think doctors find it very convenient to write off patients with psychiatric histories as having psychosomatic disorders. And I was just crazy enough that I was beginning to believe they could be right. It gets slippery, because the more a patient stamps her feet and insists something's physically wrong, the more crazy she can seem. Then every inconclusive test becomes yet another nail in her coffin of delusion.

Worse, when a neurologist who saw me for all of 15 minutes diagnosed me with conversion disorder, he proceeded to lecture me in a paternal tone that the sooner I accepted it the better my chances for recovery. He added that if I sought enough second opinions, I could probably find a doctor who'd be willing to diagnose me with something. In other words, his judgment was beyond reproof. Did I mention that he was about a decade younger than I?

Once he had entered his opinion in my file, getting further tests was, as my GP put it, a political game. He still believed my symptoms had a genuine physiological cause, but he had now been overruled by two specialists—the bug-eyed rheumatologist and my Doogie Howser neurologist.

Thankfully, my GP stuck by me and slimed me into a third MRI, which proved the charm.

I have no doubt that there are people who wait longer than 13 months for diagnoses. But take it from me, anyone who wasn't nuts to begin with who goes through over a year of diagnostics without any clinical findings, gawd help them, they're on the express train to certifiability.

not dead

2006-04-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

Ever start writing something about your stupid life and then get so bored with yourself that you can’t imagine why you’re worth writing about or how on earth anyone else could possibly be interested in what you have to say? Yeah, me too.

But since my mother, whenever I call, reliably greets me with, “Oh, we were wondering if you’d died or something!” I thought it would be best to head off that kind of thinking at the pass here. Because I know it’s only natural to think, Golly, she hasn’t written a blog entry in over a week. I wonder if she died.

I haven’t died. My partner and I were in Georgia—the state, not the country—Wednesday through Sunday to visit her parents and catch some of the northern stages of the Tour de Georgia. Road cycling being not such a big deal in the States, folks can get almost close enough to the pro riders at the TdG to lovingly stroke their sculpted calves. My favorite moment—easily besting my first glimpse of a motley contingent of Confederate reenactors standing cheek to jowl in Chickamauga with the cyclists, the soldiers’ dirty gray uniforms revealing almost as much pot belly as the bikers’ colorful Lycra jerseys revealed muscle—happened when we were wandering among the team vehicles after the finish of the Dahlonega stage and a Belgian rider from the Quick Step team stripped out of his cycling kit and stood in the middle of the parking lot just as naked as an eel chatting with his teammates while an assistant massaged his still-twitching muscles.

I wish I had been born in country with a less inhibited culture. I’ll bet Belgian bloggers hardly ever harbor anxiety over the worth of what they have to say—and they never have panic dreams in which they find themselves naked in the middle of a crowd.

who’s that?

2006-04-17T17:54:00.000-07:00

Regular visitors to this blog may notice that I’ve only recently posted a picture of myself. This brings me more or less full circle: Having revealed my bloggermost thoughts a few months ago to friends who know me offline, I’m now showing my face to friends who met me online. I’m hoping that in neither case is it too much information.

I had always thought that if I ever published a novel, I’d politely refuse to supply an author photo. I’m not sure which notion is more far-fetched, that of me publishing a book, or of me, in the giddy throes of publication, not putting my face to my work. I mean, c’mon, we all want our pats on the back, don’t we? And while it seems romantic to be a Salinger or a Pynchon, living off in the woods without a PR care in the world, given the recent spate of literary shams—the unmasking of reclusive cult darling “JT LeRoy,” who turned out to be a middle-aged woman rather than a teenage prodigy who was rescued from a life of drug addiction, homelessness, and prostitution by the middle-aged woman who invented him and assumed his identity; the debunking of the more sensational details of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces—it seems best to keep one’s hands where everyone can see them, if for no other reason than to assure the public that you’re real.

Not, by the way, that I imagine even in my wildest thoughts that anyone has any reason to think I’m not real. Good gravy, if I were making stuff up, I surely wouldn’t pretend to be a middle-aged copy editor with a mood disorder. We’re precisely the kind of people who need to make up personas in order to be at all intriguing to the marketplace.

Anonymity is a funny thing. We crave it mightily, some of us, but once granted it takes on a certain weight, flying in the face of the lightness we’d hoped to achieve under its protection. I recently edited an interview with Rauda Morcos, a lesbian of Palestinian descent and Israeli citizenship. When a national magazine outed her she became the most famous lesbian in Israel and Palestine—not an easy kind of notoriety to live with—but since the outing she’s agitated for LGBT rights in ways that would have been impossible from the safety of the closet, and she's pleased as punch about it.

This is a pretty lofty example, I know, to illustrate the simple act of posting my picture on my blog. I mean only to say that while I once thought it would be easier to talk about my life from a far-ish remove, I’ve come to understand that truth equals freedom. As I’ve begun to talk about subjects I once thought taboo, like mental illness and sexual abuse, I’ve felt my personal shame about them lifting, leaving me to marvel at how silence twists events so fundamentally that we grow to hate ourselves over events quite beyond our control.

Realizing that I have nothing to be ashamed of, and therefore nothing to hide, is so thoroughly exhilarating I want to start proselytizing everyone I meet. I’m not sure how well people will respond, though, to my accosting them on the street and imploring them to tell me their deepest, darkest secrets. “You’ll feel great!” I’d promise, a slightly feral look in my eyes.

Of course, there are still topics I’ve discussed only with my therapist and my partner—so far. But I don’t know that the silence accorded them here is about shame so much as my not quite having worked them out in my own head. No use cracking open cans of worms just to see them wiggle about. If you know anything about me, you know that I like to get my worms in order before I let them slither about in public. Especially now that you can pick the owner of said worms out of a lineup.

who you callin’ a six?

2006-04-14T18:34:00.000-07:00

Wildflower season has come to Southern California! Botanical types are giving this year’s expected wildflower turnout only a 6 on a scale of 1–10, this because our rainy season delivered too little too late. But while last year’s crop—after a rainy season so relentless that the ceiling in our home office buckled and collapsed—more thoroughly painted the landscape in broad strokes of orange, yellow, and purple, the arrival of the class of ’06 is no less spectacular. Like any other native vegetation, poppy fields rise up amid spring showers, blooming as magically—and damn near as quickly—as a tin of Jiffy Pop. Seriously, does this scene strike you as a 6 out of 10?

A mountainside blanketed in wildflowers is one of a handful of sights—others being coastal Northern California and wine country—that puts me in a frame of mind to understand why people once thought my home state paradise.

My mother, having grown up in Iowa, came to California in 1958 with her family to visit her eldest brother, who had moved west only the year before and had been writing home ever since to exclaim, “You have to come see this place!” The story goes that after a two-week vacation they returned to Iowa long enough only to sell their farm and livestock, then moved to California en masse. Their acclimation was a bit Joad-esque in that my grandfather had lost his livelihood in the bargain and spent the rest of his days at a miserable factory job. And then there were all those sailors my mom and her sister picked up at the Pike, an amusement park near the Port of Long Beach. But such were the trade-offs for our temperate climate and dramatic landscapes—the beaches, mountains, and desert competing so fervently for one’s favor it’s difficult to see a downside.

But this entry isn’t about downsides. It’s very much about upsides, and the California poppy is living proof that land, left to its own devices, produces beauty beyond our most virtuosic attempts to improve upon it. I would scrap my plans for bricking in the cursed strip and instead liberally sprinkle wildflower seeds all about if I thought the delicate blooms would stand a chance against the trample of work boots as men cut across our property to get from their parked trucks to the high-density apartment buildings that flank the nearby boulevard. Wouldn’t it be grand, though, to turn our eyesore into a little slice of heaven?

’Course, though merchants are happy to sell wildflower seeds, I’m not so sure the show-offy little devils thrive in domestic situations. I almost never see them occupying orderly rows and beds—the kinds of defined spaces where marigolds and pansies muster in accordance with gardeners’ orders. I like to think that poppies and their untamed kin resist order, choosing to live chaotically and free, thumbing their stamens at the indignity of planters, serving as no man’s “lawn border.” There’s a reason, they remind us, that “pansy” is another word for wuss.

the pall of the wild

2006-04-11T14:34:00.000-07:00

We were wrestling grocery bags into the house Saturday when a stranger came to our gate and asked whether we needed anyone to take care of our yard. As he spoke he gestured at the front yard as if to say, “We can all see, can't we, that you do need someone to take care of your yard?” My first instinct was to make him go away, both because that's what I do when strange men appear at my gate and because I'm defensive about the state of our yard. Whenever I do yard work I expect neighbors to take the opportunity to approach and tell me that I'm a terrible homeowner, that our yard is a pox on their neighborhood. It's one of the reasons I'm afraid of mail: I expect upstanding families with manicured lawns to send letters rebuking me for bringing down their property values.

We've let things get a bit rangy. In truth, we've let things remain rangy. We bought a corner lot with too much yard, most of which wasn't landscaped when we moved in. And while people dream of big yards, the reality is that you're better off with a condo unless you're really into gardening. Gardening appeals to me in the abstract—being one with the earth, munching carrots so freshly pulled they still taste vaguely of dirt, wielding sharp implements—but it isn't something I want to dedicate every weekend to.

Having a big yard makes me understand my father's zeal for cement, which he's fond of calling “gray gold” in recognition of the amount of money he's paid contractors over the years to pave his world. The house I grew up in was gradually transformed from one with your standard lawn, both front and back, to one hemmed completely by concrete and brick and therefore hostile to child's play of all sorts. We had fruit trees and flowers, but they dared not overgrow their carefully delineated plots. To paraphrase Joni Mitchell's “Big Yellow Taxi,” Dad paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

Despite that early trauma, I've lately been agitating to brick a certain strip of land around the corner from our house, the upkeep of which we're responsible for even though it's technically city property. We can't even see the damned strip without effort—once a week or so we stroll over to assess the graffiti situation or pick up the trash that routinely gets dumped there: This is where you'll find your soiled sofas and such. And it seems to me that the constant weeding the area demands just adds insult to injury; actually, it spits on the already insulted injury. So, yes, bricks would be nice.

But Luis, the strange man who appeared at my gate, wasn't a bricklayer. He was a plumber, a plumber who had recently invested in some lawn equipment and was eager to get his landscape business off the ground, so to speak. After surveying our front and back yards he said he'd mow it all for $60. You might be thinking $60 isn't a huge bargain for lawn care, but such was the height of our lawn by then it was successfully camouflaging our medium-size dog. (Alas, it's not technically a “lawn,” but if you can get your weeds to cluster just so, then mow them, they approximate lawn.) This would be no quick mow-and-edge affair—this job stopped just short of requiring a machete crew. In fact, after we hired Luis I panicked that our “lawn” might kill his mower and I'd feel somehow responsible for threatening his livelihood.

We couldn't just sack out on the couch watching TV while Luis engaged in a death match with our weeds, so I mopped the kitchen and generally steered clear of looking at all relaxed. I did suggest at one point, both to myself and to my partner, that we shouldn't feel guilty about hiring “help,” as people say. Luis didn't approach us hoping we would say, “Thanks for offering, but we can do it ourselves. We're not the lazy privileged white girls you think we are.” (Not that we reek of success, but we are just two people living in an 1,800-square-foot house situated next to a building where multiple families share single-bedroom apartments.) Nevertheless, once the mopping was complete, I started to vacuum.

About an hour into his labors, Luis knocked on the door and asked whether we had any lawn and leaf bags. He had filled our city-approved green trashcan as well as a secondary can, and he had only quelled half the back yard. The necessary bags were acquired and he continued…for the next four hours. Yes, such was the piteous state of the land abutting our home it took a grown and quite able-bodied man five hours to tame it. But what a magnificent job he did!

I hadn't expected he would do much more than cut the weeds down to size such that we could once again move about our backyard, get to our fruit-heavy tangerine tree, locate the dog. I had fully intended to spend the next weekend pulling leftover, awkwardly situated weeds that sprouted between steppingstones and planters like hair from the ears of old men.

Luis had transformed our yard into more than a habitable environment: It was one gazebo and a jaunty border of pansies away from the pages of Better Homes & Gardens. I saw land I had never seen, ground around the side of the house that had been covered by rogue ivy since we moved in, jungle that had been used by generations of stray cats as a birthing environment and hideout for their young. Uncontracted by us, Luis had also attacked the cursed strip, leveling the weeds and manicuring our fence line. He had defunked the miracle oleander, so named because despite our paying zero attention to the bush, it grows like a teenager and continually spews flowers. (I guess the relative indestructibility of oleanders explains why every public school campus is lousy with them.)

Luis himself was a miracle, which is why we gave him a 66% raise his first day on the job. How could we pay the man just $60 after what he had done for us? He had given us back our yard; he had given us hope. He had given me the courage to look my neighbors in the eye and say, “Ha! How do you like me now?” To which they would undoubtedly reply, “About your trees…”

comma queen

2006-04-04T17:30:00.000-07:00

I am the greatest copy editor in all the land! Or at least I was late last week, when a self-esteem boost arrived on the wings of a best-selling author—and just in time to thumb its nose at my sickening fears of brain atrophy.

I was given a book excerpt to copyedit, see, and typically excerpts are the easiest and therefore most boring lumps of text copy editors encounter. They’re generally perfect, since they’ve already been thoroughly copyedited by the authors, their editors, and their editors’ copy editors. Besides which, even if an excerpt is a flaming turd we’re not to change a thing, being that said turd is the property of the author and his or her publishing house. Speaking of flaming turds, I used to edit a regular column by a celebrity who is very much not a writer despite the fact that she has published a book. Her writing was juvenile, clumsy, and even nonsensical at times, but I was never to touch a word without written permission. The one time I bothered to ask to change something—because I really was trying to save her from exposing herself as an idiot—I was denied permission, in writing. Such was the unflinching perfection of her word vomit.

So my instruction with this excerpt was to compare our file to their file and ensure that we were publishing the work exactly as it would appear in the book, which really only entails making certain that all the formatting carried over from one file to the next: italics, smart quotes, blah, blah, blah. There are few tortures crueler than handing a copy editor a piece of writing and telling her not to edit it. Control-freaky inclinations and obsessive-compulsive tics are not just tolerated but cultivated in our line of work, and it’s tough to turn those filters off.

Happily, the text was worth reading. It was a chapter from a forthcoming book by the aforementioned best-selling firebrand author. I had read his previous books, and will likely be reading the new one when I get my hands on a review copy or, barring such luck, when it’s published. So I approached the assignment not so much as an exercise in futility but as an honest-to-god instance of getting paid to read. That’s the fantasy, after all—that copy editors are paid to do what they love: poring over all those wonderful words. But we don’t get to choose what we edit, and reading isn’t nearly as pleasurable when scrutinizing the kinds of insane details that are our livelihood: Is that period italicized?

Here we reach a narrative crisis in my triumphant story: The number of people in the world who are interested in reading a blow-by-blow account of an act of copyediting, however life-affirming, is small. That’s why there aren’t procedural TV dramas offering viewers a window on our world: the workaday trials and tribulations of a woman—with a tragic past, natch—dispensing righteous truth through the nib of her pen, correcting the punctuation and grammar of an ungrateful nation that will continue to make the same mistakes week after week, season after season.

Suffice to say that there was some punctuation in the celebrated author's chapter that struck me as…eccentric, paired with a couple of mistakes—explicit no-two-ways-about-’em mistakes—such that I ditched my pussyfoot instructions and contacted the big-deal publishing house directly, cc’ing the folks who had admonished me to resist my copyediting urges. I outlined the mistakes—both explicit and debatable—in a humble e-mail wherein I was careful to use language that left me completely open to the idea that the instances cited may simply be idiosyncrasies of the author, the kind of poetic license we might extend to a writer whose breakthrough novel spent 70 consecutive weeks on the New York Times best seller list. If my e-mail program had allowed me to dot my i’s with hearts and flowers, I might have.

You know where this is going, yeah? I mean, wouldn’t this be a crap story if the publisher had responded with a curt “please keep all punctuation and grammar intact”? Yes. Which is why it’s my relief to report that said big-deal publishing house replied asking that I make all changes cited, thanking me for catching the errors, and noting that they would alert their production department. Ha! The book was on its way to production when I swooped in like a copyediting superhero and saved it from everlasting embarrassment. Or at least I saved that chapter. Hey, shouldn’t they ask me to proofread the rest of the book? And then shouldn’t I be lovingly thanked in the acknowledgements?

I don’t blame the copy editors at the big-deal publishing house for missing what they did. I’ve edited books too. They’re difficult, unwieldy, and the deadlines are often insane. The best-selling author probably turned in his manuscript late, then his editor almost certainly took more than the time allotted to line-edit, and it was likely passed on to the copy editor with a demand for a one-week turnaround. And while everyone else’s deadline was squishy, the copy editor’s deadline was firm, because production and advertising were already lined up for an on-sale date that couldn’t be moved.

Copy editors may be the unsung heroes of publishing, but I have to sing my praises this time, if only to a small audience. My brain’s integrity has been in doubt this past year, and it still seems slow and laborious to me, like I’m constantly operating under the influence. And then there’s that neuropsychologist who pronounced my brain sound but said my processing speed was in the borderline-impaired range. That kind of stuff can screw with a girl’s head, especially when that head is already suspect.

So I’ve been terrified off and on that it's just a matter of time before I won’t be able to do this job anymore, and the terror alert last week was orange. I went to dinner with a friend Tuesday night, where we talked about our mutual career anxieties, each able to reassure the other but not ourselves. And Wednesday’s therapy session was all about how I had finally found a job I loved and here was my brain checking out on me. My therapist, of course, saw things differently, noting that if I had received no complaints about my work I was probably doing an OK job. But she gets paid to say that, and she lives in a head where people aren’t constantly talking behind her back.

At any rate, this particular copyediting assignment seemed suspiciously well timed. Were I a woman inclined to believe in a higher power, I might think she’s trying to tell me something. Then again, if I were to believe in this higher-power business, I’d want to know why I’m saddled with a brain that doubts its own integrity. Then there’d be a whole lot of talk about faith and mysterious workings and the like, so it’s probably better if I just choose to believe that everything is random, and I most of all.

Still, I am the greatest copy editor in all the land. This week. Next week the neuroses will surely come rushing back, so somebody needs to line up another mistake-riddled excerpt from a best-selling author soon.

girlz n the hood

2006-03-28T17:51:00.000-08:00

I returned home from work yesterday to find graffiti on our garage door, which is not how I left it. That morning the garage had been painted two shades of green, just as it was when we bought the house. Two shades of green wouldn’t have been my color choice, but it was the color of the house we chose.

Had the graffiti been more attractive I might have embraced it as a goodwill gesture from budding young neighborhood artists. I could totally live with something along the lines of this:

But it was a basic black spray-painted gang tag of the sort that repeatedly shows up on our fence and gets painted over by Operation Clean Sweep, a graffiti-removal service offered free through the Los Angeles Board of Public Works.

“OCS challenges residents to become part of the solution and play a major role in the maintenance of their neighborhoods!”

I accept their challenge! And I accept their help, because painting my own fence every time it gets tagged would utterly exhaust me. Hell, I’m too exhausted to do much of anything these days, so it’s my partner who regularly calls the city regarding matters of illegal dumping and graffiti.

Speaking of illegal dumping, we’ve had two whole other abandoned-sofa incidents that I haven’t even mentioned since the storied couch of yore. One of them spawned a computer monitor, a carton full of containers of used motor oil, and a trash bag too skanky to get near enough to reveal its contents here. My partner called to report the first of these dumped sofas so soon after the removal of the storied couch of yore that the city employee to whom she spoke thought she must be re-reporting the same sofa and fussed at her for being impatient. Nope, we’re just that lousy with soiled sofas.

We were naïve new homeowners the first time our fence got tagged. Our inaugural blush of rage toward this bald act of vandalism invoked every cliché ever uttered by our parents: The nerve of kids thinking they can claim our house as their turf! Just who do they think pays the mortgage around here? They should put all that destructive energy into earning a paycheck—then maybe they’d have more respect for private property! I guess we just can’t have nice things.

When OCS came to remove that first tag they asked what color we would like the fence to be, which confused me: It was a natural wood fence; I wanted it to be natural, like it was before the mean boys came around. I’m not sure what kind of fairy dust I expected them to sprinkle over the graffiti to lift it cleanly from the fence, but I was quickly made aware of my choices: white or brown. It didn’t occur to me at the time that painting it white would make it just about the most inviting canvas in all of gangland Los Angeles. So white it was, and white it’s been ever since.

The fence is one thing, but our garage door getting tagged is a whole new sack of potatoes. The garage is so integral to the look of the house—what Realtors would call our “curb appeal”—the tag may as well be on our front door, which stirs up a whole kettle of neuroses in me. For months after we moved in I dreaded coming home, so certain was I that it was just a matter of time before I would find “LESBIANS GET OUT” painted in giant letters across the front of our house. In fact, when I pulled up Monday night and saw that our garage had been defaced I scrutinized the nonsensical letters to rule out any coded meaning.

Before this incident we already had a tag on the fence, which had been tagged over, then tagged over again. So OCS had been summoned, but they wouldn’t be able to paint our garage being that it’s those two shades of green I mentioned. Also, not to impugn their services, but the OCS crew is all about efficiency, so if there’s a little dirt or grass in the way, well, that gets painted right onto the fence. So even if they had color-match technology, I’m not sure I’d want them painting my garage.

I wasn’t so sure I wanted my partner painting the garage either. At night. In the rain. But when I arrived home at 7 the second thing I saw, right after the big ugly tag on the garage door, was an open paint can in the middle of the garage. In a rehearsed tone meant to convey that I didn’t mean to question her judgment or be controlling in any way, I mentioned that a storm was coming in within a matter of hours and suggested that we might want to put off painting until everything dried out again. She responded, rightfully so, that tags beget tags—exhibit A being the current state of the fence—and that to leave the graffiti is to invite more. So paint the garage she did. At night. Just as the storm came rolling in. We’re pretty sure we’re going to have to repaint it once everything dries out, but in the meantime, with any luck, our driveway won’t play host to a turf war.

no woman's land

2006-03-27T17:30:00.000-08:00

I’ve kept my office door closed all morning because I don’t want to engage with anyone. My supervisor will knock if she needs me—she knows I’m here—but I want to discourage unnecessary social contact. In truth, coworkers seldom come around here, so shutting my door will likely make no difference in my level of social interaction today. But isolationist tendencies are preemptive by nature, and the closed door makes me feel more secure from within, even if it piques interest from without. It’s like hiring a bouncer to work the rope at a club no one has ever cared to enter.

This weekend I acknowledged that the fog of sadness I’ve wandered through for the past couple of weeks isn’t lifting. That doesn’t mean that I’ve embraced the depression; I’m simply acknowledging its influential presence. It’s the worst kind of uninvited guest, an unlovable, overbearing relative who regularly comes to visit, monopolizes my time, and refuses to go away. He sleeps in my bed—sometimes atop me such that I can hardly breathe—he eats my food, he won’t clean up after himself, and he taunts me for being too weak to make him leave. He’s a lot like my brother.

It’s difficult to write from the state of depression, and even more difficult to write about depression. It clouds the mind such that every nondepressive thought emerges only in half measures, and the bleak thoughts that dominate come on so strong that any attempt to express them seems excessively dramatic. Still, whatever I manage to express here, it feels worse than it sounds.

I think self-hatred is more responsible for depression than any native sadness. I see a Venn diagram wherein one circle contains sadness and one contains self-hatred; where the two overlap they create a pocket of depression. I see arrows shooting across the depressive subset from the respective circles of sadness and self-hatred—they feed and perpetuate each other while reinforcing the no man’s land they create. The depressive center bulges beyond its previous confines to dominate the picture.

It's pretty simple stuff when I visualize it, and my theory goes that if I can just tolerate the sadness I feel, whether circumstantial or chemical, while imposing an embargo on its accelerant, self-hatred, I can shrink that center circle, diminishing my depressive episodes both in strength and longevity. I know emotions are seldom so neatly subtracted and divided, but I'm all about trying to make the illogical logical, so my '06 resolution is to banish self-loathing from my life in an effort to manage my depression. This is the first opportunity I’ve had to test my theory since the turn of the New Year. I know I'll just hate myself if my theory doesn't work. (Get it? *heh heh*)

My first three months (nearly) of 2006 were filled with astoundingly good feeling, almost an entire fiscal quarter of rapid growth and boundless prosperity. To those who have never experienced clinical depression, I would describe not being depressed as akin to waking up every day with the eagerness of a child bound for Disneyland. It’s heroin-good, pure bliss—the nasty side effect being all those days of despair spent jonesing for it.

Knowing what not being depressed feels like is precisely what makes it so difficult to keep from hating myself now. From the other side it seems easy enough to say, “Hey, I know, I’ll just refuse to feel that way ever again, because feeling this way is so much better.” Mind over matter, or maybe matter or mind. But when I’m feeling fine I can’t touch this level of sadness, and when I’m depressed I can’t imagine how I’ll ever feel grand again. The respective states seem impenetrable, their borders closed. It seems all I can do is sit here in depressionland, taking pleasure in what I can—my partner’s love, friends, coffee—and wait for the corrupt border guard to take pity on my soul and wave me back over. Where I belong.

happy b'day, sweet knees!

2006-03-23T14:47:00.000-08:00

A kind of creepy guy who works in my office poked his head in my door yesterday and asked why I had a pound of butter on my desk. I answered, as any sane person would, “because it’s easier to bake with when it’s at room temperature.” He seemed satisfied with that and moved on.

My partner’s birthday is today, and last night I made her most favorite cake in the whole wide world: pound cake with orange-butter frosting—from her grandmother’s recipe. As I said, I needed the butter to be at room temperature, and I had shopped for needed ingredients on the way to work Wednesday. Leaving the butter in the trunk of my car with the rest of the ingredients would have resulted in butter soup, so there it sat on my desk, left in plain sight so that I’d remember to take it home.

I was very relieved to receive a call today confirming that a custom gift I had ordered was ready for pickup. It was one of those deals with an artisan type, so it really could have gone either way. He knew I had a Thursday deadline, but he wasn’t sure he had the materials for what I wanted. (I can be less vague about this in a later post, once she’s already received the goods.) Suffice to say, I’m thrilled that this guy delivered, ’cause I didn’t want to crap all over her birthday by not having something meaningful to offer. I mean, she’s not a material girl—I don’t want to make it sound like I had to buy her something—but I was going to have to scramble to, I dunno, make her a decoupage jewelry box if my idea fell through. She’s already received shampoo (!) from her mother, and an unmarked box from Amazon courtesy of her father—he hadn’t checked the “gift” box. She opened it thinking it was something she had ordered and found some DVDs that she had asked for. Her father, normally aces at the gift-giving thing, had forgotten to have the Amazon elves wrap them.

Since she already knew what many of her presents were and was going to work and therapy today, she was feeling kind of down about her birthday, so you can understand why I didn’t want to be responsible for more disappointment. Thank God for artisans who take deadlines seriously. Wish me luck!

culture threat

2006-03-21T18:00:00.000-08:00

For Christmas I gave my partner the new 30-GB video iPod she’d been romancing at the Apple store, and as a result I inherited her first-generation 10-GB iPod. I had played around with her old iPod before, once, on an airplane, while she was asleep and I was wide-awake and completely disinterested in watching Monster-in-Law. I had to admit that it was nice having a virtual record collection in the palm of my hand and, having thus far resisted the iPod juggernaut, I wondered whether I might like one after all.

Nevertheless, the old iPod has been sadly neglected since it came into my possession. (Actually, I've never really taken "possession" of it since I feel that I shouldn't profit from a gift I gave to my partner, so really she has two iPods, one of which she keeps trying to tell me is mine.) My pop-in-law gave me a $50 iTunes gift card to kick-start my digital library, but I haven’t yet visited the site. My partner thinks that I have trouble adapting to change, or that I simply resist the unfamiliar. But that’s not entirely true. I transitioned from LPs to CDs quite nicely.

I spent the better part of my youth, which by my calculation penetrated far into my 20s, hanging out in record stores. For nine of those years I actually worked in them, my first full-time gig being at the now-defunct Record Trading Center. As the name implied, RTC dealt in new and used records, though soon after I began working there we stocked our first CD: a Japanese import of the Beatles Abbey Road album. (Just in case anyone’s wondering, it’s OK to call a CD, or even a collection of music files meant to represent an artistic whole, an album. The term comes from the days when 78-rpm discs, which generally had just one song on each side, were sold in binders (or albums) that contained five or six discs comprising a cohesive collection. When 33-rpm LPs were introduced they retained the name, signifying not so much a format as a collection of music.)

While the compact disc took off in Asia, U.S. record companies were slower to embrace the new format. CDs were treated more as an audiophile novelty than a viable replacement to the LP. Most of the initial offerings were classical recordings, with only proven rock acts receiving CD treatment, and in those cases the disc releases lagged behind their LP counterparts by a number of weeks. Even then quantities were strictly allocated since manufacturing plants were scarce and their production was limited. As the price of CD players came down from thousands of dollars to hundreds, more and more customers clamored for the relatively small catalog of music available, with demand outstripping supply for the first year or so.

After I graduated high school I took a job as a buyer at an upstart store with a crazy business model: They would sell only CDs. I worked there for the next seven years, a witness to the CD revolution.

Now, just 20 years later, my friend J has gleefully announced to me, “We’ve decided to liquidate our CDs!” He and his wife have made three piles: music already transferred, music to be transferred, and music they no longer care about. When all their music is converted J figures they'll have only a handful of CDs worth keeping—those with sentimental meaning—otherwise they're going the way of so many dusty boxes of records before them.

I know I’m a dinosaur for liking the tangibility of CDs and LPs. (I still have a turntable, as well as a small collection of records that have never been released on CD.) I like to hold them and read their liner notes. I like madly searching through bins of used CDs at stores, hunting treasure, just as I used to dive into boxes of records at music swap meets.

I didn’t much mourn the passing of the LP. It had served us well for decades, but it also degraded with every revolution, filling its music with unintended pops and hiss that now sound as quaint to us as the key strikes of an old manual typewriter. I wasn’t even terribly concerned, as many record collectors were, with the loss of A and B sides as discrete sequences, with the B side of an album often kicking off with a song meant to set the tone for the second half. I figured that not having to split the album in two (with imposed time limits per side) would be more freeing to the artist, and back-catalog albums would still retain their original flow when released on CD.

My partner thinks I'm a snob for insisting that most serious artists intend that their albums be heard as carefully arranged sequences of music, the whole of which adds up to an artistic statement. It's this prejudice that causes me to announce, more frequently than my partner would like, that greatest-hits albums are for pussies. Sure, it’s an overstatement—and I have a number of best-of and greatest-hits albums myself—but I do prefer the listening experience, and sometimes even the challenge, of music in its original context. I think it puts us closer to the artist's soul. And I know that iTunes offers complete-album downloads, but I can't help feeling that the album as a concept is in trouble.

Also in danger: album art.

As much as I love music, I also adore its ephemera. I used to decorate my room, and later my apartment, with promotional posters, album covers, and 45 sleeves I found meaningful, interesting, or flat-out strange. There were times when my living space resembled one of the rare record haunts I’d seek out in far-flung places, where the clerk/owner seemed disinterested in actually selling anything, regarding his collection more as a museum than a store. I still have hundreds of promotional posters from my music retailing days, brought home because I couldn’t bear to throw them out. I still can’t.

I know there are Web sites dedicated to downloadable album art for display on the iPod, but the iPod users I know don’t seem particularly interested in covers or liner notes. That said, I offer the following visual reminders of why album art is essential to our culture:

Save the album cover!

please send goat pics

2006-03-14T15:00:00.000-08:00

I’m getting a new sister!

I’ve always wanted a sister, assuming, perhaps falsely, that I might have gotten along better with my sister-in-potentia than I did with my brother-in-corporea. But after I was born my father had a vasectomy—no offense intended, I’m sure—consigning me to a childhood of loneliness and terror in my older brother’s shadow.

My new sister may well be older than I, but intuition tells me she’ll be younger, and I’m hoping she’ll be Rwandan, not because I have anything against Kosovars or Congolese but because it was a Rwandan who this morning served as my sisterhood catalyst.

Listening to NPR on my way to work I heard this story. The specifics of the Rwandan’s experiences were sadly not unique to her: She had been raped at age 9 by militia during the 1994 genocide, contracting HIV as a result, and now cares for children orphaned in the attacks. Her parents still grieve for the two sons they lost in ’94, but their daughter's rape remains a taboo subject—for them, anyway.

In 2003 she joined a neighborhood organization of women similarly brutalized, and in coming to terms with her past she's thrown off any shame she once felt. She supports reconciliation efforts and offers forgiveness to her attackers. She currently receives HIV meds through a charitable organization and was also gifted with a goat, which she bred. Now she has six goats.

I thought, Golly, I’d like to give someone a goat. I wonder how much goats cost.

My head spins at the mounting poverty and horror at home and abroad. The world seems so overwhelmingly bleak right now, with my own government acting not as part of the solution but very much as part of the problem. There are a thousand holes that need plugging and it sometimes seems that all I can do is idly stare at my 10 fingers in despair.

I admit that I harbor crippling levels of news fatigue. Sometimes I just can’t listen to any more details about Iraqi insurgents or Sudanese warlords or American abuses at Guantánamo, so I tune out. I pop in a CD I’ve heard a hundred times rather than listen to a news story that only seems like the hundred that came before. Occasionally I even wonder whether it’s part of the Republican strategy to numb the American public so thoroughly with demoralizing news that we stop paying attention. It certainly sounds Karl Rovian to me.

I recently received a 4% raise, which kicks in with my next paycheck. I don’t make a pile of money, and 104% of not much is still not much. Nevertheless, I had been thinking about increasing my 401(k) contribution to sponge up the raise before I even see it reflected in my paycheck; out of sight, out of mind and all. But this morning it struck me that 4% of my salary would represent a fortune to some, and I wondered how I could go about getting one of those Rwandan goats.

I have a bit of an obsessive personality, so I could have spent weeks or even months deciding where to donate my tiny sum, but it seemed important to pull the trigger today. Through Charity Navigator, an online database that rates charities by criteria including fundraising efficiency, administrative overhead, executive compensation, and so forth, I found an ideal fit: Women for Women International was founded by an Iraqi woman named Zainab Salbi, who in 1993 decided with her husband of six months to forego a honeymoon and instead spend the money traveling to Croatia to help survivors of rape and concentration camps. Taking her cues from what many of her first beneficiaries said they needed the most, Salbi parlayed her $2,000 honeymoon purse into a nonprofit organization to help women in war-torn countries regain stability and self-sufficiency—or perhaps realize those goals for the first time. Charity Navigator gives her group four out of four stars.

WFWI matches Western donors with women in need. My 27 bucks a month—which, at the yearly rate of $324 still costs less than subscribing to my local NPR superstation KCRW at the "angel" level—will directly benefit my new “sister” in providing basic needs as well as job training and rights-awareness education. WFWI also encourages sisters to exchange photos and letters, providing translation services to enable us to communicate. The model is similar to the Christian Children’s Fund—which, by the way, earns only three stars from Charity Navigator—the group Sally Struthers did all those crazy late-night commercials for. CCF infomercials have always struck me as shrill, and I’ve often wondered whether those kids feel put upon for having to take time away from their daily struggles to write letters to their sponsors.

My pledge contract says it’ll take about 12 weeks to match me with a sister. I stated my first area of preference as Rwanda—in honor of my radio friend—and my second and third choices as “wherever the greatest need.” I’m pretty excited to meet my new sis, and I already know what to say in my first letter:

Dear Sister—

I’m so pleased that we have this opportunity to be in each other’s lives, and I look forward to sharing bits of my silly American life with you. But you must promise me, if you find yourself pressed for time and ever feel obligated to write me a letter, please feel free to go milk the goat instead.

Love—

Scout

coffee achiever

2006-03-12T18:15:00.000-08:00

I was feeling sad Thursday afternoon, sad enough that I broke a hard and fast personal rule by going out for a post-lunch coffee. I avoid p.m. caffeine and sugar during the week since both substances wreak havoc with my sleep rhythms—so much as a scoop of ice cream will have me staring at the ceiling and drumming my fingers on the headboard hours after lights-out. So the Thursday afternoon coffee was a devil-may-care treat.

I’ve heard about decaffeinated coffee, but here’s the thing: If I could drink coffee all the damn day long—say, if it didn’t keep me up all night—I would, and I don’t think the increased acid intake would do my stomach any favors. Since my stomach still bears the scars of ibuprofen abuse from my dark days as a waiter with plantar fasciitis—chronic inflammation of the tendon that traverses the bottom of the foot that causes excruciating pain with every step—having taken 2400 milligrams per shift for more than two years, I probably shouldn’t push my luck.

Besides, a November 2005 article in New Scientist reported a study wherein decaffeinated-coffee drinkers showed elevated bad-cholesterol levels, compared with control groups of caffeinated-coffee drinkers and non-coffee drinkers showing no appreciable difference in cholesterol. It would appear that the robusta beans found in decaffeinated coffee, used because they retain more flavor through the decaffeination process, also produce more fatty acids than arabica beans, your standard source for regular coffee. In other words, real coffee is healthier, dammit. *smirk*

Fascinating facts about decaffeinated coffee:
The decaffeination process was originated in Germany in 1903. When the inventor had his business confiscated during World War I by the Alien Property Custodian, he lost the rights to the name Kaffee HAG, under which he had been marketing his successful product. He reestablished his invention under the name Sanka, combining the French words “sans caffeine.” And it is from Sanka’s packaging that orange became the international color of decaf.

I was an impressionable 16-year-old when the “coffee achievers” commercial hit the air in 1984. Who were the coffee achievers? David Bowie, Heart, Kurt Vonnegut, the Cinncinati Bengals, and Cicely Tyson. At least those were the folks who appeared in montage, while a confident male and a tranquil female held forth:

Male: “You are the new American society: the movers, and the shakers. You are the new coffee generation.”
Female: “Because coffee is the calm moment that lets you think, coffee gives you the time to dream it, then you’re ready to do it. No other drink does that like coffee.”
Male: “Join the coffee achievers!”

Oh, and Electric Light Orchestra’s “Hold on Tight (to Your Dreams)” served as the soundtrack. This PSA was sponsored by the National Coffee Association. But don’t take my word for it—check it out for yourself.

American coffee was a pretty weak brew in the pre-Starbucks era. We’ve since moved on to become espresso achievers.

It was at Starbucks that I sought solace Thursday. The coffee supplied at my workplace is watery and unsatisfying—just like our accountants like it—so us editorial staffers tend to buy coffee on the boulevard. (Most mornings I bring a thermos of extra-strong from home, but it was long since gone.) And I was mighty glad to have been beckoned from my office to Starbucks that afternoon; otherwise I wouldn’t have heard a suited businessman ask, after having waited for his sissy beverage, by his estimate, a full five minutes, “Has the mocha gone on break?”

Though I’ve left my retail and waiting days behind, I reflexively sigh on behalf of service workers dealing with asswipes. I remember their pain. I remember laughing disingenuously when asked by diners whether the kitchen had caught their chicken yet. I remember customers exclaiming upon my approach, “Oh, we thought you’d gone home!” a passive-aggressive way of saying, You’re a crap waiter. I’ve been called worse, like when I was walking down a boulevard in West Hollywood and a guy yelled from a passing convertible, “Oh, my God, you’re our favorite waitress!” In that moment I willed my heart to stop beating.

My friend J—to whom I apologize for this entry since she’s given up the elixir of the gods (among other beverages) for Lent—used to be a Starbucks barista. I asked her if she ever took revenge on unpleasant customers and she replied that when people were mean to her she made their drinks decaf. Having read a harrowing scene in “Trainspotting” in which a pub waitress manages to sneak urine, excrement, and menstrual blood into the food and drink of a particularly disagreeable patron, I found J’s payback positively innocent, even charitable: Assholes don’t need stimulants.

Coffee is one of the few things I can experience daily and still look forward to every time, probably because it was an acquired taste. I like to theorize that the longer it takes to love something, the longer the love will remain. It’s possible that I’m especially fond of this theory because few people like me the first time we meet, but for my part the maxim especially holds true for music: An album I respond to instantly is likely to peak and fade quickly; a slow-grower stands a far greater chance of becoming a lifelong favorite.

My first taste of coffee came at the age of four, in my grandmother’s kitchen. I wanted some of what all the adults were having, so she poured a little bit into a juice glass with an equal amount of milk and plenty of sugar. I took a sip and promptly made a face, or so I’m told.

I wonder how we ever get past our first cup of coffee or shot of bourbon or taste of tofu to discover their peculiar pleasures. How do relationships that begin badly gain the experience and traction necessary to engender love? Whatever magic happens there, my everlasting gratitude, as both a consumer of peculiar pleasures and as a bit of an acquired taste myself—or so I’m told.

jack dumps rose for ennis

2006-03-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

On my way to work Tuesday morning I passed a western wear store with a message board out front that said, “Them ain’t cowboys; they’s sheepherders.” And no, this isn’t going to be an entry about grammar. I understand the shop’s owners were being ironic and intentionally down-home, and despite my partner’s accusations to the contrary, I really have little interest in copyediting the world.

That this particular store jumped on the Brokeback-bashing bandwagon is surprising not only because of its geography, located in bluest blue Los Angeles within spitting distance of three film and television studios, but because the store gets a lot of queer traffic. It’s situated just one block from the only country-western gay bar in Los Angeles—with line dancing, two-stepping, and even a certain brand of homosexual chivalry—and it’s the go-to outfitter for the gay rodeo. Even my partner and I laid up a few provisions at the joint before we went to a dude ranch many years ago, and damn if our unflinchingly helpful salesman wasn’t as gay as Randy Jones (you know, the cowboy from the Village People).

Not that a store has to pander to its clientele. Nor do people have to pass a “Brokeback Mountain” litmus test to prove they’re not homophobes—any more than folks have to love “Crash” to escape being labeled racists. Disliking “Good Night, and Good Luck,” however, might mean you’re a Bushie.

I’ve spent at least some of this past week wondering why I’m so disappointed “Brokeback” didn’t win the Best Picture Oscar, both for its merits as a well-crafted, well-told story and for the importance of the story itself. This is certainly not the first time I’ve felt the Academy’s grand prize may have been, er, misappropriated: 1994’s “The Shawshank Redemption” losing to “Forrest Gump” seemed unconscionable to me, and, hindsight being 20/20, cinefiles likely feel a deep sense of injustice over 1941’s “How Green Was My Valley” besting a field that included “Citizen Kane.”

But life goes on for us riffraff who merely attend films. We can cop attitudes that our opinions are somehow more right than the opinions of the voting members of the Academy, but it seems silly to give the enterprise more power than that—to be hung up on a film winning or not winning an award voted on by people who may as well live on Jupiter for all we have in common. Nevertheless, toward the end of the Academy Awards telecast, when “Brokeback” had lost more awards than it had won, I began to despair for it, and I guess a little bit for myself as well.

First thing’s first, the film utterly destroyed me emotionally. During the last 15 minutes or so I cried like a little girl whose best friend had just moved away. I guess I identified a little with Ennis’s self-denial and shame, and with his better-late-than-never realization that he had let everything but his own desires govern his life.

But it was more than that. After seeing it I left the theater feeling that something extraordinary had happened. My partner and I had sat in a full theater at a suburban mall cineplex with mostly straight people who had paid money—American dollars!—to watch a big-budget film showcasing homosexual love, and no one giggled or heckled or booed or ewwwed. In that moment I could see a not-so-distant future when same-sex relationships aren’t aberrant or gross, when arguing over whether Ennis and Jack are “real” cowboys is totally beside the point, when my partner and I are just another couple—and I have to tell you it was pretty cool.

Of course, in the not-so-pleasant present the Republican Party uses populist disgust over my “lifestyle” as a wedge issue, and Gyllenhaal and Ledger answer more questions about what it was like to kiss a guy than about the film they kissed in. The actors’ heterosexuality is asserted in every interview, and for goodness sake, don’t forget that Ledger got Michelle Williams pregnant during the shoot!

We take it for granted that gays can play straights without freaking out: I don’t think Jodie Foster has ever been asked whether on-screen kisses with Richard Gere or Mel Gibson were difficult for her or put her career in jeopardy. (Personally speaking, there aren’t enough acting coaches in the world to make me comfortable kissing Gibson. Gere I could probably wrap my lips around, just for giggles.)

Growing up, I took movie love scenes as convenient breaks to use the restroom or buy some Red Vines. I saw “Grease” just as many times as my friends did, but for me it was all about Kenickie fixing up his car and whether that wiseacre Rizzo would ever let down her defenses and accept Sandy. When my friends all started talking about and dating boys, I thought they were just trying to fit in. I was sure that they would secretly rather spend time with me, just as I far preferred hanging out with them to going out with my “boyfriend.” Nevertheless, I thought the known lesbians in my high school were gross. I remember laughing along when some punks threw half-eaten burritos at them.

I wouldn’t come out to myself until years later, at 25, when I could handle it—sort of. I still shuddered at the idea of watching two women or two men kissing, but somehow I had come to accept the idea that it might not be so revolting to make out with a girl myself. When I road-tested my theory several months later it felt more right than kissing any of my boyfriends ever had.

I didn’t take the love scenes in “Brokeback Mountain” as exit cues. Nor have I left the theater during blue moments in any of the other gay and lesbian films I’ve seen. They represent cultural revolution to me, and evolution of self, and missing them would be as anticlimactic as leaving “High Noon” before the gunfight.

Hollywood knows there’s nothing like a love story to make just about any narrative that much more compelling. What is the sinking of the Titanic without the drama of Jack and Rose? (A better movie!) Given that male-female romance remains the decisive standard, I figure I choke down about a hundred Jacks and Roses for every Jack and Ennis out there. And during the love scenes between all those Jacks and all those Roses I’m still like as not to take my potty breaks. It’s not that I’m offended by the idea of heterosexual love—after all, some of my best friends are straight. But watching men and women kiss and copulate, well, it's just so damned boring.

addled

2006-03-06T16:00:00.000-08:00

When I woke up this morning I had a great idea for a blog entry that I’ve now forgotten. Aren’t those the best kinds of great ideas, the ones you forget? Because that means they can remain great forever, unexamined by second thoughts that reveal them to be stupefyingly mediocre, serviceable at best.

A friend of mine once told me that he had come to understand the meaning of life, in one startling instant, while high on pot. Upon awakening the following day his existential concept had flitted away, irretrievable to his sober mind. But he was certain that he had discovered “it” and was pleased to have had this vision while high, reinforcing his idea that stoners are god’s chosen people.

I’m having what I’ve come to call a hypoxic-brain day. It feels like my mind is suffocating, and no matter how deeply I breathe I can’t draw enough oxygen to clear it. It’s like trying to see the world through a shower curtain, or trying to drink oatmeal. Everything takes longer—walking, reading, writing—and requires more effort. I feel more like a liability than an asset at work right now, but I can’t go home because that would require driving and when I’m like this my reaction time sucks and I can’t seem to keep my attention from drifting no matter how hard I try to focus on the road. And it’s raining. Being a liability at work is one thing, being one on the road is quite another.

Around my partner and friends I sometimes refer to my supposed brain damage—as diagnosed by a neuropsychologist after a battery of tests that followed last year’s seizure/stroke/whatever—in a joking way. It comes in handy when excusing oneself for a lapse in memory or judgment. Usually, though, I doubt I have a genuine brain injury. But then there are times like these, when I have to keep prying myself out of mini fugue states to refocus my clouded faculties on whatever I was doing before my mind wandered off. Just now I feel addled with all the costs of being high and none of the rewards, and for the record I feel impossibly far from discovering the meaning of life.

wired

2006-03-03T15:30:00.000-08:00

“It is like fanny pack,” the Russian cardio tech told me as she fastened a pouch around my midsection. And she wasn’t off the mark. While my heart monitor’s mission control, the ambulatory EKG recorder, was not quite as large as your classic fanny pack, it was nowhere near as sleek as an iPod—think more Walkman circa 1979 (when, by the way, Sony initially introduced their portable cassette player as the “Soundabout”).

The Cardiac Studies receptionist apparently wasn’t kidding when she told me to wear a loose-fitting blouse to Thursday morning’s appointment, where I received a Holter heart monitor to wear for 24 hours, just to see if there’s any cardiac mischief to account for my blackouts. (When the receptionist called to schedule me for a “Holter fitting” I thought she was saying “halter,” which left me wondering for several days just how many straps might be involved.)

The first shirt I put on Thursday morning was voluminous, from about two sizes ago, back when I treated my depression with food instead of meds. When I saw myself in the mirror I felt unconscionably dumpy, and I couldn’t imagine that the wires and such would need that much wiggle room, so I changed into a shirt that was biggish but not ridiculously so. As it turned out, that shirt was just big enough to contain my gadget-augmented girth.

Shouldn’t portable medical technology be at least as advanced as portable music technology? My partner’s current-generation iPod—and only the 30GB model at that—stores 7,500 songs; my heart monitor was to store only 24 hours worth of cardiac activity (on a 64MB chip) and was about five times the size.

When I poked around online I found that Kaiser and I weren’t exactly on the cutting edge; there were Holter systems that looked far sleeker than the one I was wearing. But noting their price tag of around $1,500, I understood Kaiser’s hesitation to replace the older models. They have to trust us riffraff to wear these things for a full day without absentmindedly diving into a swimming pool or wandering through a magnetic field. Besides, they probably do have some shiny new units that they reserve for their real patients. (I fear that Kaiser has written me off as a head case and is merely humoring me with dummy tests; my suspicion is reinforced when my MRIs are performed at a unit outside the hospital in a trailer marked “MRI 2,” which my partner jokes should read “MRI too!” being the fake one and all.)

So I went to work Thursday feeling like I was packing a bomb or wearing a police wire, what with the electrodes and surgical tape covering my chest and midsection and the hard, bulky box strapped to my stomach. The tech joked that she hoped I didn’t need to go to the airport that day. I told her I didn’t but that I was worried about scoring drugs later that night.

As the day wore on, I grew increasingly itchy and uncomfortable. My “unit,” as I had come to regard it with grudging acceptance, was the least of my worries; at least its straps were adjustable. But my tape-covered chest made me feel like a papier-mâché girl.

And the worst was yet to come.

The worst being that I had to sleep in this thing, the wires of which crisscrossed my bra such that it, too, would have to stay put until the following morning. For our lady readers, what’s the first thing we want to do when we get home from work? Take off our effing bras! It’s onerous enough making our pendulous pods defy gravity all day, but curtailing their freedom to flop around all yippee-skippy once we're abed is beyond mean. The wee hours are when my breasts exercise their natural inclination toward ptosis. To deny them their due is to offend nature.

The best thing about wearing a heart monitor for 24 hours was that it made me appreciate not having to wear one. It is one of two tests I’ve undergone that I would not ever like to repeat, the other being my sleep-deprived EEG, prior to which I had to stay awake for 30 hours, toward the end of which time I would have given up nuclear secrets, the identity of the Black Dahlia’s killer, or even my friend Hugh’s cheesecake recipe, anything that might promise to earn me some horizontal relief. I’d submit to another spinal tap—without a local—before I would willingly repeat either of those tests.

Having my monitor removed this morning can be counted among my life’s great moments, assuming that we’re speaking liberally and are including the top 500 moments or so. I’d put it above finding five dollars (at age 12 in the parking lot of the Rusty Pelican) and beneath learning to swim.

I was supposed to have a female tech for both attachment and removal, but this morning a male tech came to fetch me from the waiting room. Maybe the Kaiser folks figured I was androgynous enough to go either way. At any rate, I didn’t care. I popped my shirt’s snaps open so fast you’d have thought we were shooting an exam-room porn scene, except that women in porn films seldom wear long-sleeve corduroy shirts—too seldom if you ask me. The tech countered my sexy move with his own, tearing the electrodes and tape from my bare skin like a crazed animal, or at the very least like someone who had other patients to see and no time for procedural foreplay.

After our frenzied exchange he said I was all set and turned away to futz with the equipment. Covered in conductive gel and adhesive residue, I stood at the exam-room sink with a paper towel pitifully dabbing at my angry red skin—even angrier now than it had been the previous morning, when the Russian woman rubbed it mercilessly to rough up the areas where the electrodes would sit. “Oh,” today’s tech said, removing the lid from a canister of presoaked gauze. “You can use alcohol for that.”

So I’m electrode-free, and I’ve shed my unit, and I can’t wait to free my boobs, which have been in their current state of bondage for 32 hours. Were I a woman of lesser endowment I’d consider giving them a weekend furlough, two luxurious days of braless hedonism, but nature is a cruel mistress, having saddled this tomboy with D-cup glands that forced her to stop boxing the neighborhood boys just as she was hitting her prime.

In a few days I’m certain to receive a call from my doctor telling me that everything looks normal; what else could be expected of a placebo test? A few days after that I’ll be scheduled for another appointment at MRI too! And thus life moves inexorably forward in Jabberwocky, where I’m thinking about buying a fanny pack to house my new Sony Soundabout.

an office of one's own

2006-03-01T16:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon I moved into my new office. Actually, “new” is a misrepresentation. Badly in need of paint, my walls are scarred with countless scuffs and gouges, perhaps from employees throwing pens, staplers, phones, and all manner of office accoutrements in moments of rage. Also left behind is adhesive residue from the pictures and art previous inhabitants brought from home to personalize this workspace, decor that said, “Hey, I'm not just an accountant/editor/marketing manager, I also happen to like Fellini films/quilting/Shannen Doherty.” (Though most employees advertise their private lives in an incomplete manner. They're unlikely, for instance, to bring in pictures of themselves in animal drag from a plushies and furries convention. That would be oversharing, even for a Care Bear.)

My coworkers and I were moved from our little maze of Workitrail cubicles to a suite of offices recently vacated by staff relocated to our New York headquarters. Actually, the departed employees weren't so much relocated as they were fired and replaced with New Yorkers, and they weren't so much fired as they “left the company to pursue other interests”—that's what the e-mail announcements said. I have other interests as well, but few of them, however vigorously pursued, would likely produce income.

I found out about our impending move only an hour or so before the IT guy came to my cubicle and said, “I'm here to disconnect you.” That's not much notice for the average employee to clean out her desk, take down her personally expressive wall hangings, and bid her taupe fabric panel walls adieu. But I'm not your average employee. My workspace erred on the side of asceticism, looking not unlike a temp's terminal, sharing little about the person who labored within. The only nonessential items in my cube were a bamboo plant, my 5-year service award (proving that I'm not a temp), and a toy cubicle (with a toy employee named Anne whom I introduce to coworkers as my trainee). Everything could be packed into two plastic grocery bags and wheeled over on the seats of my two chairs—that's the most extravagant thing about my workspace, that I lay claim to two chairs, one in which to lean back and scrutinize hard copy in search of grammatical and stylistic infractions, and one in which to sit up straight in front of my computer to enter corrections…and read the blogs mine hopes to be just like when it grows up. My chairs are like my (theoretical) children; I love them equally for different reasons. And if the office manager ever tries to impose a one-chair limit on me, I'll start agitating for disabled parking…and maybe a Rascal mobility scooter like this racy number:

My office doesn't have a window, but it does have four walls, a ceiling, and a door…that shuts! (There's a sign above the knob that says, “Por favor, de no cerrar la puerta. ¡Gracias!” but I'm pretty sure it's directed at the cleaning crew.) Now when I call the pharmacy for a refill and I'm asked which medication I need, I won't need to cup my hand around the mouthpiece and stage-whisper “Seroquel.” Now I can call my therapist for a quickie, knowing that when she calls back I can shut my door and have my sessionette in private. Now I can put that bulk pseudoephedrine I bought on eBay to good use in my very own meth lab—taking care, of course, not to burn down my shiny new office.

Life is sweet from here on out. I don't even care that the receptionist told someone who called for me this morning that no one by my name works here. I have an office, dammit.

good doc, bad doc

2006-02-28T14:24:00.000-08:00

My nerves are conducting information at a happy rate. This I learned yesterday from an unflinchingly nice physiatrist, which is a medical specialty I had never heard of but am pleased to add to my vocabulary.

Unlike, say, neurology, physiatry seems an extremely unsexy field of specialty, one where practitioners aren't likely to get huzzahs for breakthrough studies or found eponymously named disorders. But lack of glory aside, something tells me physiatrists sleep well at night. Theirs is a science of helping physically compromised people remain as functional and pain-free as possible. Isn't that lovely? I know there are plenty of doctors in other specialties who went to medical school to help people, but so many of the specialists I've seen seem to have lost that vision somewhere along the line, such that patients become nothing but the sum of their Immunoglobin-G indices and antinuclear-antibody ratios.

When I waitressed I often approached my shifts as marathon rounds of Whack-a-Mole, the arcade game wherein players wield giant mallets to pound moles as they randomly pop up from various holes. My mallets were breadbaskets, coffee refills, food, and—when simply sating the moles' hunger wasn't enough—comped checks or management intervention. And so I moved through my shift, knocking down mole after mole, which were in turn replaced with new moles, and so on until closing time.

Now I'm the mole, and I'm sent away for blood tests and imaging and physical therapy. When that's not enough, I see new specialists and subspecialists, most of whom approach me with an air of challenge: Why are you here? What are you doing in my office? How do you expect me to help you? Put on the defensive, I try to describe the past year as I've experienced it through a suddenly and inexplicably uncooperative body, and as I do I begin to stutter and stammer and sometimes even tear up, none of which persuades them to take me any more seriously as someone whose compromise may not be entirely psychiatric. They ask me the same questions other doctors have asked, sometimes glancing through my file as I respond, and, when no obvious answer presents itself, they declare me not their problem and bring the hammer down. By the time I change out of my hospital gown and collect my things, I, too, am convinced that I'm a waste of their time.

This physiatrist, she was different, in much the same way my GP is. Sincere and welcoming—without seeming at all undoctorly. Maybe the difference between her demeanor and that of other specialists lies in the fact that she administers her own diagnostic procedures—as I understand, only physiatrists receive the proper training to perform nerve-conduction tests and EMGs. The nature of her specialty allows her ample time to see her patients, and maybe as a result she wants to have a more personal relationship with them. Or maybe she was attracted to her field because she’s the kind of person who wants to interact with patients in this way. At any rate, she made me feel like the most important person in the room as she calmly placed the electrodes and measured the varying lengths of nerve to be assessed, as she asked how I was doing after each round and carefully wiped the conductive gel—which made me smell like a baby's bottom—from each area before she moved on to the next. If not for the electric shocks, our session might have been a spa treatment—such was the delicacy of her touch and the unhurried nature of her ministrations.

When she finished she gave me her preliminary report, that there didn't appear to be anything suggestive of a nerve disease or disorder, and said that she would write up a more detailed analysis for my GP. She said that she didn't need me to set up another appointment at this time but that I should stop by her nurse's station on my way out to pick up her card in case I wanted to see her in the future.

I left her office feeling cared about, which struck me as extraordinary, but shouldn't we always feel that way when we leave our doctors' offices? If we don't feel physically better, shouldn’t we at least feel emotionally better for having had our needs seen to?

Once my GP told me that he was going to leave my file on his desk to keep my case fresh in his mind, hoping that some previously unexplored avenue might occur to him. That idea alone was almost enough to heal me. Wouldn't it be something if some measure of kindness and unhurried personal care were all I needed to leap this terrifying divide between mental and physical wellness? If in being regarded as a legitimate patient I might at last accept that my illness is best treated by my mental health team? Isn't that treatment plan worth a shot, docs?

once more into the breach

2006-02-25T12:00:00.000-08:00

Wednesday night I passed out on my way to bed. Happily, I was standing face-to-face with my partner at the time, so she saw my eyes go dead and my face grow pale and caught me before I could fall, then laid me down on the nearby divan. (Doesn't that sound fancy? Divan? And now you might be thinking we're all regal and shit, but the divan is a piece of furniture my partner's parents shipped to us when we had their dog because, well, their dog really liked to lie on it. So our fancy divan, the one I just fainted on, is more properly a dog bed.) Then we slowly made our way back to the bedroom in a sort of waltz pose, my partner leading, walking backward with me facing her, my arms about her shoulders. She repeatedly called "H!" (short for "honey") and I repeatedly said "OK" to let her know that I was cogent despite my undoubtedly dusky appearance. She brought me a teeny glass of orange juice and cruelly refused to let me get up to brush my teeth when I finished it. And after she extracted a promise from me to call for an appointment with my doctor in the morning, she went to e-mail my friend G to cancel our breakfast plans.

This most recent blackout merely caps my frustration as I approach the one-year anniversary of "the precipitating event," a seizure on March 16, '05, wherein I lost consciousness for several minutes and awoke mentally and physically compromised in ways that persist, in their annoying waxing and waning fashion, to this day. Over 11 months later—after a head CT, two MRIs, a sleep-deprived EEG, a spinal tap, and enough blood draws to drain a medium-size child—the official entry on my chart is "possible MS" and the unofficial word in the doctors' lounge is "nine kinds of crazy." The latter pronouncement came in the fall, six months or so into my diagnostic purgatory, from a man I like to call "Dr. Malkinesis," a neurology subspecialist in movement disorder who spent every bit of 15 minutes with me before he wrote me off as having a conversion disorder. According to the National Library of Medicine, ahem:

"Conversion disorder is one of several types of somatoform disorders, in which psychological problems produce physical symptoms."

Here's the good part: "Risk factors include a history of histrionic personality disorder."

Isn't that utterly fantastic? I've been diagnosed as hysterical, a trait I'll emphasize by ending this sentence with an!

The good news about this diagnosis, as opposed to, say, "malingering," is that I'm not being called a big faker. Apparently, I would have no more control over CD than I would over MS. Also in the good-news department, the NLM emphasizes that the symptoms of CD can last "days or even weeks," so I'm really, really due to be over this thing any time now.

I was willing to believe I was a head case for a few months. I didn't like it much, but it was an explanation for the randomly relapsing and remitting symptoms, a pattern that, while a hallmark of MS, isn't enough for a diagnosis of same without objective evidence of demyelination, which was happily lacking in my brain MRI and spinal tap. "Mental" is way better than MS anyway, right? So despite my internalized stigma, I embraced the conversion disorder theory with as much gusto as I could muster and looked to my mental health team for a timely resolution.

That was about four months ago, and we have yet to answer the essential question: Why? A conversion disorder is classically a reaction to a psychological conflict which the symptoms help to resolve—i.e., paralysis of a hand before a piano recital in the face of extreme stage fright. If my syndrome is genuine CD, I should be able, with therapeutic assistance, to identify a root psychological problem, something that my subconscious is trying to help me resolve through physical compromise—in my case: a certain torpor of my left side that makes walking slow and labored, numbness in my extremities, mental fog, and a mild intention tremor in my right hand. If, as my psychiatrist suggests, my psyche is herein demonstrating impressive creativity in its approach to problem solving, I would have to insist that it stop being such a show-off and give the abstract expressionism a rest. We get it, psyche: You're very, very clever.

What with all the chirping of crickets on the psychological front, I'm not so much buying the CD diagnosis these days. I had a minor meltdown about it last Sunday, crying through lunch at PF Chang's, trying to pull myself together when the waitress uncertainly edged near to see whether everything was OK. No, it's not OK. It's very much not OK, but the dan-dan noodles are delicious, thanks.

Tuesday morning, just two days after that emotive lunch, I felt a big face-plant coming on as I stepped from the shower. I lurched the few feet between myself and the bed and lay down. I tried several times to get up and continue getting ready, but each time I met with that blood-rushing vortex that threatened to take me down. So I called in dizzy to work and went back to bed.

Then Wednesday night: the latest blackout.

When I saw my GP Thursday morning, he being the most likely doc to extend me any further benefit of the doubt that I'm not completely mental, he flipped through my now-voluminous chart and noted my "history of fainting since childhood." (Histrionic personality disorder, anyone?) No, I said, I had told the neurologist that I experienced exactly two fainting episodes in high school and no other losses of consciousness between then and March '05, more than 20 years later. "Oh," he said. "Well, that definitely makes these recent episodes more compelling."

We went over some of my less sexy symptoms—i.e., urinary urgency—and we talked about what kind of imaging had already been performed: the head CT and the brain and neck MRIs. He went back to his office to look at them, and when he came back he said, "You know, your neck MRI was soft tissue only; we've never looked at the bony structures."

Funny thing, my partner and I were just this week speculating whether there are different types of MRIs depending on what docs are looking for. Despite our scant knowledge on the topic—what we had seen on television—we tentatively decided that there is just the one kind of MRI that shows everything at once. But the inaccuracies of TV medicine are all too apparent to me when I see a whole team of neurologists on "House" hovering about the monitor during an MRI, solving the most baffling cases right there in the computer bay. Each of my MRIs were attended only by a wisecracking technician whose only concerns were whether I had any steel plates or pins in my head, whether I wanted the AC on while in the tube, and whether I was claustrophobic. No, no, and no.

"Do you think it would be worthwhile to do another neck MRI?" I asked my GP.

Yes, the answer was yes. In fact, he expressed surprise that my cervical spine hadn't already been looked at. Hallelujah! Someone still reserves a spark of faith that I'm not completely insane. Enough doubt that he's also sending me to a cardiologist—"just to rule out that kind of stuff"—and ordering nerve-conduction testing, wherein techs will insert needle electrodes into my muscles to measure their response rate when flexed and such.

The implied caveat is that when all these tests come back normal I'm going to have an awful time convincing anyone in the Kaiser system that I'm anything but certifiable. But still, each diagnostic avenue represents a way out of this Twilight Zone town Psychosomatia—and the roads can't all be cul-de-sacs, can they?

It's odd, this validation I feel over the promise of further testing. It has struck me that I'm declaring victory for a battle in a war I can't possibly win—the pyrrhic struggle between sick and crazy. My partner, bless her heart, pointed out to me that I CAN win, that they might find something wrong, though easily treatable, and return me to my former self. Then all of it—the symptoms, the stigma, the fear, the uncertainty—becomes nothing but a tale about my baffling year of sporadic disability, dead-end diagnostics, and the doctors who threatened to drive me over the crazy cliff.

I do so look forward to laughing about this someday.

but she's my therapist!

2006-02-22T18:23:00.000-08:00

For the second week running I've missed therapy because my psychologist is on jury duty. "Don't worry," she said when she told me several weeks ago that she had been summoned. "I never get impaneled."

"On the off chance you are, how long does Kaiser allow for jury leave?" I asked, an undoubtedly feral look in my eyes as I contemplated the idea of her being sequestered on a murder trial, unavailable to me even by telephone for months.

"Ten days," she said. "But it won't come to that. My experience with substance abusers and trauma victims scares off most attorneys, and the rest excuse me because I used to serve as an expert witness."

My first therapy-free week was cake. I was still flying high on my four-month psychiatric furlough. This week has been more difficult, though, and I didn't receive the chilling cancellation call from Kaiser until late Tuesday afternoon, so I was already several days into mental rehearsals for this week's session, scheduled as usual for a 9 a.m. Wednesday curtain.

The good people of the Los Angeles County Superior Court used to be much more profligate in excusing jurors from service. If you taught school or were an attorney or were self-employed, you got a pass. If your employer didn’t pay for jury service, you were off the hook. Most important, if you could demonstrate that no one but you could do your job—i.e. you’re a therapist with clients who rely on you to keep them sane—you were sent on your merry way. Angelenos who haven't been called to duty in the last few years laugh off jury summonses. "Tell them your dog's in surgery that day," they'll say, or "Just write 'deceased' on the summons and send it back; they never follow up."

Those of us who have been called since the "one-day/one-trial" system was implemented know that WE had better be in surgery that day, or that it would behoove us to be deceased should the jury police come knocking. Nobody eludes their civil responsibility anymore, not in this here County of Los Angeles.

Still, I can't help thinking that therapists should be excused in toto. No one wants to encourage criminality where it once lay fallow, least of all our county court system, and I can't promise model behavior in my therapist's absence. That's not a threat, just full disclosure.

tagged

2006-02-17T11:10:00.000-08:00

OK, so my partner tagged me to complete this survey, and while I’m not in the habit of doing everything she asks of me, this seems an easy enough way to please her. Maybe if I do this, she’ll agree to have Thai food this weekend. (She won’t. She dislikes Thai food, so she’ll probably bargain me down to Chinese food, which is what I’m actually gunning for. But had I started with Chinese food, she would have tried to bargain me down to Panda Express, which is far less appealing. For Thai food, I have to wait till she’s out of town, at which time I generally get too inert to leave the house and make myself oatmeal instead. So I seldom actually achieve Thai food. Do you see how difficult it is being me?)

Four jobs I’ve had:
a) Waiter (That’s lead waiter to you, buddy!)
b) Purchasing manager at an independent record store
c) Copywriter
d) Copy editor

Four movies I could watch over and over

This is like asking me to choose four favorites from among my unborn children, or just four kinds of salad dressing (if pressed: blue cheese, bleu cheese, fromage bleu, queso azul). It’s very stressful, because, as regular reader(s) of this blog already know, I have trouble choosing a loaf of bread at the g store. Besides which, there’s a temptation to get all highfalutin and artsy to try and convince people that I’m complicated, and not just in a mental-health kind of way. Fine, whatever, here goes:

a) Sunset Boulevard
b) Quadrophenia
c) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
d) The Philadelphia Story

Four places I’ve lived

Here’s where my colorful and varied past shines!

a) Long Beach, Calif. (my birthplace)
b) Garden Grove, Calif. (the OC!)
c) West Hollywood, Calif.
d) Van Nuys, Calif.

Four television shows I love

"Oh, I don’t own a television," she says disdainfully.

Ha! People who say they don’t own televisions are precisely the people who will housesit for you and soak up your 180 satellite channels like a crack addict on a post-rehab binge. Here are my ever-changing current faves:

a) Project Runway
b) House
c) Intervention
d) Rebuilt: The Human Body Shop (If you haven’t seen this new Discovery Health channel show about the staff and clientele of a high-tech prosthetics lab, check it out. It is at once fascinating and inspiring.)

Four places I’ve vacationed:
a) Yellowstone National Park
b) The Grand Strand, South Carolina (annual gig with the in-laws)
c) Cornwall
d) Belgium (headquarters of my family’s 1992 Great Bowling Alleys of Europe tour)

Four favorite dishes:
a) Coffee (That’s not a dish?)
b) Spicy string beans
c) Dark chocolate (That’s a dish, right?)
d) A bowl of stuff from Chipotle

Four sites I visit daily:
a) Salon
b) Dooce.com
c) Whatever (on fire)—my partner’s blog
d) The forums at DBSA (Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance)

Four places I’d rather be:
a) At home
b) On my bike
c) Walking barefoot anywhere an ocean licks the shore
d) On a massage table

Four books I love

Again, this is a mean and stress-inducing question:

a) “Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America” by Carolyn See (my creative-writing mentor’s memoir)
b) “High Fidelity” by Nick Hornby
c) “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri
d) “Cloudstreet” by Tim Winton

Four albums I can’t live without

OK, this one was initially “four video games I play,” but I don’t play any, and I was surprised there wasn’t a music question, so I’m having my way with this silly survey:

a) “The Walking”—Jane Siberrry
b) “Quadrophenia”—The Who
c) “Traffic From Paradise”—Rickie Lee Jones
d) “Eveningland”—Hem

Four bloggers I'm tagging:

Hmm, I don’t really know any bloggers except the one who tagged me, and those she’s already tagged, but wouldn’t it be funny if I tagged her back? Then we could just toss the potato back and forth, and each time we were tagged we’d have to answer the survey differently. Then we could be really self-indulgent, as if blogging isn’t already incredibly self-indulgent, and get all of our favorite movies and books and CDs out of our system, because it’s oh, so important that everyone understands how very diverse and complicated we are. For instance, I didn’t list any jazz CDs, so you don’t know how very much I like jazz and am therefore somehow cooler than people who do not like jazz. And that’s a shame, really, your not knowing that about me.

I do know one would-be blogger I can tag, hoping to spur her to action in her blog-in-potentia, which will be amazing when it evolves from its current zygote state. Grrrly Librarian, you are so tagged!

behold the friendlies

2006-02-16T10:35:00.000-08:00

My partner mentioned the mascots of the Turin Olympics in her blog and I realized that I’d seen neither hide nor hair of them despite a fair amount of Olympic viewing. Thinking back to the Los Angeles Games in ’84, Sam the eagle was everywhere—couldn’t get away from the freakin' jingoistic bird—but this Turinese pair Neve and Gliz I wouldn’t recognize were they to jovially greet me in the middle of a well-lit piazza.

At first glance, and even several glances later, Neve and Gliz look like they would be quite at home on a marshmallow package, such is the mystery of their white heads and decided lack of edge. It’s only in reading about them that we discover their true nature: Per the official ’06 Games site, Neve is a “soft, friendly, and elegant snowball,” while Gliz is a “lively and playful ice cube.” Could they be related to the Wonder Twins? “Form of: an elegant snowball!”

I far prefer Neve and Gliz's Paralympic friend, Aster the handicapable snowflake.

Aw, give ’em a break, you might say. Maybe the Turinese were so busy pulling together those opening ceremonies—constructing the fake ice-skating cows, disembodying all those shapely legs for the upside-down laterally bifurcated chorus line, learning how to set skaters on fire just so without immolating them—that they hadn’t any time left to create mascots. Except that the choosing of the official mascots, according to the site, commenced in May 2003 with 237 submissions. Wow! There were 236 proposals suckier than Neve and Gliz? Actually, to be fair, there were 236 rejected proposals; hard to say whether they were kicked because they were sucky or because they failed to adhere to the Olympic criteria for mascots: “They must be appreciated and usable all over the world considering different cultural contexts; they must express the values of the Olympic Movement, of participation, loyalty, respect and brotherhood; they must be easy to use commercially and be flexible for a variety of two- and three-dimensional applications.” Bearing all this in mind, Neve and Gliz seem like a gimme: Marshmallows are internationally appreciable and culturally inoffensive. Marshmallows are incredibly virtuous, embodying the very essence of the Olympic Games. And, finally, they’re way marketable—everybody loves marshmallows!

Olympic mascots have always seemed like a bit of an afterthought, never achieving the visibility of those shameless shills for college and professional sports franchises. We’re only likely to see Olympic mascots if we live in the host city, or are Olympic pin collectors, or make a concerted effort to look them up—as I did this morning at Olympic.org. Remember Magique, the snow imp of Albertville ’92? How about Hidy and Howdy, the ’88 Calgary polar bears? You may remember Izzy from Atlanta’s 1996 Games, but only because he was the most confoundingly unappealing official mascot ever. (Schuss, the 1968 Grenoble Games’ little skier with the tumorously large and oddly inexpressive head, while less appealing, was technically an “unofficial” mascot, with official mascots first coming into play four years later in Munich.)

By the way, I haven't seen the film “Munich” yet, so naturally I’m wondering, did Waldi the dachshund, mascot of the 1972 Games, make it into the movie?

Izzy, which Olympic.org describes as an “amorphous, abstract fantasy figure,” was so unlovable from the get-go he began to morph immediately following his debut at the closing ceremonies of the 1992 Games, where he wrested the torch from Barcelona’s Cobi, a reasonably charming cartoon dog. Says Olympic.org of Izzy, “Over time he grew a mouth where only lips had existed, he added stars in his eyes, bulked up and gained muscles in his previously spindly legs, and eventually sprouted a nose.” No wonder Izzy won the mascot gig—clearly the big freak had supernatural powers. (It’s worth noting that I was briefly acquainted with the media voice of Izzy, and he was a lesbian.)

We have Izzy to blame, I think, for the proliferation of mascots. Since the Atlanta Games no host country has chosen but a single entity to represent their Games. Hate one mascot? How about three? Or four? Sure, a couple of previous Games had offered up pairs of mascots—the aforementioned Hidy and Howdy, plus Lillehammer ’94’s Haakon and Kristin—but those early aberrations were more likely nods to gender equality than any attempt to hedge bets. The real bet-hedging began in 1998 at Nagano with the introduction of Sukki, Nokki, Lekki, and Tsukki—because one snow owl is never enough. Olympic.org reports that the snow owls were slow to grow on people but that halfway through the games “all of Japan fell madly in love with them.” (Anyone who doubts the mad love of the Japanese need only consider the strange case of Hello Kitty.)

Nagano’s originally intended mascot was a weasel named Snowple. His withdrawal remains unexplained, but I like to think he resigned in order to pursue other interests. The weasel’s agent probably reminded him that Olympic mascots are notorious flameouts, nothing but fodder for VH1’s “Where Are They Now?”

Sydney rang in the new millennium with Olly the kookaburra, Syd the platypus, and Millie the echidna, and though few people knew what an echidna was, the trio was cutish, winsome even, mascots you wouldn’t mind being stuck in an elevator with.

And our luck held through 2002, when Salt Lake City gave us Powder the snowshoe hare, Copper the coyote, and Coal the black bear—a happy little wildlife triptych anyone could get behind. Things were looking up in the realm of Olympic mascots.

But those four years of relative mascot fat were to be followed by a mandated minimum four years of lean, commencing with the arrival of Phevos and Athena, the ancient doll–inspired icons of the Athens Games. Of them the official 2004 Games site says, “Phevos and Athena are two children, simple and joyful, full of vitality and creativity, perhaps mischievous and hence lovable.” (I am perhaps mischievous, and I'm not sure it necessarily follows that I am hence lovable.) With P and A’s distorted faces, stumpy arms, and tremendous feet, less appealing mascots may seem impossible to imagine. They’re sort of Izzy times two. Neve and Gliz are admittedly a mild improvement over the Athenian kinderblobs, but they’re still squarely in the years of lean.

So, following these four years of prophesied lean, 2008 should bring great things, right? Oh, so wrong. Behold the Friendlies, the five official doll (Argh! Enough with the dolls!) mascots of the Beijing Games, unveiled in November 2005: Beibei the fish, Jingjing the panda, Huanhuan the Olympic flame, Yingying the Tibetan antelope, and Nini the swallow. THEY were chosen from a staggering 662 entries. Gawdelpus. Less appealing mascots than P and A are not only possible, they’ve foisted their scary-ass selves upon us. Avert your eyes. Save yourself.

be my…sports fan?

2006-02-14T18:02:00.000-08:00

There was a fair amount of yelling coming from the bedroom this morning while I was getting ready for work. Toweling my hair I went to investigate and found my partner sitting on the edge of the bed, positively riveted by an Olympic curling match: Sweden v. Canada. Most of the yelling was coming from the guys on TV, but occasionally she'd let loose an "Oh!" or "Nice!" I tackled and pinned her to the bed in my own homage to sport, and once she had affected a suitable look of mock-terror I rolled off to the side and watched the match for a minute.

"Oh!" she yelled as the broom guys scuttled toward the target with the big pucky thing and it knocked some other pucky things out of the way. Gauging my blank look, she asked whether I wanted her to explain why that play was so extraordinarily cool.

My partner revealed her true self to me close to 11 years ago, only a few weeks into our relationship. I was in the impossibly small kitchen of her studio apartment and she was in the bedroom/living area. "THREE!" she yelled gleefully, and I couldn't imagine what that meant. I went into the other room and found her watching a UCLA basketball game. Good God, I thought. She's a sports fan.

We were both attending UCLA at the time, and, as I was quickly made to understand, it was a playoff game, a really big playoff game that, if won, would get them into the championships, so I was willing to chalk her enthusiasm up to school spirit, in which case it was really kind of endearing. Rah! Go team! I could get behind that.

But I was deluding myself. Her love of sport revealed itself to me in fits and starts over the next year, becoming fully manifest once we moved in together. And though that playoff game served as my early warning sign of the many athletic diversions to come, she’s not much into basketball as a rule. In fact, of the "big four" U.S. sports—which I would soon learn include football, baseball, basketball, and hockey—the only one she pledges allegiance to is baseball. Not that she's some fanatic who runs around thrusting a big puffy number-one hand in the air, but she grew up rooting along with her family for her hometown boys, an underdog Atlanta Braves team in its fallow pre-'90s period. A kind of passion resulted from that long courtship, followed at last by victory. I could relate to that, having grown up within spitting distance of the Anaheim Angels.

Other than baseball, her taste veers off the beaten base path: English soccer, women's billiards, sheep dog trials. Seriously, she used to watch a show called "One Man and His Dog" on BBC America—when the BBC was still trying to figure out what British shows Americans might cotton to—and it was like watching paint dry. Oil paint. On a hot day. But she loved it. And she has this talent for absorbing information in practically osmotic fashion, such that watching a man in a plaid tam play with his border collie for 30 minutes makes her an instantaneous expert in sheepherding skills. It's uncanny.

I took a shine to bicycling a couple of years ago, and within a few months' time she knew more about the sport of cycling than I'll ever know—even if I were to apply myself. The first time we watched the Tour de France together she quickly committed the team names to memory and gleaned the roles of the various riders, from sprinters to climbers to domestiques. Her zeal makes me a little lazy, because I know that I can just watch all the colorful jerseys and beautiful bikes fly through the French countryside while she keeps track of what's actually going on. I expect to tap her talents next week when we go to the South Bay to watch a leg of the inaugural Tour of California. I haven’t so much as glanced at a roster or route map, but my partner, if asked right now, could rattle off every European team committed to attend, along with the name of each team's star rider—"captain" in cycling parlance—and the distances they’ll be riding each day.

It occurs to me sometimes that she deserves someone with whom she can share her vast reserves of idiosyncratic information, someone who would feast on her knowledge of curling rules like a dog alone at last with a honey-baked ham. And while I really do try to digest why that curling play was so cool, what I'm really thinking, what I can't help thinking while she's explaining it to me is, You're so goddam cute when you're excited about something.

Happy Valentine's Day, sweet fan of mine.