March 2008 Archives

but I'm blogging somewhere else.  Just on this one topic.  Check it out. 

Chris
HERE

I don't know about her, but I will probably just fling myself thru the gorgeous front window and eat cupcakes until I pass out.  They also have chocolate chip cookies. 

You can't see me right now, but I am breathing into a paper bag and looking for an extra suitcase to pack full of cookies.

I love New York already.

Last week my copies of The Sun and Bust showed up within a day of each other.  The Bust issue was a long overdue Men We Love, with an Ira Glass interview.  Click on that link, and mouse over the bottom right corner of the magazine.  You can turn the pages and look inside!  But no Ira.  You have to pay for Ira because it would be wrong to give him away.  (Some part of me wants to type :word: here, but I will (sorta) not give in.)

The Sun also has a theme this month -- stealing.  They always run a section of reader's letters (called Readers Write) that tie into the theme.  You can read some of last month's letters here.  The letters are always my favorite part of the magazine.  I was reading the current ones, the ones on stealing, and I remembered something I haven't thought about in a long time.  So, here's my after-the-fact Readers Write letter for the Sun.   

I think I was in junior high the first time I stole something from a store.  Maybe once I nabbed candy from the Gibson's drugstore where my godfather worked when I was little, but I don't know if that's a real memory.  My mom walking me back over to return the gum (?).  I don't know if it really happened.  In junior high, I stole something from the Hallmark store at the mall where all the kids hung out.  I can't remember what I took, but I do remember the weeks that followed. 

A rumor started that a kid from another school had been busted for stealing because a store owner had seen him on hidden camera and then looked through all the local junior high yearbooks until he found the kid and called the cops and all sorts of horrible things happened.  And, because I was painfully naive, I was certain, beyond a doubt, that the Hallmark people were gonna bust my ass.

Every night I'd lay in bed, obsessing over the fact that I was going to get caught; my good-grades image totally wrecked, my parents crushed. I'd possibly have to spend time in juvenile hall.  And in the mornings it would be worse.  I figured that from the yearbook they wouldn't be able to know where I lived, so they would come and get me at school.  I think I held my breath every day until 3.  It finally passed, though.  Either I forgot about it or summer came.  Something.   

By the time high school came around, I'd figured out that either you got popped on the spot or you got away.  No cashier from Hallmark was going to spend a Saturday flipping through yearbooks looking for the kid that lifted the pencils.  So I stole shoes.  And underwear.  Makeup, clothes, cassette tapes.  Whatever.   And I never got caught. 

Until I did.  Until the day that I was at a friend's house doing homework and my mom showed up, speechless because she wanted to kill me.  The police were at my house, wanting to talk to me about the huge collection of stolen CDs that I was hiding for someone named Debbie, who I did not like anyway.  She worked at a record store, and once when I went to WILLINGLY PURCHASE a CD, she let me have it for free.  I was not comfortable with that, because I figured it was a stupid way to steal.  But, you know, free CDs were not something to turn down, either.  I think I maybe got four of them that way.  But, it wasn't just me.  It was Debbie, and twenty of her closest friends. 

She figured out that they were onto her (REALLY?  YOU THINK?) and called me.  She said something about how no one knew that she'd given ME any CDs and could I take the ones that she had at her house so she wouldn't get busted. 

And, because I was still, despite my thievery, not the most worldly girl, I reluctantly agreed.  The police showed up at my house soon after, and that's when my mother came to get me.  To say she was pissed does not even come close to doing the moment justice.  I thought that maybe it would be fine if the cops carted me off.  They seemed less angry.

I got home and produced the goods.  I ended up losing some stuff that I had paid for, which really pissed me off, karma be damned.   In the end, after all the talk of Juvenile Hall, I didn't really get into any trouble.  Or if I did, I don't remember it.  I have a feeling that my mom was most angry about the cops coming to the house, because, you know, The Neighbors and all that.

I did quit stealing things a few months before I turned 18.  Luckily I was never addicted to the chemical rush of it, so I don't miss it at all.  I mean, you totally don't have to put up the silver if you invite me over to your place.  I've got no idea why I stole stuff. Just something to do that was a little out of character, maybe.  Because I could.  Because I wanted Calvin Klein underpants.      

I'm over the sad.  Mostly.  Went to a couple of V E R Y sweaty yoga classes and got all that gluten out of my system doing things like this:

Only I was a) not on the beach, b) in color, c) listing to the side a lot, and d) saying to my friend next to me yeeOOOOWWWfffuuuUUUuckkk helpI'mgoingsideways!
Today my back is a little tender. 

So -- in the comments on that last post, the subject of chemical issues came up, and I've obviously been giving that some thought for a long time.  I've taken medication for depression before, and it was really pretty great until it just quit working.  I am thinking that the chemical issue is more than likely a gluten issue.  I want this (the gluten thing) to be all in my head, but last Friday at work (after the Thursday night cheese pizza), my eyes were so swollen all day that my eyelids disappeared.  Also, I gained four pounds overnight, my hands got swollen and arthritic and I had a headache, cried a lot and wanted to kill people. 

No more cheese pizza.  Ever.

Now I'm in that annoying phase where whenever someone else has a health problem, I'm all, You should go off gluten for a couple of weeks!  I predict that soon I will have no more friends.  (looking at watch)

Except maybe Laura.

I never wrote about skiing, how very much my kids loved playing in the snow and seeing their aunt and uncle.  And I ought to write about Willow's birthday celebration yesterday, her grandparents over for dinner and Watch-Me!ing.  Or today, Sophie getting up at church to say Happy Easter and light a candle and the kids running all around looking for eggs and Nathan sharing my coffee with me.   In the afternoon, visiting with a family that I love and overstaying (like we always do) and bringing lemonade with too little sugar and jumping on the trampoline with a passel of kids.

I don't know how to put this, but I am having a really difficult time.  It's getting more and more obvious, maybe.  Definitely my family notices.  There's nothing wrong, but everything is, and instead of having a stupid pop song stuck in my head I've got this rotten negative loop of the same tired words over and over. 

The only way I can think to explain it is that I feel wrapped up like a mummy, with my arms tucked in at my sides and unable to move.  And I have this overwhelming need to fling my arms out but I can't.  That makes much more sense in my head than it does typed.  It makes sense to me, anyway.  I'm also incredibly homesick for Texas, which is pretty normal, but lately anytime I see someone old enough to kinda sorta resemble one of my grandparents, I cry.  Older couples out for a walk hand-in-hand, I cry.  A woman on the radio talking about her childhood in the 1930s, I cry.  It's tiring to be so sentimental.  Emphasis on the mental.  Just being so self-absorbed and sad is exhausting.  I don't really like it much.  I like the sort of thinking that makes me want to think more, or that makes me laugh or makes it feel like there are good things or interesting possibilities coming.  The kind of thinking I've been channeling lately just leaves me feeling both awful about myself and in need of deep, deep sleep.

I'm looking forward to more light.  Evenings at the beach.   The kids getting into the bath at the end of the day, dirty and happily chattering about their afternoons.  Popsicles.  Early mornings on the couch by the open window, reading before anyone else gets up.  Iced coffee.  Peaches and strawberries and dark plums.  I hope I fucking snap out of this in time to enjoy all the good stuff in front of me.  Now would be just fine.

to myself? 

I *know* that gluten and dairy are the devil.  For me, anyway.  But, damn.  The kids had a thin crust cheese pizza for dinner and there was a piece left on the table.  I resisted.  I went to throw it away, but suddenly found that I was eating it.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

But, you know, once I have the dairy and gluten in my system, I may as well have cheese and crackers.  Good god do I miss cheese and crackers!  So, I had four or five crackers with some string cheese.  Then I just ate parmesan cheese all by itself (mmmmmmm) and finished up with some blue cheese stuffed olives.

It was lovely.  The best supper I've had in ages.  And, tomorrow?  I will feel like death and will probably have gained four or five pounds overnight.  My face will be swollen, I will have a terrible headache centered in the back of my head.  I'll feel like someone's taken a good crack at the back of my skull with a baseball bat, actually.  And, I'll have other issues that don't need sharing. 

Why do I do this?  It's not like I have no willpower.  But sometimes, I have NO willpower.  Also, there is a small part of my brain that tells me that these food intolerances are bullshit and that I can eat what I want.  That part, as much as I'd like it to be proven right, is always sorry several hours later.  It's the part that remembers the fact that my FAVORITE foods are bread, cheese, and ice cream.  The part that knows that the substitutes for those foods suck.  It forgets that it can take me a week to get over a cracker with string cheese. 

It's going to be a long weekend.   

Not the best ever photo. 

Near La Seu there is a teny little religious shop.  The front is all windows, with light colored wood frames.  The doors are the same.  Handmade candles hang from hooks in the wood over the front door.

I stepped inside by myself, and the women behind the counter smiled and said hello.  The shelves were filled with gorgeous religious figurines.

The women working there were so content.  It was odd, but stepping in from the street to the shop, there was a difference in everything -- the air, the noise, the light, the energy.  It felt peaceful.  Like the idolized version of a nun's life, I suppose.  In a glass-topped case (also made of that same wood) was a bracelet made from bitty images of hundreds of years old Virgin Mary paintings, all in sepia. 

I bought the bracelet, and the woman asked if I wanted to wear it or have a package.  I wore it, and she put it on for me, first asking if I wanted the images to face me or the rest of the world.  I had them face out, and wore the bracelet for the rest of my (way too short) stay in Spain. 

Now that I'm home, whenever I wear my bracelet I turn it so that the images face me.  Like they are for me only.  I realize that I sound like a huge dork, but I totally fell in love with Barcelona.  When I have that bracelet on, it's like I'm a 1950's high school girl wearing her guy's letterman's jacket.  I look at it and sigh. 

Really.

And think about being there.  And going back. 

Gwendomama sent me a challenge via Sweetney.  Who knows why, but I agreed to take a photo of myself fresh out of bed.  Now that I've got it from the camera to the computer, I can see that it's blurry. Since I don't see very well for the first little while after getting up in the morning, I had no idea.  Really, it's much better for everyone involved this way.

Trust me.

Tonight the kids' school hosted a stargazing party.  I didn't want to go, though I knew that it would be fun, because I'm cranky and tired and my ear hurts and I am poor company.  We went, John leaving after the first little bit for work, and I stood there with my ear still aching from the cold wind, even under my hat and hood. 

There were lots of clouds, but they were low and blew over.  I think there were five or six high powered telescopes.  The lenses were big as dinnerplates and the kids clambered up stepladders to see moon craters and nebula (nebuli?), and the funny, looks-just-like-a-1950's-textbook-illustration Saturn.

I did have a good time, fatigue and ear pain notwithstanding.  Just like I knew going in, we were the last family to leave.  I had to extract the boys from a discussion (with visual aides) of the earth's size in relation to other celestial bodies with one of the grown ups who'd brought a ginormous telescope.  The girls wanted to see Saturn One More Time six or eight times. 

It was past our bedtime, but really? what is a half-hour difference?  They were so excited to see the grey craters, shadows, and mountains on the moon, the space dust, the stars.   It was a gorgeous night and the clouds were so light and white they glowed.  The moon looked clean and brighter than usual.  I just stood back in the dark and watched, until I could easily pick out my children on the blacktop because they were the only ones left.  Earlier in the evening, there were at least a hundred kids, many of them on the playground, thrilled to be sliding and climbing around in the dark.  They'd get up close to one another and giggle as they tried to figure out who was who.

I looked through the telescopes, too.  There is a star nursery, near Orion, where the dust that the stars were born from glows kind of like neon.  I felt like that, that cloud, watching my kids whirl all around me, happily learning, marveling, laughing together in the pretty pretty night.

I'm inbetween naps, up scrounging for pain medicine and getting more tissue for my ear that is bleeding (ugh).  I've had so many ear infections that now my eardrum just gives up really early on. 

Willow is entertaining herself in the other room with tiny treehouse/dollhouse furniture.  Little red wooden plates smaller than dimes, teeny mugs of hot chocolate with marshmallows, apples the size of peas, bitty logs for a fireplace with red and orange wool fire glued to them.  She's sick, too, and I hear her playing and coughing.  Most of her games have the little dolls and animals in peril, and so she says "Oooooohhh nNnnnooooOOoooooooooo!" and then makes explosion and crashing sounds with her mouth. 

The kids will be back from school in less than an hour, and even though I know that will end the napping portion of my sick day, it will be good to see them.   

Back to sleep.

Know what's a total trip?  Watching Star Trek II (the wrath of Khan) under the influence of a 103 fever.  For me, that trippyness is intensified by the fact that I rarely get fevers.  Appendicitis?  No fever.  Several ear infections with ruptured bleeding eardrum?  No fever.  Fevers knock me flat on my ass.  So, last night I sat wrapped in one of the boys' dinosaur quilts, shivering and watching Star Trek II with all the kids (this makes me sound much more of a cool nerd than I really am.  Introducing Kirstie Alley!  Who knew?)  But given the brain sizzle I had going it was hard to focus. 

Still is, truth be told.

Anyway, there is this part where Khan (question for Trekkies: Did Ricardo Montalban slice off his nipples for that role?  It was both distracting and skeevy to find that I was searching for a little bit of nipple to poke out of that vest.  I didn't want to see it, but I knew I'd feel better knowing they existed.  JUST SAYIN.)

So there was this part where two guys get the little mind control pincher beetles dropped into their helmet (by Khan) so that the bugs can tunnel into the ears of the men, latch onto their cerebral cortexes and allow Khan to control their minds. 

According to google, this Simply. Isn't. Possible.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22from+the+ear+canal+to+the+cerebral+cortex%22&btnG=Search

Your search - "from the ear canal to the cerebral cortex" - did not match any documents. 

And, even if it were, a munched cerebral cortex isn't worth controlling, and WHY did Chekov not have any resultant hearing loss or even a little brain damage once he was saved?  And, the other guy (Terrell I learned from this SUPER geeky site. You were warned.), Kirk could have been a TAD more grateful, you think?

But, besides the nipples and costumes (Bones.  Those pants he wore when he brought Jim the birthday hootch?  So wrong! He was still the hottest crew member, after Lt. Uhura, of course.)  I looked for a shot of the pants, but they elude me.  Have some Belushi instead!

So, besides the search for nipples (heh Star Trek III: The Search for Nipples!), and the costumes (space, the final 70s frontier!) what intrigued me was the brain bugs.  Because, in case I haven't complained at you about this yet, I have a bad-ass weevil or two in my brain.   I've had a fever since Thursday (it's Saturday night right now) and I have coughed so much that my back and neck now feel like they are made up of thousands of little achy penny sized muscles that are wired strictly for pain.  My head and face are in an evil vise that will not let me sleep and hurts so much my eyes water.  I'm S I C K.  And I was thinking about the concept of brain bugs and then viruses in general and it came to me that viruses?  Are totally alien life forms who are here to fuck with humans.  And cows.  Birds, too. 

See, first Sophie got sick.  She started with a headache, followed up with fever and coughing, and was knocked out of action for six days.  Then, Willow and Nate got it, followed by me.  We've all had the same exact symptoms, only they actually get to NAP because I don't jump on them and say I LOVE YOU while they are sleeping it off. They all missed a week of school, and I missed work on Friday.

Strangely, other people I know but have not sneezed on, have had the exact same illness.  Lots of other people.  And, I cannot help but wonder in my fever induced haze, if the virus isn't cognizant and able to organize and give orders about what to do once it tunnels from the ear into the cerebral cortex.  Forget what I said earlier about it being impossible, my brain HURTS.  Bugs totally got in there.

So, that is that.  I'm still sick.  Every strand of muscle I have aches, I am making no sense, and I'm being controlled by brain bugs.

Sophie lost her second-ever tooth tonight.  I remember so clearly the day she turned four months old and her first tooth came in.  It's sort of odd that her first teeth are now in my jewelry boxes, scattered among the earrings and pennies and safety pins.  Nathan lost a tooth over the weekend, and so after the kids fell asleep, I folded two dollars into paper hearts and slipped them beneath their pillows.

directions here ~ thanks, Jenny

Up till now, the tooth fairy has ALWAYS brought gold dollar coins, but despite writing myself a big, printed, circle-the-words "GET COINS AT BANK" note, I forgot to get coins at the bank tonight.  These are cute, so I'm not sorry. 

We've got this tenacious fever going around here.  Sophie had it for six days, and Nate and Willow are in my bed now, tossing and talking in their sleep, sweet little furnaces.  This is the first real string of sicknesses that we've had since I went back to work.  A test, I suppose.  I don't want them to be miserable, so why am I disappointed that they don't really need me so much?   

Don't answer that.