Like A Twister

The Cure

2009-11-10T06:13:00.000-08:00

Here's what I know.

Betsy was born with hip dysplasia that left her with medical bills so long and impossible to pay that my parents, who had three other kids, just started wrapping her up in them and taking her picture. There she is, in a body cast on the couch, and a bill no less than 12 feet long swirls around her. My dad worked full time, and when he got home my mom went to work until 10 or 11 at night. Sometimes he had two jobs. Sometimes after Betsy's surgeries, my dad couldn't stay at the hospital with my mom because he had to get back to those jobs.

Jennifer was diagnosed with CLL in 2005 after having surgery to have her adenoids removed. Fortunately she was employed at a fabulously supportive accounting firm, one that helped her relocate closer to home to pursue chemotherapy and one that gave her time off during her treatments. It was also one that came with incredible health insurance. And it is exactly that health insurance and the chronic nature of her disease that keeps her in that job. She knows her disease will flair up again at some point, she knows that she will need treatment, and she knows that the only way she can get the treatment she needs is to have health insurance. Which means that even though she wants to try a new career, wants to stay home with her future babies, wants to have the life she chooses rather than the one the health insurance industry forces on her, she can't.

Heather has two sons. The older son has a sensory issue of some kind. He has been to therapy to learn how tricks for how to deal with it. Because of this issue, he was traumatized while trying to pottytrain and had to be admitted to the emergency room. Heather is a stay-at-home mom who has worked as a nurse and an insurance assessor. She told me once that when you put bandaids on a patient in the hospital, the patient is billed for the entire box of bandaids even if they only use two. Same thing for gauze. Some thing for fluids. And the sticker price of these drugstore items are hugely inflated because, hey, it's not the person we're charging, it's the insurance... In trying to get her son the intervention that he needs, she has had to hound insurance companies for thousands of dollars. Normally a financial genius with a safety net that makes me jealous, Heather and her family have gone into debt trying to bridge the gap between paying for the therapy and being reimbursed by the insurance company, which sometimes doesn't happen.

Charles and Shannon were living in England one year and they came home for the holidays. Normally they buy traveler's insurance, but this time they forgot. This was the time that Charles would get appendicitis and spend Christmas Day in the hospital. He came home after one day, back to his old self, except now his old self had a $20,000 bill attached to it. With no way to pay it, they went back to their country, where if I was visiting I could have surgery for free, and hoped for the best.

I have lived without insurance at several points in my life, as has Mack, and fortunately my politics allowed me to take advantage of Planned Parenthood and the services they offer, which come with fees based on your most recent pay stubs, my health allowed me to stay alive, and my luck kept me from drowning in debt. I eat pretty healthily, I exercise at least once a week, I maintain my weight within 10 pounds, I do regular breast exams, I take vitamins, but I am not invincible to disease or illness.

Thanks to the representatives who stepped outside of politics and looked at what Americans need, I may not have to be. The United States may just catch up to other first world countries in providing this basic service to our citizens. We may just be able to stop worrying about how we're going to take care of our parents and how we're going to afford having children. We may just start taking responsibility for our own health, which is something that, like it or not, insurance companies do not let us do.

It's going to be collectively expensive if we get it, one of the biggest barriers to the public health option, but it's no more expensive than paying the overinflated costs we're personally paying now. (Insurance for me and Mack was $400+ per month at my last job... imagine if I donated that money instead to universal health care and it didn't matter how sick I or anyone else got!)

This really isn't about politics. It's about people... Betsy, Jen, Heather, Charles, me, Mack, our parents, the babies we love, you. It's completely doable, it's long overdue, it's anti-American to let people die.

Click here to find out how to nudge your congresspeople to be brave and forward-thinking. And here to educate yourself on what's really at stake.

The Dollhouse Saga... also Why I Was Accused of Being a Hoarder

2009-11-02T12:09:00.000-08:00

Back in July, in the throes of unemployment and with entirely too much time on my hands, I started thinking about Halloween. And then I started thinking about my party. And then I started thinking about a dollhouse theme. And then I went on Ebay, bought a dollhouse, and officially bit off more than I could chew.

I thought, oh I'll just glue it all together and it'll be easy. Nope.
I started gluing door adornments together. Then I glued windows together. Then I realized I should be painting all these things before I assemble them because painting them once assembled would be impossible... unless I was miniature. So I went to buy stain and paint and proceeded to step 2.
Which is when I realized, holy crap, building a dollhouse is H.A.R.D. First I had to give myself a crash course in dollhouse building language, which is a lot of RPs and Gs and numbers on wood pieces that fall apart and make you wonder if it was a 4 or an 8. Then I had to look at these strange drawings and squeeze my brain into knowing what partition 1 is and how exactly is should line up with slat 97.
After I got the thing mostly built, or at least built enough that I could tell what was going on, I was just about to burn out on the Dollhouse Saga of 2009. I wanted to get to the fun part of decorating it with cute miniature things, but no. Instead it was time to decide if I wanted lighting. And if I wanted lighting, I had to know where I wanted it so that I could then make sure that my flooring or wall covering would cover it... if I lived long enough to get to the part of putting in flooring and wall covering.

I had to splice electrical wires together to make them longer and magically keep everything from short circuiting. I learned about transformers and power strips and found some very adorable blogs by people who have made several dollhouses and are still not institutionalized!
Finding my fellow miniaturists gave me a good little push, but rather than work on finishing the inside of the house, painting and wallpapering and carpeting, I decided to do some siding work. Mainly because I realized I had none of the supplies necessary to do the flooring or wallpapering work I needed to do -- except painting. I could have painted but painting meant laying on the floor with my face mashed into the ground and getting hand cramps from trying to paint miniature inside spaces.

So, instead of heading to Hobby Lobby, which I discovered is a social destination for Pentecostals, I started gluing down some creep siding. It was colorful and came with an instant gratification factor that was necessary at that point.
You see that? You see that workspace up there. Well, it just so happens that the corner of our living room started looking like this right when the A&E show Hoarders debuted. Mack and I would watch Hoarders and look over at that corner and I had to swear to him that it was a craft project for Halloween and NOT a compulsion that would take over our lives. At least not for forever.

After the siding, I got to build the porch, and the porch was fun... once I consulted to dollhouse translation dictionary to discover what a porch roof was called.
The last major hurdle to building the house was putting on the third floor walls and dormer windows. That required a magic trick using wet paper towels and finger muscles I didn't know I had. But once that was all done, it was finally finished!
Almost. (Look, I warned you this was a saga.)

With the outside finished, it was time to look inside. I had to furnish my house. Which meant I had to go back on Ebay and look for beds and chairs and tables and couches and art and books and a Ouija board and a crystal ball and a microscope and tarot cards and plants and magical money to fall out of the sky to pay for all of this crap that I got addicted to because it was miniature and cute.

While I waited for the furniture to arrive, I set to work hiding electrical cables underneath door moldings and carpet and wallpaper. Good miniaturists take care to cut out little channels to recess their wires. I just put electrical tape over mine to create a ramp up and down from the bump they cause.

And then, when the goodies arrived, it was time to finish my vision. To make the dollhouse I'd dreamed of come to life. To see the fruits of my labor. To finally make tiny dolls commit suicide.
And with that, the saga comes to an end... until next year.

Pumpkining

2009-10-30T17:20:00.000-07:00

Renee and Ben came to Auntie Am's scary house to carve pumpkins last week.

Like all good babies, they abandoned the carving process and left that to their aunt, but when it was time to blow out the candles, we couldn't lure them away, even with M&M bribes. We must've relit the candles a dozen times, and they'd count and blow them out again and again. Renee would count to 3 most of the time but sometimes she'd go to 8, huffing and puffing all the way.

Pretty much, it was adorable. And just one more thing to make me love Halloween.

It's getting scary in here...

2009-10-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

I am not blogging because, in case you haven't noticed, IT'S FREAKING HALLOWEEN!!!

Also, we went to the lake house last weekend. And I had a test today. And tonight I'm carving pumpkins with two of the best babies in the entire world. And I've been very busy putting spider webs on everything with a sharp corner. And it's horror movie month on SyFy. And something happened to Billy Bell and he isn't on So You Think You Can Dance and I want to know what illness he got exactly...

To tide you over until next time, ponder this.

Changing Perspective

2009-10-20T11:47:00.000-07:00

Several years ago my mom got a print of the painting Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth and gave it to Shannon for her apartment. I really liked it, and in a yard-sale gift from the universe, my mom found another framed print of it and gave it to me. I'm not sure exactly how, but Leiah also ended up with the print.
Christina's World is like an artwork thread that keeps us all connected. I can't help but think of my mom and my sisters when I look at it, but I also like it because it reminds me of being at my Grandma Scott's house growing up, looking back at her farmhouse from the distance, a tether to safety. In the suburbs you couldn't get too far away without losing sight of your home base, but in the country, especially the flat fields that make up the country in Indiana, you can wander far away and still feel like you're in the front yard. Leiah said it reminds her of the times we used spend afternoons laying in corn fields trying to trick the buzzards into circling us, being out in the middle of nowhere, trying to maintain the same stillness that Christina mastered for the painting.

Turns out, we're both clueless.

Dr. Mack came home the other day and schooled me on the painting. Apparently, as his teacher told it and as I later confirmed on Wikipedia, Christina is not looking back on her home in quiet reflection. She has not tried to run away and is lurking on the perimeter to see if anyone notices. She is not trying to trick the buzzards.

She is paralyzed on the lower half of her body due to an undiagnosed muscular deterioration and she is dragging herself across the field to get home. Because that's how she gets around. By dragging herself.

Wyeth, whose summer home was across the field from the house you see in the painting, was friendly with the real life Christina and her brother and used them as inspiration for many paintings.

It's kind of cool to know the truth behind the painting, the one that hangs in our bedroom, but it's also kind of a bummer. I mean, the fact that it has a twisted secret matches our artwork tendencies pretty well -- I was recently told some of my favorite pieces are "morose" and "bleak" -- but I actually liked that it wasn't as cryptic as my other stuff.

For instance, Christina's World does not have a single stick figure in it, something Mack claims is in most of the artwork I buy. And it's of a girl who has clothes on. And there's no blood or obvious anguish. And there is a natural space just waiting to be planted with thoughts. And it, technically, could qualify as a landscape, and I actually don't like landscapes in art all that much (I much prefer the real things).

But I guess it's just not meant to be. If something really was all sunshine and rainbows, I probably wouldn't like it. Unless it was an UMBRELLA.

The Bright Side

2009-10-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

I had to walk to school today because riding my bike in the rain leaves me more soaked than just walking, and since I don't have a big gay umbrella, I was in a bad mood from the minute I walked out the door.

There was just too much cold paired with too much wet. Which is also the definition of miserable.

Halfway through the walk, my toes were frozen, my nose was running and my middle finger kept shooting out of my pocket in a blind rage. Then I realized I was below a canopy of the most beautiful color orange I'd ever seen, something the color of pumpkin mixed with the electricity of wet grass and dusted with yellows of sunshine from a couple days ago. I felt myself soften with appreciation.
And after class, Mack picked me up and we bought a Wii. Take that, rain.

Homecoming

2009-10-09T06:53:00.000-07:00

Five years ago, Shannon decided, in the span of about two months, to get married and move to England.

We were living together at the time, and by we, I mean me, Shannon, Mack and Charles, all of us in a 2-bedroom house with one bathroom and a shotgun kitchen. Outside of our childhood, when we shared a room until she was 14 and I was 12, I have lived with Shan twice in my life -- once in 1997 for a couple of months and then again in 2003 when she came back from her first experience in Cuba . That time when she came back to Cuba made me fall in love with her as a person, not just as my sister.

She would leave little bits of half-noshed snacks laying on an end table or on the counter. And she would go into marathon baking sessions and whip up 5-6 blackberry cobblers. I would leave to go to work, and when I'd come home, the surface of every wall would be covered with Charles' artwork, like I had my own private art gallery.

Shannon dives headfirst into things I'd like to do but that my Taurus need for control doesn't allow. Also, I am a fraidy cat and don't have the courage.

She is as fearless about living abroad as she is about plastering walls with paintings, and for our entire lives, she has blazed paths for me that she has no idea about. When she was 14-17, she had a best friend named Krista... and I had a Krista's little sister Erica as a best friend. When we moved to Kentucky, Shan worked at the dollar movies... my first job (which I kept for nearly 2 years) was at the dollar movies. Then Shannon worked at Billy's BBQ... and so did I, and she worked at Atomic Cafe... and so did I.

Her global pursuits, living in Spain and France and England and Cuba, made me more comfortable with the world we live in, comfortable enough to travel to places that are "scary." Those experiences have shaped me more dramatically than all the years I've lived the suburban American dream in this country.

When Shannon left, with her new husband who I also love, and went to England, I got her out the door, waved good-bye, went into our kitchen, and fell apart on the floor. I physically collapsed, broke down, broke apart. The pieces of her that I needed, the bright spot in my daily life was gone, and I would never get it back. I was never going to discover an abandoned snack or come home to any dramatic surprises like an enormous garden in the middle of the yard. I was never going to wake up to an enormous hand-made banner of encouragement when confronted with a professional challenge. I was never going to watch her pull up in her rinky dink car after a long bike ride with a 40oz. in a paper sack. There would be no more Summers of Abandon or arguments about who has the tightest ass.

She was married and gone, and the bond that allowed us to simultaneously and intensely love and hate each other, reinforced by constant physical proximity, was uncertain. We'd never been through long distance, like the kind where an ocean separates you, for a long time, and I just didn't know what would happen. I mean, I knew I would love her fiercely and miss her every single day, but I didn't know how hard it would be to call each other, how easily our conversations would go. Without her lead, I didn't know what I was supposed to do.

So I followed her. I decided to grab life by the horns and move to Los Angeles... and I loved it. I missed my family, but I had Mack's family to bridge the gap between trips home. And I missed out on birthday parties and little weekend events, but I was always home for the big stuff... the stuff Shannon and her clan come home for. We were both missing links in the tangled chain that is the Hensley family, but it seemed easier to miss out when you knew someone else was missing out too.

Well, in less than 12 hours and for at least the next 4 years, none of us will be missing out. Shannon and Charles are coming home, bringing their sweet English rose Renee back to her kindred spirit Auntie Am, and putting roots down where the rest of their family tree is. I can't wrap my head around how happy I am, how full I feel, how perfect this is, how grateful I am to be in Kentucky right now, how much I love my family, how special I feel to be one of us.

This Little Piggy

2009-10-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

A couple of nights ago Mack decided it was time to go to bed and I absolutely was not ready. There were several episodes of the 2005-06 season of Grey's Anatomy on the Tivo and I am on fall break from school and I just felt like staying up retardedly late and flexing my "I'm a grown up and can do what I want when I want" muscle.

But he was not having it. In physically dragging me to bed, he also dragged/drug/dragguged the sofa and coffee table into the hallway.

And then, during the final hoist of his far-from-waiflike wife into the bed, my not-quite-baby toe hooked on his lobster claw toenail and... bad feelings happened.

He did emergency bandaiding, and I figured it'd be better by morning. But then last night I had volleyball and ground my ouchie in the sand for an hour and then today I put on socks and tennis shoes and went for a jogalk. Now my not-quite-baby toe is really made at Mack's lobster claws.

How can I somehow milk this situation for this...

Hallo-freaking-ween

2009-10-04T16:33:00.001-07:00

In honor of the boobies...

2009-09-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

Saturday, at 8:45 a.m., Leiah, Ben, Lisa & I, all in different shades of pink, met under the awning of Taste of Thai to do the Race for the Cure.

In the pouring rain.

It ended up being an alright time, except that my shoes are still drying out and will likely get that ruinous mildew smell reserved for shoes soaked once in their lives. Lisa is a running champ, and once she started going, she didn't slow down to a walk at all. I jogged probably a total of 1.5 miles and then, overheating from my wet hoodie and with a creeping sour mood from being drenched, shifted into walking mode once we were safely past the crowds of people. I couldn't look like a wuss with an audience. For the home stretch (where the crowd picked up again), I did muster one final jogging push, doing that special kind of bouncy walk/jog that old ladies (and out of shape 30-year-olds) do, and hit the finish line at 41 minutes.Then I walked back to meet up with Leiah and Ben and jogged with them across the finish line 5 minutes later.

If a 5K was made up of multiple finish lines, I could probably talk myself into jogging the entire thing. That finish line thing is a blast.

But the rain, the rain sucks.
(No, I'm not having a stroke, that's just a side effect of exercise apparently, and no, Leiah did not style her hair with pin curls, that's just a side effect of running in the rain with glasses on your head. This is no doubt the sexiest picture we have ever taken together.)

Just say no to life lessons

2009-09-23T05:18:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Leiah and Ben stopped by for a visit while Intervention was on. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity for learning and teach Ben to say no to drugs.

I was inspired in this way about 15 years ago during an episode of Oprah that featured toddlers who had been taught to call 911 in an emergency and ended up saving someone's life. In this instance, Betsy was my pupil. I explained to her that if something ever happened that made her afraid and there was no grown up to help her that she should call 911 and even went so far as to point out the numbers on the keypad of the phone and pair it with a nice jingle. Sure she had learned the lesson, I pushed it out of my head and proceeded to strut my big sister stuff.

A couple days later the phone rang.

"This is 911. We got a call from this number. Do you have an emergency?"

After soothing the 911 operator, I asked Betsy if she called 911. Of course, she insisted that she didn't. We had previously convinced her that we had a ghost named Arthur living in our house, something we proved thanks to water on a counter and the sliding effect that suction gives to Tupperware containers, so she suggested, with an eyebrow raised and the cutest fake detective voice allowed, "Maybe Arthur did it."

You'd think with the way that backfired I wouldn't be using television as a platform for life lessons anymore, but fool me twice...

So Ben is running around acting crazy and I, his serious aunt addicted to shows about addiction, interrupt his playtime to teach him not to do drugs.

"Ben, if someone ever asks you to do drugs, you tell them, 'No way. I don't do drugs.' Got it?"

He looks at me like I'm on crack and resumes running circles around the couch. A few laps in, I catch his arm, hold out my open hand and offer him some invisible drugs.

(I did not teach him to punch the dealer. That's just a genetic response we have.)

Feeling pretty awesome that he got the message and added a very relevant-to-his-life reference about the potty in his rejection, I released him and off he ran. Leiah and I refocused our attention to the meth heads on TV, when a few minutes later, Ben stops his marathon, holds out his hand and says, "Hey, Ami. You want some drugs????"

Next I plan to teach him cuss words, starting with the phrase "Dammit Joan."

BONUS VIDEO BECAUSE IT'S FUN TO DO THIS TO KIDS

Shifting gears to hating Kentucky...

2009-09-21T07:45:00.000-07:00

A couple things have happened in the last four days that have really made me want to throw my hands up and scream, "This is what I mean!! This is why I hate Kentucky!!"

First, a person that I have never met in my entire life decided to call a client of mine and defame me. To say that I acted criminally and am a liar. To say that I personally caused irreparable harm to his endeavor. To say that I am not fit to do the job I've been hired to do because he refuses to receive correspondence from me.

Like I said, I have never met this person. Nor have our professional paths ever crossed. He is simply acting on a grudge held by others that is approaching its 10-year-mark. It is ludicrous, unprofessional, out of line. And, it's just plain small town high school pettiness.

I wish this town and the people who live here really had problems so I wouldn't be such a powerfully destructive force in my volunteer efforts.

The other thing to really piss me off happened yesterday between 2pm and 8pm... you know, when it's daylight outside. Some fucker came right up on my back porch, while Mack was home studying, and broke our porch trellis to steal his bike.

In L.A., two of our bikes were stolen in the course of three years. In Lexington, we've had two stolen in three months.

In L.A., we rode our bikes for pleasure most of the time, mainly because Mack's school was too far away and I didn't like getting to work and being all sweaty and gross. But since we've been back and living in downtown Lexington, we've become everyday bikers. We ride to school, we ride downtown for events... we rely on our bikes as our primary mode of transportation. And then some social disease just prances up onto our back porch, breaks it apart, tramples my vegetable plants and then steals Mack's bike.

Add to that the rain, and Kentucky gets an F- for the past few days. If it weren't for the good falafel with my parents, the snuggles from my nephew and the pineupdown crack silliness from Leiah yesterday, this move wouldn't be feeling very worth it right now.

Test Day

2009-09-15T05:29:00.000-07:00

Today is my first exam since hitting the books again. My study skills have gone a little into the realm of Crazy Freak, but somehow that seems to be working.

The British are coming! The British are coming!!

2009-09-14T11:56:00.000-07:00

These things are moving back to Kentucky. In one month. Thank you, Jesus.

The Endorsement Series (Part 10 in a lot)

2009-09-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

I'm cheap. There, I said it.

My whole life I've been a frugal experimenter... always open to trying the generic brand just to see if it really is the same as the name brand. In some cases, such as those involving shampoo, rising crust pizza, scented candles, tampons and toilet paper, the generic brand can't hold a candle to the name brand. But in many cases, such as those involving jalapenos, aspirin, tortilla chips, sparkling water and canned beans, the generic option is just as good as the fancy and more expensive one.

Yesterday, while Mack and I were driving around with the cosmetic mirrors on the sun visors open, we started an open discussion about how our teeth had become seriously yellow. In my case, the bottoms and the pointy one just to the left of my incisors were particularly shocking. I had started to notice mine looking a little stained a couple weeks ago, so last weekend I asked Leiah what she recommends since she works with dentists. She said Crest White Strips, so I told Mack we should get some when we got to Target.

We walked back to the white strips section and whoa. Do you have any idea how many options there are?

There is the Classic version for $20, which you wear twice a day for 14 days. I don't do anything twice a day for 14 days. Then there is the Premium for $25, and you wear those twice a day for 7 days. Then you've got the Pro Effects for $40, which give you lasting results and give you a noticeably whiter smile in 3 days. I like 3 days... I don't like $40. Finally you've got the Advanced Seal option for $45. This one whitens in 14 days, only doing it once a day, and it lets you drink water while you whiten.

My head was spinning in that white strips section. I wanted to get rid of the yellow, but I didn't want to take two weeks to do it and I didn't want to spend more than $20. Hello, my little generic friends.

Target had an off-brand of the Premium version, one step up from the Classic, for $15. We bought two of those kits, one for each of us, and hurried home to try them out.

I put them on, checked the clock, piddled around on the computer, went to feed the stray kitties up the road, came home, took them off, and HOLY WHITENESS!

Just one use and my yellow spots were mostly gone. It was amazing. I'm doing my second treatment now, and then I think I'll be good on the whiteness. Which means I have 12 more whitening sessions left in my box alone. Which is definitely making me smile about being cheap.

Cue the Country Ballad

2009-09-11T05:17:00.000-07:00

I hate 9/11. I hate that it happened, but more than that I hate the way it's remembered.

I hate that the media made it a frenzy of fear and defiance and righteousness and an annual ratings party. I hate that a lot of Americans confused patriotism with arrogance, and that despite the love for our fellow man that was in the air in the days following, our country ended up as divided as I've ever seen it in the years since. I hate that 9/11 gave Bush momentum and got us in a war that has so far claimed the lives of more than:

- 4,330+ American soldiers
- 304 soldiers from other countries
- 1,395 civilian employees
- 423 Iraqi academics
- 139 working journalists
- 100,000+ Iraqi civilians

I hate that still, 8 years later, there is a hole in Lower Manhattan that I will see for the third time in my life in a couple months, a hole that isn't helping that amazing city heal. I hate to think about the horror those people who were on those planes felt before they died. I hate that their fear was transferred to the people who jumped out of the World Trade Center to avoid burning to death. I hate that the workers who swept up that mess are living with a lasting lung disease and god only knows what kind of nightmares. I hate that they still don't have free, unconditional access to comprehensive health care.

Talk about a boot in the ass.

Shoe Fetish... turns out it's genetic

2009-09-10T17:45:00.000-07:00

My Grandma Scott loves shoes. I love shoes. Leiah loves shoes. There's something about shoes and Scott DNA, and considering Scott DNA also comes with white trash tendencies, social alcoholism, and a carton of Chesterfield Kings, I'm pretty grateful I got the shoe thing.

This weekend, while Leiah and I were in Columbus for our cousin Kevin's wedding, we decided we needed a pair of backup shoes in case our primary shoes didn't accommodate all the secret dancing we planned on doing. Betsy and Magnolia (another cousin) acquiesed to our good logic, and the four of us, with Ben on our heels, headed into a Payless.

The four ladies branched out looking for something that would do our tootsies justice. But Ben found just what he was looking for within seconds of coming into the store.

A pair of camel-colored wedges in a size 7.
You should have seen this kid clunking around the Payless, looking in the mirror and remarking about how good his shoes look. After the newness wore off the wedges, he found some pointy-toed pantent leather heels and tried those on. And then he walked out the door of the Payless all by himself.
With stylish back-ups in hand and Ben cleared of theft charges, we headed to the reception. Leiah decided to abandon her ruffly red heels about half way through and switch to the red patent flats courtesy of Payless. She made this decision while Ben was half naked on a sofa with poop covered balls getting his diaper changed by Gigi. Ben went bezerk for those shoes when he saw them come off his mom's feet, and the only way to get him to stop squirming and get the crap off his boy parts was to promise he could put on the ruffly red shoes when he was finished.

The power of negotiating with a shoe junkie.

He got up, put on his ruffly red heels, and pranced back into the reception, where he proceeded to walk around in circles on the dance floor like he was leading a conga line of 1.

I just like this is all.

2009-09-04T08:05:00.000-07:00

I was listening to NPR the other day and they ran a piece by Andrei Codrescu, a Romania-born poet who used to teach at LSU and writes for and edits a cool little brain sizzle called Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Letters & Life.

The piece, which I googled for about an hour before finally finding it, is called "Notes on the Mustache." I couldn't find him reading it on NPR, even though he now has a regular radio show called Poet on Call, but I did find it written out and still love it. It speaks to the life of the 'stache in a way that's perfectly synched to my experience with father figures.

Enjoy.

"The mustache, once a ubiquitous symbol of manhood, has nearly disappeared in America. It still turns up here and there, but mainly in conjunction with a beard. Nearly all American men are cleanly shaven now. Our enemies, on the other hand, all have mustaches.

"Saddam Hussein's mustache, a direct quotation of Stalin's mustache, now identifies the bad guys. A hairless upper lip denotes sincerity now, while the horizontal parenthesis of the mustache encloses something hidden and menacing, pointing to a lie. Tracing the history of the mustache would be a worthwhile project for a political anthropologist who might want to study its career from Neitzche's depressing, downward pointing mustache, through Hitler's frozen hairy snot, Stalin's lippy scimitar, Dali's upward pointining antennae (through which he communicated with aliens), all the way to Saddam's face brush (which seems to crawl with germ warfare in the current depictions).

"I am not an anthropologist, so I'll keep this personal. I was born with a mustache, a fact that scared the nurses at the hospital and freaked our neighbors when my mother brought me home. My mother had to love me because that was her job, but I often woke up terrified in the middle of the night as she hovered over me with a shaving brush full of white soap. I always screamed and she never got me.

"Luckily, I was born in a world of swarthy mustachioed men and I became anonymous around the age of fifteen. Later, it was the Sixties and young people raised mustaches for protest. The American mustache of the Sixties, in connection with long hair, was a glyph of rebellion. Businessmen and soldiers were clean-shaven because they had to be. Nobody wanted to be mustacheless, but the military-industrial complex required it.

"When the Sixties ended and Nixon's clean-shaven mug became a rubber mask some people wore for fun, the severity and strain represented by the fighting mustache relaxed. In time, mustaches grayed and became a sign of old age rather than youth. Every year since, the number of mustaches eradicated by American men rose steadily until at some point in the mid-Eighties you could count more shaven heads than --- staches.

"My own was eliminated one morning in Venice, Italy, when I looked in the mirror and saw an old man staring back. Venetian mirrors are famous for spooking people, so I just closed my eyes and took the plunge. I had never seen my upper lip, which turned out to have a pretty big angel's finger-depression in it, which explains why my memory isn't what it should be.

"Since then, I have become anonymous again, but I can't suppress two suspicions: one, that my mother shaved me, and two, that if I still had it I might be one of the bad guys."

Miller High Life

2009-09-03T11:52:00.000-07:00

Until last weekend I hadn't seen Jen since I met Milo. During the swirl of events leading up to her wedding, I got to see her on an almost weekly basis, but since that's died down and she's shifted from Miller to Kelly and been running marathons and adopting cats like some kind of addict, our visits had become way too infrequent.

So, this past weekend we planned a little girly get-together in Cincinnati at Jen's house, where the kitties make you want to steal and the main ingredient in all the food is love. I've visited Jen everywhere she has ever lived, and every time I look forward to it like it's a vacation. I know I'm going to sleep in a bed cleaner than any bed I've ever slept in, eat delicious foods made from scratch and come to know a relaxation that my chaos coping mechanisms won't allow.

It's a little joke between us that the only thing missing from Jen retreats is the chocolate on the pillow. Well, this weekend, Jen had even paid attention to that little detail.

Let me just tell you how it started. I clunked around Saturday morning in a rush to get some work done and get out of town. I left a mess of a dollhouse in the corner and undone dishes in the sink, threw my toothbrush and some clothes in a shopping bag, and hopped in the car. To go from that frenzy state to a Jen state literally lifts the fog out of your mind.

I walked into Jen's house, which is remarkably comfortable despite its pristine state, and was greeted by the smell of homemade minestrone soup on the stove top. And, since that just wouldn't look pretty enough in a bowl by itself, Jen had baked up a fresh loaf of basil beer bread to go with it. She'd also already been on a 7 mile jog that morning.
To recap, I had sat on a computer, grabbed my toothbrush, and driven to Cincinnati in the same time Jen had run 7 miles, made a homemade soup and baked a loaf of bread.

While the bread was finishing baking, Jen pulled out some veggies and prepped a breakfast casserole for the next morning. I drank a V8.
At that point I asked if she wanted to marry me and Mack and be our wife. Or, if Mack was a deal breaker, would she just marry me and bring Milo to replace Mack?

Lucky for Mike, she's happily married.

Since I've been having kitty fever, a condition which can be directly blamed on Jen, I was super excited to also visit Milo and meet Daisy (of Love). Since kitty sitting Milo, Mack and I have joked that when we do get a cat, we need to send it to Jen to get it the right way. We will ruin it. We ruin anything we're supposed to take care of for more than 12 consecutive hours.
Those two cats. That's all I can say. They lick each other and wrestle each other and vie for the seat in front of the back door and play tug of war with a shoe string. They are Pete-and-Repeat at ridiculous proportions. Daisy would lay on the window sill, which was barely big enough for her tiny body... Milo would lay on the window sill, with half of him resting lopsided on the back of the couch.
The kitty watching was a blast, but we did venture out of the house to go to the Art Museum and see the impossible things people do with wood. Then we went to the Krohn Conservatory and learned about bonsais. Then we went out for Thai food. Finally we retreated back to the Jen Inn and got down to the serious business of relaxing with a glass of wine while watching a funny movie.

Finally, I got some Jen time.

A French Slip of the Tongue

2009-09-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I had a dream that Mack was gay with his friend Rob and had decided to leave me for the male persuasion. I was all snotty from sad about it, but he was business as usual... except for the being gay part.

Not even Shahin had sympathy for me. She was like, "Well, people are born that way. You can't change it." And then she hauled another box of my stuff out of the house.

I told Mack about it so he'd know why I was mad at him, and since Rob is like a pet, I told him about it too. It started out like this, "Please promise me you won't be stealing my husband with your gay love." And then we got into all the gritty details about the threesome in the bathtub with this girl named Colleen, who was playing the role of mattress more than seductress, and how judo was the gateway to gay.

Well, things were on the mend and we were all laughing about it by the time Mack and Rob came home from judo tonight. I was taking the recycling out when I saw them walking up the sidewalk with another judo friend, this one a new recruit living in Lexington as a refugee from Congo. He hasn't been here long and knows no English. But French, he knows French.

Rob comes in and while he's washing his hands in the bathroom, we joke about the dream. As our conversation continues in the kitchen, where the Congo man is standing, I say, "Yeah, we know how you like a menage a trois."

So here's this skinny refugee guy who knows nothing about me and Mack and Rob, and Rob walks in like he owns the place, and I just touched the guy on the back and gestured inward to try to get him to come away from the door and take a seat, and now we're talking about menage a trois. It'd be like if I went to Iran and was there for one minute, just inside the door and someone patted me on the back and then two seconds later said "gang bang" amidst an ocean of Farsi.

I have no idea what ran through his mind at that point, but he was gone within 5 minutes. C'est la vie.

Uh, Smokey, this looks like trouble...

2009-08-31T15:51:00.000-07:00

The forest fires in LA became a fixture in our lives while we were out there. The city is such a mess of concrete that it seems like it's be impossible to incinerate it, but the forest surrounding the city is desert delicate. So much so that Mack's dad once got pulled over for throwing his cigarette out the window while he was driving.

One of the biggest fires last year, the one where a bunch of celebrities lost their homes, threatened to take out the Getty Villa and lots of them have come dangerously close to the incredible Griffith Observatory, the incomparable Hollywood Bowl and the famed Hollywood sign. During that one, we went to get in our car and saw these chunks of dust swirling around, thinking what could this be? Then we realized the fire was making it rain ash in our neck of the woods, so much so that a layer had landed on our car and had to be dusted off.

I found this footage of the fire they're dealing with now, and whoa. It is unbelievable.

This is not going to be good for the housing crisis...

I think it's called association...

2009-08-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

I'm learning about electrons and reduction and oxidation and covalent bonds and polarity. Which is to say that I'm learning funny little shortcuts like "the story of the lion"... wherein if you Lose Electrons there's Oxidation (LEO) and if you Gain Electrons there's Reduction (GER).

Those funny little shortcuts made me remember these photos of white tigers that I stumbled across recently on the book of magical things known as the Internet, and if this whole thing isn't the universe's way of telling me to go on safari, I don't know what is.

a National Geographic photo of the day of a diving tiger

a retarded tiger... I never really thought about a retarded tiger before

Summer Times

2009-08-28T05:48:00.000-07:00

Since summer is winding down and my life hiatus of the last 6 months is coming to an end, well, it's making me need a vacation.

Or at least a look back at one of the best yet.

Nitsirk spelled backwards is Kristin

2009-08-27T18:27:00.000-07:00

Kristin is one of my favorite people in the entire world. Not only does she know how to make world-class gravy, but she is also never without snacks and is always, always, always up for some fun. Plus, she is adorable in a blinged-out, over-sized Escalade with her seat totally erect.

Well, Miss Nitsirk stopped in from Vegas last weekend for Granny's birthday and Ryan's birthday, and to celebrate her special appearance, the birthdays and Will's acceptance to UNLV (shout out Will!), I followed her to Marikka's, where I ran into some old(er than Ryan) pals. You may have heard of them before... Brett, Jon & Amy.

At one point cameras came out like crazy so I joined in to capture the debauchery brought to you by Washington Apples. The next day was a struggle, but that night was a total blast.
* Sorry to anyone I may have pinched or whose nipples I may have tweaked.

Things I Learned at School Today

2009-08-21T07:16:00.001-07:00

This education stuff is fascinating. Even though 85% of the people at my school are morons.

Today in my developmental psych class we watched a video (watching a video on the first day of actual class... is that a copout?) about conception and sex and birth. It was a typical school video in its sterility, but I couldn't believe how they'd captured the clips that make up the film. They filmed an ejaculation from INSIDE the body, so you could see all the man spunk shoot at the woman's cervix. Then they zoomed in ridiculously close to the fallopian tube lining and on sperm with gimpy necks. It was incredible.

The big takeaway for me was that sperm have it rough. They are like little soldiers put in impossible situations, and yet somehow, babies are born all the time. For instance, when the sperm is in the man's body, it's dangling in a sack in his hot crotch trying not to cook to death. Then, when he leaves the hot sack, he and millions of his buddies have to swim up the littlest, most cramped tube and out the shaft of the penis before they even get to the vagina. Once they hit the battleground, the vagina tries to kill them with acid. If they survive that, cells in the vagina start eating them alive. If they make it past the vagina, the cervix squirts out this sedcutive little river to make it easier for them to swim through, sort of like a little temptress who's luring them deeper into a trap. Most of them get disoriented and just ram against the wall and die. Those who make it through, they have to swim UPSTREAM through the fallopian tubes. There are little cilia in the fallopian tubes that actually create a current that makes their mission even more impossible. And then, even after they swim all that way and if they don't die before they make it to the ovary, then they might realize, oh crap, this is the wrong freaking ovary! There's no egg here!

So millions of sperm set out to find the egg and usually only about 50 make it. Which means, as Mack pointed out, we start out the best of the best and it's all downhill from there.

Also, do you know why the U.S. isn't on the metric system? Would it suprise you to know that Thomas Jefferson tried to adopt the metric system back when he was president? Would it suprise you even more to know that his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, tried to acclimate people to the metric system by switching our money from shillings and pounds to dollars and cents? Would you be floored that I now know that's why Hamilton is on the $10 bill? And since they redid the money recently, Hamilton is looking like one sexy metric system supporter.