appreciating the banal in life

This week I woke up one morning and, as is my wont, checked my email and Facebook before getting ready to drive the children to school.  I learned that in the middle of the night my friends' warehouse had burned down.  They had jumped out of a second floor to safety, throwing their two dogs down (tragically their other two dogs were not reachable and died in the fire).  Both my friends were in the hospital.

These are friends who are in the peak of life, just married a couple of weeks ago at Burning Man (it is the groom who built the cathedral, with the paltry assistance my friend N. and I could offer).  Now one is facing a couple of months in a burn unit, having already had two surgeries and with the prospect of many more.  The other one has just been released but is in a wheelchair.  They are homeless and have lost most of their possessions.

The Sober Husband and I resolved to check our smoke detector's batteries.  We have only the one working, upstairs.  We renewed our perennial squabble over having one on the ground floor.  I offered to try one out in the living room.   Long ago I took the controversial move of disabling the one near our kitchen, as it went off every single time I cooked, mistaking steam for smoke.  I don't even burn things, but that damn smoke detector was convinced I was a menace, and I couldn't have it screaming at me when I was trying to make dinner.  The dented ceiling still bears witness to the days when I'd jab up at the fire detector with a broom, angrily trying to silence that damn thing.  The smoke detector in the bedroom I have nothing but fond feelings for, however, and I'd be willing to try forming a relationship with another well-behaved, better-positioned one.

This week has been a dull one for me.  Lola spent a day home ill from school.  I've had a couple of unpleasant social encounters lately that have left me holing up at home, associating only with the children most days.  But rather than feel disgruntled, I'm happy to have the luxury to be in my home with my pets and children.  I'm not in a burn ward facing rounds of skin grafts.  I'm not having to replace all my things.  I'm lucky.

I went to a bookstore and bought a replacement copy of the book my friend was reading when her home was burnt down and added it to a bag of yuppie food treats to give her a break from the hospital fare, and I dropped it off for her at SF General without seeing her (she was tired, and I didn't want to bother her with having to make conversation).  If my house ever burns down, that's what I'd want done for me personally:  bring me whatever book I was in the middle of and some decent food.  The surviving dogs have already been taken in by other friends.

"What are you going to do for J.?" asked Iris.  Unfortunately I can't send food to my other friend, as the burn ward has very strict rules allowing only cards to be sent to patients (burn victims are at great risk of infection, and who knows what germs could be lurking in a bag of upscale food).  "I'm going to draw him a homemade card," I said, "with him thinking, 'I need some real #(&@ carpenters' while N. and I are trying to build the cathedral."

Check your smoke detectors' batteries, everyone.

bruised but unbowed

I ran off to Burning Man this year and came limping home a few days earlier than planned to recover in the bosom of my loving family.   My psychiatrist was taken aback from this.  "Usually you don't want to come back from Burning Man, and you gain energy from it," he mused.

I nodded.  "Not this year."

So what happened?  First I went early in order to work on my theme camp's highly ambitious building, the Jerk Church Cathedral.  Skilled members of the camp had drawn up plans for a three story Gothic building; we had done the fundraising; the pieces had been cut and painted in the Bay Area already.  I was excited about this, thinking that it would be a lot of fun being with the artists and workers creating the event, learning valuable carpentry skills while watching the city arise around us and undoubtedly celebrating every night, long before the regular attendees arrived.  I negotiated a deal with the shrewd Iris where I was allowed to leave town before her birthday, eager to head out to the dust.

The reality was that when my friend N. and I arrived at night, earlier rains had caused the organizers to shut down the gates.  We spent over three hours sitting in our cars, and we had to sneakily pee by the side of the parked traffic (luckily not getting a stiff fee for it, as this year the BLM ticketed several Burning Man workers for peeing in the wild).  We pulled in after midnight and threw up our tents and crawled into them.

In the morning we put up our shade shelter and unpacked a bit, setting up what was supposed to be our home for the next ten days.  We were nowhere near done when we were informed that we were already late for our work shift.  J., the lead carpenter, was fuming.  No one had shown up to work.  No one.  N. and I were the sole crew, and we were, to put it mildly, "underskilled."  The sun blazed down, and we worked under the directions of an increasingly tightly wound foreman.  By the time we went to bed, we were exhausted.  "J, you're running a fat camp," said N. the next day.

Virtually everyone failed to show up for their volunteer shifts.  N. and I worked every day and every night.  Some more skilled people did come by.  One extremely talented carpenter got fired from his paid position building the Burning Man base and spent the morning working with us, as well as drinking my beer and telling N. and me his problems, but sadly for us he was rehired by Burning Man at lunchtime.

By the weekend more skilled people had arrived, so N. and I were demoted from the slightly more interesting tasks we'd been doing (we'd learned to wield an impact driver and to assemble the support structures, but we were back to carrying things, holding things, picking up things, fetching ice for J.'s cooler, and so on).  The sun still blazed down.  We were steadily acquiring a variety of small injuries:  blisters, a burn on my thumb shaped just like a wishbone, bruises.  The worst little injury occurred when we finally felt we could take a break from construction to finish setting up our own camp, and a fiberglass pole shattered in my thumb, leaving long, painful shards blocking the joint.  A friend volunteered to excavate this and cut most of it out with an very much not sterile knife.  I exhibited the gory shards to everyone, who were all suitably disgusted and impressed (I still have fiberglass shards visible in that thumb today).  A rash on the tops of my legs began to intensify and became scary.  I had several atrial fibrillation attacks.  My body was clearly unhappy.

On Sunday night the gates opened for regular attendees.  Exhausted by a day of construction under the hot sun, we Jerks were sleeping when we were awakened around three a.m. by a man shouting over an amplified sound system. "IT'S MY FIRST TIME DJ'ING AT BURNING MAN!"  Hours of terrible, distorted dubstep ensued.  Everyone looked homicidal the next morning as we went back to building.

Monday the deadline pressure was high:  we needed to finish the cathedral for a wedding the next day.  A bored girl said loudly to her friend as she passed, "They are always working on that thing!" in a Valley girl accent, and we took to repeating that to each other.  "Oh my God, they are always working on that thing!"  Lots of people were on hand, and we finally finished up in the middle of the night.

The cathedral was stunning when it was done.  The wedding was moving and delightful, two well-suited people getting married in a beautiful church one of them had built for the occasion.  Then the congratulatory drinking began, and the groom told me that he and one of his attendees were going to fight over at the infamous Thunderdome.  "I want to fight at Thunderdome," I said artlessly, and he cut me off, sneering.  "You couldn't handle it.  One blow to the head, and you'd be out.  Concussion!"

"I have a big head," I said challengingly.  I hate being told that there is something I can't do, and a six foot-tall lesbian who works a blue collar job jumped on the chance.  "I'll fight you," she said.  I agreed to this in the heat of the moment, and we all hopped on an art car which had been arranged to carry the wedding party over to the Thunderdome festively.

While we watched the groom and his attendant fight, the groom still in his wedding suit, I had second thoughts.  "This skirt is really expensive," I said.  "I should come back another day, when I'm dressed for it."  "Just lose the skirt," said my insistent campmate.

"I should have some kind of handicap," I said, looking at my larger, stronger companion.  "Let's just agree not to hit each other in the face.  That's our moneymaker: the face."  She agreed.

The groom's fight was short and weak.  Soon we were being hustled in and strapped in.  At Thunderdome, the two fighters are armed with pugil sticks (bats with a protective padding around one end) and launched at each other by bungee cords.  I normally do not like losing control over where my body is, but the adrenaline and endorphins took over.  They launched us at each other, and we came out fighting viciously, me in my underpants, crashing together and injuring all of our four collective knees.  They pulled us apart from each other, with us struggling to get more blows in, and then relaunched us at each other again, and we hit and hit at each other.  Finally they pulled us apart again, with us once more struggling to get more blows in.  "Relax, you won," the people on my side said as they disconnected me.  I gave a victory strut and flashed the crowd, and the very professional Thunderdome people pulled me off to the side.  "You're bleeding, you should see the medic," one said.  I hadn't noticed that I had a nosebleed.  "Give me your beer," I demanded to someone, and I rinsed the blood off my face with beer.  "No medic," I said posturingly.

"That was great," said one of my campmates wonderingly. "I would pay to see that kind of thing."

My opponent refused to accept that I had won.  To this day she is posting on Facebook arguing that she was unfairly "trumped by tits," refusing to take the point that I didn't flash anyone until AFTER my victory had been declared.  This is clearly seen on the video which my intrepid friend N. took, trampling many strangers to get a good angle, but still, my opponent won't admit that she lost.  The next morning she went to the medical tent to get a wrist brace and her knees bandaged, and I gave her some ibuprofen.

As for me, my left knee is still a bit wonky, and I still have some bruises from the many I sustained. over my thighs, shoulder and back.  For over a week after the fight, both of my knees were in constant agony.   It was horrendous trying to change position in bed, let alone ride a bike and run around Burning Man.

The final straw came when a rather innocuous mole-sort of growth on my neck, which I'd had for over a decade, began to bleed uncontrollably.  "You're bleeding," everyone who saw me informed me.  "I know," I said crossly.  It's too dry and hot at Burning Man for a bandaid to adhere (indeed I was having trouble with the multiple blisters on my feet, putting moleskin on several times a day over a base layer of stinging liquid bandaid).

"I can't take it," I said to N.  "Everyone's telling me I'm bleeding.  I gotta go home."  My knees, my bruises, my mangled hands, my atrial fibrillations, my rash, and this annoying blood dripping down my throat:  it was just all too much.  "I think I am getting too old for this."

The easy-going N. agreed, and on the spur of the moment we threw all of our dusty belongings into our cars and drove away.  The children and husband were thrilled to see me four days ahead of plan.  Carrying some of my luggage into the house, a bag swung and struck me on the left knee, drawing blood, and I let out a howl.  I showed them my knees.  "You should have seen the other person," I said.  If you're going to come crawling home a physical wreck, at least you should be able to brag of a mighty victory won in your underpants over a larger, stronger opponent.

working, working, working out of a funk

The month of July was a very hard month for me.  It felt like I fell into a funk out of the blue, but talking things over with my psychiatrist, I was able to identify a number of uncontrollable stresses which had all struck at the same time.  My funk wasn't the random act of craziness it might have appeared to be, say, to a sane bystanding husband.

It is pathetic to be a middle-aged person who lives in a nice house in a beautiful city with a husband, cats, parrots, and vivacious children who is depressed.  Very, very pathetic.  I have been working to pull myself out of that funk, with extreme exercise when I am healthy (I seem to pick up viruses like clockwork), antidepressants, and avoiding stressful situations when I can.

During the worst of the funk, while I was trying to keep myself out of the darker abysses, I saw one of those extra annoying posts on Facebook.  A friend wrote about an amazing vacation day filled with adventures, love, and decadent desserts, capping it up with, "I love my life!"  At the time I was devoting myself to keeping my head out of the oven, metaphorically speaking (my beloved Aga is a lifegiver, not a machine of death).  Usually I'm not prey to the Facebook my-life-sucks-compared-to-yours demon, but it hit me that day, and it hit hard.  I fretted about how I don't go on vacations, I don't travel, I deny myself fattening foods, I budget, I have no life comparatively.  Not wanting to slide down into the abyss, I gave myself a shake. I told myself that I needed to stay off Facebook if I was going to let it upset me.

Over time I pulled myself out of the worst of that funk, and my psychiatrist congratulated me on my self care and improvement.  Then I read another update from that same friend, sharing that the friend had been fired for seeking accommodation at work for severe depression .... before the "I love my life!" post.  That person was vacationing and adventuring to fill up free time from having been fired.  I was stunned.  How ironic that this person's cheering-the-self-up to cope with depression had triggered and worsened my own.  I wondered:  do the depressed owe one another a duty not to post life-gloating updates?  Or do I owe the world a duty not to post "I'm in a funk" updates, which I have been guilty of in dark moments?  In any event, Facebook is not for the fragile.  

scholasticism meets "King of the Hill"

The children and I were unwinding one late evening, watching a couple of "King of the Hill" episodes.  I was exhausted from a grueling workout earlier in the day; the children were tired as well.

Their father entered the room, ignoring our enrapt viewing, and asked Iris some questions about a potential new humanities teacher for her school whom she had met.  His voice booming, he asked, "Does anyone know what 'humanities' is?"  A couple of us, trying to quiet him down, offered definitions, but he would not be bought off.  His voice ever louder, he proclaimed, "Humanities is a rejection of scholasticism!"  He laughed at his own wit.  Everyone else gazed raptly at the cartoon Texans, intensely beaming out "be quiet and leave us with our lowbrow entertainment" thought rays.

the joys of being thinner

Recently the Sober Husband gave me an impromptu piggyback ride.  I haven't had a piggyback ride from anyone since I was in college, and it was charming, despite the intended squashing of my joy from a certain child, who said, "Did you just squeal?  Seriously?" to me.   Certainly this would never have happened when I was significantly larger, and it was delightful.

Clothes shopping has also been much more delightful.  I tried on a corset dress at a funky boutique on Haight Street, just pulled off the rack at a store which doesn't carry particularly large sizes, and heard those most delicious of words from the salesman:  "You could go down a size, if you want."  

Shoes are also more fun.  I've taken to wearing stilettos whenever there is the slightest excuse.  I previously was under the impression that the reason I couldn't bear to wear insanely high heels was due to my advancing age, but it turned out that once I dropped some weight, my aging feet were game, just like in my twenties.   

As well as judging the squealing, the children are not so enthused about their mother nimbly darting about in corset dresses and stiletto shoes.  Clearly it is not age appropriate.  "Since I'm not employed, I could dress like that every day," I confided to one, who cast me a side eye and sighed heavily.  

we will stay until the end

Recently I heard about an experimental theatre performance taking place on the beach.  A number of plays will be staged in one evening, with the participants meeting outdoors and being led around to the plays.  The performers are from New York, flying out for this event, and I'm not sure if they realize how chilly it is going to be at night on a beach in San Francisco during our "summer."  I signed us up to attend, though, as we all love the theatre.  Bonus:  Iris can get extra credit at her school for attending plays over the summer.

Reminding the Sober Husband about this outing, I said, "Of course, we can leave early if it sucks."  But! Lola has never forgotten the one blissful evening she saw an experimental theatre troupe and did not like this crazy talk of slipping out.  "We are staying until the end.  Even if it is terrible.  We will stay until everything is done.  We will see everything there is to see.  Even if it is terrible," decreed the little theatre devotee.    She went on in this rather repetitive vein for some time, with relish.  "If someone has a heart attack, too bad; we stay!"  I began to wonder if she hoped this performance would tank.

playing ping pong with Iris and Lola

We spent last week on our annual trip to Camp Mather, the rustic cabins in the Sierras owned by SF Rec and Parks.  No internet access, no cellphone coverage, no televisions, no cats -- just hours and hours of fresh air and sunlight with the family.

At one point the Sober Husband agreed to indulge me in a game of badminton, and the badminton-loathing children decided to play ping pong instead.  There are several ping pong tables, scattered throughout the trees near the mess hall, out of sight from the badminton court, which is in a sort of valley behind the general store.  We played badminton for a long time, getting a good workout, eventually joined by our offspring, who said nothing about their ping pong match.

The next day Lola reported to me what happened.  "So we were playing ping pong, and I got tired of picking up the balls.  So the next time one went out, I didn't pick it up.  And Iris said, 'Lucy, get the ball,' and I said I was tired of it.  So she looked at me like this [commanding gaze], and I looked at her like this [one eyebrow lifted].  And we waited.  Then Iris had to go to the bathroom, and she said she expected when she returned to see the ping pong ball had been picked up, and I looked around and found another one.  So when she got back, she said, 'I see you picked up the ball', and I showed her that ball was still on the ground.  Then we played until that ball went on the ground, and then neither of us would pick it up.  So we were staring at each other.  Then Phil (a family friend) walked by, and he gave us a ball.  So we played until THAT ball went on the ground.  And then we decided to go watch you play badminton."

We saw Phil and his family later, and I told Lola to tell the full story to them. Afterward, Phil said reflectively, "In my version of that, I was much more active.   I was like a hero."  

"Instead, you were a pawn in the Iris-Lola conflict," I said.  

the bartender has cut me off

Today I took some foster kittens in to get booster shots.

"I want to keep this one," I artlessly confided to the head of my rescue.

"Well, I'm sure you can't," she said dismissively.

the exciting prospect

I have a milestone birthday looming in a year and a half, and I mentioned it today as we were all walking to the car together.  "What should we do for it?"

"Have a big party," said Iris.

"No, go on a trip.  Go to Greece!" said the Sober Husband.

Lola interrupted.  "I have just one question for you.  What do you want done with your body?"

"Oh, Lola.  Do you have to ask that in such a cheery voice?"  So nice to know that Lola is cheered by thoughts of disposal of my corpse.

hair

Before taking little Lola to school, I said, "Brush your hair!"

"Hair doesn't need to be brushed," said Lola defiantly.  She explained that in olden times, people did not brush your hair.  "It is not necessary."  After brushing aside some objections from her mother, Lola continued.  Hair is happier unbrushed, she feels.

The next day the topic was revived.  Lola was undeterred.  "Hair will live on if it isn't brushed!  Well, actually, it's dead."  She intends to write an article about how unnecessary it is to brush hair for the next issue of the children's newspaper for which she toils.  (That will follow her current opus, on the state of cancer research, and prior articles intended to introduce hipsters to new music and convince her father to let her start farming chickens).

how he remembers

Yesterday I went for a walk with the Sober Husband, to get some exercise and also have a chance to talk to him without distractions.  Among other things, I reminded him, "You do know that Mother's Day is this weekend, right?"

"There was an ad for it on Reddit, so I do know," he said, proud of himself.

"See, online advertising does work!"

"No!  I didn't see the ad.  It was blocked.  A bunch of guys were posting about it, thanking Reddit for reminding them.  I saw that."

Thank God for Reddit!

the glamorous life

Over the next few months, thirteen year-old Iris will be flying to New York for a conference, backpacking in the Yosemite back country, and attending the prestigious Shakespeare festival in Ashland, Oregon.   Next year she'll be traveling to Japan for two weeks.

Meanwhile her mother's plans are to sit around the house surfing the internet, accompanied by a rotating selection of feral cats.

Lola

THIS IS LOLA

The play I recently went to, The Great Big Also, was very good.  Before it started, though, I had low expectations. The last play I went to at that place had been quite boring. The actors read their lines sitting in chairs and straight off the script. 

I read the program, and it seemed pretty good, so I still thought it would be read in chairs off scripts but with a good subject. But yes, I still thought it wouldn't be very good.

I went in, and they asked me if I would leave everything behind for a new life. I said no. I couldn't leave Zorro (my cat) behind. And I like my life.

They split us off into different rooms. I went into one at a corner. The thing is, the rooms were separated with paper. The walls were just paper, with some doors cut out. 

It was very good. I can't really explain it, that's the thing, but I really liked it. 

Then I left and it was over.

Before I left, at one point they came in groups of one or two, explaining different things they did. The first one that came to my group talked about NASA space blankets and how they can be used ("Prevent hypothermia! Help to start fires! They can even make a lean-to!"). The next people that came talked about some sort of "Remember When" charades. It's just charades, but to remember good stuff about the past. And the last group I got was two people talking about "If something is missing from the room, you can say it and everyone will get that feeling." One family member said that they wanted to say intelligence was missing from the room but they didn't. The first example was loyalty. Then, eventually, one of the two tried to say cooperation but in the middle started to cough. That repeated while the first one was flushed and trying to keep the thing going. 

That caused almost everyone to start to cough and do weird stuff.

My favorite part was at the beginning, when everyone was getting to their rooms, and people were just talking with whatever crazy people was in their rooms. It was nice.

The end.

Lola experiences perfection

At Iris's school, the end of the seventh grade is largely about the theatre.  The students study and stage Shakespeare, and they spend much of their time learning about drama.  Actors have been brought in to work with them (Iris reported, in tones of great disgust, that before the actors arrived, the students were cautioned to be kind and polite to them, as actors are very sensitive).

The students are encouraged to attend as many plays as possible, with academic credit given, and we've been attempting to rise to this occasion.  So far we've taken Iris to five plays, with another one coming up in a few days.

Over the weekend we went to an experimental theatre piece, "The Great Big Also", by a company called Mugwumpin.  I knew it would be interactive, but none of us were quite prepared for how it unfolded.  (If you are in San Francisco and enjoy experimental theatre and trust Lola's judgment, stop reading to avoid spoilers and just go buy your tickets).   The lobby had been subtly staged.  Most of the audience members didn't really interact with the things in the lobby, but we did.  It appeared to be the living quarters of the group called "the New Settlers", and I suspected some of the performance would take place out there.

The performers came through the lobby occasionally, doing different things, and they would take small groups of people back into the theatre occasionally.  Finally a cast member came to us and asked us if we were ready.  She took the four of us and an unknown man back, checking if we were ready to spend 80 minutes with her, and asked us if we would be willing to leave our civilization for a new one.  I said maybe, the stranger said yes, and the Sober Husband and children said firmly no.  She appeared to be taking us on a tour of the facilities, but the first thing she did was to get rid of me:  she turned to me and asked me to stay in a small cubicle, where I could take a stool from a pile.  "Don't worry, it won't always be like this," she said, leaving with my family and the stranger.  The Sober Husband asked me if I was okay being left, and I, who like to go with the flow in these circumstances, said yes.

I looked around.  The others in my little cubicle (we were in a corner of a structure made of Tyvek) had also been separated from their friends.  We talked.  Things began to happen.  I thought the actor would come back to get me, but she never did.  I regretted parting from my family.  We waited on our little stools, occasionally chatting, and sometimes cast members would pass through or walk past us or speak to the people in neighboring cubicles.  Eventually we realized that this was the show and that it had already begun.

For me the performance was largely overcast by my feeling of anxiety about Lola.  She was the only child at the show (teenaged Iris being the only other minor), and I worried that something would scare her.  I couldn't see her.  I peered into the other three cubicles bordering mine, but none of my family members could be seen.  I imagined they were all together, and this made me feel sorry for myself.  I'd been in a funk that day beforehand, and being isolated from my family made it worse.  I did talk to some fun young women in my zone, but we were joined by an unfriendly man who wouldn't make eye contact.  There was also a dating couple in our tiny zone who were not interacting with anyone else but constantly touching each other, and that made me feel more isolated.

The odd events, dances, speeches, and bits of performance that made up this odd and engaging piece about settlers (cultists?) awaiting an apocalypse went on, and I kept fretting for Lola (I was sure the preternaturally poised Iris was fine).  After nearly an hour, the Tyvek partitions were raised in the air, removing some of the barriers and creating larger pens with more people in them, but I still couldn't see any of the family.  Finally I sneaked out of my zone (I was the only person I saw doing this) and surreptitiously made my way around the barriers until I reached Lola.

Lola was fine.  She was sitting enrapt on a stool, watching everything she could see.  The Sober Husband was not far from her (I found out later that their rooms were merged when the partitions were raised partway).  I didn't find Iris until the show was nearly over, and she was skeptically gazing from the sidelines.

At the end, I confessed the experience had largely been ruined for me by worrying about Lola and by feeling bereft, that I was the one singled out to be cut off from the group.  I'd have felt less left out if I'd known everyone had been separated and parked in different zones and how happy Lola was. "It was like a party in my room!" said Lola merrily.  Evidently all the hipsters in her cubicle were charmed by the idea of a ten year-old attending this experimental theatre.  "They all wanted to know why I was there, and I said, 'My sister is doing a report on the theatre,'" said Lola.  "I told them all my name.  We talked and talked."  When anything happened, Lola intently absorbed it.

For the next couple of days, we spent a lot of time discussing the performance.  Parts of it were visible to each of us, and we didn't all see the same things.  Lola found everything enchanting about it.  I suggested she might find it inspirational for her own writing, and she strongly demurred.  "It was like perfection, and now I have it in my body," she said dreamily.  If she tried to base something upon it, it wouldn't measure up to the sublime experience she'd had.

I could relate.  When I was much younger, I ate at Fleur de Lys for the first time, experiencing perhaps the world's finest and most expensive vegetarian cooking.  I left feeling I had experienced food at a level I had never imagined, and I stopped cooking for some time.  "I can't make food like that," I said, "so I don't want to try."  My ex-husband complained bitterly that if he'd known what would happen, he'd have never taken me there, but I didn't care.  I had experienced perfection.  And now so has Lola.

too personal

Iris is in the process of applying for a scholarship, which would enable her to go to the private high school of her choice, most expenses paid.  It's a lot of work, this scholarship, and it's been stressful for her.  She's in the last stretch, writing the essays, and I wanted to be helpful.  I remembered that I had been invited to apply for a sort of genius camp as a teen, for the 99.9th percentile of young geniuses, and I didn't have anyone to help me with my essays.  In retrospect I am sure what I turned in was embarrassingly pathetic compared to what the other applicants must have written, applicants from academic families or from private schools where someone would have assisted them with the essays, and I got turned down flat.

Later in life I went on to get a degree in journalism summa cum laude and learn to write essays good enough to get me into graduate programs at Stanford and elsewhere, as well as how to write fabulous legal briefs and motions.  So I offered to Iris that I would be happy to work with her, to read her drafts, and to be a supportive and uncritical reader.

Her response?  "I think I'll get [Teacher] to read them. "  A pause.  "They're kind of personal."

life cycles continue

Today I'm mourning a fellow crazy cat lady and former Modern Primitive who died yesterday at far too young an age, and also some unexpected news arrived about a birth.

The Sober Husband's brother sent him an email announcing that he is now a father of a baby girl. The email gave the name, weight, and length of the baby.... with no mention whatsoever of the nameless mother.  There was an attachment.... of a photo of a bakery. (The brother currently lives in Siberia, where he sells banana bread and teaches English).

 The Sober Husband was actually excited and happy about this.  His brother is the last person who should become a father, I pointed out. He's unstable, and selfish. And what is up with no mention of the mother? Not to mention that this baby was never mentioned before she was born.

Taking the moral high ground, the Sober Husband stated that a baby is always a miracle and always a thing of wonder, and that he for one looked forward to providing as much assistance as he possibly could at a distance.  I bit my tongue.  We took a huge pay cut this year, so that the Sober Husband could take a job at a fledgling start-up which would be more personally rewarding but hugely, hugely less lucrative.  I am always worried about money and fretting over our budget these days.  Any money sent to Siberia comes straight out of my hide.

Birth, death, what does tomorrow hold?  All I know is I'm not coping well with how the cycle of life is unfolding these days.

RIP Betsy

Back in the late eighties, I was an early member of what we called back then the Modern Primitive scene.  Nowadays piercing and tattooing are banal, but back then, it was difficult to pursue these things.  I got pierced in a leather shop's basement by a visiting pioneer of the scene, for example, whereas now the young people just go to the mall, and Haight St. is littered with piercing salons.

In those days one of the most strange and amazing things I ran across was an article in one of the earliest issues of PFIQ, which showed the most famous Modern Primitive, Fakir Musafar, before Re/SEARCH made him famous, doing something very bizarre.  The Fakir and a friend of his were chatting at the friend's tattoo parlor when another tattoo artist's wife had a brainwave:  these two men had stretched out their piercings so far that a neon tube would fit through.  She was a neon artist, and she decided to create neon which these men would wear.  The results were photographed at the Fakir's request, and he wrote an article about the experience.  The pictures were striking and weird, and I never forgot them.  (Incidentally about thirty years later, the Fakir's friend, the other man who sported the custom neon tubes, Ed Hardy, became extremely famous).

Later through a series of oddnesses the neon artist's husband became my tattoo artist.  By then he had divorced her and had a new wife, so I never met the woman behind that strange art during the years I acquired tattoos from him.

Fifteen years or so later I was at my cat rescue's annual kickoff, and a woman with striking brown eyes and a lot of tattoo art was there.  She was new to our rescue but not new to working with animals, and she was introduced as Betsy Berberian.  Feeling a bit like a stalker, I cornered her while she was enjoying a glass of wine and asked if she were the Betsy Berberian who had done the weird neon art I'd never forgotten, and she was.  We reminisced about the Modern Primitive days of the late eighties and early nineties; we talked about her ex-husband (I'd represented him as an attorney as well as being a client of his).

Betsy became a vital figure in our rescue, running the website and photographing our kittens.  I ran into her from time to time and always enjoyed talking to her.  She was making jewelry, and I bought the earrings right off her ears once at a rescue meeting.  Every time I talked to her, I thought I should try to spend more time with her, go out drinking with her, but our relationship remained at the Facebook friends and chatting when we ran into each other level.   I heard a month or so ago that Betsy was ill, but I didn't grasp the seriousness of it.  After all, Betsy was not old, she was energetic, she was full of life.

Today Betsy died.  It's a loss to the animals here in San Francisco and to the people who work to save them, and more than that, it's a loss to the world.  Someone so unusual and sprightly, so creative and passionate and odd, is no longer with us.  I'm so sorry I didn't buy more of your jewelry, Betsy; I'm so sorry I didn't pester you to come out with me.  I'm very glad I wasn't afraid to be thought a stalker and brought up your Modern Primitive escapades.  RIP, Betsy Berberian.

crazy cat lady tricks

I am a crazy cat lady who can attract the envy and wonder of strangers and neighbors alike.

How can that be?  Sadly I don't have a cat who'll walk on a leash or who will perform tricks.  But I do have a cat, a tabby with a large, fluffy tail, who recognizes the sound of my car or my footsteps and who meets me on the sidewalk to welcome me home.  As I open my car door, I exclaim, "Henry!  Henry!" and Henry cries, and I scratch her back.  We walk up the sidewalk and up the front steps, stopping for petting along the way, and anyone who witnesses this is always taken by surprise and often awe.  "Look at that cat; it's like a dog!" they say.

Henry's apparent devotion also extends to our leaving the home; Henry becomes distressed if we set out on foot, and follows, howling miserably, until we give up, capture her, lock her in the house, and then set out again.

Once inside the home, Henry doesn't appear to give a damn about me, but she puts up a hell of a show on every homecoming.  In the life of a middle-aged crazy cat lady, this is priceless.

unlike you

"Unlike you, I do not take pleasure in losing," said a child in a cutting voice to her father.

the jigsaw puzzle

Recently I put a package of hand-me-downs together for a friend with a toddler.  I wanted to include a puzzle, but I didn't feel right sending it without ensuring that it had every piece.  I still remember the sturm und drang from the large floor puzzle of an enchanted castle which I bought for then-toddler Iris, which was missing a piece from the get-go, having instead a duplicate of another random piece (and the people from the Melissa & Doug toy company PROMISED to send the missing piece but never did).

I set myself down on the floor and began the 100 piece jigsaw of kittens, suitable for a preschooler.  Lola's cat Zorro drew near.  She batted at some pieces with a paw, and I shooed her away.  Undeterred she pounced in a flash, seizing a piece in her mouth, and ran into Iris's room, carrying the piece under Iris's massive bunk bed.  After some effort I reclaimed the piece, locked Zorro in Iris's room, finished the puzzle, disassembled it, and mailed it off along with some of our more presentable cast off clothes and a random assortment of picture books.

This gave me a whole new insight into why at Christmas time we were unable to complete a large monochromatic Escher jigsaw I'd thought would be a good holiday divertissement.  I expect cats to bat pieces off the table with their paws; I don't expect them to carry them around the house in their mouths.  We'd been able to do big, complicated puzzles in the past, picking up a few pieces from under the table from time to time... but we hadn't had Zorro then.

I told this story to the Sober Husband that evening.

"To make jigsaw puzzles harder, instead of getting ones with more pieces, you should have to do them with more cats," he opined.

the trials of Coconut

I finally had Coconut, the partially tamed feral cat we appear to be keeping, neutered.  I had put this off as Coconut was not tame enough to put up for adoption or be handled, but the time had come (or, according to the head of my rescue, was long overdue).   It was presented to me, by a more senior crazy cat lady in the world of crazy cats, that Coconut should be processed through Feral Fix and given back to me.

"Feral Fix" is a program whereby feral cats are neutered for free and re-released.  The tip of one ear is cut off, to signal that the cat has been neutered.  We agreed that since Coconut was not easy to handle, it made sense to neuter him through Feral Fix, where it is assumed none of the cats can be picked up, rather than through the regular neutering program."I'll tell them to make a shallow tip," said the more senior crazy cat lady.  "It won't bother you, will it, having his ear tipped?  I'll tell them to just take a little."

I was dreading the day. Since no one can pick Coconut up, cramming him into a small box seemed highly problematic.  "I need all hands on deck for this," I said gloomily.  The last time I tried to pick him up, he sank all his fangs deeply into my arm, ran away, and wasn't seen for hours.  Everyone stood at battle stations, ready to grab the cat, and I threw a large towel over him and then quickly wrapped him up in it before he could react.  I then roughly crammed the towel-wrapped cat into a waiting carrier.  "That was easier than I expected," I said wonderingly.  Cries arose from within the towel.

I couldn't face taking Coconut in myself, as he is my greatest failure and I'm embarrassed around the other crazy cat ladies.  I had negotiated with the Sober Husband to deliver him to Feral Fix, which he did on the condition that "I only have to drop the cat off, right?  I don't have to do anything more? I just say, "Here is the cat' and walk away?"

A day later it was time to pick up Coconut.  Lola and I drove over to the SPCA's clinic.  It was reported to me that Coconut "had not done well."  Evidently he had not gone gently into that anesthetized night.  The clinic attendant who returned him to me said she was not surprised he was not tamer.  "Once a meanie, always a meanie."

This offended Lola and me.  "He's not a meanie," Lola said fiercely on the way home.  "She called him a meanie!"  We knew Coconut was frightened, not vicious.

At home we reviewed our instructions.  We were supposed to "feed and care for animal in his trap for one day."

"In his trap!" We laughed.  At home, Coconut had shot out of his carrier.  We had intended for him to spend a day in Iris's room, resting away from the other cats, but he rocketed out of the door the moment it was opened and reestablished himself in the resident cat population.

I looked at the Feral Fix handout again.  It instructed me that I could return my feral to his colony in a day or two, but "the ultimate decision is up to you."

"What is 'the ultimate decision'?  It sounds like 'the Final Solution'," I said.

Coconut, meanwhile, basked on the back of the couch, unaware that he was meant to be convalescing "in his trap", subject to an "ultimate decision."

behind my back

The children made some disparaging remarks the other day, and I said, "I'd hate to hear what you say about me when I'm not around."

Iris was noncommital, but Lola forged ahead.  "We sometimes talk about your musical taste."

I drew her out more.

"Like about that stuff you play that isn't ABBA that sounds like ABBA.  What is that?  And that other song we don't like."  Lola beamed winningly.

a memory

"I remember when I was really little," reminisced Lola.  "I was tired, and you decided I needed to be more hyper, so you gave me some coffee!  And it was cinnamon coffee, and I think I would have liked it better if it wasn't cinnamon."

"When was this?" I was incredulous.

Lola explained that it was when she was just a toddler.

"And I said I wanted you to be 'more hyper?'"

not before coffee

The Sober Husband tends to ask a lot of questions, and this morning was no exception.  Lola woke me up while I was in the middle of an intense dream (evidently I had gone to war in the Middle East, but yet I was living in a luxury penthouse).  I stumbled downstairs to get some life-giving coffee, only to be intercepted by the Sober Husband, who began peppering me with questions about my plans for the day.

"Don't interrogate me until I've had some coffee!  No questions!" I snapped.   I poured a cup and leaned against the counter while I took a sip.

Meanwhile the large feral cat I have adopted caught sight of me.  He regards me as a can-opening mechanism, and he made eye contact with me and began crying noisily.  The Sober Husband looked at the squawking animal.  "Don't interrogate her until she's had some coffee!"

a bridge too far

After a good night's sleep and time to reflect, thirteen year-old Iris appeared to have recovered from watching "Silence of the Lambs."  She said to me, "Momdude, I want to watch 'Clockwork Orange.'"

I quailed.  "That's too much for me.  I can't watch that again."  I saw the X-rated version of "Clockwork Orange" my freshman year of college, at one of the popular dollar movie nights at the giant Warren Towers dorm, and found it far too intense.

"Why?  What happens?"

"Too violent!"  I didn't even want to go into details.

"Can I read the book?"

"Yes.  Go ahead."

scarred

Tonight I watched "The Silence of the Lambs" with thirteen year-old Iris.  Just before watching it, I quavered.  "It's scary," I said.

"I'm pretty much inured to horror," said the jaded Iris.

The Sober Husband refused to be in the room for it.  "This movie has something I can't stand:  sadism."

"If you're scarred for life, will you forgive me?" I asked Iris.

"Probably."

We watched the movie.  Afterward, I asked, "Are you scarred for life?"

"Yes."

Due to a cat vomiting during the film (which we had both silently decided to postpone cleaning up until after the movie), we went out in search of cleaning supplies.   We met up with little Lola, who'd stayed safely away during the film.  She took in her sister's somewhat shaken state.

 "Let's stay together; it's safer," I suggested.   I remembered how I'd felt when I was young and I saw "Blue Velvet"; I'd been so shaken that the trip home from the movie theatre was an ordeal, with me peering suspiciously at everyone and every car I walked past.

Lola flicked a switch, putting us in complete darkness.  Iris and I emitted a squawk.  Lola laughed hysterically before turning the light back on.  "Lola, for someone so cute, you really can be evil," I remarked.

We moved as a squad down into the kitchen, obtaining the necessaries, and then back upstairs.  "It's a good thing there are no moths around here," I observed.

called out

"Momdude, you are a hipster snob," sniffed a judgmental child.

a timing issue

This Friday is "Grandparents And Special Friends Day" at Lolz' school.  It is also the day after Valentine's Day.

As I pointed out to the Sober Husband, this timing means that for everyone who has family living out of town, this means that their inlaws will be in town for Valentine's Day.  He hadn't quite connected the dots between the date on the calendar and the note on the calendar to pick his mother up at the airport.  

"We'll have some romance another night," he said optimistically.  "On the bright side, my mother always puts out on Valentine's Day."

"I think you should rephrase that," I said.

It took him a few minutes to understand my objection.  "I mean she comes through.  She'll bring something for the children."

feeling French

Yesterday we visited the U.S.S. Hornet, a decommissioned aircraft carrier.  A friend of mine who volunteers there had offered to take people to areas not open to the public.   The Sober Husband loved the engine room, while I found the little zone where the nuclear bombs had been kept to be the most fascinating (the warnings were still up declaring it a classified zone of the highest level, and there was a guard station by the door, and a small group of people lived down with the bombs).

As we walked up to the Hornet, one of the children felt uneasy.  "It's scary!  I'm looking at it, and I'm feeling scared.  What am I, French?"

our dreams

In the car, today I shared some dreams I remembered.  "Last night I dreamed I had a dog.  Oh, and I dreamed I went on tour with Metallica.  They had some seats for superfans on their tour bus, and in the dream I was a superfan.  And the Sober Husband was with me, we had terrible seats, and there was this guy across from us who was vomiting all the time and just awful, and the Sober Husband held the bag for him to vomit in.  Then the Sober Husband had that bag of vomit, and I wanted to get rid of it.  Oh, and there was a bean cake, and I didn't eat any because I didn't think it would be good, but it was gone right away and everyone was saying how great it was, it was some special cake they always had, and I was sorry I didn't have any.  Then the guy who was vomiting turned out to be a wanted criminal, and I took him down!  But the Sober Husband didn't help!  He was just standing there!"

Little Lola chimed in.  "THAT'S JUST LIKE WHEN I DREAMED ABOUT THE DOUGHNUT APOCALYPSE.  He was just standing there!!"

We both turned and looked at the Sober Husband accusatorily.

scrabbling around

Ever since our holidays blow-up, the Sober Husband and I have been prioritizing our relationship.  In general we've been looking for Things We Can Do Together (Without Fighting).  One of these things is playing Facebook Scrabble.  I've been playing it for a long time and secretly revel in being the highest rated of all my friends.

Normally the Sober Husband destroys me in any game we play which is not a game of chance (and even at games of chance he will win more than he should, as his mathematical mind is better able than my whatever-you-want-to-call-it mind at figuring out odds and calculating what might happen).  But at word-based games, like Scrabble or Boggle, he can't touch me.

Or at least he couldn't, until he wrote himself his own Scrabble-cheating program.  Suddenly now he leads.  Since he wrote his program to suit himself precisely, it's extremely helpful to him.

This irks me, as I am a pristine Scrabble player, and in this household I falsely suffer from a reputation of being a Scrabble cheater.  This stems from the fact that years ago -- AT LEAST SIX YEARS AGO -- I used to pay to play Scrabble on a large website, where one was allowed to use assistance.  After I discovered Warcraft, I let online Scrabble fade away, and I don't even know if that Scrabble-for-pay site still exists.  Eventually I returned to online Scrabble via Facebook (but not "Words with Friends", which I despise as I do all Zynga products).  In Facebook Scrabble, I am a queen of verity and ethics, but the children all call me a cheater, evidently on the basis that anyone who ever used a Scrabble help site is forever tarred as a Scrabble sleaze.

I exposed the Sober Husband's cheating ways to Lola, thinking she would denounce him.  But she thought he was clever and made a ruling that he should be allowed to use his program.  I guess she was thinking that if I were smarter, I could make myself a cheating program as well.

So thanks, Sober Husband!  Now one of my zones of feeling intellectually superior has vanished.  So far he hasn't driven my ratings down measurably, but that day will no doubt come... AND MY SCRABBLE ENEMIES WILL REJOICE.

educating the hipsters

Little Lola is enrolled in another session of the 826 Valencia St. youth newspaper.  On the way over to her first meeting, we discussed what she might write about, and her thinking seemed to be to cover "hugs:  heartfelt or horrible?"

Lolz was very tense about getting to 826 on time and kept ostentatiously checking her watch.  We had actually arrived very early and I took her to a nearby art gallery to kill time while enjoying art, but Lolz's mind was on nothing but punctuality and 826.  "You promise not to make me late?" she hissed at me.

I gave up and took Lola over early.  "Welcome back," said the hipster at the desk to Lola.

"Lola!" said the hipster behind the chain which keeps out hoi polloi like me while admitting the elite, such as Lola.  "We missed you last time!  How was your break?"

A few hours later I returned.  Lola told me that she had decided to write about "different kinds of popular music."

"Kids always write about music," I said.  "I thought hugs was a good topic."

Lolz got a bit haughty.  "As far as I could tell, no other kids were writing about music.  And the tutors, they don't know about music, different genres and things.  So it's educational."   Lolz continued in that vein for a bit, explaining how she could enlighten these poor, ignorant tutors about popular music.

I let the subject drop, but I was secretly amused.  These hipsters who help the kids write look like they are straight outta Coachella, but yet their musical ignorance appalls little Lola, who views it as her responsibility to educate them.

living the noir life

The Sober Husband and I scored a couple of seats at a showing at the Film Noir festival, which is based at the Castro theatre this year, and we stumbled out onto the streets after being fully immersed in the smoky and treacherous world of noir.  We wandered up the streets past homeless people and inebriates, up the hill, discussing the plot.

When I walked into our house, there were no lights on downstairs.  A steely little voice came from the shadows.  "I was waiting for you here, watching for you."  I jumped, taken by surprise.

Little Lolz emerged from the darkness, having successfully startled her mother.  "It's like living in a film noir, living with you," I said.

"I was waiting here in the dark, watching for you," Lolz reiterated, giving me a hardboiled stare.  All she needed was a cigarette.

the horror, the horror of a hug

Today Lola started a new evening writing class.  After I picked her up at school, I suggested she might like to brainstorm ideas for her new writing project.

First Lola loftily informed me that the purpose of the first class, "after we spend a bunch of time saying "oh I am Lordwhatever from Blabbledom", was brainstorming and that the people who lead the class would have a list of suggested writing topics.

Clearly her mother was not needed, but indefatigable for once, I persevered.  "It might be a good idea to go in with some ideas of your own, though.  I know how picky you can be."  On a prior occasion, Lola had despaired of ever coming up with a good idea to write about and shared that she thought she had shot her bolt with her hit article on urban chickens.  "I'll never have a good idea like chickens again."

Lola accepted this point and told me that one of her friends had given her a suggestion.  This friend said Lola should write about "hugs:  heartfelt or HORROR-FILLED?"  It turns out that the friend's little brother had suffered a dislocated arm from a hug.

"Lola, that's awful!  What monster hugged him?"

"It was one of his little friends, not a monster."

I shared with Lola that I had suffered some horrible hugs myself.  Lola wanted details.  The first memorable Hug of Horror occurred when my first husband and I traveled to the Saline Valley.  We shared a love of natural hot springs and camping in the desert, and we had learned that there were some beautiful natural hot springs located near Death Valley, where some hippies and hippy-adjacent people had created a clothing-optional community.  When we arrived at the Saline Valley enclave, we were greeted by a tiny older naked man, with lots of flowing gray hair, who was of questionable cleanliness.  This man was very friendly and welcoming to us, talking to us about the hot springs, the people, what we could expect, what we might like to do, and so on.  Then he asked me  for a hug, explaining that he had to be faithful to his wife but she let him hug other women.  I was at the time a cute, trim twenty-something, and I noticed our new friend only wanted to hug me, not my husband.  The last thing I wanted was for this dingy, naked stranger to hug me, but he had been very kind to us, and I felt stuck.  I let him hug me, pressing his unclean and naked parts up against me, for as short a time as I judged polite and then disengaged.  It was not enjoyed.

The other horrible hug Lola had herself witnessed, but she'd forgotten it.  There used to be some benches by the subway station in the Castro, which have been cut apart and taken away because homeless people used to spend time on them.  I myself thought the particular homeless people who congregated there added color to the neighborhood and didn't detract from it; they never panhandled me or hassled me, but other people in the community wanted them gone.  When the homeless people still had a place to sit or lie down, one day one of them called out to me as I was walking through with my family.  He asked me for a hug, saying he was unhappy and really, really needed a hug.  Without hesitation I hugged him, although in the back of my mind I was wondering whether he would stab me; he was definitely troubled.  After the hug, he called out to me sincerely, "Thank you! Thank you!"  The Sober Husband told me, "You were very brave.  I thought he was going to stab you", which called into question why he didn't intervene if he thought his wife was in danger.  Did he want his wife to get stabbed?

Lola pondered these hugs.  She now had three Hugs of Horror she could write about.  Hugs, she felt, were a far scarier thing than one would think.

Coney and Notconey

Over the holidays we catsat for a friend of ours who has wonderfully taken in two cats with feline HIV.  These cats were unadoptable and could not be kept at the city shelter, but the city employees didn't want to euthanize them as they were very attractive cats with warm, friendly personalities.  Thankfully my friend M. stepped up and took them home, where she has taken painstaking care of them.  A local cat lady has donated a life subscription to her raw foods for these cats, and M. can take them in to get veterinary care for free, which relieves the financial burden on her of taking two cats with a serious condition.

These cats don't look sick.  They are beautiful, fluffy, and energetic, but they must be kept indoors and can't mingle with other cats.  Their raw food diet is kept refrigerated and needs to be served to them twice a day.  Although M's temporary housemate was willing to feed them, he is not a cat person and was not about to provide the hours of attention these cats normally receive from their doting owner.  So we were enlisted, to come by and play with the cats and give them some love (and also check on their litterbox).

M's housemate obviously fed the cats, but he didn't tend to their litterbox noticeably.  He also didn't play with them very much.  Every time I arrived, always with the stalwart Lola at my side and normally with Iris as well, the cats were ready for endless playtime.

One of them had a rash on her chin which she picked at, so she had to wear a cone of shame.  The children dubbed them "Coney and NotConey."  They loved ridiculing Coney when she tried to groom herself with her cone on, licking the inside of her cone and putting her paw up to it.

The children devoted themselves to photography of Coney and Notconey, trying to get pictures of them airborne as the children whipped them up to a frenzy with the cat toys.  The frustrations of nature photography were all too apparent, as the best shots seemed elusive.  They filled my iPhone up with over a hundred pictures of those cats in no time.

Driving over to M's place one day, we passed near her place of employment.  I had a thought.  "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if we went to M's salon?  You know she is always showing everyone all these pictures of her cats on her phone.  Now they have a break from looking at pictures of those cats, and we could take my phone in and make them look at pictures of M's cats on my phone while she's away!"  The children thought this was hilarious and were definitely up for it, but I was too lazy to inflict this prank on M's colleagues.

Since M's return, Coney's skin has recovered to the point where she no longer needs to wear the cone of shame.  I shared this with the children, who were disapproving.

"Coney isn't that cute; she needs to wear the cone to be cute!"

"What will we call them now, if they can't be Coney and Notconey?"

The sentiment among the children was that if M. expects any more high quality catsitting, she'd better put that cone back on.  The children's love is not unconditional.

not the lilies of the field but the feral cats of the alleys

The most recent feral kittens I have fostered were the subject of an inquiry from a gay couple, who were interested in possibly adopting them.  I invited them to come to my home and meet the kittens, two calicos who were recovering from a terrible cold and becoming socialized.

One of the men was blind, but as I had a very close friend in college who was blind, I know how to host blind people (speak directly to them, describe the room to them, narrate anything happening).  That wasn't newsworthy.  What was interesting was that this man was extremely Christian, in a way you don't normally run across in San Francisco.  I know many devout people here, I know people who have strong faiths, but I had not run across anyone who lives here who speaks in this way of witnessing, with little gaps left where it seems what is being called for is a "Praise Him!" as the only response.   I didn't think I'd ever met a blind, gay Christian before, definitely a small segment of our population.

It turned out God had indicated to these men that they adopt these particular kittens, which was fine by me and seemed fine by the kittens as well.  The kittens took a long time to recover from their ailment, and I invited the men back to visit again on another occasion.  This time the kittens were in no mood to be friendly and chose to have almost nothing to do with their potential adopters.  I was a little worried that a good placement might fall apart, and I voiced that to the Sober Husband.  "But didn't God tell them to take these kittens?" he asked.

"God says lots of things," I said darkly.

But I shouldn't have worried.  Today the adoption is going through, but as I'm ill, it's being handled by another cat lady (a more senior and important cat lady than me, who gave me the kittens to foster to begin with).  She was a little worried that the placement might fall apart and wanted to know what the men were like, and I told her that God had told them to adopt these kittens.

"Really," she said.  There was a pause.  "I'm an atheist, you know," she said in her thick European accent.  Another pause.  "I'm glad you told me this.  I wouldn't have known how to handle it.  I'm not used to that kind of thing."  I could tell this was a moment of culture shock for her.

"In my ten years of doing this, this is the first time I've had God tell someone to take one of my kittens," I shared.

"I"m so glad you told me about this," she said again.  

describe me

The little paragraph describing this blog is woefully out of date.  I virtually never drink any more, certainly not "too much."  I exercise more than three regular middle-aged people combined (hell, maybe more than ten regular middle-aged people).   I'm more fit than the Sober Husband these days, always eager to point out when he is out of breath and I'm not.

Fabulous prizes await if someone writes me a pleasing yet roughly accurate soundbite for this blog!

intricate, high level planning

I ran across a discussion of Burning Man preparation by chance on line, and one person urged others to send him their email address, as he's been going for years and has an Excel spreadsheet for a packing list which he enjoys sharing with others.

Spreadsheets?  Lists?  Here's how my friend N. and I planned last year:

I arrive at N.'s home.  Before we start planning, she suggests we have a cigarette in the backyard.  After her smoke break, we go indoors to get serious.  I pull out a notebook and a pen.

N.:  "What do you want to drink this year?"

A discussion follows of cocktail options, which is pretty much pointless because it was completely predictable that we'd want to drink the same things we drank the two years before:  shandies (N.) and sparkling wine (the D.H.), and maybe we'd do something with tequila, and it might be good to have some vodka just in case.

After I note that I will buy sparkling wine and tequila and that N. will bring beer, soda for making the shandies, and some vodka, the conversation stalls.

N.:  "So, will you bring everything you brought last year?  I'll bring everything I brought last year."

Me:  "Yes.  Oh, can you bring a dishpan?"

I make a note:  "N:  dishpan."

N.:  "Was there anything else we needed to plan?"

Me:  "I don't think so.  I don't know why we thought we needed to have a meeting."

unsatisfying

At my "lit club", the reading class I lead at Iris's school, a fifth grader said with a passion, "I want to complain about this book.  There weren't enough murders."

the healthy lifestyle doesn't pay off

I.  Feeling like crap:  Lately I've been suffering from headaches, pounding headaches every day.  This is particularly maddening because I'm exercising, eating healthily, staying hydrated, getting lots of sleep, and avoiding alcohol.  The other day I woke up with a horrific headache, worse than a hangover, and this irked me more when I pondered that I hadn't had a single sip of alcohol in over three days.

II.  Looking like crap:  As part of his "Pacifying The Hostile, Crazy Wife" program, the Sober Husband bought us tickets to an annual event I'd long wanted to attend, the Edwardian Ball.  I'd never tried to attend as the tickets are expensive, it tends to sell out, and it requires buying new clothes, a thing normally despised and avoided by the Sober Husband.  But!  I had complained bitterly that he never arranges for us to do fun things as a couple, and he was hellbent on proving that wrong, and he even initiated some shopping expeditions to get us outfitted.

I visited Dark Gardens, San Francisco's famous corset store, as part of the planning for the Edwardian ball.  There I tried on a corset and was appalled.  Somehow I looked fatter in it than out. Practically every fat San Franciscan woman I know relies upon corsets to make herself look amazing and desirable, but yet when I, who has lost fifty friggin' pounds, put one on, I looked significantly heavier.  

Even odder than that was that I appeared relatively flat-chested in the corset.  Somehow my natural DDs looked like Bs.  This made no sense to me, as usually women with small breasts look amazingly buxom once they are hoisted up by a corset.

I was so depressed by what I saw in the mirror at the Dark Gardens' fitting room that I felt like taking to my bed and never appearing in public again.  A supportive friend shared that she, too, had tried on a corset, thinking it would work the same magic for her it does for every chubby woman she knows, and she had also ended up looking both fatter and flatter.  "My D cups looked like someone with B cups trying to look wenchy",  she said, and, as misery adores company,  this cheered me up.  Also, I was cheered up by the thought of saving the over $500 that the Dark Gardens corset would have cost.

But still, after all this freaking healthy living, I should feel divine and look like a goddess in a corset.  "That just goes to show that all that health stuff is stupid," opined a child.

another "how not to take a compliment" lesson, courtesy of the DH

Recently I was talking to a man, someone significantly younger than me, and I noticed he was fidgeting a lot.  "Why are you twitching like that?" I asked.

"I feel nervous talking to you, because you're so hot."

I gave him an incredulous look.  "I am forty-eight years old!"

another expensive, faux British possession

As many people know, I've been locked in a struggle with the Sober Husband over whether to trade in my Volvo.  I'd been driving the Volvo for over five years without complaining until it suddenly lost power while I was driving in heavy traffic.  Then it did it again.  Both times there was no error code, and three different mechanics could not find any plausible cause.  My favorite of these mechanics told me earnestly to get rid of the car as soon as possible and didn't charge me a cent.

However, the Sober Husband saw this differently.  After all, the Volvo was practically paid off, and it was perhaps a better car than I deserved.  He himself had driven an ancient rusty Monte Carlo for part of our marriage (remembered fondly as "the Garbage Car" by the children).  "There's a value in driving unreliable cars," he said.  "Poor people would make that decision differently."

"Just because someone will risk their life in an unsafe car because they can't afford another one means I should?"

"I just think I have a higher tolerance for unreliable cars than you do."

He ended up having to live by those words, as I said, "That car is dead to me" and refused to drive it any more.  So the Sober Husband took the Volvo (which maddeningly never failed him) and gave me his Prius, which had two strange and upsetting failures during my brief tenure as its primary driver.  Some people recommended to me that I find some sort of new age healer to cleanse my chakras of the evil car-killing emanations I must be sending forth, but I refrained.

After some time went by, the Sober Husband began to carp about driving the Volvo.  "It costs me ten more dollars a day in gas than the Prius."

"Trade in the Volvo for something else, and I'll give you back the Prius," I said.  "That car is still dead to me."  This inevitably got the Sober Husband to make remarks about my economic policies and unrealistic expectations for cars.   These discussions never went anywhere, but at least I was able to wrap them up more efficiently once my psychiatrist supplied me with a great line.  "My psychiatrist says you do not value my life highly enough," I would say when the Sober Husband direly discussed the economic foolhardiness of getting a younger, more reliable car.  The Sober Husband never figured out a good response to this line, and it was always an argument-killer, but we were no closer to a resolution.

Then in late December, following a rather large spat between us over a variety of other causes, the Sober Husband said one morning, "Today I'm going to take you to get a car!  Whatever car you want!"  Later that day as we were filling out the papers to purchase a slightly used Mini Cooper Countryman, he said to me, "I guess now is the time I should tell you there's a recall out on the Prius.  The driver can lose control of the steering at any time, with no warning."

"When were you planning on telling me?"

"You weren't speaking to me."

As I drove the Mini home, I realized that now my Aga is not my most expensive possession any more.  I also pondered that my two beloved and extravagant-for-my-station-in-life possessions both have British brand names but are not actually British (the Mini was made in Graz, Austria; the Aga came from France).  Evidently I fall into a certain consumer niche, the faux British category:  someone who seeks out things which look like they are vintage English but demands non-English engineering.  Undoubtedly there is a marketing term for this, and probably it's not flattering.

walking through a winter wonderland

The other night we walked down through the Castro, as I was meeting a friend for drinks and the Sober Husband and children felt like going for a walk.

The walk was particularly enjoyable for me, because I was trying out some new performance socks I'd ordered at a holiday sale.  These particular socks are so advanced that a catalogue I'd received in the mail referred to them as "systems" and had a diagram pointing out the various features.  I had enjoyed ridiculing that diagram, but it was an effective sales technique, getting me to order them, and they are the best socks of my life.  As we walked, I kept reveling in my "systems."  "I am never wearing socks again!  I am only wearing systems from now on," I shared.

A particular child found this annoying and requested that I stop referring to my new footwear as "systems" as it was "dorky" and potentially embarrassing.

"You're not the boss of me," I said maturely.

"I should be the boss of you.  I'd do a better job managing you than you do."

We walked on, me reveling in the joy of my systems.  One particular bar with a balcony was full of festive drinkers, who were shouting at pedestrians trying to egg them into jaywalking.  They shouted and shouted at one particular pedestrian next to us.  "Don't be a little bitch!"  Then one festive gay drunk shamed the others:  "There are little kids down there!"  Much gay drunken guilt followed until I shouted up to them, "Don't worry!  She hears worse at home!", gesturing towards little Lola.  This met with a lot of loud, inebriated approval, and as we walked away, when the lights finally changed, one drunk screamed out, "I wish you were my mother!"

I turned and waved in acknowledgment.  "Are you flipping them off?" asked Iris.

"No, I'm waving!  He said he wishes I was his mother."

"Well, I don't wish that," said Iris fiercely.

"WHAT?" I squawked.  "You don't wish I were your mother?"  I knew she wants to go away to boarding school, but unwishing the very biological bonds that tie us together is another matter.

"No!  I don't wish you were his mother!"

After this misunderstanding was cleared up, mother-child love was restored, and we all parted ways:  the Sober Husband and offspring off to eat cake, and me to have cocktails.

this isn't disturbing; no, not at all

The Sober Husband has been bored at work lately, and he calls me from time to time.  The other day we were chatting, and he shared, "Yesterday I was so bored I watched your dot."  He clarified that he has a program which monitors where my cellphone is.  "I watched you drive up Masonic, then wait on Waller, then drive off.  I was so bored, I just sat there watching for a really long time."

Lola's wacky drug experience

Yesterday Lola went to the dentist, always an ordeal for dentist and patient alike (Lola, who has a huge dental phobia, has been known to vomit and cry during procedures).  One of her baby teeth had broken in half, but the jagged remains remained firmly rooted.  Normally I am the dental parent, but the Sober Husband decided to take Lola this time.  He was sure that the dentist would airily say, "Oh, everything's fine, just let it come out in its own time."  I, on the other hand, was sure that the dentist would remove the rest of the tooth.

Indeed the dentist did want to pull the wretched stump, and it didn't go easily.  After a rough beginning to the proceedings wherein Lola cried and the Sober Husband ordered all of the dental personnel out of the room, Lola took some time to compose herself, and the Sober Husband allowed the dentist and his assistant back in.   (When I heard this story, I winced and became nervous that our family would get blacklisted from this dental practice.  The Sober Husband was quite militant in describing this to me, and I had flashbacks to when we used to go to a particular vet who was afraid of him and would have to visibly brace herself to enter the room if he were with me).

Perhaps understandably the dentist chose to give fragile Lola plenty of nitrous, in addition to numbing gel and a novocaine injection.  As Lola described it later, "It was like I wasn't alive, but I wasn't dead."  After she was done at the dentist, Lola went to school.  She told me later that she was working on a project with one of her best friends, "but I got all giggly.  My teeth were shivering and I couldn't stop giggling, and A. didn't know what to do with me, so she had to take me to Ms. B.  And she didn't know what to do with me either!  So she told me to color or do whatever, and I was giggling and crying at the same time and my teeth were shivering."  Eventually Lola returned to normal.

"Well, Lola, that was quite a day you had today," I said, contemplating it all.  I imagined that the dentist could have used a few hits of nitrous after getting the wrath of the Sober Husband turned on him.

the embarrassment

This year I'm co-teaching a class at Iris's school, where we read and discuss books.  Today the students were trying to guess the age of a character, a rather raddled and frizzled alcoholic who is described as wearing gold stiletto shoes.  This sparked a lively debate, as the description of the character's face, with its wrinkles, made the kids think she might be in her sixties, at least forties, but those gold stilettos... she had to be in her twenties to wear shoes like that.  Maaaaybe thirties at most, but then how would she be wrinkled?

I pointed out gently to the children that I am in my late forties, but I wear stiletto shoes.  They were bemused but soon thought they had me.  "Not gold ones!"

But I was not to be caught out that fast.  "I do have gold ones."

They were nonplussed.  I promised to bring the shoes to our next meeting to prove that a woman in her late forties could wear gold stilettos.

At home I shared this story.  Iris interrupted me at the point where I said, "I told them I wore stilettos."  Moaning, she said sadly, "You had to.  You had to say that.  When did you say that?  So embarrassing."

When I got to where I promised to bring my gold stilettos, Iris erupted.  "When you come into my place of residence, you have a responsibility!"

Perhaps not surprisingly the conversation turned to Iris's obsession, going away to a prestigious boarding school.

"Can I come visit you when you're at boarding school?" I asked.

Evasively Iris answered, "I don't think you'll want to come."

"Well, you'll come home for the summer."

Pensively Iris mused, "I wonder what I'll do for the summers, whether I'll want to come home."

the life of a Debbie Downer

After perking up and feeling happy and energetic for a while, so perky indeed that I was back in the kitchen trying new things (like a homemade caramel and chocolate ganache tarte with a sablé crust and like pasta with baby spinach, fried chickpeas, and fresh mozzarella), I'm back in a slump.

Yesterday I not only went out to a party, but I talked the Sober Husband into coming with.  It's rare he'll socialize with my friends, as he views them as his inferiors.  At the party, there was only one person he enjoyed speaking to, and he was disparaging of my other friends after we left.  The disparagement didn't stop with my friends -- it continued to me.  He referred to "your suicidal bullshit."  I would have jumped out of the car and stalked off right then had we not been driving on an elevated freeway.

Obviously it must be difficult to be married to a suicidal person, but referring to it as "bullshit" seems completely wrong on so many different levels, so trivializing and so apt to provoke the very behavior being criticized.

This argument put me right back where I was, in that dark, deep hole.  I don't even want to look at him or hear the sound of his voice.

how not to take a compliment

After losing over fifty pounds, I've been enjoying wearing smaller, form-fitting clothes.  Not long ago I indulged in a little retail therapy and acquired a dress which I call "my mid-range hooker dress."  It shows a lot of lace-obscured cleavage and is tight all over, and it is one hell of  a dress.  You could go a lifetime without finding such a rewarding dress, just the right amount of sleaziness.

Recently I had the right occasion to wear this dress in public:  a friend had a private party at a wine bar.  After I'd had a glass of wine, a former Marine sergeant I know made his way over to greet me.  "You look great," he said, hugging me.

"Thanks!" I said.  I turned this way and that.  "I call this 'my midrange hooker dress.'"

"That's exactly what it is," he agreed.  "It's good enough that you can go into a hotel or restaurant in it," but we both agreed a call girl would do well wearing it.

"Sexy!" was his final judgment.

"Thanks," I blurted out sincerely.  "That means a lot, because I know you don't like me."

Then came the awkwardness.

fear the judgment of the children

Today was a rainy day, and Lola's thoughts when I picked her up were on another rainy day spent waiting for me at dismissal time.  She and her friend "were sitting in one of the only dry spots on the stairs, you know, it was all wet.  And we had one of the only dry spots.  And then this car came tearing down, it was going so fast, and we all gasped.  And I said, 'You shouldn't drive that way down here, because it is full of judgmental children, AND WE WILL JUDGE YOU. ' And we did."

a very deep thought

"On the outside, I may appear to be an emotionless, sarcastic jerk, but like an onion, as you peel back each layer, you find exactly the same thing.  And then you start crying."  (Courtesy of one of my Burning Man campmates).

insults and metaphor

Today as I was driving Lola to school, she asked me what a metaphor was.  It was especially pleasing for me to get a question I could actually answer, and I delved into metaphors and similes, making up some and quoting famous ones.  "The fog crept in on little cat feet" went over well, but Lolz balked at "Shall I compare thee to a summer day."

"Summer days are hot," said Lola disapprovingly.  She and her sister, native San Franciscans, prefer a cool, foggy day.  For Lola, Shakespeare was an idiot.

"NEWSFLASH, LOLA:  you and Iris are not normal.  YOU ARE NOT TYPICAL."

Lola did not take the point.   A new insult has been found:  comparing someone to a summer day.  Those are fighting words, all right!

sorry

I'm really sorry for all my failures.

the crazy man and the mystery of his shoe size

Act I.

The Sober Husband needs new slippers and new sneakers, but somehow over the nearly five decades of his life, he has avoided learning his shoe size.  I buy his clothes for him, but he's on his own foot-wise.  "If you only managed to learn your shoe size, you'd live in a wonderland," I nagged him the other day, "where I'd keep a stack of slippers for you.  Like when you said you needed new pants, and I told you to look in your dresser, and there was a pile of them I bought when they were on sale."  

We were walking through the Castro when we had this conversation, and the Sober Husband suggested that he walk up a block to visit a store which sells garish sneakers as well as campy t-shirts to get his feet sized.   I vetoed that suggestion.  "Stores like that don't measure your feet," I explained.  "They rely on you to know your size when you go in.  Normal people know what size their feet are.   Iris and I know what size our feet are."   We sneered superiorly.  

The Sober Husband was unconvinced. 

Act II.

The following day, while Iris and I were taking in a matinee of "Seven Psychopaths", the Sober Husband and Lola stopped by that same store in the Castro in an attempt to get his feet sized.  "You were right," he admitted; the store didn't even possess a shoe sizing board.  "They treated me like I was a crazy man.  I think they thought I was insane."  

It was a double victory for me, as the Sober Husband had predicted that "Seven Psychopaths" would be too gory and upsetting for Iris, but in the end she had, as I'd known, enjoyed the movie.  

Epilogue:  

The sad part is this was probably the highlight of my entire year: having a laugh at the expense of my usually better-than-me spouse due to my superior knowledge of how to buy shoes.  It's all downhill from here.

the things we ate

People think Thanksgiving is all about the turkey, but here in this vegetarian household, I bring the feast.  Yesterday we had nine dishes, none prepared ahead of time (due to the chef being in a funk), all made Thanksgiving morning.

- Asian marinated cucumber salad (to give us something light and crunchy),

- garlicky mashed Yukon Gold potatoes (Lola's favorite),

- turnip gratin (so simple but so pleasing),

- lantulaatiko (a Scandinavian rutabaga pudding which has become the Sober Husband and my holiday tradition, served every Thanksgiving and Christmas like clockwork ever since we were
dating and first discovered this food together),

- Tofurkey! marinated and roasted with little potatoes and carrots (mock if you must, but it tastes fantastic),

- homemade cranberry sauce (this year's had cherries, Cointreau, apricot preserves, and ginger, and it was a disappointing recipe which will not be seen next year, the one underperforming dish of the year.  Last year's cranberries with sugar and orange zest were much better),

- green beans cooked in vodka (seen every year),

- mustard-chive monkey bread (the only really time consuming and tricky thing which was made), and

- sour cream pumpkin pie with fresh whipped cream.

There was only the one pie, due to the chef's health kick and huge weight loss, and not coincidentally it was a pie which the squash and pumpkin-hating chef does not eat herself.   Another non-coincidence was some complaining by the minors over the relative lack of pies, which was met by the spirited rebuttal that they could eat the leftover tres leches cake in the refrigerator if they needed to stuff their yaps with sugar.

hate reading

It's terrible, it just is, yet I have no shame over my newest filthy, unforgivable habit.  I'm hate-reading,  I'm reveling in schadenfreude over the last election.  I don't feel bad about this, as I was on the losing side for virtually every election during my voting lifetime and have sadly bucked up every four years.

Sadly my supply is running dry as more time goes on past the election.  But here's a toothsome gem, one which doesn't age:  http://dailywitness.com/sifting-the-numbers-for-a-winner-by-karl-rove/

surcharge, shmurcharge

In the aftermath of the election, some CEOs of chain restaurants are spitting mad that healthcare may be in their employees' future.  The head of Papa John is charging 10 cents more per pizza, which frankly strikes me as a bargain. I'm happy to pay an extra dime if it means a struggling, hardworking pizza chain employee can go to the doctor.

As Wonkette reports with delicious snark, another CEO is trying to egg customers into stiffing waiters on their tips to punish them for wanting healthcare and Obama:

 John Metz is nobody’s fool, so John Metz, CEO and owner of Hurricane Grill and Wings as well as some Denny’s and Dairy Queen franchises, is going to pass the cost of Obamacare onto the employees AND the customer. “If I leave the prices the same, but, say on the menu that there is a five-percent surcharge for Obamacare, customers have two choices. They can either pay it, and tip 15 or 20 percent, or if they really feel so inclined, they can reduce the amount of tip they give to the server, who is the primary beneficiary of Obamacare,” Metz told The Huffington Post. Metz is a WINNER, you guys, and WINNERS do not pay for the health care coverage costs of others. They make you, the customer pay for it (SUCKER) and if you don’t want to, then YOU get to be a winner and make the waitress pay for it.

Frankly I'm all for him doing that.   We've done that already in San Francisco, and restaurants, waiters, and diners all seem to be fine after adjusting to a new reality.  When a new law called "Healthy San Francisco" was passed, restaurants of a certain size had to start providing healthcare to their employees.  Many restaurants decided to put a surcharge on the checks labeled "Healthy San Francisco", to make it clear to the consumer that she was having to pay out of her own pocket extra for her meal in order to give the doctor-craving waiters and cooks health insurance.  And you know what?  All the doom that was forecast didn't happen.  Restaurants are still opening at a crazy rate (our economy has perked up here, thanks to Silicon Valley); people are still eating out.

Just yesterday I took little Lolz and a pal of hers out to lunch, and we paid our "Healthy San Francisco" surcharge on top of our tab.  The heavily tattooed staff who waited on us and bussed our table looked healthy, and the surcharge was modest enough.   Funnily enough I didn't have any sort of class rage against my waiter, the way that John Metz seems to think I should.  We all of us get sick, and we all of us need some medical care from time to time.

it's that special time of year

It's that magical time of year, when I am constantly reminded that I am unlovable (the only person in the world who has ever genuinely loved me after getting to really know me is the Sober Husband, and that's probably because by then he was stuck with me), unloved, unlikeable, and mostly unliked.  Also, I've lost the one advantage life gave me, which was that for a while I was pretty damn good-looking.  I was an ugly child, a hideous adolescent, and then I blossomed into a hot chick, but that didn't last long enough.  I have lived too long past my sell-by date.

Yes, it's birthday season!  Happy fucking another year older to me.  I can't wait until it's over.  The actual day is Tuesday, but the dread and funk arrive ahead of time.

a very special genre

I'm co-teaching a "lit club" class at Iris uber Alles's school.  It's like a tiny little foray into the working world, and I love the children.

Not long ago I asked them to tell me about what they like to read, and one shared, "I like books where mermaids commit suicide."

detente pictured

There are a lot of gray animals around here lately, and there is only a fragile detente at best, with your humble narrator at high risk for small bodily injuries.

not appropriate

Iris and I went to a clothing exchange over the weekend, where we each scored some great finds.  Most notably Iris got a beautiful leather jacket and I got a Michael Kors dress; I also ended up with an extremely ornate, bead-encrusted wedding gown.

"I don't understand why you took that wedding gown," said Iris.

"I've always wanted to go to this event called 'Brides of March,' where everyone runs around bars all day in wedding gowns, both the men and the women."  (Indeed several people at the clothing exchange had lit up at the sight of the wedding gown, all thinking of the Brides of March, but it was me that the gown fit perfectly.  Although I've been married twice, I have never owned a real wedding gown.  I have lots of friends who have had inordinate amounts of fun at the Brides of March pub crawl, and I've always intended to get a wedding gown for it, but I've never managed to find one in my size at a thrift store).

Iris made a derisive sound.  "You are a forty seven year-old mother of two!  THERE IS SO MUCH WRONG WITH THAT, I CAN'T EVEN BEGIN."  She shook her head.

so very cute

This morning I was tired, from insomnia-caused sleep deprivation and from far too much exercise over the past several days.  The Sober Husband called my attention to the fact that one of my foster kittens had diarrhea (in the litterbox, good kitten, and which I had already realized and arranged to get some medications).  I had a realization and shared it with him.

"I feel that almost everything you say to me is conveying a piece of negative information.  Like that almost everything you talk about is either damage or disgustingness caused by animals or [perennial topic of anomie and worry not appropriate for the public].  It's making me fear you opening your mouth.  I'm dreading talking to you.  We need to fix that."

The Sober Husband feistily argued the point with me for a while, which caused me to further stiffen in my views.  Then he broke off and stared at the latest foster kitten.  "That orange one is over there.... "  He paused.  "Being cute."

I walked over and saw the kitten, bent over vomiting heartily.  I turned to the Sober Husband and ran my hand through his hair affectionately.  "Well said!"

a mystery

Tonight I had the Sober Husband drop me off at the gym.  He proceeded on to a cocktail party, while I had a good, long, strenuous workout.  By the time I was out of the shower, he was waiting to drive me home.

I felt like exercising, not drinking.  WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME?  I used to be so much fun.