Long Press Three Second

I was going to tell you what stuff I liked this year, but I’m too late. Nobody is shopping this week. Nobody.

Well, I’m sure there’s some schmuck out there who makes his family wait until two days after Christmas so he can get cut-rate prices on gifts. I met that man when I was in junior high. He was proud of his Christmas shortcut. He was also the teacher who made up excuses to punish girls in his classes, especially the innocent ones, by using a paddle with his name routed backward in the wood. This left his name printed in welt on my ass for a few hours. My mother wasn’t too happy when I showed her that. She didn’t call to complain though. Women didn’t complain as easily back then as they do now. I didn’t talk to that teacher except when it was absolutely required for class for the rest of the year. He was a creep. He’d be roasted alive if he did that today.

So, I can’t write about what I love because of that guy and his cheap-ass Christmas tradition.

Instead of writing about what I love, I’m going to write about some of the presents that I got.

Mike gave me four new books, real books, with textured covers and embossed titles. I love the feel of a good book. I really hope that the recommendations I got from David George Haskell for books he liked are really going to be books that I like. That’s what I asked Mike to put into my stocking. I loved Haskell’s book The Forest Unseen so much that I felt like a stalker when I asked him questions about it and about other books I could read in the same vein. He seems like one of those quiet people who was surprised by the success of his books. I hope he’s writing another one. And I promise to stop asking him questions.

He also gave me a spit test to see who I’m related to. I would bet a lot that we’re all cousins.

“Do you think I’ll mess up the results if I eat just before I spit?” I asked him as he wadded up and recycled wrapping paper.

What a waste of resources, wrapping paper. Mike paused and looked at me as if he were trying to determine my lineage. I already knew my lineage. I’m a mutt, one hundred percent certified mutt.

“They can probably eliminate any DNA that belongs to another species, right? Maybe it depends on what you ate. Your results might say that you were related to the Bovine clan or the royal house of Poultry.”

I’ll brush my teeth before I spit. I could be related to you. I’d bet we’re all cousins. I’ve heard that people share 25% of their DNA with trees. I’m a distant cousin to the trees. It won’t say that on my results, but I’ll be looking for Neanderthal. I’m hoping for a little Neanderthal. It would explain a lot.

Nick gave me earbuds for Christmas. I love them. Yes, I’ve joined this century by having my first Bluetooth earpieces. I asked Mike to help me to set them up.

“Have you looked at the instructions?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Can you try?”

I picked up the instruction packet, opened it, and read aloud.

“ ‘Rotate to open the charging case and remove the earphones’ “ I said. “No period at the end.”

“So, it was translated. You’re always going to get some punctuation errors in translation,” Mike replied.

“Okay then,” I said. “ ‘Choose right R slash L earphones insert ears…’ Does that help?”

“Insert ears?”

“Yes, insert ears.”

He chuckled. I like when I can make Mike laugh.

“And this - ‘When Earphones in power off <comma> Long press earphones Touch button 2 second.”

He laughed again.

“Of course. Long press earphones. Touch button two second. Makes perfect sense,” he said.

“To turn them off, you ‘Keep press earphones touch button 3 second, the light in red LED flashing’ “ I said.

We both sat on the couch and laughed as I held the pamphlet in my hands and scanned for more. I went into the settings on my iPhone and clicked the Bluetooth button. The little timer spun around and around while we laughed. It didn’t stop spinning so I handed it to Mike.

“It can’t find them,” he said.

“Here it is,” I said. “ ‘Bluetooth pairing way:’ That must be the section we need.”

“Bluetooth pairing way. You should take a picture of that and post it on Facebook and ask for a translation,” he said.

Now, I was only looking for good phrases from the instructions.

“ ‘About 10 seconds the earphone will paired succeed.” I skipped lines that were almost normal. “Another earphone in blue led slow flash. If the left and right earphones cannot be paired auto, please following below: Keep press two earphones. Short press, after 5 seconds left and right earphones pair succeed.” I paused to let Mike breathe. “ ‘The earphones has been paired when in factory, Listen music: Short press touch button, then can play/pause. Long press the main earphone for 2-3 seconds, Last song.”

Mike laughed during my entire monologue. Mission accomplished. I love my new Bluetooth earbuds. When Nick gets up, I’ll have to read some selected instructions to him too.

The miracle is that we got them to work. I’m using them now.

Thank you for listening, jules

Fucl<ing Cookies

Yesterday I decided, since it was my day off, that I wasn’t already busy enough and needed to make Christmas cookies.

Save some money, I thought. Make homemade Christmas presents. I could give cookies to my students, cookies to my friends, cookies for church, and have leftover cookies for Mike and Nick.

So, I bought flour, sugar, brown sugar, butter, vanilla, chocolate chips - because who doesn’t want chocolate chip cookies? I even bought baking soda because I didn’t know the state of my baking soda. And maybe I needed another bag of chocolate chips. When I got home, I realized I already had two open bags of mini chips, one open bag of regular chips. Crap! I also had an intact bag of Lily’s chocolate chips. Mmmm, Lily’s.

I want to tell you right here that I don’t advertise even though it seems like I do. This is just me, loving the things that I love. You know, like Oprah, and Omnicon. Just kidding. I don’t know anything about Omnicon.

I set straight to work. I washed my hands then lined up my ingredients on the counter so I’d have half a chance to end up with only one open container of anything. I ran a load of dishes, shifted the ingredients to clean the counters, washed my hands again, and put on an audiobook, Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. I love anything that Kingsolver writes. I was good to go. I briefly considered listening to Christmas music, so I added a Christmas CD to the player for later. It could take six discs. That should be more than enough kitchen entertainment. Right?

As soon as the dishes got going, Mike came into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich.

“Who are those for?” he asked.

I could tell he wanted his portion of cookies.

“I’m going to make cookies for my students. If I buy something for them, it would get expensive fast.

“How many students do you have?”

“I don’t really know. I’m not sure if I’m giving a package to every kid or just to the ones I work with this week.”

I went back and forth in my mind, trying to figure it out as Mike made his sandwich and wandered out of the kitchen. I could have as many as two kids an hour for the next three days of work before Christmas break began. Plus, there were kids who would be working with other tutors but would want cookies too. I needed to consider that some of them weren’t going to show up. I’d already heard from one kid that he was going to Hawaii for vacation.

Hawaii. Shoot! Where was I going over the break? Nowhere.

Then I remembered that a bunch of other kids came twice a week and I’d never bothered to figure out who those kids were. So, I had no idea what real numbers I was working with for them. It could be fifteen kids. It could be eighty. Fuck.

I estimated that I’d have about twenty kids and that I could bring a container of loose cookies for kids who I didn’t work with that week. I should be okay.

I had to back up the the CD to hear what I’d missed while I was thinking. It was a hazard, thinking and listening to a book at the same time. I doubled the ingredients and got both of my mixing bowls in on the action by adding one batch to each one. My only problem was that I usually creamed the sugar and butter together before adding all the flour and since I’d added almost all the ingredients to the bowl that wasn’t in the mixer mixing, I had to stop the whole process, scrape the blade, and switch bowls to get all the goo and part of the flour mixed in the second bowl.

I stopped the CD so I could think. How much of the partial flour had I added to the second bowl? Was it one cup or one and a quarter?

And had I added that last quarter cup of flour to the first bowl?

Had I added vanilla to the second?

I shook a cup of flour into the bowl that was mixing. When the blade hit it, flour poofed out of the bowl and coated the front of my shirt, the counter, and the left side of my espresso machine. Crap. I stood there and let it mix while I tried to wipe flour off of surfaces and organize my next steps.

I washed my hands again. I have something against the kitchen sponge. I replace it as often as I can, but it still smells and I have to wash my hands after I use it. When that was mostly cleaned up, I switched bowls in the mixer to blend in the chocolate chips. Did I still need to add flour to the second bowl?

Wait? Which one was the second bowl?

Finally, I sorted it all out as well as I could and set the CD player to proceed. I spooned dough out onto foil-lined baking sheets.

Why did I use the foil? So what if my baking sheets got dirty? Was I collapsing the environment with excessive one-time use of resources?

I backed up the CD to hear what I’d missed.

And then I realized that if I wasn’t sure about the flour in one bowl and the vanilla in the other, I should do test cookies.

So, I scraped up all the cookies I’d dropped so far except one blob from each bowl.

Then, I turned on the oven. I’d read that it helped to conserve energy if I eliminated the preheating time when I used the oven. Okay, but how long would the test cookies have to bake? How many times would I let heat out as I checked them before they were done? How much energy did that waste? I set the timer for twelve minutes, figuring that it would preheat in about three minutes and I could check them a minute before they’d really be done.

I backed up the CD.

Then, I had nothing to do for twelve minutes. Dishes were running. Ingredients sat lined up on the counter, ready for another batch. Two test cookies consumed as much energy as two dozen because I couldn’t keep track of my ingredients.

The earth was going to hell in a handbasket.

Mike brought his lunch dishes back into the kitchen just as those two cookies came out of the oven. What timing.

“Will you be a taste-tester?”

“If I have to,” he said, grinning.

“I need to make sure I added enough flour in one and the vanilla in the other.”

The grin dropped off his face.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Just then, Nick walked into the kitchen. Timing.

“Want to help taste-test?” I asked him.

“Oh yeah,” he said with a glint in his eye.

I have a theory about the olfactory timing of these two men. Humans have evolved to love the smell of food that is cooked to a point that it is safe for us to eat. It’s similar to the connection between beauty and good genes. Scientists have discovered that the perception of beauty is related to symmetry and conformity which is a result of genes that are free of aberrations. Beautiful people were the ones that were more likely to survive and procreate. As for anything delicious, anyone who didn’t get proper smell genes ate raw food, got parasites, died, and left no spawn to pass on their tasteless genes to.

Both cookies passed muster, but we all agreed that one of them really did need a little more flour, maybe that quarter cup. Which bowl was that? I poked at the dough in both bowls with my spoon. Hard to tell. I added a quarter cup to one bowl, hoping it was the right one. The mixer popped more flour across the counter. Shoot.

I poked the backup button on the CD player then went back to spooning out perfectly proportioned globs of cookie dough. I grabbed a second spoon from the drawer so I could scrape the goo off one spoon with the other.

A clump of cookie dough fell onto the floor. Damn! If I left it, I’d step in it and track it all over the kitchen. If I picked it up, I’d have to wash my hands one more time.

I used a paper towel to wipe it up and washed my hands. One more paper towel for the landfill. If there weren’t so many rodents in the forest around my house, I’d have been able to put it into a compost bin. We had bears, squirrels, rats, voles, mice, shrews, and raccoons. Mike was adamant about not having a compost bin after some animal chewed right through plastic to get through the last one we had.

Suddenly, I was in a groove. I alternated two pans of cookies so the oven was never empty. As one pan baked, I stacked and packed the other cookies. I loaded big Ziplocs with cookies for each of the friends I was too cheap to buy presents for. I labeled them and put them into the freezer, yelling a warning to Mike and Nick not to eat them. I don’t know if they heard me. Then, I began to load snack bags with funky wrapped candy I’d gotten from Uwajimaya earlier in the week and added a cookie to each one. I thought it would be cool for the kids to get candy with the Japanese characters on the wrapping instead of English. Environmentally, I felt bad about the little bits of extra plastic for each piece of candy, but it was for a bunch of kids and I wanted it to feel sanitary.

Some of the cookies were slightly too big to fit. And would the outside of the candy wrappers get too greasy from the cookie to be nice to open? Or was it going to be yucky? Plus, there was that plastic packaging question again. The environment. I voted for less packaging and figured the kids wouldn’t mind if a piece of wrapped candy sat in a bag next to a homemade chocolate chip cookie. I scraped a few edges off cookies to make them fit into the snack bags.

Mike appeared again. Time for tea.

“Are you just putting one cookie in those bags? It looks kind of chintzy.”

“What?” I said a little bit too loudly. “I thought it looked cheerful with all the candy in there.”

“One cookie? Seriously?”

Seriously.

Then, I got behind in loading my baking trays with more cookie dough as I opened all the snack bags and added another cookie to each one. The oven was going to bake empty for a while. Damn! What about the environment?

Mike got out the ingredients to make dinner. Fish and potatoes. Suddenly, the counters were jammed with stuff and I didn’t want to have to share my kitchen. I’d been in a groove. It was hard to stay in a groove when I was tired and had to dance around someone else in my small kitchen. I popped the pause button on my audio book.

I went back to wrestling with each snack bag to get it closed. Two cookies were almost always too big to zip closed. A cookie fell onto the floor.

“Fuck!” I muttered.

I picked it up, threw it away and washed my hands again. The floor was still a little gritty under my shoes.

“You should put those into the bigger Ziplocs,” Mike added. I know he was trying to be helpful. He put the fish and potatoes into the oven, leaving a rack free. Lovely. My chocolate chip cookies were going to smell of fish. I glared at him.

“But then they’ll need three cookies to look like there’s anything in there. And I have to have enough cookies for Rachael, Lily, and Penny. Plus, I volunteered to bring cookies to church next Sunday.”

I didn’t say anything about the environmental impact of throwing out twenty greasy and crumbly but unused snack bags so I could put everything into bigger, thicker plastic bags.

“Three cookies sounds good,” Mike said.

“But that’s a whole -nother batch of cookies. I’m going to be baking all day.”

“You’re going to be baking all day.”

And Mike left the kitchen. He popped the play button to turn on my story.

Fuck the cookies. I jammed the second cookie into each of those narrow snack bags, breaking off any edges that got in my way. Each of my students was getting a snack bag filled with two broken cookies that smelled of fish along with greasy pieces of unidentifiable wrapped candy because all the lettering was in Japanese. Two cookies. Not three.

Just then, Christmas music came on.

Fuck those fucking cookies.

Thank you for listening, jules

Just a Little Bit of Plastic

I need to do a load of dishes. After everyone has gone to work in the morning, I try to get a load done so I’m not doing it at bedtime when I’m most tired. Some days, tired or not, I have to do two loads of dishes. The worst part of it is that no matter how I try to Tetris the hell out of that space, I still end up with one or two items that don’t fit. That leaves me with a kitchen that is mostly clean, but not quite.

If, as one friend suggested, I were to put dishes into the dishwasher as they were dirtied, then run it when it got full, I’d inevitably have to rearrange everything because someone didn’t play the Tetris game and there would be lots of extra room for dishes in a load. Plus, there would be a chance I’d forget where we were in the cycle and eat from a dirty plate. Ew.

But I like to pretend the main reason is that I’m good to the environment when I jam as many dishes into my dishwasher as I can fit to be efficient with water and energy.

Oh, the agony of doing dishes, right? Spoiled, right?

Yeah, I admit that I’m spoiled. Most of us are.

And let’s consider dishwasher tablets.

I shop at Costco and found that finish Powerball makes the ones that clean my dishes the best. Clean dishes in one load: efficient. Good for me. Good for the environment.

But then they began to package their tablets in little plastic pouches inside the plastic tub. What a packaging overdose. I guess it kept those tablets from breaking into pieces in transit, but I didn’t plan on returning a mostly-used box of dishwasher tabs because a couple of them at the bottom were broken.

Plus, it was hard to get the little suckers out of their plastic pouches after my hands had been slimed with water and food residue. The worst part was knowing that every single one of those little plastic pouches went into the garbage to join the garbage gyres in the oceans.

Then one day, I opened a new container of dishwasher tabs and they were coated with a little bit of goo that went right into your dishwasher and melted off during the cycle. Yay! No struggling to open any pouches. No extra plastic in the gyre. But these still came in a big plastic tub. It was better for the environment, but not perfect.

A few months went by and I realized I needed to go to Costco again. Damn! No time. I ran from errand to errand to try to get done before work, so I figured Mike would forgive me if I skipped Costco and bought some dishwasher tabs from Albertson’s instead.

The cool thing was that I could buy my favorite brand, finish Powerball, and they came in a recyclable cardboard container! Was this company joining in the effort to save the planet from being drowned in a pile of plastic?

It looked like it was.

That night when I ran a load of dishes, I opened that wonderful recyclable cardboard box.

Inside were nested fifty finish Powerball tablets, each individually wrapped in a little bit of plastic.

Argh!

Thank you for listening, jules

Wearing a Coded Message

I want to tell you a secret.

On the day of the midterms, I texted back and forth with my sister. She texted that she waited over an hour and a half to vote. I told her that I had voted in the comfort of my living room and dropped the ballot into a box by the library a week earlier. She voted in a sea of red. I voted in a sea of blue.

That isn’t my secret.

It was her birthday but I hadn’t even figured out what to give her yet.

That isn’t my secret either.

Every year, I am late sending her a birthday present. I’m derelict that way. As kind as she is, she always says that it’s okay. It’s really not. Finally, as I sat on my cozy couch anxiously watching election returns, texting her encouragement as she waited, I suddenly knew what I wanted to send her.

I wanted to give her a big blue tsunami for her birthday.

It would be hard, considering the conflicting reports I saw on television. I was just a single drop.

So, while my sister sporadically texted me about her progress toward the voting booth, I sat down at Amazonsmile, searched ‘silk scarf tsunami,’ and found this lovely silk scarf. It was patterned after the Japanese print, The Underwave off Kanagawa, by Katsushika Hokusai. This one was going to take three weeks to reach my sister. It was coming from China.

That’s not my secret either.

My secret is that after I ordered my sister’s birthday present, I bought one of those scarves for myself. I wanted something to commemorate my tiny blue drop in this blue wave, whether or not it succeeded. I wanted to wear it to remember that moment in history.

I pictured myself at ninety, telling my grandchildren about the years I fought tyranny that somehow crept into the White House, how I worked to protest as loudly as I could. I would show them the book I wrote, Angry Housewife Fights Tyranny, the posters I carried when I marched in the Women’s Marches, the March for Truth, and the March for Science. I would show them the letters I wrote to the editors and to my representatives. And I would wear my blue tsunami silk scarf as a reminder of the days I watched midterm returns unfold into a blue wave that I hoped would be big enough.

Finally last week, it arrived. It was perfect, beautiful and soft. It matched almost everything I wore so this past week, I had to stop myself from wearing it every day.

But that’s not what feels so right about wearing my new blue wave scarf.

After the example of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I wear my blue-wave scarf to continue to protest the way trump separates children from their parents at the Mexican border. I protest the cold rooms in the detention centers. I protest lobbing tear gas at groups of women and children inside Mexico. I protest bringing troops to the Mexican border. I protest the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and trump’s weasel response to the Saudi prince’s involvement. I protest the incursions into the freedom of speech, our First Amendment right. I protest interference in Mueller’s investigation. I protest Mitch McConnell who refused to allow a vote on a bill protecting Mueller’s investigation. I protest the way trump treats Muslims, women, and people of color. I protest almost every single tweet he posts, except an occasional one that was obviously written by one of his staffers because it contains words trump couldn’t spell.

I protest still.

So, when you see me wearing my scarf, you’ll know my message, that I protest. If I see you wearing one, I’ll know that you protest too.

Thank you for listening, jules

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas Stress

Did you ever have the perfect storm of events all happening on one day?

Today, there are five things that I want to go do and, at best, I can make it to three. That’s only if I get cracking right now and only if I get stuff done right now.

Crap!

I also want to sit here with you for a minute. I haven’t vented. I haven’t cheered. I haven’t told you my innermost wishes for this new season. I haven’t told you how I’m worried I’ll peak too soon, how I’ll sing Christmas songs from Black Friday on (for which I stayed in my pajamas and bought nothing) to some time the week before Christmas actually happens when I suddenly get sick of the whole endeavor and turn the cheerful songs off in frustration. I just don’t know if I can make it through four weeks of merriment.

That’s what it takes these days, doesn’t it?

I’d rather take a couple weeks to think about what the season means to me first, the way I do on Thanksgiving Day, a quiet gratitude. I’d like to work on smaller gifts that really connect me to the recipient, maybe homemade gifts this year.

Oh my God, I have to make my friend Rachael a quilt by Christmas! How am I going to get a quilt done in four weeks, even a lap quilt? And if I make a quilt for Rachael in my copious spare time, don’t I have to make quilts for all of my best friends? Can I just substitute something of equal or greater value? And what about a baby quilt for my niece who is expecting any moment? And what about my sister? I have a partially-finished quilt for her already. Can I get that done in time to send it across the country to arrive before Christmas? If I even walk into my sewing room, there are five quilts that beg for me to make them. Plus, I need to make something for each of my students, something meaningful, quick, and economical. What would that be? Something that a variety of children would appreciate? And when will I figure out what to do for Nick? He’s an adult now. What do I make for him? And poor Mike has never been given a quilt yet. Can you imagine? I’ve been quilting for twenty-eight years and I’ve never finished the quilt for Mike. He wants it to be hand-stitched. That’s the problem. Hand stitched. When? When can I do all of this marvelous work?

After I come home from all of my parties tonight.

Thank you for listening, jules

A Gift of Flight

Two days ago, I lost my friend, Jon. I’m not sure what happened, but I didn’t even know he was sick.

I’m mourning. I’m shocked. I keep trying to remember the last time I talked to him.

I want to tell you about Jon. That will help.

Jon was a pilot. His wife is a pilot too. He once took Nick and his friend Adrian up flying when they were ten. I’ll never forget that day. We arrived at their house and Jon used some kind of assisted pulley to back the plane out of its hangar. Jon’s wife said there wasn’t enough room in the four-seater for her to join us, so I nodded my head and the four of us climbed into their plane without her.

Then, Jon taxied out of their driveway, down the road, and onto the little neighborhood airstrip. Imagine living in a neighborhood designed for pilots, one with its own runway, one where every house had a hangar instead of a garage. My dad would have liked Jon. For some reason, my dad had a lot of friends who were pilots. I guess I like pilots too.

I sat in the back seat with Adrain for the first leg of the trip. The plan was to let each boy have some time at the controls. Jon was calm about that. I was nervous. Looking over Nick’s shoulder where he sat in the front seat, I could tell Nick was nervous too.

“For this first part, you let me handle the stick and once we’re in the air, you can give it a shot,” Jon said.

“Okay,” Nick said. I could tell by his voice that he wasn’t going to touch anything until Jon gave him the go-ahead.

I loved the feeling of being pressed back into my seat whenever I lifted off in a plane. I was so excited, I don’t remember if Jon talked to anyone on his headset or if you just had to keep an eagle-eye out whenever you took off at such a small airstrip.

And then we were airborne.

“Can you show them where they live?” I asked over the hum of the engine.

“Roger,” Jon said and the next thing I knew, we followed our road up and circled around our house. Adrian’s house was easier to identify because of it’s oversized deck.

“There’s my house! I see it!” Adrian shouted. “There’s my mom’s van! It’s so little!”

“I see it, and my house too,” Nick yelled.

We were so low to the ground that if I’d been looking out my front window, I’d have wondered at the plane circling overhead like a hawk.

“Do you want to fly the plane?” Jon asked Nick after he’d straightened the plane out and gained some altitude.

“Can I do that?” Nick said. Oh, he was nervous. I’d let him have a go at steering my car a few times, but he hadn’t even had control over a go-cart.

“Sure, I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

Then Jon walked Nick through the altimeter, the artificial horizon indicator, and the stick.

And Nick proceeded to wobble up and down in our flight path, continuously over-steering until Jon suggested he let go of the stick completely.

Nick looked at him in abject fear.

“Just let it go. We’re not going anywhere,” Jon said.

Nick looked down at the ground, then over at Jon again and finally let go with his hands hovering over the stick just in case. Jon laughed.

The plane evened out.

“Wow. Did you do that?” Nick asked.

Jon explained that changes made to the plane’s direction could be controlled with small moves, that the plane stabilized when you let go.

“So, we’re not going to spiral straight down to the ground?” Nick asked.

“Nope. Do you want to make a turn?”

“Sure, if it’s okay.”

Nick wasn’t going to do anything unless Jon said it was okay. There was a glow to his face. He was flying the plane. We spiraled to the right. Jon told Nick to keep an eye on the altimeter and told him to lift the nose. We swooped up as if entering a loop-the-loop on a roller coaster. Jon calmly told him to even it out and Nick evened it out, only dipping the nose below the horizon a little bit when he did. Then, we spiraled to the left. Meanwhile, I kept my head on my window so I could see where we were on my mental map, more than half way to the airport in Snohomish. Cars below us on the road were tiny, the mountains on the horizon looked closer, and any people I could see looked like ants. I thought of the time when I was nine when my dad chose me to go flying with him in his friend Larry’s plane. I’d been ecstatic. Larry had let me fly the plane all by myself.

Just then, Adrian groaned.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” he said.

“Ah, Jon,” I said over the buzz of the engines and whatever Nick had been saying, "We need an airbag back here, just in case.”

“It’s in the briefcase under my seat.”

I pulled out the briefcase, popped it open, and handed Adrian the little green bag inside. Jon turned around and looked at Adrian.

“You’re a bit green, aren’t you?”

Adrian couldn’t answer, just nodded and clutched at the open bag I had given him.

“I’d better get this puppy on the ground for a bit. Nick, may I have the controls?”

“Okay,” Nick said.

After a few words and numbers stated into the headset and a garbled response, Jon dropped the plane onto the runway like a duck landing on a pond.

“I don’t think we’re going to stop for lunch today,” I said.

Adrian groaned.

“The Buzz Inn has good burgers,” Jon said, raising his eyebrows hopefully. Jon had expressive eyebrows.

Adrian groaned again.

“Nope, sorry. No lunch today.”

After three trips to the Museum of Flight and its flight simulator plus a couple of rounds around the fairway at the State Fair with Adrian, I knew he wouldn’t make it if he even sat at a table with food on it. And I didn’t want to have to steam clean Jon’s airplane after we got back either. That smell would take a year to come out of the back seat.

So, Adrian and I walked in circles around the plane trying to settle his stomach while Jon did the preflight check with Nick. Before I knew it, we were airborne again. Adrian sat in the front seat this time, but held both hands on the airsick bag I’d given him. Jon kept the controls.

That trip back seemed to take only about seven minutes. Jon flew straight. He flew without any flourishes that I so loved about flying. And then, we were back on the ground. Adrian and I got out of the plane at the landing strip and walked back while Nick and Jon taxied back to the hangar.

When we got back, I told Jon we’d have to take him out for lunch another day, that Adrian needed to go home and just sit for a while.

“Can I give you money for the fuel?” I asked.

“No. It was a pleasure. I loved going up with the kids.”

I kept trying, but Jon wouldn’t have it. He said it was a gift. And it was, despite Adrian’s queasy look. Nick still had a glow and a grin on his face.

It was a gift. And now, when I’m missing my friend, it will be a gift I will never forget.

Thank you for listening, jules

Squeeze the Day

It’s 5:51 am. It’s a holiday. No work. No school. I’ve been up for an hour.

My mind, despite a week of telling it otherwise, is still on Daylight Savings time.

Fuck Daylight Savings time.

I’m not some farmer with six kids I have to set to work milking the cows before school. Is that even why some idiot in the courthouse switched the time by an hour every summer? Who the fuck knows? The truth is out there, but I’m too mad and too tired to give a damn.

All I know is that it’s a week later and I’m still getting up at the same time. Productivity sucks whether it’s spring forward or fall back. It’s going to take me a month to get used to the new time. I’m going to walk around zoned for the rest of the day because I didn’t get enough sleep.

Scratch that. I’m going to walk around zoned all day anyway. I’ve been zoned since college when my roommate called me a ‘space cadet.’ I didn’t like my roommate. I’ve been zoned since I was a teenager and spent a whole summer reversing my days and nights so I could... Well, I’m not exactly sure why I did that. It just happened.

If there really are circadian rhythms, then I used to have a twenty-four and a half hour one. Once school let out for summer, I’d have flipped my days for nights within a month. In forty-eight days, I could have cycled back around to the beginning and would be getting up at a normal time. I don’t know why I didn’t. Back then, circadian was easy. I could stay up all night on a Friday and a Saturday, sleep all day and night Sunday, then head happily back to school on Monday. Okay, we’re being honest here. Calculus class, the first class of the morning, was always hard. I might have done better if I hadn’t dozed through so much of it. Still, sleep seemed so easy then.

Now, my inflexible old brain wants to go to bed within five minutes of the hour I went to bed the previous nights. Now, if I go to bed late, I seem to wake up early, meaning colossal fatigue for two or three days. That makes me follow the rules more closely. So right now, bedtime wants to be 8:30pm. I’ve been hungry for dinner at 5;30pm. Pretty soon, I’ll arrive at Denny’s at 3:45 in the afternoon and order dinner. Or I’ll fall asleep on the couch at 6:45 pm, then get up at 3:30 am and wander the halls of my assisted living and wonder why breakfast isn’t ready. My grandma did that. Sorry, Grandma.

Well, I’m not in an assisted living arrangement, not yet. But I do feel zoned out regarding time.

Every spring and every fall, I wonder how we’re still stuck in this outdated mode of switching time. Yeah, that hour that ancient politician reset aeons ago, that Daylight Savings, as if we’d be fooled into thinking we were saving anything, that time is fucking us all up and we should stop. We are not more productive because of Daylight Savings time. I like to remember the Native American’s view of Daylight Savings time: ‘Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket.’

Who’s in control of time in this state?

Not the fucking state of mind.

I mean Washington state. You know, the other Washington, the one that’s still reasonably sane. Who’s in control?

Hello, helloooo. We want our time unchanged. Hello? Is anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me.

Thank you for listening, jules

It's Always Something

I have to admit that I’m in a bad mood because I washed my favorite dress and managed to get clumping cat litter stuck onto it. Then, I had to pick it all off piece by piece and rewash it. It was all in how I rolled it into a towel after rinsing it. Usually that’s a good idea. This time, I made the error of spreading the towel out on the laundry room floor so I could roll it up more easily. Big mistake. I’m behind. I’m really behind since I was sick for eight weeks. There are things that haven’t been done.

Men.

Men just don’t vacuum the way women do. Don’t tell Mike or Nick I said that. I LOVED that they cleaned the house when I was sick. Can you picture an eighteen year old guy hugging his mom and pulling out the vacuum cleaner after just one request?

It was awesome.

Except that they vacuumed the living room but not the stairs, the kitchen but not the laundry room, the floors but not the cobwebs on the ceiling. They did dishes, but didn’t wipe the counters. They collected the leaves in the yard waste bin, but didn’t rinse the leaves out of the bird bath.

Are all women detail freaks or is it just me?

So, I was supposed to be reading my book, American Gods this morning. That Shadow is hot and the cool thing is that he’s kind of my age so that doesn’t have to be creepy. It’s what I love about books. The characters become your characters. Shadow looks a little like Mike.

But instead of reading my book as long as I wanted to, I recognized that this house does not spin right without my version of maintenance. Plus, I was happily reading on the couch, tucked into my favorite dress and blankets, when Seth jumped onto my lap to snuggle, the blankets shifted, and a waft of foul air met my nose. Ew!

I showered yesterday. I was not exactly the problem. It was my beautiful dress.

So, I unceremoniously dumped Seth onto the floor and got up to get some stuff done. He walked away as if it had been his idea, but he was miffed. I could tell by the way he twitched his tail.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realized the importance of doing the cleaning in the right order, cat litter first, then clean-but-wet-favorite dress pressed into a dry towel before hanging it. It’s much more work when you do things in the wrong order.

Thank you for listening, jules

Dissident Poetry

What if it doesn’t work? What if the voice of the people isn’t loud enough?

What if voter suppression negates too many votes? How is it that Debbie Cox from Dodge City hasn’t been arrested for her involvement in moving a single polling place for thousands of poor people out of town, out of reach, and with the wrong address on the labels?

What if nobody fixes those machines that were set to switch blue votes to red at the last moment? Is that even true or is it an urban myth?

What if gerrymandering has been so effective to have isolated blue votes into an ineffective place? I am an example of someone who has a narrow blue line drawn around my house, a tiny peninsula, that keeps me from voting against a red incumbent, the guy who has had the most influence on my community and Nick’s schools. Our house has been excised from that equation. My vote has been rendered useless.

The Russians have come into our country to ‘monitor the election.’ Doesn’t that give you a chill up your spine? Who let the Russians in and why do they get to ‘monitor’ our election?

So, I’ll admit that I carry a weight of trepidation today. When Mike was in the bedroom getting ready for work this morning and I walked in to talk to him, I saw he had the news on and I backed out the door before I got drawn into it. I am not ready to see.

I don’t exactly know what I’m going to do tomorrow if the blue wave fails to have an impact. I might crawl back under the covers and hide for a while. I might not look at the news for a few weeks. I might go into a mode of grief as if I’d lost a member of the family. It could feel that bad, knowing that children might not escape their cages, that racists will continue to feel they can scream obscenities at people of color, that the caravan will be met with hostility and armaments, that freedom of the press will be repressed, or worse, murdered.

Maybe I’ll take to the streets. Maybe I’ll have the courage to get arrested for standing up against a dictator. Maybe our relatively peaceful way of life will tilt into an age of chaos, driven by a man who can’t remember to get into the limo that waits in front of him, who can’t condemn violence, in fact, encourages it, who openly mocks people of color.

Maybe I’ll write dissident poetry and land in prison with lots of people like you.

Thank you for listening, jules

Priorities

Well, I’m back to work full time, or rather my usual half time. I feel mostly okay most days. I’ve slowed down thinking about my mortality.

Well, I’m still thinking about my mortality, just not as morbidly as I was before. I’m going to die. I’m GOING to die. Everyone is GOING to die and I’m no exception.

Just not right now.

Intellectually, I’m a fan of mortality.

On all levels, mortality seems like a blessing. I know our culture doesn’t see it that way, but it is.

On a global level, it’s easy to see how the balance of mortality and reproduction has to remain stable so that we don’t overwhelm the Earth. We are, in fact, in the process of overwhelming the Earth with ourselves and our by products. Any habitat must achieve equilibrium or risk the suffering of its individuals and the habitat itself. Have you ever seen the destruction and starvation caused by an overpopulation of deer? I have. New Jersey, 1986. I agree that it is difficult for our minds to comprehend our actions on a global level, but it’s starting to sink in, isn’t it? The one problem, the potentially catastrophic problem that we have is a result of our resistance to mortality combined with our love for procreation.

Climate change.

Oh, we might mitigate the problem with science and a reduction of our dependence on fossil fuels, but climate change is, ultimately, about population.

But I have to admit that I have been repulsed by any attempt to limit either the birth rate, for example, China’s one-child law, or any limit on a person’s age. What was the name of that movie, where people were put to death when they got too old? Apparently, there is more than one. Logan’s Run was the oldest one I could find. They were cut off at age thirty!

Plus, I’ve heard scientists describe death as a scourge to be conquered.

On a local level. It’s a little harder to see the benefits of mortality in your neighborhood. Your friends and the nice people at the grocery store would never die, but neither would that crazy guy who stares across the fence at the elementary school and curses at other pedestrians. Food and housing would get scarce. Seattle is a good example. Teachers can’t afford to live in the neighborhoods where they teach. Food and gas are much more expensive, not scarce, but demand has had its impact. Traffic is a nightmare. Imagine if everywhere was like the metropolis that lay between Washington DC and Boston, one continuous city. People would have to be rooftop farmers. Livestock would live in enclosed buildings all their lives. Oh right. much of livestock already lives cramped and miserable lives, never seeing fields or

sky.

And there’s the experiment run by John B. Calhoun, who described the collapse of society when too many rats were put together in a cage. The rats couldn’t procreate or nurture their young, cannibalized each other, prevented groups from accessing food, and generally lost their peaceable social skills. Would that happen to people? Just think of the occurrences of rage on increasingly cramped flights.

And there is the effect of mortality on an individual. I can tell you about that. The past six weeks of kidney stone pain combined with my oxygenation problem left me knowing I could die sooner than later or or leave me brain damaged. As I struggled to breathe, on what felt like it could be my deathbed, I grieved over Mike and Nick. What would my loss do to them? Was Nick old enough to manage without a mother? And there were things I needed to accomplish.. I was not done. I wanted to fulfill my purpose before I died.

Now that I’m not dying, my priorities are more clear. My love and that of people around me is a solid presence, not just an ephemeral fog. I don’t take things for granted, at least not now. My time is limited. I can noodle around, but I can’t waste it. (Noodling around can be fun.)

So, think about your mortality. It’s not morbid.

Who is important to you? Make the presence of that love a solid presence in your life. Tell them. Feel that joy.

What is your purpose? Do one thing today toward that purpose, even one small thing. Then, schedule yourself to completion. Tell people about what you want to do before you die, about your dreams.

I guarantee that the world will be a better place if you act on that purpose.

I’m sure that people will be better off if you tell them that you love them.

Thank you for listening, jules

The Gift of Ordinary

I made Nick’s lunch. He looked at it, then emptied similar uneaten items from yesterday’s lunch, only the fruit and vegetables, into the garbage. He looked at me and packed the new lunch into his insulated bag. Insulated. I opened a can of wet cat food and fed the cats. They didn’t eat it, just stared at the bowl and then at me, in unison. Stared. I fed the dog. He ate some of it and then went to the door and asked to be let out. I let him out. It was raining. He stood under the eaves on the deck and gazed up the hill into the darkness. When did it get so dark as I made breakfast and lunches in the morning? I missed so much when I was sick. I tried to see what he was looking at. I didn’t see anything but darkness. The rain. He came back inside. He burped. Then, he stood by the door and asked to be let out. I ignored him. Now, he’s lying on the couch, staring at the side of my head.

I made my smoothie. I didn’t complain about it. I didn’t glare, stare, or gaze in another direction in hopes of something better. My smoothie was ordinary. It was perfect. I was the only one who saw that through the darkness.

Thank you for listening, jules

Some Days Are Still Hard

This morning, I yelled at Mike for buying the wrong carrots. The wrong carrots. WTF?

This morning, spilled a whole CPAP tube full of soapy water on the bathroom rug, the rug where the little cat had dragged out at least three-quarters of a cup of used cat litter from the litter box, used cat litter that was still ready to clump. I took a good hand towel, the only one immediately available, and threw it on the floor to mop up everything. Then, I stepped on it to squeeze the water out of the bathroom rug into the good towel. Now, the good towel has clumping cat litter stuck on it.

This morning, I spilled a half a cup of water on the bathroom counter. It all rolled toward a row of new books I liked to keep in the bathroom because new books make me happy. Yes, I decorate with books I want to read. I took the good hand towel, the only one immediately available, off the floor with the used cat litter still clumped onto it and wiped up the half cup of water that was rolling toward my nice new books that I hadn’t yet read. I will need to bleach the counter, the good hand towel, and the bathroom rug.

This morning, I folded the good hand towel with used clumped cat litter on it into the bathroom rug and brought it upstairs to the laundry room. Then, forgetting to scrape the used clumped cat litter off the good hand towel, I threw all of it into the washer.

This morning, I spilled a few drops of bleach on top of the washer where I keep the cat food for the two cats so that the dog won’t eat it when no one is looking and throw up in my garden shoes by the sliding glass door.

This morning, I threw away a whole bowl of prescription cat food in case any of the bleach I spilled got into the little cat bowl. I tried to smell it to see if it smelled like chlorine, but by then, everything smelled like chlorine so I just threw out all the kibbles and put the little cat bowl into the sink where I could run it through the dishwasher.

This morning, the cat sat forlornly on the washer where his bowl should have been and cried. Since I hadn’t run the dishwasher, I was out of little cat bowls, so I put wet cat food into one of my grandmother’s Memory Lane Royal Ironstone berry bowls and hoped the cat wouldn’t push it off the edge of the washer as he ate. I stood there and watched him eat so I could take the bowl off the washer before I washed the bathroom rug and the good hand towel on prewash-extra-rinse-high-spin.

Later, I’ll need to clean the used clumped cat litter off the inside of my washer because I forgot to scrape it off before I threw it in to wash.

This sounds a little like ‘If You Give a Mouse a Cookie’ only not as cute and definitely not as sanitary. Doesn’t the mouse go back to bed at the end of the story?

Thank you for listening, jules

Physiology and Defining Care

I’ve been doing a lot of navel-gazing.

I had to do a lot of navel-gazing since I got sick, but I’m sick of being sick, sick of thinking about anatomy and physiology.

It doesn’t sound so whiny when I phrase it that way, does it?

Anatomy and physiology are science, how the body works. It’s a miracle piece of machinery that we all take so much for granted when things run as they should. The shin bone is connected to the knee bone. Have you ever looked at a backhoe, really looked at one? It was designed after an arm, right down to the radius, the ulna, and the humerus. But when a sick older woman starts talking about how the body works, some people’s hearing closes down.

Okay, I’ll be honest. Most people have listened to me. Mike has listened to me in detail, repeatedly. Most people have listened, even the part about feeling for the first time like I could die if I didn’t solve the problem. You should have heard me talking to my ninety-four year old friend on Sunday. It was a relief to hear her concern, to feel like she was open to listening to my fear, even if it drew us closer to looking at that end point: death.

But I worry that other friends, younger friends, won’t want to hear all my talk about my health.

This is a legacy from my grandma, isn’t it?

When I was about six, my grandma had her gallstones taken out. I think I’ve told you about that. Now that I’m an adult, I know that it was very painful for her. Now, I know that the scar that ran at least eight inches across her abdomen must have been difficult to heal. When I was six, I was incredibly impatient to run back outside whenever she got started talking about her gallstones. I didn’t really want to look at that thick frightening weal across her stomach. I especially didn’t want to look into the little pill bottle where she kept those nasty gallstones. It seemed as though she could talk about her illnesses, and they were many, into eternity.

If souls continue after the death of the body, I hope her heaven has been to have a willing ear for her pain until she was done talking about it, until she found peace and felt better. But when I was six, I was resistant to listening until she was done. I started to get antsy whenever she began to wind up into an ailment story I’d already heard, with visual aids included. I learned the art of closing down a conversation. So, I know what it sounds like when I hear it turned back on me. That’s karma, isn’t it? I wouldn’t listen back then and now that I need people to listen, some of them are closing down the conversation just like I did.

My problem is that I’ve been encountering that resistance mostly from 'medical professionals.’ There have been five of them. Yes, these people were accredited doctors and nurses, but they acted like the six-year-old me acted when my grandma got going. as if they just wanted to run back outside to play in the grass with their cousins. I could hear them thinking, ‘Why is this woman going on and on and on about her pain?’

These five people made me feel stupid as I tried to understand the physiology behind what was happening to me. That task was especially hard since one of my symptoms was confusion. Plus, I hadn’t spent two to twelve years studying the specifics. I’m not stupid, just not as thoroughly educated in those specific areas. They made me feel like a stupid old woman who wouldn’t shut up about her ailments. How is what I was doing any different than what they were doing, trying to tease out the science behind what was happening in this body? That was the problem. I assumed too much, that they actually wanted to tease out the science of what was happening to me. Those five people didn’t.

It’s all in the perspective, isn’t it?

What, to one person, is a doddery old woman whining about her ailments is, to a real medical professional, a person trying to understand the complexities of illness while they are in the throes of that illness.

As much as I want to, I’m not going to write their names here, the names of those awful doctors and nurses who did nothing to help me, who made me feel stupid and left me feeling sicker than I had been before. I will tell you that if one doctor had done her job a year ago, I might not be sick right now at all. I really want to tell you their names, don’t I?

Revenge.

What I will do is go to the websites that allow me to rate my doctors and I will write about their lack of response, of care, to my illness.

I promise that I will also rate the wonderful cardiologist and endocrinologist that I’m seeing now. I always feel that it’s important to highlight good professionals along with the ones who pose but are secretly miserable at caregiving.

Thank you for listening, jules

Resisting in Any Way I Can

I’ve been watching Call the Midwife. It’s a wonderful show with an amazing cast of what seems like realistic people.

The thing I have to complain about is that, in my state of illness, every pain on television feels more real than it should. And this is a show about women giving birth, women having complications while giving birth. It is a show that illustrates our need to support women’s reproductive rights, in detail.

Have you ever had that feeling of hurting when you see someone get hurt? When someone says they had a visceral response and your gut clenches just thinking about the stuff that comes next in their story? Maybe Call the Midwife isn’t the show for me right now, but I can’t stop myself. It’s a really good show.

Plus, there’s nothing else I haven’t already watched on Netflix. I watched six or seven seasons of Drop Dead Diva. I’ve rewatched all the movies on my list including The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, three times. I’ve watched almost all of the standup comedy specials.

It’s a good time for standup comics. When I find one I like, I search for all their specials. My favorite right now is Mo Amer. He’s a Muslim American who lives in Texas, looks and speaks Spanish like a Mexican, travels frequently, and doesn’t have a regular passport because of his route to citizenship. Oh those stories are hilarious.

But they weren’t hilarious when he experienced them. Were they? This man is a testament to the work of a true comedian, turning pain into laughter. These situations had to be frightening, time consuming, and frustrating when they happened to him. So, if you want to learn about racism, xenophobia, and problems with immigration, but want to laugh your ass off while you’re doing it, check him out. My favorite is when he’s in Walmart yelling for his cousin, Osama.

I figure that by supporting Mo Amer, I am furthering my effort to #resist Trump and his awful racism and ridiculous views on immigration. I haven’t been able to support the movement all that well lately because I’m on the couch and slightly high from low oxygen saturation. No, the doctors haven’t figured that one out yet, so pray for me. I don’t want to have brain damage when this is all over.

And after you’re done praying, watch Mo Amer to do your civic duty.

And vote!

You should know that for this critical election, any vote for a Republican is a vote to support the status quo. And the status quo is some crazy fascist shit right now.

So vote and vote wisely.

Thank you for listening, jules

Ignoring the Old Lady

Yes, I’m angry.

I have every right to be angry. This whole month would have been easier if anyone, especially my doctors and my nurses, had listened when I said I was lightheaded and feeling as though I was going to pass out.

I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. On Sunday, my oxygen saturation was 89 percent. Yes, I do expect medical professionals to respond when I complain that I’m too dizzy to drive. Two weeks ago, the nurse wrote a note telling my boss I didn’t have to work, but she didn’t investigate why I couldn’t stand upright without feeling like I was blacking out.

I’m angry.

I wandered about in my pajamas, struggling to think clearly for two weeks, not feeling well at all, wondering if I was going to die.

I didn’t have to feel that way. I’m pretty sure it was the pyridium, but the urologist and her nurses didn’t respond to my complaints. They didn’t even call me back when I called them.

I’m tired. I feel like I could sleep for a week. I’m going to go sleep for a week.

Thank you for listening, jules

When You Can't Even Write Well Enough to Entertain Yourself

Well, I didn’t die on the OR yesterday. Yay! In fact, I already feel the difference the surgery was intended to fix. That kidney stone is gone. Yay!

Have you ever felt that, still in pain from a surgery yet feeling that the underlying pain has vanished?

Yay!

A friend of mine, an avid nonfiction reader, recommended a book called The Gift of Pain by Paul Brand and Philip Yancey. A while back, I picked it up from the library and it sat on the table next to the couch for a while.

I have to admit, I couldn’t even begin to read this book while I was in so much pain. I just couldn’t. I still haven’t read past the first page in the introduction. And I looked at the cover. It’s not a very good cover.

Yes, we do judge a book by its cover. We do. We always will.

But now that I’m feeling a bit better, maybe I should read it now, do you think? I had a friend mess up a knee surgery once because she felt so good after they discharged her that she went outside and did a lot of gardening. On her knees. It would be appropriate for me to read about pain since I just spent the last sixteen days in the most pain I’ve ever felt. I think that’s true. I’ve had trouble with my back when I was younger, but did it ever last this long? No. Did I think I could die from it? No.

I need to tell you that I’m still loopy. From the anesthesia? From the two doses of hydrocodone I took yesterday as I wandered about my house after they discharged me? I don’t know which, but this morning, I almost poured cranberry juice into the base of my Nutribullet blender. That would have been bad. I also did some things, forgot, and went back to do them later only to find that they were finished. I wish all housecleaning went that way. But now, I forget what those things were that I had already finished. I forgot the feed the dog at all. I fed the cats twice because they're better at staring me into understanding. This morning, I told Nick to put the recyclables back into the fridge when he was done with them. I meant the milk. Plus, I wanted him to bring the bin back up to the house from the curb. Words got tangled in my mouth. After Mike and Nick left for work and school, I walked into the kitchen and wondered what I’d come there to find. At least I wasn’t so loopy that I couldn’t go back to the couch and remember what it was that I had forgotten. I needed breakfast. That was what I forgot. Seriously.

I kept losing time. By the time I made breakfast, it was somehow noon. Then it was three in the afternoon and Nick was home. Then, it was six and Mike was home. I’m not sure what I did all that time, but the cats and the dog are all inside and there aren’t any strange messes around the house.

I did manage to make dinner in the slow cooker almost by myself. Chicken noodle soup. Mike seasoned it when he got home because I forgot. But at least I didn’t burn down the house with my slow cooker.

There are days when a woman is supposed to lie on the couch and watch Netflix instead of organizing anything. But it was a little boring. Time was strange.

Before, as I waited in pain for my surgery, time crawled on its belly. Now, it’s bolting forward like a horse race. And I’m just watching it and trying to remember to do very little until I’m done being loopy.

That’s the reason why post-op patients should be supervised for twenty four hours after a surgery.

I’m glad I didn’t try to drive. Adding potatoes to the grocery list on the white board instead of lemons is a minor mistake. Losing time and making poor decisions in a car could be fatal. Even zoned out, I knew this much, so I didn’t go anywhere today. Not even during that afternoon hour when I actually felt good, as long as I wasn't moving. Don’t drive drunk, not even when an anesthesiologist did it to you.

This is boring. Am I boring you too?

Aw, shit.

I am. Sorry.

Thank you for listening, jules

Because It Hurts

I have to tell you that it’s difficult to read all this stuff on Twitter about how Kavanaugh, the nominee for the Supreme Court, allegedly raped multiple women. I sit at home in an altered pain-state that a kidney stone and a stent has created. It’s surreal. I’m dissipating, diffusing, dissolving as we speak. Pain alters time and space. One bright spot of pain dissipates throughout an entire life over thirty-five years. I keep trying to tell myself that it’s only a metaphor, right? It’s not happening now. It’s some caustic karmic metaphor for all these arguments about why she didn’t report it thirty-five years ago to make it better for women that came after her.

The #MeToo movement is a powerful thing. It is going to take down some people, but not without a fight, not without comments like ‘What were you wearing?’ or ‘All teenage boys do that.’

She didn’t report the incidents because of comments like this, because she knew people would say it wasn’t really rape if she’d actually had a drink at the party with the guy first. She didn’t report the incidents because her lawyer said she couldn’t prove anything in a court of law. She didn’t report them because a manager told her she’d never work in the business again if she did. She didn’t report because the African American guy who could have backed her up said he was in enough trouble as it was and he really needed his job and she knew he was right. She didn’t report because she’d had a couple of drinks and she knew this was an unwritten invitation to rape. Don’t dignify it by calling it unwanted sex. She didn’t report the assault because she’d worn a skirt and pink lipstick. She didn’t report because he told her he’d get her in trouble if she told anyone and she knew he would do it. She didn’t report because he was her boss, the guy she was supposed to report the incidents to.

Did you read this article about Amber Wyatt who did report her rape? This is the answer to that question of why others didn’t report until thirty-five years later. There are death threats against Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. This is the answer to the question of why she didn’t report sooner.

I can’t sit here for very much longer today. I’m floating away.

I’m floating away on the argument that even if she did report, it probably won’t matter. The men are likely to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court anyway, even if he did rape multiple women.

And it hurts. Everything fucking hurts.

Thank you for listening, jules

Practicing for a Role on the Walking Dead

Today, I could play a walk-on on the Walking Dead, you know, the crowds of gray people, shuffling about, reaching their hands through chain link fencing, seeing but with no light in their eyes. I think my kidney stone is moving about, trying, despite my too-narrow stent, to plow its way out.

Yes, I played a zombie on the phone today too. Someone from my family called while I was resting and wanted to know how I was feeling. Like shit, or rather crap, I wanted to say. I know I was supposed to perk up, to say I was fine, to assure her I was ready and able, still cheerful despite everything.

I wasn’t. I let the conversation fall on its face. I couldn’t carry it. I couldn’t take responsibility. The best I could do was ask a question that diverted attention from my gray tone and hope she talked for a little longer before she realized I was simply holding the phone and panting on the other side.

I needed to lie down.

Why couldn’t I say I needed to lie down?

Oh right. I did say I needed to lie down. I said I had to walk upstairs because the call was crackling on my one bar from my comfortable place in my bed. I said I didn’t have much energy, that I felt a constant need to lie down even when I was reclined on my couch.

And still she talked. Worse, she asked questions I felt too exhausted to answer. No, I had no idea about the tests they would run on me after the surgery to make sure they took out all the pieces. No, I had no plan to demand that they analyze the pieces of my kidney stone after they’d already told me they would analyze the pieces. And no, I had no idea whose kidney stones, among the family kidney stones, were bigger and more damaging.

There are roles people play in any family. Mine is to comply, to entertain, to remain cheerful despite all evidence to the contrary. I’m fifty-seven years old and my family still expects me to smooth over every conversation.

Fuck that shit. I am the walking dead.

Thank you for listening, jules

Pray for Me, Honey, I Feel Like Shit

Will you pray for me? I’m afraid I’m going to die next Tuesday.

My doctor’s office is ignoring me. I’m trying to do what they told me to do, take an antibiotic a week before my surgery, but they haven’t called it into the pharmacy and haven’t called me back when I called them about it. How confident do I feel knowing that these people don’t even return my phone calls, don’t facilitate what they said I needed to do in order to be safe for my surgery?

I still have this stent in my ureter, that tube between my kidney and my bladder. I still have a kidney stone that’s 1.5 centimeters in at least one direction, but I’m thinking about skipping out on this doctor and finding someone else to do the surgery, someone who calls back when I call to arrange what they told me to do to be safe before my surgery.

I still feel like a corn dog. Did I tell you I feel like a corn dog?

I feel puffy inside my skin. And a little meaty inside that. And then there’s that little wooden stick that gets jammed into the puckered end of the hot dog and holds it straight when what it really feels like doing is flopping back and forth in the hot grease as it cooks. Every time I bend over to pick up a noodle that I dropped, every time I reach up to get a glass out of the cabinet, every time I simply put one elbow over my head to stretch after lying on the couch for three hours, I feel that corn dog stick jammed up inside me.

I feel like crap. I went to the dog park for a half hour with Teddy today and I felt as though I was driving drunk. I remember those days before.DUI when I’d get into my car completely plastered to drive home. Yes, I admit it. Yes, I was one of those people back in the 1980s who drove twenty miles an hour under the speed limit because I knew my reaction time was closer to what was happening that way. I never had an accident. I never killed anyone.

Thankfully.

Seriously, that was back when everyone drove drunk after going out. We all tried to sober up, but we drove home anyway. We drove drunk. It’s a wonder anyone near a bar survived anyone driving home in the 80s.

But I made it to the park alive today. And I didn’t have to drive under the speed limit either.

Then, when I walked, slowly, to the fenced-in area where a pack of Teddy’s friends waited, I could feel the corn dog stick moving about inside me, keeping me from flopping around.

I also felt like a half-inflated water balloon.

I look like I’m a little pregnant. My ankles aren’t fluffy, but my gut is a big bloated mess.

I bought a new mumu from Amazon three days ago. It was really hard to sit upright and choose a loose dress that wouldn’t make me look homeless, but I did it even though it hurt. I found something I thought I might like and pressed that buy-it-now button. Then, I reclined on the couch until it arrived.

Late last night, some car drove too fast up the driveway and dropped it in front of the garage where Mike could drive over it on the way to work. Thankfully, he rescued it from his car and brought it inside for me. This dress is beautiful. It’s embarrassing to wear it around the house with my ugly slippers. It’s the ultimate in fat-girl fashion. I wish I’d bought a dress like this years ago. I feel like such a pretty corn dog. It’s a twirly dress, loose, flowy, and soft.

The problem was that my pretty new dress smelled like a Bandaid. I tried to wear it anyway, hoping the smell would dissipate, but I kept thinking about an episode of House in which a couple of kids were poisoned by wearing jeans they’d bought off a truck without washing them first.

You know House. They almost died before anyone figured it out.

So, I washed my new mumu, but the care instructions required hand-washing and line drying. Shit. Couldn’t I have bought a cotton version of my beautiful new mumu so all I had to do was throw it into the laundry with the towels and underwear?

Even with my broken finger…. Remember I broke my finger at Wild Waves? Yeah, I think I rebroke it the other night. I woke up in the night wrestling with my comforter and felt a little snap and a sting and my pinky finger decided to go all blue and green again.

But who has time to worry about a broken finger with the corn dog stick?

So, even with my broken finger, even with a corn dog stick stuck inside me, I decided to wash my new mumu.

By hand.

I already felt like I was half-way through a House episode because of my rebroken finger, my kidney stone the size of a finger to the first knuckle, and the corn dog stick I could feel inside me every time I moved. I needed to wash that Bandaid poison out of my mumu so I didn’t add poisoning to the mix.

Then, I imagined wearing that dress to my surgery, this flowy pretty black dress with a scoop neck and three-quarter sleeves.

And I felt ridiculous.

I am either stuck wearing something really pretty that begs for new shoes or wearing my faded blue and white mumu that only really looks right over a bathing suit at the lake.

And I’m not even sure I want to show up to this soiree. Remember? I’m not thrilled to put my life into the hands of people who won’t even return my phone calls. You know what I mean? If you’re going to get really drunk, you want to be with people who will take your keys and drive you home, people who make sure you’re tucked into bed on your side in case you throw up in your sleep.

So, I’m kind of afraid of Tuesday.

Thank you for listening, jules

Accidentally Running a Bed and Breakfast

I'm at that point when I really need to sit in my quiet house when I'm not at work and do some work, you know, writing, editing, going through piles of papers I should probably throw out, but now that our house guests have gone, all my friends want to catch up with me. They've asked me to

• go to the movies
• get pedicures together
• have lunch
• meet for coffee
• get together and talk about books

That sounds fun, right?

I'm trying not to be crabby about it, but lately I've been dreaming that cretins have been breaking into my house and wrecking my stuff. I've been dreaming of people who walk around behind me and never stop talking. Whenever I need time alone, I always dream that people are running rampant through my house.

So, even with my best friends, doing stuff I love, I'm not quite enthusiastic yet.

I need a retreat. I need a week off from work, a week off from obligations, a week off from talking and from listening.

Finally, I got a job that features my best characteristic, talking with people, and now all I want to do is crawl into a hole and stay quiet for a long while.

It's solitude that I needed but didn't get during my vacation. I knew I needed it. I wanted it. I had planned that whole week as a chance to sit in front of the computer while Mike and Nick played video games. I didn't ask our friends to come visit. It turns out that Mike didn't even ask our friends to come visit. They just announced their visit. They weren't bad house guests. We just weren't in a good position to host.

When we first moved to the Pacific Northwest, a raft of friends came to stay at our house. A week after I moved here, our best friends Jim and Caroline arrived. I was still living out of a suitcase. The movers hadn't delivered my stuff yet. Still, we all explored Seattle and the mountains as if we were tourists. I was a such a new transplant that I was a tourist. I had no idea where I had moved, really, what the place was like. Besides Mike, I only knew one person and I really didn't like that guy. I knew it would be a while until I connected the way I did with Jim and Caroline. So, we had a great time with them, an incredible time.

After that, more people came to visit. For every friend that came, it became a little less fun. I didn't know exactly why at first. It was supposed to be fun. We were missed by our friends. We were not alone out here. Five, six, seven groups of people came to visit within the first year.

Then, a guy called and said he was coming out, Lyle. Mike wasn't good at saying no. We knew Lyle from GE, where we used to work together two years before we moved. And so Lyle showed up. We picked him up from the airport. Lyle was picky. He didn't like what we cooked for him. He was snarky. I felt insulted. He complained about our guest room. He expected us to take off from our jobs during difficult projects. He complained about the car we loaned him for those couple of days we couldn't possibly take off from our jobs. We carpooled together so he could drive the car. He brought it back with a new scar on the bumper. He said nothing about what happened. He stayed for ten days. Ten. The night before he left, he talked about coming back for a second trip. Mike and I whispered in the kitchen over a raft of dirty dishes while Lyle sat in front of the TV in the living room. How could we discourage him from coming back?

Early the next morning, we finally brought Lyle back to the airport. As we watched him walk down to the terminal, we waved at him, then both of us sighed at the same time. I looked at Mike. He looked at me.

Mike said, "Thank God he's gone. It didn't seem like you and Lyle were all that good friends. You were about to take his head off there at the end."

"What do you mean, friends?"

"I didn't know you were friends with him at GE."

"Me? I wasn't friends with him. I thought you were friends with him."

"I was never friends with that jackass."

Yeah, I need a retreat. But I'm willing to pay for it.

Thank you for listening, jules