tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83696118486941637632024-03-06T01:14:08.092-06:00days like this since 1974Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-42919146676317046032010-09-29T07:50:00.002-05:002010-09-29T08:10:49.292-05:00Ten Types of Happiness1) Happiness of being cared for/loved<div><br /><div>2) Happiness of caring for/loving</div><div><br /></div><div>3) Happiness of knowing self</div><div><br /></div><div>4) Happiness of having self known</div><div><br /></div><div>5) Happiness of body comfort</div><div><br /></div><div>6) Happiness of feeling safe</div><div><br /></div><div>7) Happiness of time on your side</div><div><br /></div><div>8) Happiness of successful work</div><div><br /></div><div>9) Happiness of a good environment</div><div><br /></div><div>10) Happiness of good food</div></div>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-4575835695545184792010-05-28T21:37:00.007-05:002010-05-28T23:07:52.537-05:00In my dream, I'm a teaching scientist and I live in PhiladelphiaAnother doctor's appointment today. My TSH levels are higher each test but still "normal". Up to 2.6 now. My symptoms are worse. Body temp never gets above 98.1 F and is usually much closer to 97, sometimes as low as 96.5. Face puffy-puffy, joints achy-achy. I sleep. A lot.<div><br /></div><div>I do think my doctor is finally convinced that a "wait-and-see" approach is no longer appropriate.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Your thyroid is HUGE, you definitely have a goiter" she tells me. </div><div><br /></div><div>Today I think I managed to convince her that she has to start actively treating me. Does this mean I get treatment today? No. But I've got a promise that by July, after a few more tests, she will do something. We'll see. I'd say that I won't hold my breath but I might as well hold it a little since the ping-pong ball in my neck, which is pressing on my wind-pipe, saves me so much effort in the breath-holding department.</div><div><br /></div><div>I am starting to understand how so many people turn to crack-pot "alternative" medicine. I don't mean to suggest that non-western medicine is crap. I'm talking about the modern day medicine hucksters, selling fake "remedies" on late-night TV. The type of advert where it is claimed that scientists have discovered something great for your weight loss, or your sleep problems, or your poop problems but are just "keeping it a secret".</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm a little embarrassed to admit this but right now, I think I might be the target of those ads. I know that I'm not well. I'm pretty sure I've been sick, and getting sicker, for two years and that it's affecting my work, my relationships, and the rest of my life. (What is there other than work and relationships you ask? Um... laundry and dishes mostly). I'm glad I don't have a TV or I could see ordering some of 2010's latest snake oil. I wish I were kidding.</div><div><br /></div><div>I live in a sort of permanent fog now. I'm really worried about my job performance. I fantasize about things that used to be routine for me. I live in my head a lot and my fantasy life has always been really rich. </div><div><br /></div><div>For example: Fantasy Life B.L.T (Before Lumpolina Thyroiditis)</div><div><br /></div><div><i>I go to a cafe to read the paper. I have a perfect latte and also strike up a conversation with a stranger. She turns out to be a recruiter for a new biology-environment-human-medicine-space-travel think tank. A week later she calls to see if I can do a little consulting for them. They are really lacking an ECM biologist on their team. It goes well. I keep my job in Philly but moonlight enough to take short trips to exotic places like Taiwan, Cuba and Outer Space. I use those experiences to enhance my teaching and thus win a teaching award. I also use my new found connections to put together the best young investigator grant EVER. In my spare time I write a book about my work as a teaching biology-environmental-human-medicine-space-traveler scientist. It's so informative but also so warm and hilarious that it becomes a best seller. I'm invited to go on the Daily Show. John Stewart loves me and invites me to have dinner with his family. John Cusak (but not jerky) or Fareed Zakaria (but not married) or Sidney Poitier (but not married and from 1968) or David Sedaris (but not gay and less OCD) happens to be in the audience of the show because he's coming to dinner at the Stewart house and he falls in love with me. It becomes a famous romance and we write several books and/or screen plays while I also pursue a </i><i>successful career in science. I can afford to move my mom, Froggie and her brother to Philly. </i><i>Plus, through all this I'm 30 lbs thinner and have really great clothes. Plus two Cell papers. Plus a Nature paper. Plus I have some gorgeous babies with John-Fareed-Sidney-David. Plus some other great stuff.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Ha ha! Fun.</div><div>However, my fantasy life is very different these days.</div><div><br /></div><div>For example: Fantasy Life W.L.T (With Lumpolina Thyroidcrapitis)</div><div><br /></div><div><i>It's Saturday and I manage to wake up before noon. When I wake up, I feel refreshed from sleeping and my body doesn't hurt too much in my joints for me to move about the apartment. I have a healthy breakfast because I feel good and I'm hungry. Then, I pack up some laundry and take it down to the laundromat to wash while I plan experiments for the week. I finish my laundry, drop it off at my house, and head in to the lab for a few hours. I get all prepped for the coming week and leave feeling on top of my job and excited about research. I walk the 1.5 miles back from work chatting with my mom or A~ on my cell phone. I pick up some fresh groceries on the way home. I make a yummy dinner and then wander out to meet a friend for a glass of wine before calling it an early night. It's fun to have a drink with a friend because my head is clear, I can focus on what they have to tell me and I have something to talk about other than how much I sleep and how frustrated I am with my health care. I'm a teaching/research post-doc and I live in Philadelphia. My clothes aren't that great but at least they are clean. Plus some other great stuff.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Right now, B.L.T. fantasies and W.L.T. fantasies feel sort of equally possible for me. I wish my doctor(s) could understand how scary that is for me. It's not good when you are as likely to marry Sidney Poitier from 1968 or a hetro David Sedaris as you are to get your laundry done on a Saturday. Not good at all. Hoping for July.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-73299755180026547572010-05-04T08:55:00.006-05:002010-05-04T09:47:46.966-05:00Fashion trends from a true fashionista!If you've never met me in person, let me just tell you that I am a fashion diva. In the picture of me to the right of the page? <div><br /></div><div>Jeans: Old Navy,</div><div>Clogs: Naturalizer </div><div>T-shirt: Sears</div><div>Sweat Ring around T-shirt: model's own</div><div><br /></div><div>So, you probably want to think about taking your fashion advice from me. I don't usually post anything other than stories but I saw an <a href="http://www.pajamagram.com/hottest-products-gift-set-gallery.html">ad for this</a> on CNN.com and I thought I had suddenly popped into an SNL mock ad: Pajama Jeans? No. Yes? Is this the next snuggie? The tag line is "Pajamas you live in. Jeans you sleep in" </div><div><br /></div><div>The advert showed a woman proudly walking around in her PajamaJeans (TM) (good thing they trademarked that, this is going to be 2010s Chia Pet, I can feel it) while wearing a blazer and a kicky scarf. Then she sheds the blazer and scarf and curls up in bed. It looks like the perfect gift for the women in your life who are prone to alcoholic black-outs.</div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIjuTHivxE5Iav_eOk3SV39N6ZNx8s0kTN56mgfVMcqnM21l3-UZt-sEU0SB8Hy1FHLXwPPEhxsu4P5BRo1c4fuS7jdXBanqcGgwCmjM5Qy8gn3DSwTGRgKghqyUz0SsFhOHazbljNPZ8/s1600/Picture+3.png"></a><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIjuTHivxE5Iav_eOk3SV39N6ZNx8s0kTN56mgfVMcqnM21l3-UZt-sEU0SB8Hy1FHLXwPPEhxsu4P5BRo1c4fuS7jdXBanqcGgwCmjM5Qy8gn3DSwTGRgKghqyUz0SsFhOHazbljNPZ8/s1600/Picture+3.png" style="text-decoration: none;"><br /><img style="text-align: left;display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 242px; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIjuTHivxE5Iav_eOk3SV39N6ZNx8s0kTN56mgfVMcqnM21l3-UZt-sEU0SB8Hy1FHLXwPPEhxsu4P5BRo1c4fuS7jdXBanqcGgwCmjM5Qy8gn3DSwTGRgKghqyUz0SsFhOHazbljNPZ8/s320/Picture+3.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5467417338543122530" /></a>I also received an e-mail advert from The Gap. I need a few summer things so I popped over to their website and found some lovely T-shirts (would look so nice with PajamaJeans!). They were expensive, sure, but they come with a <i>narrative</i> and that's worth at least an additional $15.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here is the narrative: </div><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 166px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7kVDmjg1HVPfUAT9PapkdJKQDmDA4CmyOzprc1jx1pus5D0i3Cl9uEi2lJhn17hndbVXOPvRMbWnpoPxRvpnSgqWh_Yrs2Tf-NvTDhZCJ8grflMf88QRfTHDL2bSysKqvEl5CXQCGsqE/s320/Picture+4.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5467421691076133394" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"><br /></span><br /><div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>And here are some examples of the execution:</div><div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW-TnOKMFBLzvYT2uGT2Kp2gEnKoi8u2164Skx37C5Xbp6sJsy8vkTKsvXpgKnTSputC-_n8Pq9YhkklZbgYe5x-4kPo1yZokC3xlfZ5_UiNa55yX0TgMqjCTWnbccHcyhNrbCgVcP9XM/s1600/Picture+7.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 196px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW-TnOKMFBLzvYT2uGT2Kp2gEnKoi8u2164Skx37C5Xbp6sJsy8vkTKsvXpgKnTSputC-_n8Pq9YhkklZbgYe5x-4kPo1yZokC3xlfZ5_UiNa55yX0TgMqjCTWnbccHcyhNrbCgVcP9XM/s400/Picture+7.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5467422663136529826" /></a><div>I know that's hard to read so from left to right: 'The suffragist', 'The patriot', 'The flapper'.</div><div><br /></div><div>Thanks Gap. I appreciate that you are both educating young women about the term suffragist and enforcing the idea that patriots wear ugly American flags on <i>everything</i>, even their boobs. I look forward to your next line of T-shirts designed around even more iconic female roles. I am particularly excited about your upcoming "The Virgin and the Whore". </div><div><br /></div><div>The 'Whore' will of course feature a T-shirt with circular cut-outs, directly over each breast. </div><div><br /></div><div>The "Virgin"? Obviously that will be a T-shirt with even bigger circular cut-outs... directly over each breast.</div>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-16058785509167326172010-05-03T22:46:00.013-05:002010-05-28T21:36:58.159-05:00This is what four States of love tastes like<div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>I am a crabby butt-head today. I am tired. I am behind in every aspect of my work (teaching, research, old papers from former lab) because I have been run down. I spent the weekend with guests. Some of this was lovely, but I'm tired now. Did I mention cranky? I feel like I need a week to get caught up. I need a vacation from being unproductive. I am <i>SO</i> behind at work. I had to cancel my doctor's appointment for this Thursday and it made me want to kick rocks. I'm so sick of waiting for something to be done with lumpolina-the-thyroid-disruptah.<div><br /></div><div>DP was one of my guests and she left this morning. Even in my sleepy stupor, I was sorry to see her go. Sorry, but (when I woke up) completely confused as to what made her want to shove all of my toiletries (the ones I use daily and so keep on the counter) into a drawer. D? You reading this? What's up with that? You had to get the toiletries out of your sight on the morning you left town? That drawer was not arranged randomly, by the way. It <i>was</i> one of the only organized areas of my whole apartment. I still love you anyway. We'll always have D'Angelo's. And Yogorino. And 1993. And the lasagna episode. And raspberries. And the naked mud bath. Plus years and years of conversation. We have a lot actually. I do really love you. But next time leave my toiletries alone?</div><div><br /></div><div>Crabby-butt-dinky-head. It didn't help that I checked my e-mail first thing to find that I was behind on...EVERYTHING. My fault, I know. Still sucked. Then I get an e-mail from a new Philly friend. We e-mail a lot. This is new to me and I can't seem to stop doing it even though we work in close enough proximity that I could easily walk over and say hello in person. Procrastination or novelty, I'm not sure, but it's wearing me (and likely NPF) out. I had e-mailed yesterday to tell him that I was planning on seeing a movie this evening and that the protagonist shared NPF's name. NPF wrote back today to say he didn't think he could make it, but he'll try. This makes me want to cry when I read it. Not because I'm disappointed that he can't come, but because I hadn't really intended to extend an invitation. I was with people all weekend (well, it was <i>all</i> weekend relative to how little company I keep these days) and I just wanted to have the evening to myself to recharge. Plus, I have a huge zit on my chin (again) and nobody should look at me or even in my vicinity until it's gone. I was stuck between wanting to go to the movie alone and not wanting to go alone since there was a perceived invitation and now maybe going alone meant that I was being rejected. Making connections in a new city is exhausting.</div><div><br /></div><div>C.R.A.B.B.Y. You figure out what the damn initials stand for. I'm too grumpy to do it.</div><div><br /></div><div>I worked on the computer for the day. Did not get caught up. Exchanged a few crabby texts with NPF. He was polite (not wanting to seem as if rejecting?), I was terse (why are you making me feel rejected when I only want to be alone anyway?). I almost bail on the movie idea but then buy myself a ticket online so I can't skip it and anyway, it was one-night-only.</div><div><br /></div><div>Crab face, but then....Things Turn Around*. I go, alone, to the movie. I don't feel lonely. I feel relieved that I'm doing something for me. It's a light movie, but sweet. There is a "conversation with the director" afterwards. He's a light director, but sweet. I walk out of the community center, prepared to take a cab as it is after nine and realize....I LIVE IN PHILADELPHIA! The weather is warm, mid-70's at least and the street is just full of people wandering around, chatting, walking dogs, eating frozen yogurt. I'm totally safe to walk home. This is nice. I put my phone on and find that A~ has called me. This is nice too. I wander to a Chinese restaurant near my house and order "Healthy Vegetarian Szechuan Hunan Special General Tso 'Chicken' " (because nothing says "healthy" like deep fried soy-wheat mash soaked in red dye #5 and high fructose corn syrup) and some veggie dumplings. A~ and I chat about the movie while I stand outside the restaurant, waiting for my food. Some feeling starts to seep into me...it's happy, just your garden-variety-contentment version of happy.</div><div><br /></div><div>I head home with my fructose...er..."chicken" and we continue to chat. At my front door is a package from LC. This is exciting for me because she keeps bees and I am expecting some of her home-harvested Alabama honey. I open the package and find that it's better than anything ever. One mason jar of Alabama honey harvested from LC's backyard, two mini bottles of Maker's Mark bourbon, a card that says "I miss you, we'll have a drink soon" and five cans of Buffalo Rock Ginger Ale. One of the cans is completely crushed and, although the pop-top is still sealed, the can is empty. This probably explains the soaking wet newsprint lining the box. Still, perfection.</div><div><br /></div><div>For me that is what four States of love tastes like. It tastes like meddlesome Oregon toiletry rearrangement, peppered with some Pennsylvania self-invoked alone time, soaked in fructose and Washington conversation, then washed down with Alabama honey and Buffalo Rock. I've got women in every corner of the USA watching my back and I'm holding my own too. Behind at work or no, I'm doing okay as a human being.</div><div><br /></div><div>I know, sometimes my writing can be a bit much. Does it sound too sweet for you? The metaphor a bit tender and mushy? Yes? Well....why don't you go suck a sharp dusty rock? I'll do my happy any damn way I please and that includes both cheesy and happy-crabby. Habby? Cheese-Chappy? Screw you. I'm going to bed. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 160px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic77g7_NMxiNGJI11r1rXt9M0qsXQ6GDGEKqwrqj8TevcOjpI97U2Dc04ETYoVtYZHly4qauxlnY3DR0yDUkmubRoFxRzlazIfApQh7w6J_2ISC_LRFeM6xSMNarhenM1X9dibs1hzxgw/s200/alabama.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5467276589739464018" /><br /></div><div>(but I'm going to bed happy)</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">*I'm not sure, but I </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">think</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> "Things Turn Around" is the title of an ill-fated work by Chinua Achebe, meant to follow his ground-breaking "Things Fall Apart". Unfortunately, nobody wanted to read it. Mostly it just contained detailed passages of yam crops growing, unadulterated by locusts, and people sitting around chatting about what kinds of non-threatening animals had wandered through the village that day.</span></div>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-20763715049775603262010-04-29T06:04:00.005-05:002010-04-30T13:00:20.198-05:00Hello Incident Report, it’s been a while. How sweet of you to drop by (now get out).<div>Arty-G came into town from Birmingham this evening. He clearly carried a big slice of the old B’ham in his pocket because I met him for a few drinks at his hotel and suddenly my life is once again party-party followed by incident report and, as a bonus round, an altercation with my neighbor. Seriously, for that kind of fun I should be paying only $550 a month for rent and having Buffalo Rock ginger ale whenever I want. I think the additional $500 a month I pay in Philly, plus the ginger ale deprivation should at least come with a party-party-but-no-incident-report lifestyle.</div><div><br /></div><div>No such luck. The night started out pretty tame. I have only seen one other B’hamian since moving to Philly so I was pretty excited when I found out that Arty-G was coming up for a short work trip. I’ve been tired, tired, tired, lately and today I found out that while my thyroid is not cancerous, it may be infected from the biopsy and I have to start a course of antibiotics.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let me pause for a second to say again that the result of my biopsy was BENIGN. I found this out officially on Monday. Now I smile, you can too if you want! Now I frown, and launch back into the rest of my story.</div><div><br /></div><div>So…I wasn’t feeling well but I managed to slump through the rest of my day. I was looking forward to Arty-G but also a little worried that I would be too wiped to be any fun. He was late finishing dinner and so I was already in his hotel lobby bar (At the Ritz baby! Arty-G does it in style) when he came in. Oh! The happiness of, and on, his sweet face! On my face a big grin as well, reflecting the happy happiness of being known, not new, and loved (or as he would say lurrrved). We chat. We gossip. We eat stinky cheese and honey. We tell the bartender to make us a “Ben Franklin Slamma”, or a “Liberty Bell”, or a “Philadelphia Freedom” or an “Elton John”. We think we’re hilarious because none of these drinks exist on the menu (or anywhere for that matter) and the bartender gives us something that tastes a lot like pez candy, if pez was made with red bull. It costs us a lot of money to be that silly, since we are at the Ritz. I introduce Arty-G to Philly’s local gin, Bluecoat. He takes me up to his suite on the 29th floor to split a split of champagne (Ritz Champagne, Arty-G…naturally) where we can see teeny, far away Philadelphia under a big fat moon.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yes. A Pez Franklin Slamma (whatever that was made of) followed by Gin followed by champagne. Only with Arty-G. I left the Ritz knowing that I will regret being out late, drinking any alcohol at all and drinking that alcohol in particular. But I also left feeling relaxed and happy to have seen a familiar face and even better, to have been a familiar face. </div><div><br /></div><div>When the cab dropped me off at home I walked up to my front door and immediately called my mom. My leasing company recently rehabbed our front door and while it now looks amazing, it doesn’t really close. Unusually, both the inner and outer doors to my building were wide open and, as it was past midnight, I felt funny about going in alone. I should also add that to get to my door on the second floor I would have to walk by not one, but two empty apartments, both with open doors. Crreeepy, so I called my mom to ‘walk me to my door’. </div><div><br /></div><div>I used to do this all the time with mom or B when I was coming home late from work in Birmingham. They would be quiet until I said, “I’m safe!” and then we would chat for a bit. In Birmingham, this was necessitated in part because I had a scary, antagonistic, relationship with my scary, antagonizing (likely drug-addicted, definitely crazy-ass-mean) downstairs neighbor. In Philly, however, I have no such relationships…until tonight.</div><div><br /></div><div>I made it past the cavernous apartments, gave mom the “I’m safe!”, and we chatted about my evening. She was so happy that I had seen a friend that I didn’t even get scolded for drinking when I’m already sick. “I know I’m going to pay for this tomorrow” I tell her, “but it was really worth it anyway”. On that cheerful note, I said my goodnights and curled up to sleep the (not very restorative) sleep of the over imbibed. </div><div><br /></div><div>About three hours later I woke up when I heard the downstairs door open and close. I was about to head back into la-la-land when I realized that someone was walking up and down the stairwell. Not up the stairwell, up and down the stairwell. On the third trip up I can hear men’s voices and then oddly, the third floor hall window opening. I got up and quietly went to my door. I could hear duct tape being pulled from a roll? The window closing? I looked out my peephole and saw a man coming back down the stairs while another man was just coming up the stairwell. It didn’t feel right, or it looked funny. I don’t know why I kept looking out the peephole except that mostly I knew if I walked back from my door, the floor would creak.</div><div><br /></div><div>The two men stopped on the landing in front of my door. They conferred quietly for a moment and then the downstairs guy turned toward my door. He was looking right at me but didn’t realize it. He turned back to the upstairs guy and gestured to my door. I couldn’t make out his face, but I saw upstairs guy shake his head “no” just a little. Then downstairs guy turned back to my door and turned the handle.</div><div><br /></div><div>WHAM! I hit the front door so <i>they</i> would know that <i>I</i> knew and RAN to my living room for my cell phone. The men yelled something through my front door but there was no f#@$ing way that I was getting close enough to that door to find out what it was. The police were there in five minutes or less. I watched for them out the front window and saw three cars race past my building. Flashbacks of standing on my porch in Birmingham after calling to report a break-in, watching police cars drive repeatedly past my house for an hour before they found the location.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the Philly cops come back around quickly and I don’t have to wait long until they are in the building. I could hear them talking in firm voices to someone downstairs and when they came upstairs I called out through my front door. The officer who came to my door was in his 40’s, had a thick Philly accent and I felt instantly reassured. I told him what happened and he asked me to come downstairs. </div><div><br /></div><div>“Why?” I ask. </div><div><br /></div><div>“I’d like for you to take a look at somebody for me please” he says. </div><div><br /></div><div>I knew this already. I could hear a man complaining loudly downstairs and I didn’t want to confront whoever it was. I walked down behind the officer to see…Yes! It’s upstairs guy #1! I hadn’t really made out his face but same bald head, same black jacket. Relief! And then…</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh.</div><div><br /></div><div> </div><div>Shit.</div><div><br /></div><div>It.</div><div><br /></div><div> </div><div>Is.</div><div><br /></div><div>My downstairs neighbor.</div><div><br /></div><div> </div><div>He’s shaved off his head of thick hair since the first (and only) time that I met him. He’s handcuffed, being held by a second officer, and he’s pissed.</div><div><br /></div><div>“Man, I live here!” he says. </div><div><br /></div><div>“He lives here.” I say.</div><div><br /></div><div>“You’ve got me handcuffed in my own home!” </div><div><br /></div><div>The last comment was directed at me and I opened my mouth to apologize but here’s what came out instead:</div><div><br /></div><div>“What the F@$ck did you think I was going to do? What did you think was going to happen when two grown-ass men start messing with my door in the middle of the night when I live alone? If it were your mother what would you tell her? You’d tell her to call! If it were your sister, what would you tell her? You’d tell her to call! If it were your grandmother, what would you tell her? You’d tell her to f@%ing call!”</div><div><br /></div><div>The fright, and late hour (4:30 am) had turned me into The Great Reverend Doctor, complete with the booming volume. At that moment, I was every single one of my black aunties rolled into one, halleluiah and amen. </div><div><br /></div><div>He’s still handcuffed, listening to me and politely nodding in agreement. He looks contrite. I ruin my sermon by finishing with:</div><div><br /></div><div>“Jesus! I’m sorry to inconvenience you.” </div><div><br /></div><div>I went back upstairs with the first officer. He and the other cop had waited patiently while I stood on the stairs and yelled at my neighbor so I apologized to him as well. He stood in my hallway, politely ignored the pile of laundry on my bedroom floor, and told me that there was nothing to apologize for, that it was the middle of the night, I was clearly sound asleep and that he would have wanted his daughter to do the same thing. He took my name, birth date and phone number for the incident report, wished me a good night, and left.</div><div><br /></div><div>Meanwhile, I could hear that my neighbor was still talking to the cop downstairs. I heard the officer say that they wouldn’t do anything about one call but not to get called about again. I retreated to my living room and this computer. </div><div><br /></div><div>It’s 6:30 in the morning now. I’m not sure that I’ll get back to sleep. I hate the thought of living in another situation where I don’t feel safe because of my neighbor. Or where I feel bad for having antagonized a neighbor.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here’s the thing. It was embarrassing, yes. But a few things are still bothering me. Why didn’t my other neighbors wonder about all the yelling in the hallway? What was he doing with the third floor hall window at 3 AM when he lives on the ground floor? Where did his friend go? What were they talking about on the second floor landing? What did that bartender put in the Ben Franklin Slamma that made it taste so much like pez? </div><div><br /></div><div>But mostly what I’m wondering is…why were they trying to open my front door?</div><div><br /></div>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-9462405263123275022010-04-19T02:02:00.002-05:002010-04-19T02:13:19.325-05:00You can play from the rough with your regulation thyroid<div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">I want to write something happy and really funny here. I want to write something happy and funny but I’m a little stuck in that realm known as pro-fess-shee-unal-ism. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"></span></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Here’s the problem: A while back I threw all these stories into a book for my mom via an online site. I made the reference public so that a family friend could order one too (yes, I did tell her it was also available for FREE online). Helpfully, Google picked up the reference and NOW when my name is Googled, the book shows up…with a link to this otherwise semi-anonymous site. It is my fault and a stupid mistake. I’ve tried and tried to erase the reference, but it won’t go away.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">So here’s me, moved on to Philadelphia and a Postdoctoral Fellow (can I just say that I can never figure out if post doc is one word or two? Anyone?). Having survived graduate school with most of my organs in tact I now find myself facing the semi-real, although still unlikely, possibility of future employment in some sort of scientific/academic field. Even more troubling, I am currently supported by a fantastic teaching and research training grant. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">How can it be both ‘troubling’ and ‘fantastic’ you ask? Well the folks who run this grant have provided me with a really awesome set-up: three years of support, lots of money for meetings and supplies, rigorous teacher training and free hoagies about once a month when we have an organizational meeting. So obviously that’s the ‘fantastic’ part. The hoagies are especially fantastic because the veggie hoagies on the platter are essentially raw broccoli and lettuce sandwiches which is both icky and genius. I think about those sandwiches a lot, but I digress. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Anyway, the ‘troubling’ part? They are pretty serious about this program and would probably prefer that I not undermine their efforts by discussing a time when I might or might not have had to suppress my gag reflex while cheerfully encouraging students to dissect cats with gangrenous livers. NOT. That did NOT happen, but if it had, what a great story that would have made for this sad, neglected blog.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">So that’s where this stands. Me, stuck with the choice: entertain the two people who stop by here once every two months (yeah, I get a count on the hits) or retain the ability to make almost enough money to pay for a one bedroom apartment and health care in any major city. It’s a tough choice and I do love entertaining you but also, I really need the health care.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"></span></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Which brings me to another point. The damn lump in my thyroid is now the size of a ping-pong ball. I’m not exaggerating, I put the largest diameter of the thing into Google and I got all these hits about the size of a regulation ping-pong ball. I’m glad it’s not bigger than a ‘regulation’ ball because that would just make me feel so rouge. Still, I’m a little scared and a little overwhelmed. I am not worried about cancer, that’s basically been ruled out although another biopsy will be done this week. Even if the biopsy comes back malignant the survival rate for most thyroid cancer 20 years out is something reassuring like 95%. Nope, I’m scared that I’ll have to wait another six months while this stupid lump gets bigger and then just be put off again: </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">“Come see me in six months.” </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">“I’m not too worried. Come see me in six months.”</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">“I tell you what, let’s check in on this again in six months? Sound good?”</span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"></span></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">No, it doesn’t sound good. It sounds stupid. Every time they check, the damn thing is bigger and bigger. This last ultrasound it was almost 50% bigger than it was a year ago. I feel it always now and it’s starting to make me feel strangely self-conscious about how I look. This is particularly crazy of me because I’m pretty sure that from a distance my ass (which is slightly larger than a golf ball) is more noticeable than a lump in my neck. But I USE my ass for sitting and the bigger it gets, the nicer it is to sit. The lump, on the other hand, seems to only serve the purpose of making me feel claustrophobic when I wear turtlenecks or drink too fast.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"></span></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">I also believe that Lumpolina (yeah, that’s what I’m calling it as of right now, Lumpolina. I named it. Gross!) is wreaking havoc on my energy levels. I sleep all the time. I’m not exaggerating that either. I average 12 hours a night. That means that sometimes I only sleep 10 hours but other nights/days I sleep more like 15. This was happening to me in Birmingham too but everyone, including me, just assumed that I was depressed or lazy and trying to avoid finishing my Ph.D. Well I’m nearly as happy as a clam here in Philly…a sleepy, tired, washed-out, moderately happy clam, and now I really believe I can say that something just isn’t working. I am also gaining weight at a steady clip, which is weird since I’m too busy sleeping to eat. It must be Lumpolina’s way of compensating for me. Like maybe if my ass gets to be big enough, no one will notice whether I retain “regulation” standards for ping-pong or have to move on to golf-neck. Just 0.26 cm more to reach that goal. Come see me in another six months.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"></span></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">So that’s the update. I’m good. I have a lump in my neck. There was absolutely no gangrenous cat dissection (but can you imagine if there was? No, don’t try. It would have been a terrible smell, had it happened.). I like it here but I’m struggling with growing up. I want to tell you all about it but can’t in case they decide to listen in and don’t like what they hear. Is that what we get for moving on and moving up? More secrets? Maybe that’s why I waited so long to get going. I must have known. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"></span></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Oh, and I miss you. Yeah. You. Just know that I’m here. Even though I would like to; I just can’t tell you all about it any more, or at least not about the cats, because that didn’t happen anyway. I swear.</span></div><div><br /></div>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-71678792134065546012009-10-12T22:38:00.006-05:002009-10-13T00:20:01.007-05:00Bad day for 21st and WalnutI walked home from work early today. I was tired from my new job, which so far entails reading and jockeying for position with another employee. I think I will be happy there, but today the effort of continual adjustment sort of wore me out.<br /><br />By the way, I live in Philadelphia now.<br /><br />I walked home from work, enjoying the fall colors, cold air (fall! It’s been so long since I’ve seen one!) and deciding if I would stop for a glass of wine or head straight home. I was so lost in my own head that I was almost on top of the disaster in the street before I realized that the crowds of people were not normal for 21st and Walnut.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/art/Crane_collapses.html">A crane had fallen</a>. 125 feet, according to the newscasters, who were severely reporting into their cameras. It wasn’t really a crane so much as a huge cherry picker/man lift. Repairs were being made to the spires of a church on the corner. I’d been watching the progress for a few weeks. The machine operator was dead. A woman injured from falling debris. Street signs were lying in the street, the awnings of the local florist shredded. A workers truck sat with a smashed windshield near what remained of the bucket. High above it all, a large hole had been carved out of the roof and wall of the apartment building over the florist shop.<br /><br />None of this had occurred when I walked by the same corner seven hours earlier.<br /><br />I watched for a while, called my mom, and then backtracked to reach my street. I walked into my local bar and ordered a glass of wine. I was the only patron and the bartender and I start to talk about the accident. She tells me that when she was a little girl her father worked construction. One day the platform he was working on collapsed and he fell five stories, landing on his feet.<br /><br />“Was he okay?” I asked.<br /><br />I know he’s alive, she had mentioned him before. But she tells me that her father was and wasn’t okay.<br /><br />“He contracted Hepatitis C from the blood transfusions, he was never the same after that. Tired a lot. I didn’t realize how massive the event was at the time. I was only five or six.”<br /><br />And then she apologized to me for making someone else’s tragedy about herself, which I found completely sincere and endearing.<br /><br />“But you do think about yourself when you see a situation like that.” I told her.<br /><br />I certainly had thought about myself back on that corner. When I called my mom from the accident site she answered, but was crabby from working on her taxes.<br /><br />“It’s right at the bus stop I use every morning mom, the bus stop is a little smushed.”<br /><br />“Uh-huh. Okay. Well good thing you weren’t there then.”<br /><br />“MOM! I’m serious.” I tell her.<br /><br />“Yes, okay well I’m working on my taxes so I’ll read about it later okay?” and with that my mom said good-bye and disconnected.<br /><br />I was irritated and then embarrassed that I was worrying about me. I wasn’t at the bus stop. It happened in the middle of the day so I wouldn’t have been at the bus stop. Really, I was selfishly thinking about how two weeks into a new town I didn’t know anyone who I could call if I had to go to the emergency room. I was too embarrassed to tell the bartender what had gone through my head when I saw the accident, so I changed the subject and ordered some bread.<br /><br />We chatted a bit more while we waited for my order and then she turned to help two more customers who had managed to find their way into the bar, despite the street being blocked off. I finished my glass of wine and suddenly felt so tired that I wasn’t sure I would even make it across the street to my apartment without a nap first.<br /><br />I stumbled up my stairs and then wandered through the maze of packing cardboard that leads to my couch. I was barely able to register when I laid down, shoes still on, pulling the couch throw over my shoulders and up to my ears. I fell into the mental twilight that sometimes lingers before the deep midnight of a big sleep. I wandered through the afternoon again, changing the scenario at the corner several times over.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">In the first instance I imagine that I come down Walnut and find a crowd, TV crews, emergency response teams. A crane is down, the building and street damaged. The crane operator is badly hurt and he will require many surgeries. The first surgery is already underway, it will be a tough road but he will likely survive.<br /><br />Then the same picture but he’s not as badly hurt. He will definitely survive.<br /><br />Then I see the crane fall only this time a freak miracle accompanies the freak accident. He’s able to jump free of the basket, or maybe he was thrown. But instead of falling all the way to the sidewalk he lands on the roof of the building, hurt, but not too much, a few broken bones.<br /><br />Then the same picture only this time he lands inside the apartment where the crane makes a hole in the roof. This time he falls right onto a couch under the hole and is a little bruised and has some scratches but no broken bones. “If it weren’t so serious it would be slapstick.” is how the incident is reported on the local news.</span><br /><br />Then, right before my conscious completely faded:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I come down Walnut and…nothing. Nothing happened. The crane, it drove over the manhole cover and wobbled, but it held. No one knows about it. Traffic is the same. There are no news crews. No one dies.</span><br /><br />My shoes were still on and my new living room was strangely quiet with all of the cars diverted to other streets and finally, I slept.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqpNyJoOeghuSEsAdV0A1cfriz_3AtG6499o5VmqA2WpUeckv_KnmLbLNvwPxEdn5ahLwnQH0Uhxo74aiDR6kS_8FPn5cPpuwshth25eh90O8SApZY7VMXSlnA043vxzGeUp5_93XKJE0/s1600-h/GEDC0244.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqpNyJoOeghuSEsAdV0A1cfriz_3AtG6499o5VmqA2WpUeckv_KnmLbLNvwPxEdn5ahLwnQH0Uhxo74aiDR6kS_8FPn5cPpuwshth25eh90O8SApZY7VMXSlnA043vxzGeUp5_93XKJE0/s320/GEDC0244.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5391929994028116818" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> The cherry picker the week before. Mom happened to take a random picture of it when she was visiting.</span>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-30480797102413069412008-12-17T12:35:00.002-06:002008-12-17T12:39:42.622-06:00Introduction -or- why bother?My favorite part about having a blog is definitely the "log". I like looking back over my own words and seeing the comments left by my friends and family. It's like having the faint essence of a conversation frozen in time. I think our ancestors had something like it that they called "letters". My first blog was on The Myspace and sadly, when I moved it over to The Blogspot, I lost a lot of the comments that were left on the earlier stories. I also like how the public venue makes me feel like I should work harder to entertain. Having that constraint really helps me boil down my stories to a manageable few pages. More importantly, the desire to entertain allows me to find the humor in situations that otherwise might only be stressful or dreary.<br /><br /> I think my least favorite part of having a blog is the feeling that I occasionally have to deeply censor what I write to protect the privacy of myself and my friends. Because of this I still have never written about a few of the bigger events in my life over the last few years. I also have to be very careful when I talk about "Froggie". There are four stories in this blog (so far) that are wholly or in part about my "Little Sister". It is a sad commentary on the progress of AIDS awareness that in 2008 we are still unable to speak about HIV/AIDS in a more open and accepting format. This lack of progress has had a huge and negative impact on her quality of life. As her one of her caregivers it has also made it difficult for me to find the support that I need to replenish my own stores of strength.<br /><br /> Initially, I started "Days like this since 1974" as a way to express my feelings about being an older graduate student. I have found that very little of that has crept into my stories even though it completely dominates my life. Perhaps I needed a place to feel like a human with value outside of my last experiment. Maybe I'm just deeply in denial. Either way, it's been nice to write some and laugh some and bitch lots (and lots!). I haven't written much in the last month. I have a few good stories to get down. One is about quitting (almost? really?) graduate school. Another one is about driving over my mom's foot and then there was the time I sat in a dirty room full of nerf-covered couches and dust bunnies while doctors tried to decide if I should be committed to the psych ward. <br /><br />Well, maybe I'll just wait for something more eventful.Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-28337324782452468152008-11-04T19:43:00.006-06:002008-11-05T14:02:46.239-06:00Apparently you have a time machineSo I'm sitting at the Bottletree with Meg, Wen, and T. We get angry with the early reporting and send the following snarky e-mail cause we are HILARIOUS. Also, we are PISSED off AND ourah nurves is toe-up!* They are calling the election seconds after the polls have closed in only a handful of states.<br />__________________<br /><br />Dear Dedicated Reporters and Staff at Reuters, <br /><br />It is Tuesday night in Birmingham, Alabama. While we are often accused of being behind the times we have recently recieved a shipment of calendars into our Walmarts. In this way we are able to determine that it is November 4th...which is a ding-dang-dawg Tuesday. <br />Imagine our surprise when we read (just having learned that too) that you are already calling states for Obama not to mention that these results were collected on Wednesday, November 5th. <br />We sure hope you send that technology down here soon.<br />Sincerely, <br />Olabama Lovahs in Bama<br /><br />(Seriously, how can you justify calling results so soon? It has only been minutes since the polls closed.)<br /><br />Auto-Response<br />Dear Reader,<br /><br />Thank you for contacting Reuters with your comments and feedback. Your comments have been passed on to our editorial team.<br />We appreciate reader feedback, and all e-mails to Reuters.com are read by a senior editor. Please note that due to the huge volume of e-mails sent to the Editors daily, we may be unable to provide a personal response. However, we take your compliments, comments and criticisms very seriously, and we invite you to see what some readers are thinking on our Reader Feedback Page.<br />We appreciate your feedback and we hope that you continue to use and enjoy the Reuters website.<br />Kind regards<br /><br />Reuters Editor<br /><br />__________________________<br /><br />(Ha ha, jokes on us...turns out it IS Wednesday in Reutersville which is obviously around the world somewheres.... he he he....blush)<br /><br />* Yankee translation: Our nerves are some what frayedTransplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-8011385170415951332008-11-04T18:07:00.007-06:002008-11-20T12:13:39.161-06:00Don't forget to breathI woke up this morning and was already on pins and needles. I cried. Not because of school, or the break up, but because today I wish that my grandfather, and grandmother, and my cousin Mgn, and all of my black relatives who died could be here today. I'm scared. I'm hopeful. I'm scared.<br /><br />Rr called me this morning and we went down to the Fire Station together. We voted. My friend KD sent me text messages about hope, and history. She told me that he would be the first black president of the USA four years ago. I voted for Hillary in the primary. KD and I had fought about it. She called me a chicken then. She might have been right. <br /><br />I'm a hopeful chicken right now. I'm also sort of frantic. I miss CNK like crazy. I want to talk to him. I want to know what he's thinking about all of this. <br /><br />My mom sent me the best e-mail and she gave me permission to paraphrase and then post it here. She's been calling people in Indiana on behalf of Barack Obama. Mostly just leaving messages about where the message recipient can go to vote. Here is her story:<br /><br /><br />"So I called people in Indiana again today. Didn't get too many -- in <br />fact got lots of disconnected numbers. Must be dragging the bottom of <br />the barrel. Of the people who did answer here is the best conversation I had...<br /><br />Woman on phone in Indiana: Well I voted already<br /><br />Mom [in her head]: [she sounds so friendly I assume she means for Obama]<br /><br />Woman: I gotta tell you... I don't go with that Obama <br /><br />Mom [in her head]: [Oh no! I'm chatting up a McCain voter... my heart is breaking]<br /><br />Woman : No... I don't usually go with that. And he really doesn't have any <br />experience. <br /><br />Mom [ihh]: [Why argue with her... she's already voted.]<br /><br />Woman: People say that and it's true. But you know what. You aren't born <br />with experience. No one is born with president tattooed on their <br />forehead. No, he'll get it. I had to go for him. <br /><br />Mom [ihh]: [What IS she saying? She DIDN'T go for him, she DID go for him? Put me out of my <br />misery!] <br /><br />Woman: I did. I voted for him. Usually I don't go for those kind of people. Well I never have. But you know. We can change. We can learn. NOW I'M STILL NOT FOR MIXING 'EM UP. NO NO NO, I DON'T GO FOR THAT. But I had to vote for him. I had to do it. We're in big trouble here. Well things aren't going to change overnight. But at least he'll get us going in the right direction. And you know what?! My neighbor voted for him too! We all did. <br />None of us had ever gone for one of them before... but we all voted for him."<br /><br />My mom told me that is made her cry a little when she got off the phone. <br /><br />We can change. We can learn. <br /><br />I'm completely terrified. It's 6:45pm CST and so far McCain is up...I'm hopeful anyway.<br /><br />We can change. We can learn. Just a few hours now. Don't forget to breath.Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-68541850561640668932008-09-20T15:32:00.012-05:002008-10-05T09:56:31.525-05:00Lady DivaFroggie called me yesterday. She sounded funny, like maybe she was crying, and my heart sank. I was in the middle of an experiment and didn’t want to spend 45 minutes consoling her about what ever her latest problem with her boyfriend was. I’ve been having a hard enough time consoling myself lately.<br /><br />“What’s wrong?” I asked her.<br /><br />“Nothing! I just wanted to tell you the good news.” <br /><br />But really she sounded bad and I was not optimistic.<br /><br />“My doctors just called me and told me that my T cells are up. I have 15 now and last week I only had 9!”<br /><br />For the last few months Froggie has made an effort to take all of her AIDS meds and go to her weekly doctors visits. At various points in her life, her health has been in real danger from secondary infections and yet it has always been a struggle to get her to comply with her doctors orders, even after weeks in the hospital she would refuse to swallow pills.<br /><br />It is a source of embarrassment for me that I don’t know more about immunology, given my insistence that I am a biologist. Even worse, I’ve been caring for a child with HIV/AIDS for more than a decade and I still have to think hard about relative value when I hear numbers like “viral load” and “T cell count”. I was pretty sure that 15 was not a high number even for an AIDS diagnosis. <br /><br />“How many are you supposed to try for?” <br /><br />“It’s like 500 or something. That would be really good but I didn’t have any and now I have 15. The medicine is working!”<br /><br />“Honey? Why are you crying?”<br /><br />She really let loose with the tears and while it was hard to understand, it became clear after a minute that she was saying, “I’m just so happy!”<br /><br />She went on to thank me. She missed her mom and wanted to be able to show her how well she was doing. She said that my mom and I had never given up on her. That even when she would fight and fight we still made her take her medicine and now she could do it on her own and every thing was going to be alright. <br /><br />I cringe when she says things like that. I’m afraid that her body, after so many years of “non compliant” medicinal abuse will give up on her even if she really tries to stay healthy. Even a few bad days can send her into a funk that makes it seem worthwhile to her to attempt life without the hassle of trying to stay alive.<br /><br />“I think that’s great. I’m really extremely proud of you. Just…there are going to be days when your counts don’t go up, or they go down a little and I don’t want you to be too disappointed when that happens. You know, life can be pretty up and down.” <br /><br />I’m currently nursing my own disappointments and I realized as I said it that maybe I was projecting just a little. Or just a lot.<br /><br />She smiled and I could hear it in her voice. “I know, but don’t worry okay? I know there is going to be bad things but at least I won’t ever again have the bad thing be swallowing a little pill. I can do that now!”<br /><br />I catch myself trying to dampen her optimism more times than I like to admit. Here she is telling me that she feels like she made it over a huge hurdle in her life and all I can think is that I have to protect her from any and all other disappointing days to come.<br /><br />Last year Froggie’s mom died. It was a horrible mixture of crack and alcohol and having exhausted the medical system. In the end her mother couldn’t speak because there was so much yeast and bacteria clogging her throat. Froggie was left alone in the house with her while she died slowly for months, most days unable to leave her bed. We couldn’t get the State to take her out of there, even when she used a razor blade to carve “I hate me” into her arm and underlined it twice. When her mother died Froggie was 17 and could barely read. She now lives on social services and food stamps. She graduated from high school and is learning how to cook, trying to practice her reading, and cleaning up the apartment after her brother. She has a life-long and life-threatening illness. She’s 18.<br /><br />So there she was, telling me that she was having a great day because she had risen from about 2% to 3% of the T cells she will need to get out of AIDS and back to HIV. And there I was, trying to warn her about hard times because I’m 34 and my boyfriend dumped me.<br /><br />I thought about what CNK said when I had asked for his impressions of Froggie after we had dropped her off at her apartment on my last visit home.<br /><br />“It wasn’t what I expected. I mean, maybe it’s different out here…but at home in Alabama I haven’t had that experience with, you know. Like African-American urban culture isn’t usually so demonstrative…they were just so taken with you. I guess I didn’t expect them to be so demonstrative, and so taken with you.”<br /><br />“Who are you talking about?” I asked him. <br /><br />I was trying to remain open to him so I didn’t say anything about how much the term “African-American” bores me in any context other than academia.<br /><br />“Who are ‘they’ or ‘them’? Those kids are my family. Of course they are taken with me, I helped raise them!”<br /><br />Then I spent the next few miles reassuring him that I wasn’t uncomfortable with his comments when all I wanted to do was talk about how great both kids looked and how much better my heart felt seeing them after a long, hard year in Alabama. I should have known that he was headed out the figurative door then. I should have opened it myself before he could tell me that our relationship was mostly ‘fun’ and ‘convenient’ but not ‘sustainable’. My relationship with Froggie and her brother has often been extremely un-‘fun’ and the least ‘convenient’ thing for everyone involved. There have been times when I thought caring about them might literally end my ability to get out of bed, but somehow ‘sustainable’ has always been achieved. I think the difference must be love.<br /><br />I tuned back into Froggie. She was off on a long story about her biological father and his second family. There is a Tweety Bird jacket she wants for her 19th birthday next week. The jacket says “Lady Diva” on it and she thinks that would be accurate and classy on her. She wants to learn how to make spaghetti because she already knows how to make tacos. Her brother is still working at the job he got last week and now she doesn’t mind cleaning up the kitchen after him because he’s really contributing. She doesn’t want him to buy her something for her birthday because they shouldn’t waste their money but maybe he could take her to the movies or to get something to eat in a restaurant. <br /><br />“I just want to do something that is spending time with him. I don’t care as much about all that stuff that you buy because you barely remember that stuff anyways. Like when you used to take me for a ride on the ferries and we would have hot chocolate.”<br />I couldn’t help it; I had to smile because sometimes talking to her for ten minutes makes me feel like I’m co-staring in an Original Inspirational Story presented by Hallmark…but with a lot more drug abuse and real curse words.<br /><br />Froggie and I ended our phone call with the promise of talking again soon, I-love-youes and hints about Tweety Bird birthday presents, which I rebuffed. I got back to my experiment. I wasn’t all better. I didn’t want to dance around the room yet. But I did stop thinking that I wasn’t going to make it to the end of the day and started thinking about what to have for dinner out with B. I could feel, just a little, my value climb.<br /><br />She’s totally going to get that jacket.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgezpRPY4c_zuMcXxAHGQeYPtPhLJXUq7SRYkzyI34P9dJPCAnvIuFkCCm2wqQT43pbSVTZEvGxEfVIHuliz5jcrMUzNCM2bHW_28uThA9Bw3mijWmBjHKYHsoZCIJ6d5juWhd5xLgU7sg/s1600-h/tweetydiva.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgezpRPY4c_zuMcXxAHGQeYPtPhLJXUq7SRYkzyI34P9dJPCAnvIuFkCCm2wqQT43pbSVTZEvGxEfVIHuliz5jcrMUzNCM2bHW_28uThA9Bw3mijWmBjHKYHsoZCIJ6d5juWhd5xLgU7sg/s320/tweetydiva.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5253683371881547698" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjByvawYB57sHj2v2lDmuPwWVfxrQnc8r2g5Oy4SOkc8TI5hhuO3qOnd_5fLFD5NWFtmZKy_jLEs_cdRFYzDj_0fEFDByccJpy5h0TmW_13a8NbHwPO3PVagl7lQPquX8NlVYVComE3gsQ/s1600-h/tweetyxo.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjByvawYB57sHj2v2lDmuPwWVfxrQnc8r2g5Oy4SOkc8TI5hhuO3qOnd_5fLFD5NWFtmZKy_jLEs_cdRFYzDj_0fEFDByccJpy5h0TmW_13a8NbHwPO3PVagl7lQPquX8NlVYVComE3gsQ/s320/tweetyxo.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5253683668312336386" /></a>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-49162530198367711682008-07-25T13:15:00.006-05:002008-07-25T14:47:58.802-05:00When last we met...So again, a long time since the last entry. Both of my fans (me and my mom) have stopped checking the site. I blame my lack of updates on two events in January:<br /><br />1) I started dating CNK again.<br />2) A week after we got back together my house was broken into and my computer stolen.<br /><br />I am not saying that there was any kind of causal relationship between those two events. CNK is an engineer and not a crack-head. <br /><br />Please don't write in to tell me that not all crack-heads will steal your computer and that not all engineers won't...I know. <br /><br />Regardless, I'm pretty sure that if CNK had broken into my house and stolen my computer he would have given it back by now because I definitely made him, and everyone around me, sorry that it happened.<br /><br />So now it's July, nearly August, and here is the update in abridged form:<br /><br /><strong>January 2008 -</strong> CNK and I give it another go. I am thrilled. I get ready to make him a "so-glad-we're-back" dinner and come home with a bag full of groceries to find my front door has been smashed in with a shovel. I know it's a shovel because I don't own the one inside my front door and my neighbor is missing the one she keeps on our shared front porch. She was home at the time that it happened but just "figured [I was] making a lot of noise at the front door". I think she must have been confusing me with her roommate who installed a <em>full drum kit</em> beneath my study. I call CNK and B to come rescue me. Neighbor and her roommate also hang around with us. Cops take TWO hours to show up and three phone calls. We all freeze on the porch while the squad car drives past us and doesn't stop. <br /><br />On my third call, the dispatcher asks me if there is any kind of landmark that the officer can look for. "There are five people standing on the front porch waving and shouting at cop cars" I tell her. Among the items stolen were: my computer, my DVD player, my backpack, my ability to shut the front door for two days, my ability to sleep comfortably in the apartment for one month, and a half-full bottle of Chambord raspberry liquor.<br /><br /><strong>February 2008 - </strong> I don't really remember anything of significance. I mean, it's not like my house got broken into again. Oh, CNK takes me on an awesome valentines date. We have the worst meal ever but it's so bad that we laugh about it the whole time and then he takes me to a show at the Virginia Samford. It was fun but we get sleepy and so leave early to sit by his apartment's pool, wrapped in jackets, eating jelly beans and chatting.<br /><br /><strong>March 2008 -</strong> - People continue to not break into my house. I really appreciate it.<br /><br /><strong>April 2008 - </strong>B turns 28. This is infuriating because I have been getting even deeper into my 30's and he's still only in his 20's. Jerk. CNK and I throw him a little sushi birthday bash and we all have a great time. <br />In addition, CNK takes his PE exam so suddenly we can see each other more often and not only from 10pm-10:30pm on Fridays. It is a difficult adjustment but we make it. I have a successful committee meeting where they tell me I have enough to graduate in December! YES!...(spoiler alert, the July entry will dash all excitement you may have for me). My friend DP comes for a visit and we see Allison Kraus and Robert Plant which was surprisingly fabulous.<br /><br /><strong>May 2008 -</strong> I try to write a paper. I fail. I try to write a paper. I fail. I try to write a paper. I fail. I try to write a paper. I fail. My boss yells at me. I yell at her and then cry. I try to write a paper. I fail.<br /><br /><strong>June 2008 -</strong> - Everybody moves or gets married. I help CNK move. He helps his friends move. My friend's Lx2 get married, I miss the wedding because my cousin gets married in ATL on the same day. My mom comes out for the cousin's wedding. We also see our dearest old family friends and spend an entire day in IKEA. It's my birthday month. I refuse to get my hopes up and end up having a truly nice time, making a large dinner of crab legs and salmon, which I don't eat...I'm a vegetarian. I receive absolutely lovely gifts from everyone. Wine, cookies, shoes, serving bowls, a backpack to replace the one that was stolen, bookcases, flowers, and paper masks of my face mounted on bendy straws that say on the back "The world would be a better place if everyone was a little more like M---"<br />I'm very relieved that they say "a little more" because it saves us all the trouble of picturing the petty, stressed-out, crabby, snarky horror that would be if the world were a LOT more like me.<br /><br />Most significant though, my distant cousin, <a href="http://seatobham.blogspot.com/2007/08/96-cousins-three-aunts-laterthe-family.html">Mgn</a>, dies. I find out at the wedding when I ask after her as I was expecting that we would be at the same reception table. Her death was sudden and efficient, just like her. The funeral at <a href="http://tr.truveo.com/Remembering-Mignon-Lewis-C51/id/3202727923">Spelman College</a> is amazing. Her family legacy is amazing. I get to see people who I will miss by not attending this year's family reunion and I wish I could thank her for the opportunity, as strange as that sounds. <br /><br /><strong>July 2008 - </strong> Work continues. My training grant is renewed for a year and suddenly my mentor doesn't think I'll finish in December. Now it seems like it will be next June but I'm sure that has nothing to do with the additional six months of free funding. More people move. CNK and I help his sister in T'loosa and his friend in B'ham. I try to write a paper...I sort of manage but not really. I collect more data, it's actually decent.<br /><br />And there it is, seven months in a nutshell. Nothing to it. As of this morning my house was still okay. I think it helped to remove the shovel from the porch and to get a real doorframe that's not made out of rotten wood. I haven't replaced the computer or the chambord but it's been really nice to have a backpack again. <br /><br />If you get a chance, check out the links to my <a href="http://www.brown.edu/Administration/George_Street_Journal/vol26/26GSJ07c.html">cousin Mgn</a>. She really was an amazing woman and worth knowing.<br /><br />I'll write again soon, or at least in the next seven months. Honest.Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-9717397222301083912008-01-09T00:28:00.000-06:002008-01-09T00:44:26.714-06:00Just as good the second time aroundI talked to my grandmother for an hour today. I’m a bad granddaughter because my aunt was going out of town so my mother made me promise that I would call my grandma every day from Saturday through Tuesday. I only remembered to do it today…Tuesday. I come by it honestly, the forgetfulness. My grandma has been forgetting things too and that’s why she recently moved into a retirement center. I shouldn’t say that she forgets, she just never remembers in the first place. Her brain is no longer bothering with information about how many yogurts she has in the refrigerator or what movie she just watched on TV and instead is laying out her memories of growing up on a farm in Stanwood, Washington with abundant detail.<br /><br />We have all been taking her…I don’t want to say decline…her shift, in very different ways. My youngest aunt, who is the only daughter living close to my grandmother is shouldering most of the responsibility and it clearly worries her. My oldest aunt gets a little frustrated and tries to jog my grandmother’s memory by telling her when a story or fact has been repeated too many times. My grandfather, who doesn’t live with my grandmother, is losing one of his oldest friends and being constantly reminded of his own age. He can rebuild Packard cars from scratch, even sew the upholstery, but he can’t fix her. Me, I have found that I appreciate my grandma in a way that I never could when we were both younger.<br /><br />I called from work, while I shuffled data around on my computer. We started our conversation by talking about the weather. It was 70 degrees in Birmingham but snowing heavily in Nevada City. Then she asks me about my mother, who is currently out of the country. We talk about water aerobics and agree that it is too cold for her to walk up to the pool in her bathing suit. She tells me that the center will send a van to pick her up at her door and then asks me to forget that she told me that because she would rather have an excuse to skip the pool. “Let’s just say I don’t have a good bathing suit for the snow in case anyone asks okay?” and then she laughs at her own joke. A few days ago, or maybe more, she had dinner with my youngest Aunt in the dinning hall and they had some Very Good Salmon. The Salmon, and some meatballs she had one other time were so good that she wondered if maybe the facility had hired a new, Norwegian cook. <br /><br />I know when she mentions the cook that I will get to hear something about her childhood. Both of her brothers died in WWII and when I was growing up she didn't like to talk about them very often but lately that rule has been relaxed. She tells me about going to church when she lived in Stanwood. She and her twin brother would feign sick every Sunday but their mom would never fall for it and when they made it to the church they were always glad because all the other kids were there too. Before that, they lived in a county so rural that their cousin, who was 13, was allowed to drive the car every Sunday to take them to church. She tells me about lying to people when she got to college in Seattle so that they wouldn’t know she was Norwegian. When I ask her why she lied, she says that she just wanted to be an American. <br />“But you are an American, you were born here.” <br />“Well I know that. I guess it just seemed so corny to be Norwegian” she tells me.<br /><br />I tell her that I have a first date planned for Saturday. She asks what he does for a living and when I tell her that he teaches liberal arts at a university she sighs with pleasure. I tell her that I had been dating an engineer and that makes her happy too. I never used to tell her about any dating unless it was quite serious. That sort of information would too quickly become family property and pressure. I always felt somehow guilty when it inevitably didn’t work out. I’m one of only two grandkids and the only one currently old enough to have children.<br /><br /> “That’s great! I might forget that you are going on a date so please remember to call me and tell me all about it.” <br /><br />She asks me how old he is and when I tell her she says that she doesn’t think that the age difference (four years) means anything at my age. <br /><br /> “At least your not 17 and he is in his 30’s!” she says. She is talking about my mother’s first boyfriend and I ask her if she wanted to rip my mom’s face off when she went out with a man that much older. <br /><br />“Rip her face off? No, I never wanted to do that. It was just very worrying. But I never wanted to rip her face off. I just loved her. Boy, it is really snowing outside! You know, I was thinking of going for a walk but I’m afraid that I’ll just break something.”<br /><br />And then we are back to water aerobics and the Very Good Salmon with my aunt. She asks about my mom—still out of the country. When is she coming home? Still next week. I tell her again that I’m going on a date on Saturday just because it’s nice to say out loud and if she remembers me saying it before; she is just as enthusiastic as the first time and doesn’t seem to mind my repetition. We reprise our entire conversation in a slightly different order but this time leave out the part about Stanwood and being Norwegian. We are our own chorus.<br /><br />I finish compiling documents together and reluctantly end the conversation.<br /><br />“I have to go Grandma. I should really get back to work.”<br /><br />“Okay, well I sure love you. I still have your note on my refrigerator.”<br /><br />The note she is referring to is one that I left when my mother and I visited her just before Christmas. My grandfather installed the board on her refrigerator so that he could leave her reminders about appointments. When we arrived in California it had the dates of our arrival and departure listed. Upon leaving I erased the dates and replaced it with a note of our own: ‘M—-- and M--- love you very much. You have lots of yogurt in the fridge. Look in the crisper drawers when you want apples and tangerines.’<br /><br />I ask her what she’s going to do for the rest of the day and she says that she’s headed down to the lobby to see if anything is going on. It’s really snowing and she might see if they are having salmon or meatballs for dinner which can both be Very Good. She says goodbye again and tells me again that she sure does love me -- it sounds just as good the second time around.Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-79634781232414552382007-12-08T19:37:00.000-06:002007-12-08T20:08:47.614-06:00Salamanders don't have ironsToday has been freakishly warm. 70 degrees or some such craziness. I saw two salamanders on the street. They were moving slowly, waking up to their temporary spring. It's not good for salamanders to wake up in December. It gives them a really strange feeling of unrest, like they left the iron on and can't even find it to turn it off because...well salamanders don't have irons* so you can imagine how discombobulating it must be.<br /><br />I felt a little the same since I had decided to buy my Christmas tree today. I was sweating by the time I got it into the house and it just didn't feel like the holidays in shorts with the windows wide open. In the future, like next year, we will all celebrate winter holidays by sipping lemonade** in lawn chairs while we roast fresh salamander over an open tar pit. Global warming is starting to freak me out.<br /><br />I'm still using my whole oven when I want to make one piece of toast.<br /><br /><em>* Salamanders do not have irons because they do not have clothes or linens. It is not some sort of choice they make to reduce their carbon footprint.<br /><br />** '<span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Lemonade</span>' is what we will <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">euphemistically</span> term cool glasses of 'acid rain'.</em>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-91618855732725180762007-12-05T09:23:00.000-06:002007-12-05T09:26:41.220-06:00It's all relative<strong><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Top ten worst things I've heard in the last month:</span></strong><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">10) We only have one tube of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">TGF</span>β<br /><br />9) I just saw someone having sex in the park.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">8) It appears that, since your neighbor moved in, we have been charging you for her electric bill and vice <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">verse</span>.<br /><br />7) Your power has been disconnected.<br /><br />6) Did you authorize 21 charges for $5.06 over the last three days?<br /><br />5) He finally admitted to me that he did sleep with _____ so I cried for like, one week, and tonight I'm packing up all of his things.<br /><br />4) I'm not really cut out for anything other than...you know...like a platonic bosom-buddy thing.<br /><br />3) It will just be a small laser inserted in your anus.<br /><br />2) There was a fire, barn burned down, all the pigs are gone.<br /><br />1) While he's taking a nap, I just wanted to let you guys know that he has cancer.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><strong>Top ten best things I’<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">ve</span> heard in the last month:<br /></strong><br />10) I’ll split it with you.<br /><br />9) It <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">wasn</span>’t anybody I knew.<br /><br />8) It looks like it will work out in your favor. On average you over paid about $10 each month. You can probably expect a large credit given back to you.<br /><br />7) Since we never managed to actually disconnect your power we’re not going to charge you anything extra.<br /><br />6) We will be crediting $385.00 back to your account<br /><br />5) I’m really doing well now and I can’t wait to see you soon. We make plans okay?<br /><br />4) Well, it <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">doesn</span>’t matter what he said because I think you’re amazing.<br /><br />3) There is no blood in your stool.<br /><br />2) I love you.<br /><br />1) We found out that they caught it really early so that’s the best news we could have.</span>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-36387543454176430192007-11-29T09:01:00.000-06:002008-12-08T17:22:18.789-06:00Sloss Furnaces<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9i5UOzoHAd3l3hDGLs6Ejbj5KtV8sHDhGFVgGgNlRnSrhdzqyRGxlBMVu22SbkBuuRo3Op0jU-fFqayQjgbtWi_dWw1-6yZk-V7pvYFqopnN2wkx8Tb0Om8n_8FVVPJ-yS2uC3LBW9hY/s1600-h/sloss1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5138278056540642338" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9i5UOzoHAd3l3hDGLs6Ejbj5KtV8sHDhGFVgGgNlRnSrhdzqyRGxlBMVu22SbkBuuRo3Op0jU-fFqayQjgbtWi_dWw1-6yZk-V7pvYFqopnN2wkx8Tb0Om8n_8FVVPJ-yS2uC3LBW9hY/s200/sloss1.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH5IEX3tabQz8pRq-aSwdkslx0eIGO-0WjMtijSxMcQPpZ7j0hj67adHUliKvLxCVl6t1qjpVdvDtLylslN-nInipVoWJ200P19xJBUygnygz-kqt5Xi0UwkFXCgnr1TkDnfcrYUrOD0w/s1600-h/slossfrog.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5138278060835609650" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH5IEX3tabQz8pRq-aSwdkslx0eIGO-0WjMtijSxMcQPpZ7j0hj67adHUliKvLxCVl6t1qjpVdvDtLylslN-nInipVoWJ200P19xJBUygnygz-kqt5Xi0UwkFXCgnr1TkDnfcrYUrOD0w/s200/slossfrog.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMnQ6cbuflh2_Pq2LQ-NoTwcVA-QWjKZ6HO_Qc85wpHL5yGxez9092ld7ktOrXej-EYztQMivA__Czpg8xpmMcKQpAGkJTGzcR6nTsXBdvKW7L7_lX_7AHpFoChqpDRLtFwdhmN6XrglE/s1600-h/sloss2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5138278060835609666" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMnQ6cbuflh2_Pq2LQ-NoTwcVA-QWjKZ6HO_Qc85wpHL5yGxez9092ld7ktOrXej-EYztQMivA__Czpg8xpmMcKQpAGkJTGzcR6nTsXBdvKW7L7_lX_7AHpFoChqpDRLtFwdhmN6XrglE/s200/sloss2.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdoCY7q4xzHMbXNwmprCKj5tkZvfsQOzqKxAHsoSn2ra1XgDbo7pcsh5BJ-ZWuzARvLAO5cY-kKY4xsOV6p734Y4Flx_C3zCJOLDDXarJfuKvaTFQ6bzweiN_rJqPcMtF0f6mJhQinH9o/s1600-h/at+sloss+inside+shovel+blue+coat.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5138278069425544274" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdoCY7q4xzHMbXNwmprCKj5tkZvfsQOzqKxAHsoSn2ra1XgDbo7pcsh5BJ-ZWuzARvLAO5cY-kKY4xsOV6p734Y4Flx_C3zCJOLDDXarJfuKvaTFQ6bzweiN_rJqPcMtF0f6mJhQinH9o/s200/at+sloss+inside+shovel+blue+coat.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiklQeMp-ba8-UH3yrIbbn1JDXWyxBT9QO-dekHFEtzaARqOcNC5CcuFosoP3J_PP8H2In7BKxbS2oBIX80ZlPhTaQlU9FDT3_hxDdMW1_uth2u-a2gQpPHmAPhVEvnw9B1b5aGekdjUR4/s1600-h/at+sloss+inside+shovel+sideways+(1).jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5138278073720511586" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiklQeMp-ba8-UH3yrIbbn1JDXWyxBT9QO-dekHFEtzaARqOcNC5CcuFosoP3J_PP8H2In7BKxbS2oBIX80ZlPhTaQlU9FDT3_hxDdMW1_uth2u-a2gQpPHmAPhVEvnw9B1b5aGekdjUR4/s200/at+sloss+inside+shovel+sideways+(1).jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div></div>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-30735251313604502662007-11-18T15:58:00.000-06:002008-12-08T17:22:18.896-06:00Excuse me...what's so special about your Christmas Blend?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd0MixwMytxdLu0bGDntmBtIuhaIY2TFCCKrQa9sC23ZUDnm306fTBSn_ZX0A9GQb_Pf4HoRx_zJR5CHSdIQMKLCAejIGtxb4K24X-iJY_GXPSNB4yfUX2zzIFEucwlyvcxbuBXlQYcSk/s1600-h/ruffner+mt+view.jpg"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5138303637365857394" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd0MixwMytxdLu0bGDntmBtIuhaIY2TFCCKrQa9sC23ZUDnm306fTBSn_ZX0A9GQb_Pf4HoRx_zJR5CHSdIQMKLCAejIGtxb4K24X-iJY_GXPSNB4yfUX2zzIFEucwlyvcxbuBXlQYcSk/s200/ruffner+mt+view.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Today I scrabbled around in the quarry at Ruffner Mountain. I went with CNK. The tree colors were fabulous and the company was relaxing. Sadly, we both had to work this evening and so didn't stay out for very long. On the way into work I decided to reward my Sunday diligence with sugar and caffeine. </span></div><div><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span></div><div><br /><br /><strong><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span></strong></div><div><strong><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span></strong></div><div><strong><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"></span></strong></div><div><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><strong>Starbucks low point -</strong><br />The cup containing my grande 1/2 eggnog - 1/2 nonfat milk latte (Hey, like <em>you've </em>never bought a nasty Starbucks drink!) says the following:<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><em>Bequeath a wreath. It's fun - just leave one hanging on somebody's door or in an office cubicle. Make it a surprise, and maybe leave a note on it that says something like: "This wreath is a circle. Do something nice for somebody else and keep the circle going."<br /></em><br /><strong>Starbucks high point -</strong><br />While purchasing the aforementioned latte a woman interrupts my order to ask the barista, "What's so special about your Christmas Blend?"<br /><br />Without missing a beat he looks up and replies,<br />"It tastes like Jesus."<br /><br />No response from the woman but, like a true pre-Christmas miracle, I feel the migraine that was trying to settle behind my left eye instantly dissipate into a grin.<br /><br />Birmingham, today I have a crush on you.</span></div>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-31485313517495300882007-08-14T23:39:00.000-05:002007-11-29T11:04:02.416-06:00Peeburgerheatwave<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I'm not so great at the sleeping lately. It's too hot here. And it's too sad here. Stupid, sad, hot, Alabama days. I always feel like I've got a thick rubber band around pieces of my body. They slip around to new locations all the time. Right now they are sitting just below my rib cage and around my right hip.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">I locked myself out of the house yesterday. It's my 'thing', being locked out of the house. Some people like to wear a particular color. My mom made navy blue her 'thing' for two decades. Some people only eat organic food. My little brother likes to collect tennis shoes so much that he would rather be (and therefore, he is) homeless than go without, it's his 'thing'. My little sister would rather risk a life of painful hospitalizations than swallow a pill. Most people have a 'thing'.<br /><br />Like I said, my 'thing' is being locked out of the house. During times of really high stress I can do it more than once a month. That's how you can tell the real me from all other imitations. When in doubt, ask my suspected impostors how many times they have locked themselves out of their apartment in the last six months. If the number they give you is anything less than four, shoot first and ask questions later.<br /><br />Yesterday, I locked myself out in the usual way. I sat down to tie my shoes and left the keys on the hall steps. In a weird way I kind of like it, being locked out. It makes me feel self-sufficient like I might finally get the opportunity to live on dandelion greens and my credit card (For some reason I never leave my purse or phone in the house). However, I do not like having to get back in. My landlord doesn't like it either. I also don't like having to walk two miles to work on day seven of a triple-digit heat wave.<br /><br />Birmingham has almost no public transportation. It is kind of Birmingham's 'thing', being the city that requires a car and yet has a significant number of residents well below the poverty line. I went down to University street to wait for the DART trolley. I've seen them on the street but I've never ridden on one. Yesterday was no exception since, after 20 minutes of waiting for the non-existent trolley, I decided that I might as well melt on the move.<br /><br />I crossed University by St. Vincent's so that I could have continuous sidewalk access on my journey. As I was crossing, a man came from McDonald's and ambled up to the corner. He about 40, wearing dark, crisply pressed, jeans and a tucked-in white t-shirt. While he was waiting to cross the street he began to eat a hamburger he pulled from a paper bag. He balled up the burger wrapper and dropped it on the ground at his feet. I was standing about five feet behind him. I idly considered saying something about the wrapper but didn't really have any desire to follow through with the impulse. It was too hot to hassle, already 101 F, and who cares if you drop burger wrappers at the apparent gates of hell? Good thing too because it was a long light and we had to stand there for a while. It would have been awkward to have an after-school-special exchange about littering followed by standing around on the corner. Plus, he started peeing on himself while he ate his sandwich so that would also have been a little weird too, if we had made eye contact.<br /><br />A steady stream of urine was dripping from his jean cuff, pooling under one foot and then trickling down the sidewalk. It caught up the burger wrapper and pushed it out into the street before the walk signal appeared. To my surprise, I was much more freaked out that he kept eating his sandwich than that he was peeing on himself. I think I would have had to stop chewing to concentrate. He looked from side to side but if he saw me behind him I didn't catch it because I was too busy staring at his feet.<br /><br />The light changed and he walked halfway into the street and then politely paused for a few cars making a right turn. I let him get ahead of me and then stayed behind him, walking as slowly as I possibly could. He didn't weave in his path and continued to pull burgers from the bag, eat them and toss the wrappers into the street. After two blocks the bag was apparently empty and that too was discarded on the sidewalk. To people driving by, I must have looked like the insane one, walking by barely putting one foot in front of the other, clutching my book bag.<br /><br />He finally sat down in one of the stairwells of the project housing that lines the street. I hoped he would move on before I reached him. He was still sitting there as I drew closer. I sped up my pace to a ridiculous power walk and caught his eye as I blazed past him. I broke into a run when I hit the next crosswalk just in case he had followed me. I felt silly when I got to the other side. I was sweating and out of breath with lungs burning from the street exhaust. Silly. I'm still not sure what I envisioned, that he would grab me and pee on me? Or maybe he might demand burgers and a clean pair of jeans. What a terrible thing, to spend a hot day in pee-soaked jeans while University kids run by you on the street.<br /><br />I thought about him all day. I told a few people the story. Sometimes I thought it was funny. Sometimes I thought I had been very brave. Everyone asked me if he was homeless. That seemed like a strange thing to ask.<br /><br />"How would I know if he had a home?", I responded.<br /><br />You can have eight pairs of $300 sneakers and be homeless. There really is no way to tell by looking at someone, you can only guess.<br /><br />When I got home at the end of the day my landlord had unlocked the door for me and had left me a sweet note about it. I think he felt that the heat was punishment enough for anyone. I fixed myself a bowl of greens and ate them standing in the middle of the kitchen. Then I put a slice of cheese on a cracker and took it into the bathroom. I tried to see if I could eat it while I peed but ended up tossing it in the garbage...who wants to eat a cracker that has been in the bathroom?<br /><br />My mom called and I told her about being locked out, and the pee-burger guy, and my day at work. We tried to avoid talking about my little brother and sister. Neither one of us can fathom that it got to be as bad as it was, as quickly as it did. We usually try not to talk about it but sometimes it is harder to ignore than a man at a crosswalk peeing on his own feet.<br /><br />"We did what we could." we reassured each other and then neither of us slept last night.<br /><br />We both realize that we won't know for some time if they will be okay. There is no way to tell by looking at someone, you can only guess.<br />Stupid, sad, hot, Alabama days.</span>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-35518625575023183192007-08-06T20:46:00.000-05:002007-11-29T11:09:24.859-06:00My Nekkid Chicken Booty (Part 1: The MnM-I-love-you-song)<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Recently, things have changed in my life and it is all very Chinua Achebe meets Charles Dickens. Things fell apart and then a plague of locusts dropped plucky street urchins on my stoop. Or maybe there was some political upheaval and men with guns forced me take cover in my home where I will live out my days, in a four-poster bed while wearing an old wedding dress. Or maybe a new health epidemic arose in the 1980’s and sometime in the 1990’s I decided to get involved for a few weeks. You know, so I might have something to pat myself on the back for. Everyone loves a good deed, almost as much as they love a good epidemic.<br /><br />In 1997 I was 23 and back in school after 18 months of working then traveling. I hated college. I had always been a truly terrible student, which was in direct conflict with my desired career path, research scientist. I had a sweet, green-eyed, stoner boyfriend, a job in a developmental biology lab, lived in a city where the average summer highs are 75 degrees, and owned my own apartment. When I look back at it now, it seems strange that I was so discontent. I’m 33 now and I am still a student in a biology lab, rent my apartment, it is 96 F outside, I’m single, and I have gained a solid 25 pounds. I have no idea why we can’t all be happier, but I do know that at 23 I was willing to try almost anything to feel more connected to the world at large. When one of my coworkers suggested I volunteer as a camp counselor for two weeks that summer, I jumped at the chance.<br /><br />AIDS camp. “For Kids and Teens Whose Lives are affected by HIV and AIDS”. I thought that it would be great and of course, noble. I already liked working with kids and my coworker/friend who had suggested it was older, thinner, and cooler than I was. It was flattering. There was an interview with the camp directors complete with questions to make sure that I would be suitable for the job.<br /><br />There were questions to make sure I could get along with other people:<br /><br />Q: What do you do in a conflict?<br />Wrong Answer: Cry like a baby.<br />Correct Answer: Confront it directly and listen to the other person.<br /><br />Questions to make sure I wasn’t a religious conservative:<br /><br />Q: Why do you think AIDS exists?<br />Wrong Answer: Because God will always punish sodomy.<br />Correct Answer: Viruses are opportunistic, which sucks.<br /><br />Questions to make sure I knew something about kids:<br /><br />Q: What do you like about kids?<br />Wrong Answer: Their silence.<br />Correct Answer: Their honesty and spontaneity! (Said with a straight face)<br /><br />But there were no questions to make sure that I had my own immunity in place. I was never asked if I would be able to walk away once engaged or if I would think twice before taxing my own support system to the utmost limits. By the end of this story I will have dropped out of college two more times, be living in Alabama, have several best friends who no longer be speak to me, and I will have involved my mother in a story that leaves her just as heart-broken as I am.<br /><br />We are however, only at the beginning. This is Part One, before the drought and locusts. I will introduce you to ‘Froggie’ and tell you that she has AIDS. But she won’t die at the end of this story so it is safe to fall in love with her. You can know that now but we didn’t know that then and for years to follow we waited for her body to stop. We held our breath and alternated between trying no to love her and loving her even more fiercely when guilt and joy got the best of us. By the end of this story she will have been hospitalized multiple times, expelled from school at least once a year, homeless twice, and in her teens will become her own mother’s end-of-life caregiver. But for now she’s safe, and so you are too. It’s okay to love her.<br /><br />At seven years old her head was the biggest part of her body. The rest was sinew and brown skin. When she stepped out of her clothes she was so tiny it surprised even those people who saw her every day. Her bottom was comprised only of where her legs met her back bone. A shock of wooly hair and large brown eyes were the only things to grab attention from her face splitting grin. Mostly she refused to eat unless it was chicken or pancakes and then she would comfortably consume her own body weight. She was in my cabin, a total pain in the ass and rapidly becoming my favorite.<br /><br />That summer was unusually hot and the camp lake was overgrown with vicious algae. The campers, especially those few with HIV, weren’t allowed to swim for fear of incurable swimmer’s itch. Everyone was becoming restless and the arts and crafts shed was always overcrowded, being the only cool spot in camp. On the fourth day of camp we decided to take Froggie’s cabin on a hike into the sweltering woods. To call it a hike was a bit of a stretch on our part but it sounded more exciting than “a-little-walk-up-that-hill-by-the-big-tree” and the girls were ready to do anything that was more daring than making paper plate masks.<br /><br />There were five girls and three counselors. The way up the hill was filled with happy chatter. There was the occasional name-calling but it was mostly ignored by the counselors and enjoyed by the girls. At the crest of the hill we rested, fed them juice and peanuts, and then got ready to head back down. The girls had lost most of their enthusiasm by then and so, to distract them from the heat and dust, one of the counselors started the “I love you” game/song. It was a progressive song, requiring that each person repeated what had come before and then added a new verse. The rules were laid out as follows: “You say ‘I love you like’ and then you say what it is you love. For example ‘I love you like some popcorn’. Then the next person says what you said and adds a verse, like this ‘I love you like some popcorn, I love you like some ice cream’ and so on.”<br /><br />The girls, between seven and nine years old, took the examples literally and all of the verses involved food.<br /><br />“I love you like some popcorn<br />I love you like some ice cream<br />I love you like some M n’ Ms<br />I love you like some pizza….”<br /><br />Froggie, as usual, wasn’t listening but instead was running in circles around the rest of the group as we descended.<br /><br />“It’s your turn” we told her.<br />“My turn for what?” she called.<br />“Your turn for the song.”<br />“What song?”<br />And so she was coached through the first four verses, repeating after us:<br />“I love you like some popcorn<br />I love you like some ice cream<br />I love you like some M n’ Ms<br />I love you like some pizza!”<br /><br />She looked triumphant at the end and then exasperated when we called her back to hear her verse.<br /><br />She thought for a moment and then laughed; the voice booming out of her tiny body was as surprising as a gallon poured from a Dixie cup. She did a little dance shaking the air where her hips would be, if she were anything more than vertical.<br /><br />“I love you like some POPcorn<br />I love you like some ice CREAM<br />I love you like some MnMmmmmmmmms<br />I love you like some Pizz-uh…<br /><br />AND I LOVE YOU LIKE MY NEKKID CHICKEN BOOOOTY!”<br /><br />As adults, setting an example for impressionable children, we tried not to laugh and then gave up. Froggie ran down the rest of the hill, leaving a trail of laughter and choking dust in her wake. I was completely charmed and on a path that would change my life forever and throw into question many of the things I thought I knew about America, family, friendship, responsibility, obligation, HIV and love.<br /></span><br />I can't always write about this. It's too hard. But from time to time, when I'm feeling strong, I'll try to tell you this story. In the end, it is a story about an epidemic but not about AIDS. I hope I'll be able to show you, through only one family, and my involvement with them, how difficult life can be in America. You might not believe me now, but if I tell it right, if I don't leave out too much, or get caught up in my own issues, you might be able to see how living in this country can be so bad that a life-threatening illness became the closest thing they had to salvation even as it was killing them.<br /><br />Between the three of them, Dickens, Achebe, and Froggie, they had it right. From Dickens: There is much comedy in tragedy, from Achebe: the randomness of life will not always reward good people and from Froggie: nothing says 'love' like shaking your nekkid chicken booty. Not even Mn'Ms.</span>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-19733802021077282732007-08-06T15:59:00.000-05:002008-12-08T17:22:19.178-06:00The home of water<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXt4m3lOEgIU1WXVDwaXf4nsW0193VRWyWrq-g5X8RMN9sNRkgU9evFKXCXzl-BVIz-H4Iye3W4MqbpholabTXA56FVNps86iidLI5XmqPFL-kRoZJk5ySwRC6H1nYmlCL9GGSjNAdgQM/s1600-h/nobska%202.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5138305097654738050" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXt4m3lOEgIU1WXVDwaXf4nsW0193VRWyWrq-g5X8RMN9sNRkgU9evFKXCXzl-BVIz-H4Iye3W4MqbpholabTXA56FVNps86iidLI5XmqPFL-kRoZJk5ySwRC6H1nYmlCL9GGSjNAdgQM/s200/nobska%25202.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><span style="font-family:times new roman;">May 28th, 2007</span><br /><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">(old post from the myspace)</span><br /><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It was a stroke of luck that P~ picked up the phone when I called on the 17th of May. It was around 9:30 pm Birmingham time and an hour later in Cape Cod.<br /><br />“Hey! What are you doin?” she said, sounding more southern than usual.<br />“I’m about to go skinny dipping” I told her.<br />“Seriously? I wish I was there! How warm is it?”<br />“Not warm, it’s freezing actually but we are going anyway.”<br /><br />We start giggling and I can feel the nerves start to tickle my stomach. Now that I had announced my plans to P~ there would be no going back on it. I was definitely going into the bay.<br /><br />Before setting out, the leader of our group had reminded us that we had to be quiet as public nudity was a felony. “It is when you do it!” I quipped and for that I was rewarded with cheers. The cheering was followed by good-natured shushing and then more giggling as we set off to the beach on foot.<br />I kept P~ on the phone with me during the walk.<br /><br />“How many people is it?” she asked.<br />I counted and told her we were 23 people, about an equal distribution of men and women and an age span of about 40 years. I whispered to her for the duration of the walk. I told her how fundamentally tired I was and how long I had been working.<br /><br />When she asked me if the work was worthwhile I replied with, ‘absolutely!’ but in truth, I’m not always so sure. Something about sneaking around in the salt-windy dark made the previous months seem less consequential and less painful. We talked about a mutual friend and how much I missed the both of them after only two weeks. She told me a little about the weather at home, my house plants and quitting her job.<br /><br />The wind picked up when we rounded the corner to the beach. It hit the mouth piece of my cell phone and P~ gasped, “I can hear it! It sounds so cold there!”<br /><br />I was still whispering but I increased my volume slightly to compete with the wind.<br />“We’re walking through some bushes now” I told her, “We have to press our sides into the fence of a tennis court because the path is so narrow. People are disappearing around a corner in front of me…I’m there! I’m here! I’m at the water. I have to go, I wish you were here, can you hear it? I have to go!”<br />I was babbling with excitement as a fresh surge of wind pushed off the ocean. She was laughing on the other end of the phone. “Go! Go!” she said, breathless, “Bye!”<br /><br />Later, when I reached my dorm room again I called her back, but she didn’t pick up. In voice mail I told her that it was amazing and great and that I would talk to her soon. Her voice mail cuts you off quickly so I didn’t tell her the following until I returned to Birmingham:<br /><br />The beach was cold and completely sandy. As I stood there, trying to get my bearings I could hear shouts and laughter coming from the water. It was frightening because the wind and surf muted their calls, making it sound like they had been carried out much further than could be safe. Along the reeds at the top of the beach people were stripping off clothes and running into the waves. They were mostly naked, some clothed but the only thing that marked the distinction was a slight change in the light their bodies reflected from a little sliver of the moon. I removed my shoes, jeans, and tee-shirt but kept my underwear and a tank top on. I told myself that it wasn’t prudish modesty, just practicality and protection from the cold water. I stood there for a second more and then ran, straight into the water, not stopping until it hit my shoulders. I could feel my feet slip and my head went under. For a second I panicked, feeling like I would be swept away, and no one would know I was gone. Then the tide surged forward just enough to plant my feet in the sand and my eyes adjusted to see all of the people bobbing around me. I pulled my clothes off under the water and started laughing.<br />It was colder than my skin could comprehend and while my brain tried to sort out information about temperature, salinity, motion and time it was unable to think the following things:<br /><br />1) Graduate school is scary because success is not guaranteed. You can not depend on the outcome.<br /><br />2) Your family needs you and you are not there. You can not be depended on.<br /><br />3) Some day soon your little sister will learn that being an adult means being alone, even when you are surrounded by people who love you. You can not always depend on others.<br /><br />4) Every day something can happen to change everything that came before and love may not fix it. You can depend on that.<br /><br />My brain put everything aside and for once, just processed the information at hand. The temperature was extremely cold, the salinity was high, the motion was soothing and time didn’t matter. Once that piece of news reached me, I walked out of the bay. I didn’t care that my thighs were still fat and that I was holding my underwear in front of relative strangers. I found my towel just as a naked Swiss man grabbed me in a bear hug.<br />“We did it! Ja! We did it!”<br /><br />I couldn’t stop laughing as I pulled on dry clothes. Further up the beach another student heard me laughing. We had butted heads for most of the course but when he spotted me he called out, “Mariya! Did you see me? I did it! Did you see me? I went in!”<br /><br />I lied, and told him that I had seen him go in. Then I told the truth and said that it was awesome that he went in. I pulled a water bottle full of whiskey from the pocket of my sweatshirt, took a swig and then offered it around. Everyone had some and everyone thanked me for it. The walk back from the beach seemed too short. It was over and already becoming a sandy, damp, ridiculous memory.<br /><br />When I think about it now it seems a shame that a feeling like that can ever fade. I guess if we walked around thinking, ‘the motion is soothing and time doesn’t matter’ it would be hard to get things done. So now I’m home. It’s hot in Birmingham and the wildfires from Georgia have made a thick haze throughout the city. We are landlocked here, so no ocean to clear the smoke away from our brains and our bodies. Nothing is perfect but one thing did surface from that salty cleansing of my brain. I read it when I was in college it is one of my favorite quotes from Zora Neale Hurston. The day after skinny dipping I woke up with it in the front of my mind.<br /><br />“Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday”</span></div>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-4008423243084338832007-08-06T15:55:00.000-05:002007-11-29T11:10:21.327-06:00In my perfect world you always know to cut the red wire first.<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">February-ish 2007<br /><br />(old post from the myspace)<br /><br />Yesterday I started to write a new blog entry. It started like this: Well, it's been ages since my last entry but I haven't had any misdemeanors to report.<br /><br />It's like I willed it to happen. I finished the first sentence and then walked into the lab tissue culture room to set some media warming while I finished my blog. The three other graduate students who I work with were already in the room.<br /><br />"Just ask everyone!" one student was saying to another.<br /><br />"Nooooo, that's too weird" the other one replied.<br /><br />"Ask people what?" I asked.<br /><br />The first student turned to me and said, "She had some NutriGrain bars and a magazine in her desk that went missing. You haven't seen them have you?"<br />I laughed and said that I hadn't. Because I'm a jerk I asked what flavor the bars were and told her that she shouldn't have gay porn magazines in her desk anyway. Then, because I'm a really big jerk, I offered to sell the missing bars back to her at a considerable mark-up. The whole point was to tease my labmate about the possibility of someone stealing three NutriGrain bars out of her desk. I mean…they aren't even tasty. She took it in good humor so I asked around the rest of the lab. No one had the NutriGrain bars. The magazine turned out to be a Dell Computers catalogue so that also seemed like a pretty lame item to steal.<br /><br />We were in the middle of writing a message on a board in the hallway ("did you enjoy the Nutrigrain bars and the Dell Magazine?") and continuing to tease my labmate about her loss (maybe the thief has a crush on you and they are making a shrine!) when a technician in our lab mentioned that she was missing some popcorn out of her desk too. I am really fortunate to work with people whom I trust and respect so at no point did any of us think that it was the work of somebody actually in the lab but we did start to feel creeped out.<br /><br />I sat down to finish my blog entry, now with exciting news to report, and decided to put my ipod on for inspiration. My ipod was not in my desk and neither was the cord that goes with the ipod, nor the earphones. I informed my boss and called campus police. The man on the other end of the line told me that it might be a while. Half an hour went by and our post-doc discovered that his laptop was missing. Another graduate student was missing a T-shirt and a pair of socks from a desk. Now I felt terrible for teasing about the NutriGrain bars.<br /><br />I called the police to report the other thefts. We were informed that it would be a while longer before someone could come out to take our report but they couldn't tell us how long it would be.<br /><br />"Look" the officer said "I don't want to tell you that it will be ten minutes if it might be eleven".<br /><br />I tell him that we can handle waiting for an extra minute; it's the difference of hours that we're trying to ascertain.<br /><br />"Yeah, I can't tell you that." He says that the UAB police were all dealing with an incident and they wouldn't be able to help us any time soon. We decide to leave. One of my labmates gives me a ride to my car and on our way there we can see that two city blocks are barricaded and completely saturated with emergency vehicles. Here is what they were doing instead of taking our report…<br /><br />**************<br />Police Detonate Suspicious Package At UAB<br />Friday, Jan 26, 2007 - 12:15 PM by Chris Pallone<br />BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Just after four on Thursday, UAB students left their classes and discovered chaos.<br />Police got a report of a 'suspicious package' inside the engineering building at the corner of 11th avenue and 13th street south. Streets around many UAB buildings, including the Alys Stephens center, were back open about three hours after the bomb scare ended.<br /><br />The scare disrupted rush hour traffic, students couldn't get to their cars or classes.<br /><br />Birmingham and UAB police shut down at least six blocks of the University's downtown campus.<br /><br />Fire trucks, Haz-Mat vehicles and police cars were scattered everywhere.<br /><br />Curious onlookers didn't know what was going on.<br /><br />"I didn't know what to make of it. I just hoped it wasn't in the building I was in." said Heather Torbert a UAB student.<br /><br />Heather Torbert soon learned police were investigating a suspicious package. Someone had discovered what looked like a bomb in a knapsack, just inside the entrance of a UAB engineering building.<br /><br />A bomb squad member dressed in a heavy protective suit went in and out of the building several times examining the device. Around 6:30 p.m., they pulled it out onto 13th street and destroyed it.<br /><br />"We did trigger the device and it turned out not to be real," said Henry Irby from the Birmingham Police Department.<br /><br />Police say it was a hoax, something meant to look like a real bomb.<br /><br />For two hours, police prevented Heather Torbert from getting to her car but she finally left campus, glad that nothing bad came from the tense situation.<br /><br />"It's scary. It's scary. It really is," she said.<br /><br />Tonight, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is leading the investigation into who put this fake bomb in the engineering building, and why."<br />******************<br /></span><br />Why did they blow the backpack up first? In my perfect world the bomb squad would have opened the bag first. I've seen how to do it on TV, you sweat buckets and shake and then you cut the red wire…or is it the blue?<br /><br />Anyway, in my perfect world:<br />The bomb squad opens the bag, the air is tense. The lead member of the squad is training a rookie. She's tough but attractive and there has been plenty of jockeying for power position mixed with a little sexual innuendo. They will no doubt sleep together later.<br /><br />"What do you see rookie?" That's what he calls her. Later, when they move past the animosity she'll ask him to call her by her first name but for now she's just 'rookie'.<br /><br />"I don't know!" she's shaking but trying to hide it.<br /><br />"Look, you've got to do this. It's now or never." He's unforgiving.<br /><br />"Jesus" she says, almost under her breath. "It's…wait."<br /><br />"There's no time! ID the wires and get them cut NOW!"<br /><br />He starts to move towards her but she puts her hand up, waving him away.<br /><br />"I've got an ID. It appears to be an ipod, a laptop that runs on a Japanese operating system, several NutriGrain wrappers, a computer catalogue and a pair of socks."<br /><br />"GET OUT ROOKIE!! The wrappers are a fuse; it's the Kellogg's cereal bomber. Grab the ipod and GET OUT NOW!"<br /><br />We see her spring to her feet, ipod in hand, running as if her life depends on it. Her life does depend on it and just as she reaches the safety perimeter the ipod starts to play the Carter Family's 'Let the circle be unbroken'. The backpack explodes. She is thrown into his arms. There is an awkward moment while they look at each other. He releases her and says,<br /><br />"Good job saving that ipod. The jerk who built that bomb didn't deserve to have such a great collection of tunes. I mean, this thing has got the Carter Family and Nina Simone for chrissakes"<br /><br />She looks him dead in the eye, confident again.<br /><br />"Yeah, I guess we're looking for someone who is crazy but has regular bowel movements"<br /><br />He gives her a questioning look but there is a tinge of respect starting to shine through his eyes.<br /><br />"Well, the way I figure it, you'd have to be crazy to blow up even a single David Bowie track and those NutriGrain bars will...excuse my french sir...give you the shits."<br /><br />And that's just the way it happened in my perfect world. Oh, and I want my damn ipod back.</span>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-40905101801062404502007-08-06T15:49:00.000-05:002007-11-29T11:10:50.105-06:00I miss you honey and I can't wait to hear the news of your most recent incident report<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Thursday, November 16, 2006<br /><br />(old blog from the myspace)<br /><br />I haven't really talked to my best friend since her birthday in early October. We had a falling out in August and recovery has been slow at best. This is a woman with whom I can have a four hour discussion every Saturday even when absolutely NOTHING has taken place in the intervening week. So it has been strange not to communicate with her but then, for a while, talking was even stranger. We've been trying to reconnect and have been playing a little half-hearted phone tag as a result. She's got a new beau to keep her busy and I'm dating graduate school (no, not SOMEONE at graduate school or the WHOLE graduate school. Basically, 'graduate school' is my surly, crappy, boyfriend and it keeps me busy) so it has been easy to avoid an actual conversation.<br /><br />I don't normally mention this kind of thing much in a venue like the web-log. It is personal, and not just to me, so I won't say much more about it…except, one way that she has been able to keep up with me as I go incommunicado is to read my blog. The danger in judging my life by the blog is that I appear spend my days going from a party to witnessing a misdemeanor to another party and so on. It's kind of disturbing and I hadn't noticed the trend until she called me last night. I was glad to see her number on my cell phone and, although I was otherwise engaged, I answered her call.<br /><br />"Hey, I'm not ignoring you but can I call you right back? I'm busy."<br />"Sure!" She sounded cheerful, "What's going on?"<br />"I'm filling out an incident report with police"<br />"Again?" she said.<br />"What?"<br />"Well I just got done reading your blog."<br />"Ah, right. Yeah, again. I'll call you right back, kay?"<br /><br />This is why it is important to keep your dear friends around for the rest of your life. If you lose them, then who will remind you of the patterns in your world? I would have completely missed the point that I was participating in an incident report for the second time in less than two weeks. I was caught up in the moment.<br /><br />That particular 'moment' had started about 45 minutes before the incident report. I was watching TV. It was showing me a story about a man who wakes up every day in the same day but with the ability to affect different (violent) outcomes. I liked it; it's a lot like graduate school. You wake up every day with a sense of what you are going to do differently to achieve success and instead you learn six new ways to screw up your data. But back to last night, there was a lot of noise in the TV show that sounded like a windshield being bashed in with a baseball bat so when that same noise was talking place outside my apartment, I didn't notice it at first.<br /><br />When the TV switched to showing me a commercial of children smiling in silence I realized that there was something wrong on my street. I jumped up and looked out my living room window to see if my car was okay. It was. Then I looked across the street just as a man who had been crouching on the ground looked up at me and started running down the street. I ran to my back room and watched him run. He made relatively slow progress since it was raining and he had chosen to run down one of the few really steep streets in Birmingham.<br /><br />I ran back to my front of room to pull on a pair of jeans and to call my downstairs neighbor. She came outside with me and we went over to the car in question. To my surprise, it looked fine and for a second I felt sort of silly. Other neighbors were coming out of their apartment buildings including my neighbor, Fred-the-Grillmaster.<br /><br />"Ohhhh, lookit that tire!" someone said and then I saw it. The front tire of the car, a cobalt blue mustang, had been punctured. Looking down the street we could see another car that had lost its front tires and was pointing nose-down into the asphalt. I was surprised that it made so much noise to slash a tire. It was a dull popping sound and I had expected to see broken windshields when I heard it. I called the police and told them that we thought we had seen the guy who was responsible; they said they would be right out.<br /><br />By the time the police arrived the mustang had finished sinking into the road. Three of its tires were slashed as were three tires on the SUV a few cars down. One of the neighbors knew who owned the SUV so the owner was now standing out in the street with us. He was barefoot and wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. I don't say this to criticize his outfit, (I was wearing an oversized, bright red Dale Earnhardt Jr. nightshirt over my jeans) but rather to point out that he was mad enough that the rain didn't even seem to faze him. The mustang belonged to his girlfriend.<br /><br />When this piece of information was revealed, the rest of the neighbors all exchanged a look. Fred asked Mr. SUV if he and Ms. Mustang had any enemies. Mr. SUV swore that this was not a possibility, they had just moved to Birmingham and no one knew his girlfriend's car. Fred tried to look like he believed Mr. SUV. It was funny to watch the two men interact. Mr. SUV was about 6'4", white, and extremely skinny. Fred is black, about 5'7" and weighs around 300 pounds. He had just returned from his job as a janitor and, because he walks to work, he was wearing a yellow rain jacket that reached his past his calves and a matching yellow rain hat. Imagine the love child of Paddington Bear and the Gordon's Fishsticks Fisherman.<br /><br />The police officer who showed up only contributed confusion to our little group. He was fairly young, early 30's at the most. He walked over to the first car and said,<br />"Oh, geeze! Oh man! What is WRONG with people? That guy must have been a real slimeball; I mean…that's a MUSTANG!"<br /><br />This was not encouraging to hear since: a) he must have learned his dialect from watching the Andy Griffith show and b) the murder rate in Birmingham has jumped in the last month to several killings a week. One might imagine that there are more disturbing things happening in the city than a few slashed tires but then, maybe it is different when it is a mustang. I'm not really a car girl.<br /><br />When he was done riling up the car owners with more exclamations of regret, the police officer took our statements. We gave him conflicting descriptions (he was tall/ short/ white/ black/ young/ older/ clean-cut/ had a mustache) and when we were finished he asked each of us if the guy looked like "a real wacko" or "a total slimeball".<br /><br />Frankly, I was starting to suspect the police officer. Who says "slimeball" and "real wacko" under the age of 60?<br /><br />It was around this time that my best friend called. I was giving my home address to the officer and I stuck around for a few minutes just to see if Ms. Mustang and Mr. SUV would own up to who might have slashed their tires. There were two cars parked in between theirs and a total of about twenty cars on the street which were left unharmed, pretty coincidental coincidence. However, no additional gossip was revealed so I went back into my house in time to see the hero of the TV show wake up once more to the same day only this time he had been shot in his chest.<br /><br />The TV ended the story, changing to Birmingham local news and a trial involving a triple homicide. I turned the sound off and thought about how I would write about the tire slashing in this blog and what I would say to my friend when I called her back. There have been a few other happenings in my life aside from parties and misdemeanors. A little bit of stress, some academic failure, some academic success, a sinus infection, some old heartbreak and a few funny stories along with worries from the family at home. Somehow those things have gotten left behind when we try to talk lately. My phone rang and it was her.<br /><br />"Hi!" she said, "So I couldn't wait to hear about your latest incident report! Wait, are you okay? What happened?"<br />"Oh, it was no big deal. Someone had their tires slashed and I saw the guy. I think it was the police officer drumming up business for himself or maybe a jilted lover getting revenge. It doesn't matter really."<br /><br />I gave her the synopsis of the evening. She told me her reaction to the Greyhound bus story. We paused. It was there again, that sticking point. For several minutes I talked while I stuffed my mouth with an entire roll of Mentos, three at a time. We chattered a little, making inane jokes, and then I finally took a deep breath and said, "You know, really things are okay. I'm mostly fine these days. There have been one or two things going on though. Listen…."<br /><br />And she did.<br /></span></span>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-32354691240724763202007-08-06T15:26:00.000-05:002007-11-29T11:11:11.900-06:00Since when do you have a crack baby?<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">November 10th, 2006<br /><br />(old post from the myspace)<br /><br />Last week I went to Nashville for a conference. I gave my first talk at a national meeting. I did not burp into the microphone so by my standards it was a roaring success. There are other things I would like to tell you about that meeting but I can't. I want to keep my job. Just know that, if you ever have a chance to go line dancing with about 60 scientists, you should do it.<br /><br />What I can tell you is that our banquet was held in the Country Music Hall of Fame. I love that place. If you think that American culture is a compilation of the lowest common denominators (Brad Paisley, velveeta cheese, televised award shows) then this museum will blow you away. Early country music was full of color and energy. Some of the people involved were flat ugly to look at but so sweet to hear. My favorite exhibits at the museum: Koko Taylor videos (Fujiyama Mamma) and Elvis' car with recording equipment in the back seat and real crushed diamonds and gold in the paint. Okay, so maybe some of America's culture was built on some wildly tacky sh*t but as far as low denominators go, ours can be pretty cool.<br /><br />Of course, there are those lowest common denominators which do not make it into the Country Music Hall of Fame. I'm convinced that those particular "denominators" are all on their way down to Orlando, Florida via the Greyhound Bus. Which brings me to this question- If you could be in any one of the following three places would you prefer to be:<br /><br />1) Walking at night in Birmingham's Five Points neighborhood when a strange man pulls out his penis and shakes it at you.<br /><br />2) At your ex-boyfriend's wedding while his mother tells you how forgettable you were/are.<br /><br />3) On a Greyhound bus heading towards Huntsville, Alabama.<br /><br />If you picked anything other than the Greyhound bus you were correct. The last day of the conference I decided to skip my ride home with the boss and stick around Nashville for a few extra hours. I have a good friend who lives there and we hadn't had much time to catch up during the conference. We checked out the Vanderbilt campus and then had a nice lunch. I had already reserved my bus ticket for later that afternoon but we got to the bus station early just to be safe.<br /><br />I was filling out luggage ID tags when we overheard one side the following cell phone conversation: "Well just send me some money. No….send me some money. I have to get out of here! No. No. I can't stay here okay? No I can't go back there. I already TOLD you, if I go back to Alabama I'll be arrested, they got a warrant out for me. Well forget that. He owes me a shit-load of money, just take a hundred, hundred-fifty bucks out of the register and wire it to me! Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? F@CK!"<br /><br />My friend and I exchanged a look. All I could think was that at least phone-dude wouldn't be on my bus because I was definitely going back to Alabama. The man continued to make phone calls, demanding money and alternately cajoling then threatening to "get completely wasted" if the person on the other end didn't help him.<br /><br />Meanwhile, two little boys were throwing themselves onto the filthy lobby floor, using their jackets to slid face first into each other. I couldn't figure out who had brought them. There were a number of lethargic men and women in the vicinity but no one seemed to be looking at the boys. They had something about the way their faces were formed that suggested low birth weight and fetal drug addiction. My friend and I stood next to each other for a minute, not saying anything, just taking it all in. "What are you thinking?" I asked him. He raised his eyebrows and said "I'm thinking that I've never been so freaked out in a place before and I just spent a month alone in Africa."<br /><br />We didn't say much for the rest of the wait. I kept insisting that I was fine and that he could go and he would look around the lobby, smile tightly, and insist that he didn't mind staying. I was relieved when we could finally line up for the bus and he could be released from his uncomfortable vigilance. We said goodbye and I promised to call when I got in. "So if you don't call…by what time should I assume that you've been murdered?" he asked.<br /><br />No one sat next to me on the bus. The floor-sliding boys were there, just a few seats behind me. They had an old woman and a ten-year-old girl with them. The smaller of the two boys was about four or five. He was having a hard time sitting still. His grandmother grabbed him by the throat and pushed his head back into the seat. He was gagging and she was growling into his upturned face "You sit down you hear me you sit down you hear me you sit down you hear me you sit down you WILL sit down do you hear me…" She finally released his head with a final push into the seat. Able to breathe again, he started coughing and crying which only earned him a slap. I sent a text message to my friend "woman on bus hitting child thanks for lunch was great!"<br /><br />The bus started out of the station and we were informed that we couldn't smoke, take illegal drugs or consume alcohol. Someone opened a bottle of nail polish and the driver informed us that we couldn't do that either due to improper ventilation. The crack-babies were running up and down the aisle. Their grandmother vacillated between ignoring them, feeding them candy and hitting them. About 30 minutes into the ride, the littlest boy jumped into the seat next to me.<br /><br />"Me a story" he said. He was holding the cover insert to an Avril Lavigne CD. There wasn't really a story there so much as several mopey pictures of a skinny white girl so I made one up. When we got to a picture of Avril lying on a cot I told him that the little girl was sleeping because she was tired from changing her clothes for all those pictures.<br />"She not sleepin' she dead" he told me.<br />"No, she's sleeping."<br />"She dead cause they kill her dead and she's dead".<br /><br />He was a creepy little boy.<br /><br />"Little boy, what is your name?" I asked him.<br />"L'boy, my name is li'l boy" he said.<br />"No, your name is not little boy. You must have a name, what do they call you?"<br />"My name IS LI'L BOY!" He seemed angry.<br />"I don't think so," I said.<br />"My name is LI'L BOY and yo name is UGLLLLYYY li'l Girl!"<br />At that point he looked very pleased with my facial expression and decided to crawl into my lap for a short nap.<br /><br />My new crack baby had just wandered back to his grandmother when voices rose up from the back of the bus. I ignored them in case they were also proclaiming my homeliness. A man walked to the front of the bus and spoke to the bus driver but then went back to his seat. Moments later the voices rose again and this time I could make out someone saying, "I warned you!"<br /><br />The man from the back of the bus came to the front again only this time he was yelling "Bus driver I told him and told him, it's about to go down!" The driver pulled the bus over. We were somewhere in Alabama, not yet to Huntsville, and it was early but completely dark outside. By the time the driver got out of his seat a fist fight had broken out. I called my friend to tell him that there was a fight on the bus and I might be a bit late getting home. Li'l Boy decided that this would be a perfect time to start running up and down the aisle again. When he ran by me I hauled him by the back of his pants into the seat next to me. I was afraid he would be trampled. I hung up on my friend and tried to keep LB-Crack Baby in his seat with the promise of cheetoes. He was indignant. His body went completely stiff and then completely limp as he threw himself into the aisle just in time to trip the bus driver on his way back up to the front. I sent him back to his grandmother and gave them the bag of cheetoes and a handful of starburst that were lurking in my book bag.<br /><br />The fight seemed to be over and bus started moving again. When we pulled into the Huntsville station a few minutes later the police were waiting for us. The man blamed for instigating the fight turned out to be completely soaked in booze. How they even let him on the bus is a mystery to me. According to the people involved he had taken it upon himself to harass a nine year old boy who was traveling with his father. We waited for the police to arrest him and make an incident report before we finally loaded up again and headed for Birmingham.<br /><br />I called my friend back to apologize for hanging up on him.<br />"Are you okay? What happened?" he asked.<br />"I had to get my crack baby out of the aisle to keep him from getting trampled" I explained.<br />"Since when do you have a crack baby?"<br />"Since this bus ride."<br />"You know, it's never boring when we hang out" he told me, but it didn't totally sound like a compliment.<br /><br />The rest of the bus ride was more uneventful but stinky. A woman across the aisle from me talked to herself constantly in a low hiss but I tuned it out and fell asleep, clutching my purse. Strangely, no one sat next to me even though the bus was nearly full after Huntsville. Probably the fact that I had showered that very day was putting them off or maybe no one wanted to sit next to an ugly li'l girl. What ever it was, I was grateful. P picked me up at the station, wisely choosing to bring her big black dog. She warned me that he was in need of a bath but I just laughed.<br /><br />"Trust me" I told her, "I can't smell a thing."</span>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-77184456544874163482007-08-06T15:23:00.000-05:002007-11-29T11:23:46.502-06:00B'ham, you are on your way to being the strangest place I've ever been to (and I've been places)<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Monday, October 02, 2006<br /><br />(old post from the myspace)<br /><br />I swear that Birmingham is not the strangest place I've ever been to. The Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD is stranger. But Birmingham might be the strangest place I've ever lived in. I don't say that lightly. I once lived in Vienna, Austria and those people buy milk you can leave on the counter for days and all of their local wine comes in bottles that say either Rot or Weisse. Plus they yell at you if you can't remember the word for "stamp" in German. Apparently asking for "A small piece of paper with glue which I will to you pay 90 schillings and use to send this letter to my mother in America" is annoying to them. Don't even get me started on the mean old ladies in fur coats with teeny dogs or the rendered goose fat that they spread on bread or the way there is NO live music other than the symphony....I digress.<br /><br />Point is, I once lived in a city that puts corn on pizza but made fun of me for bringing homemade brownies to a party and I still find Birmingham to be the stranger place.<br /><br />Example: Friday night I went out with M~. She's a huge Karaoke fan so we started the night at Starz. I hadn't been there before, probably because karaoke makes me so nervous that I get light headed. Unfortunately/fortunately I was the designated so there was no way that I was going to be drunk enough to perform a song. This did not keep me from doing it anyway. I think I felt bad that M~ was out with a total karaoke-pooper. I droned Mazzy Star's "Fade into You". My knees literally knocked together and the KJ put flashy lights up in my face, maybe to pep up my rendition. If you want to know what I sounded like, pick a note. Make it any note but not your favorite note and then sing any song but only with that note. That will sound better than I did.<br /><br />Not long afterwards the bar started filling up. Some people were pretty good but most weren't. It was fun once I started breathing again. There was a guy there who kept dropping by our table to do magic tricks. Card tricks mostly and one trick that involved lighting a quarter on fire which ultimately didn't work but we didn't care because of the entertaining fire.<br /><br />By far my favorite people of Starz were the girly-girls. (I know there is a theme emerging in this blog and it is: Mariya-makes-fun-of-girls-with-smaller-hips-and-better-fashion-sense-than-she-has. What's your point?)<br />So there were lots of girly-girls there. I insisted that they were all coke-heads but M~ told me that they were from Samford and were able to be that ridiculous on one and a half beers. Each and every one picked a "sexy" song. The best was a rendition of Kelli's' "Milkshake". Two girls got up to perform that one. There was a fat one, about a size 8, and a thin one, wearing a size 2 but it was falling off of her. They didn't know any of the words except for the chorus but the dancing was magnificent. The Thin One attempted a jelly-shake but not having any jelly it was possible to hear her bones knocking together. At one point I thought she was collapsing, having used up the very last of her energy stores. I actually stood up to see if she was going to be okay but it turned out that she was just dropping it like it was hot and not falling over from hunger.<br /><br />Actually, I was the one who was falling over from hunger so I dragged M~ out of Starz and over to midnight sushi at Sakura. The place is under new ownership and I do really like what they have done with the décor and the menu. They have lots more veggie choices now. The staff however, is still just as underpaid and over utilized as they ever were. M~ and I sat at the sushi bar and got to witness several staff meltdowns between cooks and waiters. The place was slammed and people started to leave when their food never arrived. At one point, the sushi chef standing in front of us took the lid of a rice pot and banged it down over and over in response to a particularly annoying waitress. But we survived, got our food (very) eventually, and had a nice chat in the process.<br /><br />We left around 1:30 AM and although it was Friday, Five Points was definitely emptying out. I was just saying to M~ that I regretted parking so far from the restaurant when we heard a commotion to our left. In the street next to us was a yellow cab with the back door open. The cab driver was in the driver's seat. In the back seat was a man half lying in the cab while outside a second man was trying to pull him to the curb by his pant legs. The man still in the cab was yelling "you can't make me!" over and over. The second man reached into the cab and tried to pull the first man out by his collar. At that point the first man changed his cry to "I will cut you! I will f@$king CUT YOU!" while kicking the other man in the nuts.<br /><br />I chose to run across the street in the opposite direction, forgetting that M~ was wearing heels. We crossed into a red light and I heard her clack-clack-clacking behind me but neither of us was hit by a car. We were however, regretting our (my) choice a moment later. The street was pretty much deserted except for us and one other person. He was walking towards us with a very purposeful step. M~ and I were a little nervous and both of us picked up our speed when we saw him. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him reaching for something at his waist band and I was pretty sure it was going to be a gun. We tried not to look at him directly and kept walking. Both of us breathed a sigh of relief when we could hear his footsteps continuing to recede behind us.<br /><br />"Just so I'm clear, that was his penis right?" She has a very charming southern accent so "penis" came out sounding like "pay-nuhs".<br /><br />"Yeah, M~. He just shook his dick at us."<br /><br />"Oh, I didn't want to look directly at it in case it was a gun."<br /><br />She considered for a second and then added, "Or a penis, I also didn't want to look directly at a penis."<br /><br />We were nearly to my green Rolla when a car full of men started hooting at us. I wasn't fazed; they kept their pants on or, if they were pant-less, they at least stayed seated.<br /><br />So that was our night. Strange, a little scary, but still not as wierd as a whole building covered in corn kernels. Give it a few more weeks, I'm sure Birmingham can live up to the challenge.<br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369611848694163763.post-40577093073054537112007-08-06T15:05:00.000-05:002007-08-06T15:08:14.290-05:00Your plywood breasts are cutting my face<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Sunday, September 17, 2006</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(old post from the myspace)</span><br /><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />So graduate school continues to be...continuous, constantly. The work is going well but every day I realize that I am only scratching the surface of what I need to be doing. Here is how I'm handling the situation:<br /><br />1) Don't panic<br /><br />2) Work harder<br /><br />3) If the first two fail you and you still feel overwhelmed, go out for beers with your best friend on Friday afternoon.<br /><br />4) If the third option still doesn't lift the weight from your chest then when he's not looking, go into the bathroom and start crying.<br /><br />So that seems to be the plan I have adopted and it's working out nicely. Friday I went to the Mill/Grill/Schmill (I can never remember which it is now) with B. We ordered a pitcher of beer, tortilla chips, and a steaming hot bowl of fat. Right there that should have been enough to ease the rising panic that is grad school but something was off. There wasn't enough cheese in the fat-bowl or something. We were chatting about life and fighting over the last congealed globs when I realized that I was going to start crying. <br /><br />So I headed for the "ladies" and once there I had a nice little sob. Deeee-lightful. I was rinsing my face when a very tall, very outfitted, woman walked in. She was a quintisential B'ham woman. Her age was somewhere between 21-45. She was painfully thin, blonde, overdressed for a brew pub, and had cleavage that looked harder than Washington's chin on Mt.Rushmore.<br /><br />I was blowing my nose and wondering why gold necklace belts were once again stylish when she asked me if I was okay.<br />"I'm great." I said, and then let out a completely pathetic sniffle.<br />"Oh sweetie!" And the next thing I knew she had used her long stick arms to pull me into her rock-hard boobs. I could feel a blood vessel break in my left cheek.<br />"Damn! that's going to leave a mark" I thought. <br />"I'm Amy Jo" she said, as she released me. She was smiling with what I think was supposed to be a benevolent and warm gaze. Instead, it reminded me of a TV commercial and I was the particularly well-performing dish soap.<br /><br />"Listen, sweetie, I know it doesn't look like it but I have been through some real tough times. See this?" she was pointing to her mascara which would have been hard to miss in a black-out.<br />"Uh-huh" I was rubbing the circulation back into my cheek.<br />"Well it's waterproof! Because you believe me, I have cried before!"<br /><br />It was sort of cute really. I decided that she must be in her mid-twenties and although her sympathy was really unwelcome, it was at least sincere. I was just starting to warm up to Amy Jo when she hit me with a wammy even tougher than her chest.<br /><br />"Do you believe in GOD?"<br />"Right now I believe in another pitcher of beer Amy Jo."<br />"You might feel that way now, but in the morning when you wake up, say a little prayer."<br />I assumed that she didn't mean to the god of porcelain but rather to a giant white man sitting on a cloud.<br />"And you will hear HIM. HE is real. HE's there for you. Okay?"<br /><br />I wanted to ask Amy Jo about her 'HIM'. I wanted to know if HE was so great why she felt the need to second guess HIM on the whole breast situation. Also, I'm not sure you can get into heaven while wearing a gold chain belt.<br /><br />I refrained from saying anything else other than a quick 'thank you'. When I got back to the table it was clear that I had been crying but B didn't press me about it much. We both knew what was happening there. M showed up not long after and we decided to head on to the Blue Monkey. We passed Amy Jo on our way out and she gave me a truely sweet smile with a little wave.<br /><br />"Wow," said M, "you know everyone!"<br />And I thought, "True, and I've got the bruises to prove it to you."<br />Which brings me to the final step in coping with graduate school:<br /><br />5) If all else fails, have some plywood knockers smashed into your face. It will make you laugh and after that, there is very little that two cool friends and another beer can't fix.<br /><br /></span>Transplantedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03202633745852531019noreply@blogger.com1