You Haven’t Licked Me…Yet

Stop it, Toast. STOP it, Toast. STOP IT, TOAST!

No licking, Bagel. No LICKING, Bagel. NO LICKING, BAGEL!

It started last night when I took the dogs up for bed. The previous two nights, JP and I have never slept so well, except for a few nights in that amazing bed at the W in Dallas. The key to these wondrous nights sleep? We made the dogs sleep in the office downstairs. It was amazing. No forced removal (those are my pillows; that’s my spot) at midnight; no cleaning each others ears at one in the morning; no high-pitched barking while chasing dream rabbits at two; no turning in a circle five times to find the perfect spot at three; no deciding that the perfect spot is actually under the covers between my knees at four; no click-clacking trips to lap loudly at the water bowl in the bathroom at five; and no incessant paw licking (they’re clean for God’s sake; you’re not even licking your paws anymore, you’re just licking the carpet) at six.

The dogs usually sleep with us every night. And, in reality, I find it sweet and comforting when Toast settles in the crook of my knees or Bagel noses her way between my pillows at the top of my head. And it’s only slightly annoying that they don’t bother JP at all during the night, but it’s a small price to pay for all that furry cuddling. But Toast’s allergies have kicked in, and lately he has spent more of the night licking and scratching and rubbing his face on the carpet (even with the e-collar) than he has sleeping. The other night, when we finally couldn’t take it anymore, JP carried him downstairs to the office. Normally I would have felt really bad for him, down there by himself, with only his soft dog bed rather than our soft people bed. He doesn’t like to be alone. But I was tired and cranky and frankly feeling that simple banishment wasn’t enough punishment.

The next night we put Bagel down there with Toast to keep him company. It was another night of blissfully peaceful sleep. But last night, I forgot, and it was terrible. I tried yelling. I tried burying my head under my pillows. I tried gentle nudges and not-so-gentle kicks. He would not stop licking or scratching or the doggy equivalent of tossing and turning. I felt bad for him; he was obviously miserable. But I felt worse for me. I don’t know why I didn’t just get up and put them downstairs, but actually getting out of bed is tantamount to admitting defeat. And they haven’t licked me…yet.

Must Feed the Beast

Bagel

My dog Bagel is a beagle. She’s 14 years old, sometimes an old girl, sometimes still a puppy. Like all beagles, she loves to eat. All the time, almost anything, no matter how much she’s already had. The usual stuff of course, meats, cheeses, doggy treats. But she also eats lettuce, broccoli, twisty-ties, and pretty much anything her nose can find (which is every single micro-crumb in her universe). Just the other day she ate the just-ripe strawberries I had been waiting for right off the plant in my garden, leaving green stems  with their prematurely amputated ends just grazing the dirt.

In our 24/7 information age…are you as sick as I am of hearing that phrase? You are? Great! Read on…as I was saying, in this age of non-stop information, we have developed a voracious appetite for information and entertainment. Just like with food, the more you consume, the larger your hunger gets each time, so the more you require to fill you up the next time.

I must see new tweets on twitter; new status updates on facebook; new emails in both my inboxes; new text messages and voicemails–which is apparently in its death throes–on my iphone; fresh feeds from the Times, CNN, the Austinist, and other blogs in Google Reader; new comments on new posts to my own blog, etc. I bounce around, searching for new bits, new bytes, for information that will amuse me, enrage me, annoy me, bore me, whatever.

I want to shut off the computer, but I can’t, let me check everything one last time. If you have a personality like mine, you never like to leave things undone–but the Internet is never done feeding you, so you can never finish eating. How can you walk away when it just served up another tasty morsel? Read that, and by the time you’re done, there’s another one.

I get information, therefore I am. That might seem like it’s pretty close to I think, therefore I am, but it’s not. Sucking in all that information in such massive quantities means you don’t taste it (here’s that food analogy again, maybe I’m hungry?), you don’t savor it, you don’t think about it at all. The consumption has become the final goal; the information is not the end result, or perhaps you would more easily find satisfaction and walk away, it is just a byproduct of our need to devour everything.

Look at this Internet. Do you call this clean? Do you?

This will be the fourth opening paragraph that I’ve written for this post on four different topics. I’d wanted to write something about a DiSC assessment that I completed recently and how helpful, actually, I found it when I was able to get a one-on-one analysis of the results by a professional. I thought about writing on stress since I’m feeling quite a bit of it at the moment and not dealing with it particularly well, as usual. And I considered a post on some exciting new and challenging projects at work that I haven’t quite started but which are waiting out there for me when I resurface from my current all-consuming project in mid-May. I may still write about that one; I’m not sure.

I don’t blog about work usually. By the time I get home or make it to the weekend, or when I wake up in the wee hours like I did this morning, the last thing I want to write about or think about is work. (Although I guess it’s thoughts of work pedaling like mad in the spin class from hell in my head–going nowhere fast–that have me up this morning.) In fact, I think of this blog as a personal escape mechanism, not as a platform for professional topics. Maybe I could post more professional writing, but then even fewer people would bother to read it. But occasionally, like now, I have a hankering, an urge, a need to write about something work-related.

So what’s stopping me? The last two weeks–prompted, I’m sure, by the millions of recently unemployed people putting themselves online (potentially for the first time) to help build their network and find a job–have been filled with articles about the dire consequences of putting too much information online (too much of the wrong kind of information, apparently countless numbers of trite vision statements and tedious lists of professional accomplishments are OK). Future employers, who WILL Google you, might think you party too much or gripe too much; they may not like your politics or your religion (or lack of same); they may think that particular photo is less arty and more pornography; they may think your language is too profane or your jokes are too off-color.

I can’t count the number of times just in the past few weeks that I have read: only say online those things which you would say to your priest, your boss, or your parents because it’s likely that one or all will find them eventually. So sanitize yourself. Steam clean your life, your thoughts, your words. Bleach everything until it is the same dingy shade of nothing. Scrub, damn you!

And there’s some wisdom in that. But it’s a sad and stifling wisdom. The Internet is not one big resume site. I mean, it is, but it’s not. It shouldn’t be. We put ourselves out there for every Tom, Dick, and Google to find. And, although I was uncomfortable with it at first (NO! don’t tell anyone I’m blogging. I don’t actually want anyone to read it.), I do want people to find me. To read. To laugh (or at least chuckle). Maybe cry. To agree whole-heartedly or disagree completely. And not with my resume.

That being said, let me now say this: don’t be an idiot. Don’t post diatribes against your employer, call your boss an incompetent git who does none of the work and takes all of the credit, or let everyone know that your colleagues are a bunch of whiny babies who wouldn’t know real work if it bit them in the ass–even if it’s all true. That’s just stupid. Plus it’s unkind and unworthy to beat up on those so obviously weaker than you. Don’t post those hilarious pictures of you drunk and half-naked at last year’s  Christmas party on your public flickr site–they’re really not quite as funny or sexy as they might seem. Don’t confess the times you snuck out your bedroom window to get drunk and let Bobby Basketball Star cop a feel. Don’t talk about that one time you cheated on your spouse and how you really regret it and isn’t it great she never found out. C’mon.

Do remember that what you post will be seen and probably by someone that maybe you would prefer didn’t. Maybe it wouldn’t be clean enough for Joan Crawford, but is it clean enough for you to live with?

PB Call Home

I called my mom the other day like a good daughter should. Although I guess a good daughter would have called weeks ago. It’s been a while, I admit. But I don’t really like talking on the phone–especially to my mom. I usually call from the car, on my way home from work. That way, the conversation has a limited time length and any moment of inattention can be excused by sorry, this idiot almost sideswiped me.

The phone rings and my stepdad answers. And though he’s been my stepdad–my dad, really–for nearly 30 years, we usually have an awkward 30 seconds max of what’s up/what’s up with you conversation before, practically throwing the phone away (he loves me but my liberalism could be catching), here’s your mother. And then begins the painful task of trying to find something to say.

I guess I’m just not a very good conversationalist. I can hold my own with specific topics. Why, yes, you’re right, that is tragic what happened at that nursing home. No, I don’t think it would have been any better if the staff or the old people would have been allowed to carry weapons inside. You think so? Well, color me completely unsurprised. In your world 50 old people would have shot each other or themselves as they tried to hit the gunman. Besides, I don’t think that you can just casually kill someone–even in self defense. I think you pay a price. Well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree…So, how’s Aunt Ginger?

Of course these are exactly the conversations that I avoid having with my mom since they invariably go just as I’ve described.

But I falter in finding general, safe conversation that doesn’t find us on opposite sides of a fairly stark line, me shouting from the left, she from the right. So, what have you been up to, Paula Jeanne? I work. I sleep. I try to go to yoga. I sit on my deck in the sunshine when I can. I read books, listen to music, watch television (I can’t talk about these because she doesn’t know the books or the bands or the shows since neither are about God). Occasionally when I’m feeling really productive I might pull weeds or tackle organizing my home office, but I confess I harldy ever feel really productive. (I consciously omit mentions of facebook or Twitter because the last thing I want is for my mom to try to friend me.) Really, these aren’t exciting sorts of things that are conversation worthy–or at least not worthy of a very long conversation. I know that perhaps mention-worthy things have happened, but I never remember them. And if I do, I’ve long since talked it all out with my therapist or JP or friends or twitter followers, and I really hate repeating myself.

So after about 2 minutes of me telling her what I’ve been up to, I usually just sit quietly, hmmming and ahaing and isn’t that wonderful or awful, depending, (usually in the right places although sometimes I admit I’m not listening as close as might be required) as she gives me the latest family news. And maybe that’s for the best…since I don’t like to be on the phone again anyhow.

Rabbit Food

Salad--it's what's for dinner!

A happy little lettuce.

I made salads for dinner tonight. No big deal. They weren’t even fancy salads. Just lettuce, a red wine vinaigrette, some corn pico I made yesterday, a sprinkle of Parmigiano-Reggiano, some fresh cracked pepper. They were good. No–they were great. It was the best lettuce I’d ever had.

Because it came straight from my little garden (really little, maybe 20 square feet, but still, I grew my own lettuce in there, so that’s pretty cool). Friends with considerably more gardening experience had given me dire warnings about eating my lettuce before it flowers and/or gets hot or risk ending up with a fork full of yuck.

So tonight, home from work and errands, I grabbed some dull scissors, a colander, and JP. Despite the friendly gardening tips, I still wasn’t completely sure how this lettuce harvesting process would work. So I just took a deep breath and trimmed off the outer leaves. I mean, the plant was going to die a bitter death anyhow, so at worst I was only hastening that demise.

And with that, we had harvested our first crop–okay so the words “crop” and “harvest” might imply slightly more vegetation than a small colander part-full of bronzed green leaves. Back in the house, humming what I imagined was a jaunty little farming diddy but actually sounded quite a bit more like Beck, I gave the leaves a gentle, cool bath. Then, I pulled out the trusty OXO salad spinner, which I haven’t used in ages because, I admit it, I buy my little organic, triple-washed greens that I don’t bother to quadruple-wash. My homegrown lettuce just got a single wash. What does it need to be triple-washed for? Not just strictly organic pesticides, but NO pesticides. Dirt, water, air. That’s it.

Of course, it’s still only rabbit food.

If you prick me, do I not bleed?

Last week I made two trips to the doctor’s office. Both times with the predictable lengthy wait and the mispronunciation of my name. BAY-LISS? Really? It’s BALES, for God’s sake. It’s an actual real word, a noun in the dictionary; you don’t have to guess at how to say it.

First, to the gyno for the annual PAP smear, which always sounds to me like some bizarre cream cheese (shmear) flavor from Einsteins. Go ahead, put that on your bagel. And then there was the blood draw, which sends me into hyperventilating near terror. It’s not the pain; I’m not afraid of the pain. I mean, I don’t like it, I’m no masochist (at least not about this), but the pain is really minimal even with the most inept hands. But I hate needles. Hate. Loathe. Fear. Dread. Completely, irrationally, totally. They call that a phobia (aichmophobia, in my case) but, frankly, the word “phobia” doesn’t sound strong enough to really pack the punch of what I’m feeling. It’s a dismissible sort of word, and it makes me sound like a crazy person besides. And there’s nothing crazy about thinking that something that enters your body to suck things out or push things in is wrong. You have skin specifically to keep stuff exactly where it is supposed to be. Needles are against nature. Just remember that you heard it here.

So, I know from the time I set the appointment that this trauma is coming. The woman–hah! she was all of 21 I’d say–had all the finesse of a teenage boy copping his first feel. First the inane chatter, which she perhaps thought was distracting, and then the fumbling around without really noticing that I’m freaking out and trying desperately to remain calm and not shove her on her ass. Turn my head, take deep breaths, and just let it happen. And then it’s over, too long, but not long enough to make you feel justified about all the panic, which I know is just slightly out of proportion to the event.

Two days later I’m back at the doctor, just a regular internal med doc for a standard annual and to try to find something to get rid of the headache I’d had for a week. (I got some drugs, but the headache is still around.) And guess what else? Vaccinations. Seriously. Shots. I thought one of the primary benefits of growing up was the end to vaccinations–unless you’re one of these crazy people that is forever jaunting off to third world countries for some third world fun and dysentry. But, no. Apparently I need a tetanus booster. Did I need Hep B? No, I won’t be traveling to any exotic locales, thank you; I take my exotic in an occasional cocktail and that’s about it.

I was anticipating another blood draw (cholesterol, etc.), but a shot? Seriously? She just kind of dropped this on me, and before I could say anything, or make an excuse, she bounded out of the room to get the nurse. Already my heart is racing, and the breaths are coming shallow and fast, panting really, and my mind is racing with how I could get out of this, what excuses I could make, I’m late, I have to go, I suddenly remembered there’s this thing…this thing I need to go do, right now. And I am just about to hop off the table and make a run for it when in the nurse comes.

Nurse is such a strong word. It has the ring of steadiness, caring, competence. This, however, is not the nurse I have. This is the same woman who mispronounced my name. And when she was taking my pulse, she needed to use scratch paper to calculate 2 x 26. This was the woman who was going to give me a shot, a shot which, the doctor had warned me just before she beat a hasty retreat, would hurt and would make my arm sore for at least three days. I don’t think so.

So why didn’t I just leave? Because the only thing stronger than this panic is my embarrassment at being so panicked, my realization that this is ridiculous and irrational, that there are, at this very moment, children handling this better than I am. My father was of the suck-it-up-you’ll-be-fine variety, and it just so happens that he would have been right about that regarding shots (not so much some other things, but that’s another post or two). This wasn’t going to kill me–probably.

And then she was coming at me with the needle, brandishing it like a weapon, waving it around. Yes, I’m going to stick this through your layers of skin (epidermis, dermis, hypodermis) and into your biceps muscle. I’m going to depress the plunger and force this in.

The cold of the alcohol swab and the wait while she takes off the protective cover. And all the while I’m ready to leap from the table and flee, pride be damned. And then it starts and I immediately, without even realizing, revert to the trick of my childhood when this ordeal happened considerably more frequently. Counting backwards from some odd number usually 23…22…21…20…19…and then it’s over. My heart rate slows; my breathing gradually returns to normal. My legs are a bit wobbly when I get off the table, and my head feels a little light. That headache, which receded with the panic, returns with a throbbing, pounding vengeance.

Every sign in the place warns that I must check out. So, with the blood draw still to face, I go to the check out area, where I stand for 10 minutes waiting my turn–waiting for the nitwit in front of me to ask yet one more question the receptionist can’t answer–only to be told that if I didn’t need to schedule another appointment, I could go. Well, gee, thanks.

Wait again for the lab techs to call my name; they don’t even bother with last names. Out the door and to the left. On the second blood draw, my veins hid. Hey, they know what’s what. Didn’t we just do this? Fool me once…blah blah blah. But the girl (lucky me! the same one!) poked around and eventually found something workable. Again, turn my head, shut my eyes, and breathe through it.

So the eyes are scrunched shut and the breathing a little closer to wheezing? What of it?

On a Wing and a Prayer

Those of you who know my parents–or know of my parents–probably know or could guess that the prayer before dinner is not to be skipped.

Growing up, family dinner was pretty much required, with very few exceptions. Even illness, unless it came with a raging fever, was no excuse; you didn’t have to eat, but you did have to show up. Scattered to the winds before and after, but dinnertime was sacrosanct. Come home, even if you have to drag your friends with you, though you tried not to do that very often because you couldn’t subject any but the very best of friends to your practically guaranteed excruciating and embarrassing family dinner more than a few times.

Although never officially assigned, we sat in the same seats every night, changing chairs only when one of us eventually moved out of the house. This helped keep the peace, I think, since there were so many of us. Even now, I confess, I often find myself sitting in what would have been “my seat” had whatever table I’m at been magically transported to my parents’ kitchen.

The prayer, unlike the seating, was officially assigned. The same prayer every night. We took turns saying those 13 words, which resulted in the nightly chorus of, “But I said it last night!” Indeed, though I myself haven’t prayed (even by rote) in more than 15 years, the words of that before-dinner ritual from my youth is burned in my brain: Heavenly Father, thank you for this food and all Your many blessings. Amen. A solid five seconds when you say it fast but not fast enough to get called for saying it fast…because that would be disrespectful.

My sister and my niece (four going on five) were at the parents’ the other night for dinner. As he starts the prayer, my niece looks at her grandpa and says, “Zip it!”

All the Little Birdies Go Tweet Tweet Tweet

The birds are chirping again. The doves are cooing. Others (what am I, an ornithologist?) seem to be whistling their merry little songs.

It reminds me how much I hate them, with their pointy little beaks and dead black eyes. Ugh. It’s just wrong–they are just wrong. And every spring, just when you’re thinking how living in Texas isn’t all that bad because it sure is great to wake up in February and March for sunny days in the 80s, there they are, singing the same damn song over and over again every morning; waking me up earlier than I wanted; pooping on my car, my favorite chair on the deck, my garden sculpture; crashing into my windows and falling dead (or worse, not dead, just broken) to my patio.

But this year, hah! This year I have my revenge. Because last fall John chopped down the cherry trees in our yard. Okay, I cannot tell a lie, they weren’t cherry trees. I wouldn’t have let him chop down cherry trees; I love cherries. Not that cherries grow here, but I digress. They were hackberry trees–trash trees. And now the trash has been taken out.

Those bird-harboring, leaf-dropping, berry-bearing annoyances have been replaced by bamboo in steel planters. What this means for me, in addition to having a better looking, easier to maintain yard, is that there are no longer birds right outside my window. Forced into neighboring trees, their song is softer and, dare I say, almost pleasant.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Last year we planted tomatoes and serrano peppers–our own little pico de gallo garden. The peppers never went anywhere, and the tomatoes got as far as a few little green buds before shriveling up in the summer sun. But were we dissuaded? No! We had planted too late, we decided, and watered too little. And we don’t believe any more that “full sun” actually means full Texas sun for 10 hours a day which is what we get in our yard. Nothing but agaves and cacti can withstand that, which you can tell by looking at the plants that are actually still surviving out there. So we’ll plant earlier, and we had sprinklers installed in the fall, and we won’t be tricked by that full sun thing. And maybe that will all help.

But I think the problems with our attempts at gardening go beyond the logistical. We get bored with gardening. We like the work at the beginning, and we like the end results (although our plants often don’t make it that far), but we get bored with the ongoing maintenance–the endless, tedious watering, weeding, pruning, fertilizing, etc.–that’s required. (And, I’ll tell you another secret, I don’t actually like to get dirty. I’ve never understood people that say they love to have their hands in the soil. It just gives you dirty hands.) I think, frankly, that this makes us the wrong temperament for gardening and we should give up now, plant some cacti, and save ourselves the money and the grief of future attempts.

But hope springs eternal, right? Particularly in the spring, when the cooler weather and the more gentle sun coax you into forgetting that it’s hot as hell here, who are we kidding? So this year, we’re trying again (serranos, tomatoes, onions, cilantro–another pico garden only with even more pico ingredients because failing to grow just the two last year, we want to make sure we fail to grow it all this year). But we’re planting them now, and we have those sprinklers, right? Maybe they aren’t doomed to a certain premature death. Maybe we will have an actual crop (do you really use the word “crop” to describe a couple of tomatoes and a handful of onions?) to exchange with our friends who are way more suited to gardening than us. Maybe I will have so many tomatoes, onions, serranos, and cilantro that I will be bottling salsa to give to my friends and relatives.

Okay, so I don’t really believe that last one. But it’s spring outside, and there’s that hope thing, and we do have those sprinklers…

A Gut Reaction

On a recent trip to Houston, we went to the HMNS to see the Body Worlds 2 exhibit, but it was insanely crowded, plus I wasn’t entirely convinced I wanted to spend the better part of the day with 200 or so “plastinated” body parts, so we decided to visit the Menil Collection, which is tucked into a tree-lined neighborhood not far from downtown and is free to the public. [Yay! for free private museums. I understand why you need to charge, but it seems a shame. Art (at least to look at) should be for everyone.]

I go to a lot of museums, NYC, LA, San Francisco, DC, of course. It’s something JP and I enjoy doing when we travel, and we can spend hours wandering the intricate mazes of exhibits–surrealist, ancient, post-modern, impressionist, Dada, romantic, medieval…it doesn’t really matter. We have favorites, periods we like more, artists we’re drawn to, museums we love to visit. And, I admit, most of it we just pause in front of, admire for technique or content or beauty or ugliness, and then move on, untouched.

But at the Menil I found one of those rare paintings that actually made me stop, that grabbed me by the brain, the gut, the heart, and held me captive. JP didn’t get it, there was no clench for him, no feeling of recognition, no visceral reaction. I saw 20 people just pause and walk past; they didn’t feel it either.

The painting was “The Rape” by Rene Magritte. And looking at it, I thought, this is it, this is the visual representation of objectification. It made me feel angry and exposed and vulnerable and sick.

I remember thinking at the time that it was interesting that a man had so accurately, so completely, captured the feeling. I read later that, when he was 13 or 14, Magritte was present when the cops pulled his mother’s dead body from a river, her clothes pulled up and tangled around her head, leaving her exposed.

The painting is the neck and head of a woman, but instead of her face is her torso, her eyes replace by breasts, her mouth replaced by the vagina. Her personality, most usually expressed in the face, particularly the eyes and mouth, has been taken from her, replaced by her sex. Even the shape of the head and neck are phallic, seeming to penetrate the hair on her “head.” She is completely defenseless–as well as anonymous–with no arms or legs or mouth. There’s nothing subtle about it; it doesn’t sneak up on you. The meanings aren’t hidden. This is a blunt instrument for knocking you out with its message.

Art critics and psychologists have long since picked apart this painting along with those of us who react so strongly to it. All I know is that it stuck with me. Here, a week later, I’m still thinking about, about what it means. I’m still feeling, still reeling a little bit in those dark mind corners.