Three Wishes

Two of my kitchen drawers are completely empty; I purge the closets every season. We've only got one dog right now. And also I'm a hoarder.

Peek at the picture: (unless you're with PETA). It's my wishbone collection, started back before the equally gruesome days of Alex's new vegan diet. I keep it on the windowsill over the sink so that, while I'm doing dishes, I can see how many wishes I've got coming to me, how many good things I have left.

My wishes aren't the only things saved and coddled in the safe harbor of my kitchen. I have two generous spa certificates in my possession, gifts I received from the person who knows how much I hate spending money on anything "luxe," as the kids say. I plan to spend one on my annual summer pedicure, an event so auspicious that it's like celebrating the new year. I once explained to a friend that the timing of the expenditure is carefully planned. Deliberate. "When the outside half my big toe is red, and the inside half is plain old natural nail, I know it's January."

"Let me get this straight," she said. "You use your toenails as a calendar?"
"It's not a bug, it's a feature," I told her.

The other spa certificate isn't so easily spent. Chances are good that I will agonize over its redemption, and when Alex encouarges me to cash it in for a massage or a facial, I will likely look at him like he's suggested I sell one of my kidneys on the black market. "Use it?" I'll ask with my arms crossed. "If I use it, I won't have it anymore."

I commit this same kind of flawed logic to other things too, specifically shampoos and bath products, including the fancy little soaps and lotions I've taken from fancy resorts. "What? They're travel-sized," I say, stuffing them into the Ziplock bag that's bulging with last year's stash. I now have sufficient materials to coat the Burning Man playa with enough lotion to create the world's biggest slip 'n slide. (I can't wait for the email that tells me it's already been done.)

But when I consider that the Dead Sea is dead primarily because there's no outlet for the incoming water other than evaporation, I look down at my toes and wonder if I'm doing myself any favors. When I consider that Ernest Holmes was onto something with his writings on the Law of Circulation, I think I feel a resolution of sorts coming on, not that I'm into resolutions or anything.

Maybe I can just say, "No more hoarding," in 2009, or any other year. I will use my things up, knowing that it's an act of gratitude, maybe even a kind of prayer, when doing so. I will faithfully use myself up, too, knowing that being too careful, too tight-fisted with one's self is the battle cry of the fearful. Whether the law of conservation of matter holds up in a laboratory or not, I will work my own experiment and let go of all my wishes, knowing that the only shortage--and the only source--of real wishes exists only in my imagination. Not on my windowsill.

I will resist the urge to engage in any more emotional constipation and let the cosmic equivalent to gravity do its work. I will exercise my gratitude and my own potential by letting loose the hounds. For my own good, I will sacrifice in order to receive. Personal growth hurts; it's going to be difficult, but I'm up to it.

I'll be at the spa.

Winter Time Warp: How a Virus Turned February Turned Into April Part I

A few months ago, which seems like a few years ago, I was trying my damndest to get Sophie well from some virus that desperately clung to her like one of those creepy boyfriends we’ve all had. (Yes, I’m talking about you, Steve.) She’d been sick with something or other pretty much all winter, which I was trying not to take personally, even though in Boulder, that’s almost impossible. When learning that a family has fallen prey to cold and flu season, it’s not just customary—it’s mandatory—to ask the mother if she’s fed her family anything but organic vegetables, or to blame gluten, sugar, artificial colors, or hand sanitizer. And if the mother had committed to breastfeeding longer, her children wouldn't get sick in the first place. Yes, mea culpa on making sensitive, deeply personal decisions, like weaning Sophie a month, a day, a year longer than someone else thinks I should have. (Like sometime before she started shaving her legs and bringing home calculus homework, for example.)

And while Sophie was entering the third or fourth day of viral symptoms, I slogged inside our nearest drugstore with my clammy, whining toddler draped over my shoulder for an over-the-counter medication we use when things go south. The woman at the counter looked at me as if I had just asked for cyanide. “We don’t carry it,” she eyed me, “people overdose their kids with it.” I’d been fetching juice, laundering the vomit out of everything we own, and watching Blue’s Clues for 48 hours straight, and it took herculean restraint not to overdose that woman’s face with my fist.

This illness, at first, wasn’t anything that I hadn’t endured before, and I had to be grateful that we’d moved away from Vail, where I didn’t know anyone who could help me while Alex was away, and where the physicians were more like EMTs in really expensive shoes. It was during that winter we spent in Vail that I invented a system of helping nurses and doctors triage their pediatric patients in the waiting room just by looking at the kind of shape their mothers were in. When Sophie was on the well side, I looked like a regular mom who could have used some highlights and a breath mint, but was otherwise holding it together OK. When she got really sick, and when her fever rose to 104.5 the minute her medication wore off, I looked a lot like Nick Nolte’s mug shot from 2002.

Living in a real place, where my parents can help me when things get really bad, and the doctors know how to do other things besides treat ski injuries, I felt a little better. Then on the night of February 5th, after we’d seen Sophie’s pediatrician, and were taking a new round of antibiotics, I looked at Sophie and didn't like how she was doing. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something told me things were bad, and were going to get worse. With my spidey sense tingling, I paged the on-call doctor, and got a phone triage nurse at Children’s Hospital. “What you’ve just described to me constitutes a 911 call. How does she look?”
“Like shit actually,” I said. I hung up, and packed us all into the car. I didn’t bother changing my clothes; despite the weather, I didn’t even put on a coat. I headed for the emergency room without passing go or collecting two hundred dollars.

Stay tuned for the continuation of Winter Time Warp: How a Virus Turned February Turned Into April, coming soon.

Boxer Shorts and Black Socks: A Love Story

The other day our friend Jim came by to pick something up. It was as lazy of an afternoon as we’re capable of having, and Alex answered the door in his standard post-bike-ride best: A pair of striped boxers and the black dress socks that he’d put on for work at least forty eight hours before. Jim looked at him, scowling, shaking his head. “What are you doing?” Jim asked him, motioning with his hands to Alex’s exposed torso. Alex puffed up his chest, sucked in his belly, then let it all out and farted.

I can’t believe it myself, but this is the very thing that drew me to Alex all those years ago: An unashamed appreciation for life’s simplest, greatest pleasures. I literally fell in love the afternoon I witnessed Alex eating a sandwich over the sink, wearing nothing but his boxer briefs and the twenty dollar Timex Iron Man digital watch that he publicly considers his best purchase in twenty years. It looks like since then, he’s decided to keep his feet warm, too—thus the socks—making me wonder: Is there anything sexier than common sense?

“Tomorrow’s our anniversary,” I told Jim, which elicited a response that Jim’s famous for in our circle of friends. I heard it for the first time eight years ago, the night the three of us crowded into a ski town hotel room for the night; the night that I saw Alex perform for the first time what I guess was standard operating procedure—if you happen to be at summer camp: Reserving the bed he wanted by yanking down the comforter and his pants at the same time, and rubbing his bare bottom on the sheets. “Got dibs on this bed!” he cheered, pulling up his pants. Jim and I looked at each other, slack jawed, before Jim said, “I don’t know how you do it, Jody. I just don’t know.”

We met in the fall of ’98, at a party that he and his friends weren’t even invited to. Because it was the time in my life when I decided working ninety hours a week would be a good idea, it took us about two weeks to speak to each other again and agree to go on our first date. I pressed for lunch, he pressed for dinner and won. Since then, he’s taken me to live in three different cities in four different houses. He has sent me to Italy, and also in a separate turn of events, quite literally over the edge. I saw a therapist once, and as I was explaining why I was in her office sitting on her purple futon, this therapist, a person who is trained to look neutral and serene and blameless while you tell her things that are quite the opposite, smote herself on the head and said, “God! What was he thinking?”

Ever since we were married in Las Vegas of all places, here, during a four-day whirlwind nuptial extravaganza in the company of 90 of our closest friends and family, I’ve heard a lot of “I don’t know how you do it”-type sentiments, including:
You two don’t match
You really keep him grounded
Did he just do what I think he just did?
You’re a saint.

And yet, here we are: October 14, 2007. Alex and I are together for nine years, married for seven. A time when, for reasons that are unknown to me, and that I didn’t bother looking up, a couple’s destiny is ruled by an entity or phenomenon commonly known as the seven year itch.

I may be a lot of things on this day in history. Flaky, tired, overwhelmed, and in dire need of highlights and an all-day moisturizer specially formulated for acne-prone combination skin, but itchy isn’t one of them. It’s true that things have changed in seven years. For one, gray hairs. I’ve found a few in my own head of hair, but not Alex’s, that lucky dog, and have plucked them from my head, knowing that these things are like roaches; for every one you see, there are at least ten you don’t. And for another, I now have collected something like seven different doctors, one for each organ or gland, with a spare, free-range, after-hours-friendly one who is willing to call in a prescription on the fly for acute maladies that present themselves between the hours of midnight and three: Pink eye and ear infections and other delights fresh in from preschool, like SARS and Ebolla.

But Alex is no spring chick either.

In most recent years, he’s earned a secret nickname: Rapunzel, for his long, long locks of hair that also happen to also be his eyebrows. “What’s with the eyebrows?” I’ve been known to say, plucking a few of the more noticeable strays from the pack by twirling them around a doorknob a few times and then slamming the door. “Do you have to tuck your eyebrows behind your ears when they check your eyesight at the DMV?” I asked him once. And then I probably pushed the envelope a few inches too far the day I told him I was starting a grassroots organization called M.A.M.E.: Mothers Against Mammoth Eyebrows.

The difference between us is that he doesn’t know he’s any older. In fact, he’s still pretty sure he’s going to camp next summer, to learn some new tricks, like how to burp the alphabet, or make a bong out of a tennis racquet. He’s got big plans, and they involve first finding his old pair of parachute pants—“They’re around here somewhere”—and then restoring a ’71 GTO in the garage, despite the fact that he’s a man who loves great gas mileage more than Al Gore. More than Bono. I’ll let him figure out that one out on his own; the parachute pants I cannot abide, however, and if it were in the least environmentally safe, I would have burned them in the wood stove several winters ago. I will hide them someplace I know he will never look: With the cleaning supplies, or with the vacuum, a thing he hasn’t touched since the Carter administration, and only then was it a means to torturing his sister.

“How about taking me to dinner for our anniversary, so that I can have a martini for the first time in like twenty seven years?” I asked him after Jim had left the building, still shaking his head and muttering. “You can have a drink, too; don’t worry, your eyebrows said they would drive.”

We went to a nice place while Sophie was at a friend’s house, and laughed and teased each other at the bar, where we like to sit, even when there are perfectly nice tables available in the dining room. I pointed out that he speaks Spanish in a way that sounds like he’s recently sustained a head injury. He remarked that the suitcase I brought home from a trip a month ago is still sitting out in the living room, still fully packed, and he’s starting to tell our guests that it’s sculpture.

Parenthetically, on the compatibility side, we’re both extremely frugal, but for different reasons. His frugality originates with the belief that, no matter what job he has, he’s always ten minutes away from losing it, leaving us all out on the street with a sign that says, “Kidneys, cheap to a good home.” My frugal behavior is inextricably linked to laziness. Bringing another nice thing home means that there’s just one more thing to vacuum/dust/wash/keep the dogs and a sticky toddler away from. And entering a mall makes me want to spin my head around on its axis and throw the nearest clergyman down a flight of stairs.

That’s when we saw Nina, a woman from the tiny town we lived in, whom we know only by first name, which is an upgrade from what we called her for the first two years we knew her: Good Diction Woman. Apart from speaking with balls-on precision no matter what she’s doing, Nina is the real-life version of that sitcom character who works every job in whatever small, funky, fictional town the show’s set in. So in the morning, she’s taking your deposit at the bank, and then your lunch order at the diner, drives the kids home on the school bus that afternoon, and then looks up from her weeding in the community garden to wave at you as you’re driving home from work that night.

Nina, as we learned from our table in the bar, is a bit of a baseball nut, and with the Colorado Rockies going to the World Series, she was beside herself with joy and victorious anticipation. She looked to me to back her up on just what a boon this was to all living creatures in the great state of Colorado, to which I explained, shrugging, “I hate all professional sports, except for the World’s Strongest Man/Woman competitions.”

She looked at Alex like I had sprouted a second head and said the most profound and unprecedented thing anyone has ever said to us, “You’re a very patient and forgiving man. I don’t know how you do it.” Ladies and gentlemen, what a night!

So maybe we’ll chalk this one up to being lucky number seven, instead of the year of the itch. Maybe we won’t have to fight it this year, or maybe we’ll have to gulp down a boxcar full of Benadryl and slip into a Calamine bath. Who knows? Maybe we will complain about and to each other; I about how I envy him. He makes everything—everything—look so easy that it makes me nuts. And he that I have the memory of a whole herd of elephants and boy can I carry a grudge. Maybe we’ll just not even notice the slightest whisper of an itch, and this year will fall away like years do, leaving us at the door of number eight, wondering where the time went. And so on, until Alex is opening the door for Jim in his black socks and Depends.

***

Blogger’s note: A few weeks ago, the lovely and talented Susan Henderson at LitPark wrote about love. If you don’t know Susan, or the Park, please do yourself a favor by getting to know the two of them.

A Top Ten List of the Things I Wonder About While Driving or Taking a Shower, Part I

1. If anyone will ever invent tooth whitening coffee.
2. If I’m paying too much for car insurance.
3. What the hell that ex-boyfriend’s problem was.
4. What I should do with all the gobs of money I’m going to have someday.
5. Why it’s called date rape if the perpetrator and victim aren’t really even on a date.
6. Why I spent so much time in high school trying to learn the words to the German version of “99 Luft Balloons” instead of studying.
7. If any of these “Part I” blog entries will ever see a “Part II.”
8. What I was thinking the last time I cut my own hair.
9. Where sexy went, and why everyone’s trying to bring it back.
10. If someday everyone will divide history the way I do: Stuff that happened before the drummer for Def Leppard lost his arm, and stuff that happened after.

Smelebrity Number Nine

Paris Hilton, Jennifer “J. Lo” Lopez, Liz Taylor, Britney Spears, Sarah Jessica Parker, and even Donald Trump: These are all celebrities with a fragrance on the shelves of your favorite department store. To date, it’s hard to name a celebrity who hasn’t thrown her scent to the shelves, as if she’s a dog at a park, madly spraying every tree, bush and swath of grass possible.

As a soap and water gal, I’ve never really taken to perfume. Everything I try on overwhelms me, and I end up fleeing a store called something like Scents for Cents with my eyes and nose watering. I drive home with the windows down, wondering how anyone determines what their favorite fragrance is, and if I’ll ever feel like spending the equivalent of a tank of gas on something I’ll likely tuck into one of my toiletry bags at home, forgetting it until airport security officials confiscate it the next time I travel. And how do you shop for the stuff without trying a bunch of it on?

I know it must be hard to pull together a commercial for something so intangible, but the television advertisements only serve to bemuse me. And they’re a treasure trove of information compared to the copy that goes into each print and catalog ad. I was thinking that what’s in the bottle either smells like something or it doesn’t, but that’s me: A fan of the “You’re soaking in it!” campaign.

One designer scent goes so far as to claim that it’s “A new fragrance interpretation that is the essence of enchanting femininity…” I’ve always wanted to know what enchanting femininity smells like, and now I can find out by driving to the nearest Sephora. What a relief.

I admit that I’m a cynic, but really—haven’t we exhausted the possibilities? Aren’t there a finite number of ways that one’s wrist or neck or cleavage can smell, and haven’t we formulated them all? With its textures and variations in preparing it, and its visual context, food is much more complicated than perfume, and if you ask most people, it always “tastes like chicken.”

So in the spirit of stopping the insanity, I’ve devised a plea and an opportunity. Forget “enchanting femininity,” let’s get back to basics, back to the beginning. Call it appealing to the lowest common denominator if you want. Call it dumbing things down if you want; I call it getting back to basics. I call it keeping it simple and real, and when word gets out, Jeremy Piven, it’s going to be huge, and you missed the boat.

Celebrity perfumes account for 7% of the US prestige fragrance market, a $2.8 billion business. That’s some pretty good scratch, and shoot, if someone can get away with pushing a bottle of liquid claiming that it’s a new “fragrance interpretation,” there must be a way for someone genuine to grab a piece of the action.

Introducing my idea for a new smelebrity fragrance: Sniff This, by Snoop Dogg.
Instead of calling it an “olfactory experience,” I plan on making this marketing plan a no-brainer, targeting Snoop Dogg’s loyal—if impaired—niche demographic. Sniff This is a unisex fragrance with bong water high notes, Cheetos middle notes, and a malt liquor base note, and I plan to roll out this scent-sational stuff at the next Widespread Panic show. So if you want to work this one out, Snoop, give me a call. You’ll find me in the book, I’m living on Shakedown Street right now.

And P.S., Dogg,
Don’t limit yourself to perfume, G. Have you seen KY’s new offerings and super-high production value TV advertisements for products from your personal lubricant aisle? We could call it celube-rity. Don’t forget to thank me when you’re a gazillionaire, yo.