Karl and the Amazing Technicolor Eyebrow

I don’t usually encourage having houseguests, but for Alex's friend, Karl, I make exceptions. Karl will sleep anywhere. Karl makes the least amount of dirty laundry possible. As the father of two, Karl knows that waking a sleeping child is an offense that’s right up there with replacing my regular coffee not with Folger’s Crystals, but with ground glass, which is what I’ll do to whomever comes close to waking Sophie mid-naptime. (Jeff, I’m looking right at you, buddy.)

Thanks to the way they acted at my wedding, I have baggage about most of my husband’s friends; this is not the case with Karl, and in fact, Karl is the person responsible for keeping me from catching the next plane to Oh, Fuck Thisville during the category five shitstorm that was the last hour of our reception. But what I like most about Karl is that, unlike a lot of us, Karl doesn’t mind telling the truth on himself.

During his last visit, Karl and Alex came home from their ritual night out of drinking too much to stand in the kitchen catching up and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Karl was taking a pretty good ribbing over the XXXL cycling jersey he tried on that day that turned out to be a few too many Xs too small. “I’ve been eating too much ice cream,” he confessed, smiling. And here's a tidbit: Karl has hair growing out of his nose. "Not out of my nostrils, mind you," he said, but out of the top of his nose. "What the hell is that all about?" He said, shrugging. Karl said he could eat, no kidding, a gallon of ice cream at one sitting. “I’m still fast on a bike, though,” he shook his finger. And Alex and I joined in the chorus we’ve heard a hundred times when he said, “I’m a former New York State champion in three disciplines of cycling.”

When I consider that Alex actually hears criticisms that come from his friends’ mouths, but is deaf to the ones that come out of mine, I suppose we really should entertain more often. “Al, you’re getting crumbs and jelly in the peanut butter,” Karl said, cleaning things up, “and crumbs and peanut butter in the jelly!” He said this not as if he was discovering three great tastes that taste great together, but with a healthy amount of disgust.

“He’s been blaming that on me for years.” I told Karl, who told me he doesn’t know how Alex and I have been married for six years without a violent incident to speak of. And that’s when Alex pulled up his shirt and slapped his belly. “Jody’s a lucky girl,” he said, “there aren’t that many guys approaching forty with a flat stomach.”

Please cue the floodgates.

When Karl and I had exhausted ourselves listing every shortcoming Alex had, including the habit of mouth breathing all night at a volume that has me taking cover from the plane crash that’s happening in our back yard, and being that guy at the end of the bar who talks a little too much about Stevie Ray Vaughn, we took a deep breath and tackled my favorite subject: Alex’s renegade eyebrows.

I didn’t have to start first; Karl jumped right in. “And dude,” I think he began, “what is with your eyebrow hairs?” Just as Karl was about to call him “Lloyd Fucking Bridges” I lunged, and plucked one from its root, which wasn’t that hard, considering that I was able to wrap it around my wrist a few times before he even saw it coming. Karl and I marveled at it for a moment before I scavenged the junk drawer for the tape measure. I taped the hair to a piece of paper and squinted. “Two and three eighths inches!” I squealed. Alex came out of the bathroom with a Band Aid over his eye, pouting up a storm. We posted on the refrigerator it and its measurements, its turn ons and turn offs, and it remains there today. And if that isn’t a testament to unconditional love on everyone’s part, I don’t know what is.

So if you’re ever invited over for dinner at our house, and you find a hair in your soup or salad, the kind of hair that’s the stuff upon which Steven King novels are based, check the fridge. Lately I’m obsessed with thinking of ways to make it useful. Tonight I’m considering fashioning it, in a weird new version of origami, into the shape of the Virgin Mary and selling it on eBay. But I’m not sure I want to part with it; it comforts me in that, if I ever need a ride to the hospital in the middle of the night, it can either drive me there or watch the baby while I’m gone. Or I might decide to use it as a paintbrush for the outside of our house. I joke.
“Someday, you won’t have my eyebrow hair to kick around anymore,” Alex said, and sadly, I know that’s true. I think I spotted it making eyes at one of Karl’s giant bnose hairs, scheming in its little eyebrow brain about starting a master race of body hair that someday takes over the world.

One of Those Days

I'm having one of those days. I say that becuase I've just looked over four of the many e-mails I've sent today, and they start with the word "Great" and end with an exclamation point. It's during these days that I ask myself who I am.
Am I really the gal who sends a half dozen e-mails that are friendly enough to belong to someone with superfresh breath and a clean car? I could be, since I caught myself earlier thinking things like, "Tax time is the right time to save for retirement," "Luck favors the prepared," and "Can't lives on Won't Street."
Yes, today I'm considering drinking enough water; I will call my mom before she calls me. I will take the dogs not just for the walk that they want, but for the walk they deserve, damn the temperature. I'm remaining firmly unapologetic that I'm going to indulge in the guilty pleasure of writing for most of the day, and I'm going to make progress.
Without going as far as baking an apple pie, I will Do Things Right today, because I can. I'm having one of those days. What a relief.

I’m Typing As Fast As I Can

I’ve got Big Ideas®, and unfortunately, that’s my whole problem. Take this blog for example. It’s new because the last platform I was using was bumming me out with its limitations and the learning curve involved in getting it to do some little extra things. I wanted to take my blog and, as Emeril would say, “Kick it up a notch,” and so in the tradition of everything old becoming new again, I revived my plain old HTML Web site from four years ago and opened a Blogger account. Because that’s what I need in my life: Another distraction.

Then I decided, hey! I’m going to post my “best-of” journal entries dating back to my 1200 baud modem! And I’m going to finish those entries I began during the Clinton Administration and post those! Where’s my Big Chief Tablet? I’ve got to rework those family portraits I drew in Kindergarten to at least include the mole on my dad’s nose; as someone who’s heard him say a million times that he likes that mole because it holds his glasses in place, I know that it just isn’t him without it.

And then thank God I had the good sense to talk myself down. No, I said. Stop. Put the “new” in New Media and move on. Forget the old stuff; go forward, ever forward, you moron. I did let myself off the hook a little, because this is what happens when we live in a culture where our good old-fashioned albums are “digitally re-mastered” on CD, and black and white movies are colorized. This is what happens when we have the technology to make things better, stronger, faster, or at least little, yellow, different. Do you see what happens, Larry?

And so here’s to new beginnings. Again. This marks my third online do-over in a handful of years, and by golly, the chances are pretty good that I’ll be as slow executing my Big Ideas® for this effort as all the others, but I really am kind of busy. Tonight I promised my daughter that I would mount a production of Yentl starring myself and one of our dogs during dinner. I’ve been rehearsing all day, and I just can’t seem to nail the part where I announce in a golf-whisper, “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight the part of Avigdor will be played by Lou the Blue Heeler,” and then make the sounds of the grumbling and groaning audience. (After all, they bought tickets just so that they could see Mandy Patinkin. No offense, Lou. )

Until the next time you visit—if you do visit—please know that I’ll be typing as fast as I can, which is actually pretty fast if you take into account the fact that I stop every now and then to wonder, seriously, where is my Big Chief Tablet?

MySpace: The (Next) Final Frontier

I am Time’s Person of the Year. And so are you. In fact, just about everyone is, except my dad and David Sedaris, who are both totally uninterested—and maybe even against—the electronic revolution that is the Internet. Personally, I’m thrilled, since I plan on adding the honor to my resume.
Lev Grossman, Time’s magazine and technology writer and book critic explains, “For seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you." As someone who’s been publishing one thing or another on the Web since 1999, I can’t decide if I think it’s about damn time, or if this is the laziest thing Big Media has done since failing to fact check James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. I am certain, though, that sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and MySpace have irreversibly warmed the digital globe, and you can drive your Vaseline-powered car all you like. We’re still in big trouble.
My own digital climate warmed to what I refuse to call the blogosphere with the advent of companies like Blogger and MoveableType. Although I also refused, until now, to use any of the available technologies to post my own content to the Web, and insisted on banging out my own bad HTML, I was delighted to watch other undiscovered writers use fledgling but leading edge technologies to reach an audience that wouldn’t have otherwise found such deserving talent. And even though I think that the term “social networks” sounds like something that requires a prescription antibiotic salve, and even though I’d rather adopt Jerry Falwell’s philosophies on reproductive rights than hear someone use the term “Web 2.0” again, and even though the simple act of asking if someone blogs triggers my gag reflex a little, I found myself at a reception for the winners of a certain contest, unable to stop my mouth from forming the words, “Do you have a blog?”
Don’t get me wrong; I’d rather talk to a writer face to face than read something he’s written about himself, although writers don’t always love talking to me—sometimes I’m a little too, “Gosh, isn’t it great that we’re all writers and stuff?” The way they push me away from them after I’ve taken both their hands in mine and swayed back and forth singing "Dahoo Foress" with more enthusiasm than Cindy Lou Who reminds me of why VH1 will never film the series Behind the Book.
For the most part, writers are content—-no, compelled—-to sit very quietly in front of either a computer or a pad of paper until blind, in part doing their work, and in part reveling in the simple fact that they’re doing something that no one else wants any part of. For most of us, solitary confinement is not the price of being a writer; it’s a perk. I’m smack dab in the middle of Myers’ and Briggs’ introvert/extrovert designation, and so minutes after meeting a writer I’ve always wanted to meet, I make a hasty retreat to my computer so that I can write something about how Tom Robbins’ eyes were so red that I’m surprised he could read through them, or how I almost actually burst into tears after Alice Walker threw my event program back at me and spat, “I’m not signing this.”
As someone who knows that I’m going to have to actually speak in front of and meet other people to “press the flesh” once my own book is out, I see the newest wave of the electronic revolution for what it is: A way of reaching out without going out. I admit also to the mildly embarrassing trait of being a bloghound because blogs aren’t just instantly gratifying literature in a hurry, they are literature afflicted with a combination of ADD, narcissistic personality disorder and maybe a dash of Alzheimer’s. Considering that I married someone with the same qualities, it’s no wonder why I’m drawn to them.
And now, to add to that list of my more unfortunate qualities, I’m spellbound by yet another meeting place on the Web that I never intended to even drive by in the first place. On the scale of embarrassing traits, I’ve done something that registers between having hemorrhoids and owning a Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch CD. For the record, I don’t have hemorrhoids or a Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch CD. Anymore. I do, however, love my MySpace.com account a little too much.
At the reception where I met some writers who were like me, and some writers who were more like writers, I asked someone about his blog. As it turns out, he’s got one, at his MySpace.com page. William L. Bryan looked normal and nice enough and all, and so I thought that maybe I should give this MySpace movement a chance too, totally forgetting that making assumptions about what the nice, normal guy’s doing is always how the nice, normal girl in the movie ends up on heroin while the roomful of men crowded around her chant, “Ass to ass!” (Bonus points if you can name the movie that goes with the quote.)
The up side is that I have a whole new avenue for avoiding work. The down side is that I suppose I’m going to have to start using “friend” as a verb and “add” as a noun, while trying to decide who my favorite Pussycat Doll is. It appears that when someone accepts my invitation of friendship, I’m supposed to leave a comment on my new friend’s page, including a giant graphic of my boobs that says, “Thanks for the add!” This I cannot do.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate giant ads animated with graphics and colors that hurt my eyes. I do. I also adore messages that command me to CliCk HERE for ~~~<3 tEeN <3~~~**pR0n**!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s just that I will be busy for a while fighting this uneasy feeling that I should start combing Craigslist for a ride to Burning Man and considering—I just said consider, let’s not go crazy—joining a colony of people with “alternative lifestyles.”
I do have the sudden urge to glue my caps lock key into their “on” position, so that you’ll know HOW SERIOUS I AM WHEN I E-MAIL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!! And, if you haven’t noticed, be forewarned that I plan on ending each sentence with at least a dozen exclamation points—OR MORE IF YOU’VE POSTED A BLOG ENTRY THAT HAS ANGERED ME!!!!!!!!!! But when I’m joking, you’ll know it, by God, because of the failsafe measures provided by the smiley emoticon followed by everyone’s favorite acronym: LOL.
But first I need to get my shit together because, if nothing else, I’m still completely confused about who I am. What kind of a MySpace person am I? Do I look like I’m taking myself too seriously? Am I taking myself seriously enough? Am I the attention-whoring, comment-mongering, look-how-many-friends-I-have MySpace user? Or do I plan to populate my friends list with celebrities who are not really talking to me when they post bulletins that sound like they’re talking to me? (And damn, Jeremy Piven, why do you have to be such a dick about your friends list?) There are inanimate entities here: Books, magazines and events to invite to this MLM, pyramid scheme-type of friendship building. There are the garage bands, the comedians, even though I will probably not see any of them live in concert anytime soon. Do I want to add them anyway? Or am I the kind of user who will end up using her MySpace community solely to schlep something?
I don’t suppose it matters right this second. Maybe, as Sally Field mewed a long, long time ago, you will like me, really like me. After all, I am Time’s Person of the Year. Or maybe you won’t like me, but you are in my extended network. I’m pretty sure.

Thanksgiving

We met on your birthday. I was thirty five, you were zero, and the time was 9:50 PM. We found ways right there on the spot to make you special before you were gone from the womb in sixty seconds: You were the obstetrician’s last delivery in private practice; you were born on the same day as Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis and Ray Charles, and your head was as round and as perfect and as peachy-creamy-looking as the C-section babies' even though you were born the old fashioned way. The doctor rubbed your back and said, “Come on, cry, baby.” You did.
That was pretty much the last time you did as you were told.
You’re two now. The time went by, as every parent says, so quickly and yet so slowly. You are growing like a weed. You are unique in all the world.
From my observations, the twos aren’t so much terrible as they are terrific. You are enjoying yourself at levels that should be reserved for rave-goers on their fortieth hit of Ecstasy. We play games that involve my threatening to bite your toes, your belly, your knees, your neck, and when I make good on each promise, it makes you laugh so hard you fart. You are so afraid of falling asleep and missing something that I've seen you actually hold your eyes open with your fat little fingers. For reasons that are unknown to me and maybe to you, you have a love-hate relationship with one of our dogs, and a love-love relationship with all others. You sing along with the songs on your CDs in the car, and the way you dance can only be described as free-style. You do it as if everybody's watching--and you like it that way. You are by far the most delightful person I’ve ever met, which makes me wonder if we are all this wonderful, but forgot.
I admit I’m still a little intimidated by the vocation of parenting. The hours are long, the mistakes are begging to be made, and the pay sucks. Before you were born, what I wondered most was how in the world I would deliver you to adulthood a healthy, educated and loved person, so that you could keep yourself safe and happy for the rest of your life. What stymies me now is how I can keep you from forgetting that you are terrific, at any and every age. I’m comforted by the fact that I don’t have to figure that out right this second. We have some time.
At completely random intervals, you will demonstrate a skill that the teachers at your preschool taught you as soon as you joined their class. You will grab one of my hands with yours and say, smiling, “Nice to meet you.” Indeed it is, my dear. Thanks for coming. Let’s spend our next hour, year, decade, lifetime getting to know each other and ourselves like all get-out. And to seal the deal, here, pull my finger.

How to Ride in a Car: A Guide for Dogs Who Can Read

Poke your head out of the window. Pull head back into the car. Shake head vigorously, making sure to fling your rabies and name tags against the metal buckle of your collar for maximum clatter. Flip your ears inside out and right side out several times, or, if your ears are, say, short and pointy instead of long and floppy, shake head, neck and body vigorously enough to rattle the entire chassis. Repeat, until the humans in the front seat appear near seizure.
When spotting certain people and animals on the sidewalk or crossing the street, bark viciously and claw the window and door panel, to the point of foaming at the mouth and damaging a good portion of the car’s interior. Make these demonstrations as random as possible, so that some pedestrians go by unnoticed, while others incite you to bark and growl so hard that your head actually leaves your body. Then, wait.
When the driver picks up her cell phone to make a call that uses one of those voice-activated menu, make sure to bark or whine at every prompt in which she tries to speak. This will ensure that the computer on the line says, “I’m sorry, I did not understand your answer—please hold for the next customer service representative. Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.” Know that your human’s call is important, and may be monitored or recorded to ensure quality customer care. Lie quietly.
When approaching a destination of any kind, be it the Lowe’s parking lot, the Wendy’s drive-thru, or your own home, emerge head from one window and then the other, squealing and whining so loudly that it convinces passersby that the black Subaru sedan is parading Anna Nicole Smith about town—pre-methadone.
Once back at home, run into the first available bathroom for a long drink at “the magic well” and hit the sack. You earned it.

Goiter Watch '06: All Clear

About a year ago, on a regular Thursday at home with the baby, I thought maybe I was having a heart attack. The heart palpitations had started at about 9:00 in the morning, and by 3:00 that afternoon were starting to freak me out. I’d become sweaty and nauseated, my hands were tingly and I decided not to wait around for neck and chest pains; I treated myself to a trip to the emergency room.
Weeks earlier, I’d called my regular doctor’s office with a laundry list of symptoms that was beginning to rain on my new-mom parade. I had headaches for the first time in my life, I was enduring 36-hour stretches without a wink of sleep and had become forgetful, confused and disoriented all the time. My eyes had always been predisposed to getting red, especially if I hadn’t slept enough, but they had become so perpetually red, they practically glowed. Move over, Rudolph, for a weirder, creepier kind of sleigh guide. When I told Alex that my heart was fluttering and my arms and legs shaking during and after a leisurely walk to the neighbor’s house down the street, he said, “That’s because you’re not getting enough exercise, of course.” Later, I would smite myself on the forehead for even asking him what he thought; Alex isn’t exactly the king of health sensibilities. I’ll stop there before I call him its village idiot. Too late.
I guess I was irritable, too.
I’ll admit that my fears started getting the best of me then, which didn’t help the insomnia. While I was up so late that MTV was playing music videos, I argued with myself over whether something awful was happening to my body, or if I was just making the whole thing up. Maybe the constant trembling of my extremities was Parkinson’s; the thinning hair and peeling nails impending dermatological catastrophe, and the headaches, complete with aural flashes, was an alien implant that had instigated the growth of a giant brain tumor. Screw you, aliens!
If there's an upside to every situation, and I'm not saying there is, the upside to the changes I noticed in my insides and outsides included the way my voice changed. Although I had to work to make myself heard, my voice took on a smoky, hoarse quality akin to Stevie Nicks'. I had also unintentionally adopted Warren Zevon’s philosophy on life and mortality. “He said ‘enjoy every sandwich,’ not enjoy every sandwich in existence,” Alex said as I was polishing off the rest of the lunchmeat in the fridge. And, in a decision to take Warren’s sage advice a step further, I was also regularly enjoying every French fry, every gallon of chocolate ice cream and every meatloaf. I didn’t care what anyone said, including my mother-in-law, who commented while watching me open a frozen lasagna that said, “Family-sized,” “You’re not going to be able to eat like that forever, you know.”
“That’s too bad,” I said, considering that I had just gone to the trouble of memorizing Wendy’s entire value meal menu. But I was certain that I was losing weight at the speed of light despite eating lunch three times a day and dinner twice because I was awesome. “I’m awesome!” I’d say to myself mid-casserole, and then I would collapse into a pile of mood-swinging, wailing woman. I'd become profoundly depressed most of the time, without being able to identify a reason. “Maybe I’m Goth and never knew it,” I told my friend Lisa after she’d asked me how I’d been. Lisa looked me up and down and said she’d never met a Goth who wore a size 2.
"I know," I told Lisa. "I'm awesome. Are you going to eat that?"
I’d started eating, but I had stopped making my bed. I’d stopped showering and getting dressed in the morning. I’d stopped writing. I couldn’t keep up with the MomsTown Guide to Getting it All; there was simply too much. And then one day I was in the middle of a silent monologue about how I was a slacker, when a novel thought jumped to the fore: Maybe I should see a doctor. I began making my list of symptoms and complaints, then shoved it into the drawer and promptly put off making an appointment for two weeks. “We can see you in four weeks,” the receptionist said. I’d put on my tinfoil hat to prevent the aliens from listening in. That’s all I needed was for one of them to disguise himself as a nurse and probe me during my physical. I said fine, I’d wait.
Two weeks later, I was hooked to an EKG machine and an IV at the Boulder Community Hospital Emergency Room. I was the only patient there. While I waited for the test results, I prepared myself for the worst by imagining the ER doc flinging the curtain back and saying, “I’m afraid it’s extremely serious.”
“What is it?”
“Your visible panty line, it just killed our receptionist, Belinda.” In fact, the daytime staff of Boulder Community Hospital hadn’t seen a deadly case of VPL like mine since Isaac and Gopher dared Charo to replace the Solid Gold Dancers’ g-strings with Wonder Woman Underoos just before show time. “I’m writing you a prescription immediately.” I heard him say. “There’s a thong-a-thon going on right now at Target. I beg you, if you want to save lives, including your own, spend everything you’ve got—stat!”
What he said instead was, “It’s your thyroid.” I could tell from the way he practically yawned when he said it that he couldn’t have been more bored with the whole thing. He’d been sitting around all afternoon, in the loneliest ER in three counties, and his big case for the day was a woman with a baby and a goiter. Forget gun shot wounds, I hadn’t even paper cut myself. “I’ll refer you to a good endocrinologist here in town, give you some medication and send you home.”
The good news is that I had Grave’s disease, a serious-ish but totally treatable condition that, with medication and good vibes, virtually disappears into remission within a year for twenty to thirty percent of patients. The better news was that I had an official disease that I could use as an excuse for any thing at any moment. Was I going to nap all day? Yes, as a matter of fact, I was. I have Grave’s disease. Did I have to watch “I Love the ‘80s” on TV again? Dude, come on, I have Grave’s disease. Had I been driving with the emergency break on all day? For heaven’s sake, give me a break already. I have Grave’s disease.
And now, after about a year of monthly visits to the endocrinologist who checks my throat, my eyes, my heart and blood, it looks like the aliens have lost. My Grave’s disease is in remission; my goiter is, to quote my doctor, much less “generous” than it was a year ago. Remission from Grave’s doesn’t last forever, but I’ll take what I can get. I am making my bed again, I’m writing again; I’m more cheerful and less hungry, but I still don’t always shower. It’s OK; I’m also trying to be nicer to myself. Hey, I have Grave's disease. It’s been a good year and a hard year, because, while Grave’s is a fantastic excuse for my behavior, it cost me about a year of sleep. And not only did I stop dreaming for that year, I stopped dreaming, which, as I’ve decided, is worth a trip to the ER in itself, in whatever kind of underpants I happen to be wearing at the time.
To a large extent, it seems we are chemical beings, and a good portion of our physical and mental health depends on good chemistry. In fact, it’s hard to put into words how strange it was to become someone I didn’t know, and then return to the person I used to be because of one pill in the morning and one at night. So, I’ll just tell you that I’m going to be ever vigilant to take care of my chemistry, and every other little component of this thing that constitutes Me.