The Diary of a Gold-Digger

In which I give my number to a man whom I don't want to call me

2012-02-09T12:52:00.000-08:00

The only good thing about being laid off - other than getting a bunch of money and time at once, which is nice but not such a good strategy for long-term survival, is that you can put off dealing with unpleasant things like phone calls from people who never should have had your number in the first place.

By "people," I mean men who asked for the number and I didn't have the guts to say no to, although I suppose it was also a relief not to get any more phone calls asking to speak to the person in charge of making the waste disposal services purchasing decisions, as was wont to happen because Dun & Bradstreet had mistakenly printed my phone number as the main contact number for Acme, which, at the time, had over 100,000 employees. I knew the D&B rep and insisted that he owed me a box of really nice chocolates for all the phone calls I had gotten because of their mistake.

In August, before I got the news that my job was disappearing and I was supposed to disappear along with it, I was at Dinstuhl's, the fancy chocolate store in Memphis, buying chocolate for the customer service reps at the factories. I had no authority over these people, no way to make them do what I needed them to do, which was a lot of pain in the neck work with the customer and product data, so I used chocolate as a bribe.

Is that wrong?

I don't think so. I think "Whatever it takes" is a perfectly good motto when it comes to work and chocolate. As long as I had that corporate American Express and as long as my boss was signing off on my expense reports, which he always did because he never bothered to read anything I sent to him - he complained that I used "big words" that "made people feel stupid," although he could never give me an example of 1. a big word or 2. a person who felt stupid, then I was going to buy Good Chocolate.

While I was waiting for the clerk to wrap my 15 boxes of assorted truffles - as soon as her back was turned, I snatched another sample of the cashew brittle that was on top of the counter, I fell into conversation with a middle-aged man - more middle aged than I was at the time - who was also waiting for chocolate.

I’ll talk to anyone if I’m bored. He was nice enough. Dressed in a suit, which is something I always like to see, as I hate business casual.

We talked about our mutual love of chocolate, comparing brands and types of chocolate, and agreeing that Dinstuhl's had better chocolate than Godiva. He told me about how he had bicycled across Europe when he was in his 20s, sampling chocolate along the way. It was a nice conversation. I was not flirting. 1. I don't flirt because I am really, really bad at it. 2. I had no interest in this guy in that way. 3. I had just met Gomez the Moroccan Millionaire so my mind was elsewhere.

He asked where I worked. I told him. He told me he was a lawyer, handed me his card. I made some joke about keeping it in case I needed my one phone call in the middle of the night.

When I saw his name, I almost asked if he was my friend Nancy Jones’ dad. He looked old enough to be someone's dad. Memphis is a small place. Everyone is related to everyone else or at least they all know each other. He very well could have been Nancy's dad.

Instead, I asked if he was related to her. I didn’t want to insult him by implying he was dad age, which in retrospect is silly because there is nothing wrong with being dad age. Now I wish I had.

Then he asked for my card.

I hesitated.

Was he asking for my phone number? What should I do? I was not accustomed to men asking for my phone number. In fact, I think it’s happened maybe two or three times my entire life. What are you supposed to do if the man asking for your number is not a man in whom you are interested?

My sister, the man magnet, is a pro at this. She would have known exactly how to handle the situation. “Oh, I don’t have any,” she would have said breezily.

Somehow, I think this guy would have had a comeback. “Let me write your number on one of my cards,” he would have replied.

But Jenny’s trick to that is to transpose a few digits. “That way, they think they just wrote the number down wrong and their feelings don’t get hurt,” she explains.

But with a sinking feeling, I gave him my card. I didn’t want to go out with this guy but I didn't have the guts not to give him my card.

He didn't call.

And he didn't call.

I stopped worrying about it.

As days passed and the risk grew less, my relief grew. Whew! Off the hook!

Imagine pages flying off a calendar. Time passes. Time passes.

Now it was December. I had been laid off. I had met Primo and ditched Gomez the Moroccan Millionaire. My last day of work was going to be December 30.

On December 12, he called. I heard the voicemail: “Golddigger, this is Steve Jones. We met several months ago at Dinstuhl's. I never called because I lost your card but I just found it. I’ll call you next week. Maybe we can have a drink together.”

That call sent chills of fear down my spine.

Even if I hadn't met Primo and even if I hadn't ditched Gomez, even if I were all alone, I wouldn't be interested in dating someone who I thought was a friend's dad.

So I did what any rational person would do. I didn't answer any local outside phone calls. I let them all go to voicemail and then I screened them.

I did that for three weeks.

And he never called back.

In which Primo and I realize we have irreconcilable differences

2012-02-02T13:55:00.000-08:00

When Primo and I first met, there was a lot of eating out. A lot of cooking fine meals. Indeed, on my first visit to his place in Fairview,* Primo made me a fabulous meal of steak and veg on the grill. It was December. There was snow. But that didn't stop him. He just went out on the porch in his flip flops, bravely ignoring the cold, and cooked with fire. Women like to see men flirting with danger. It's an aphrodisiac.

I cooked, too. I made waffles for supper one Friday evening, which is a perfectly fine meal if you ask me, but Primo was a little concerned because apparently, there is not a recommended wine for waffles. But waffles are fun and good and who has time to make them in the morning when you are really hungry and want something right now?

We ate out. Tried old and new restaurants. We ate in, trying new recipes: osso bucco, cream cheese bacon wrapped jalapeno thingies.**

Most importantly, we ate together. At the dining room table. Sometimes with candles. Always with cloth napkins. We use cloth napkins now. Even when we are eating in front of the TV.

Doris and Sly, the big environmentalists, use paper napkins. Wasteful. Tacky. Cloth is elegant, it feels better than paper, and it is certainly more responsible. (No, you do not have to wash your napkin every time you use it unless you are a complete slob. Primo and I are not complete slobs. Yes, we wash the napkins after we have company because nobody wants to use a napkin someone else has used, kind of like nobody wants to take a shower in the guest bathroom unless the tub has been cleaned. Who wants to stand in the dirt of a stranger? Not I.)

Then we got married. And moved into our house.

The dining room is in the cold part of the house. The section we keep closed off because our heating bill for the remaining part of the house is already $300/month in January and why would we want to heat part of the house that we almost never use? Are we made of money? Sly and Doris think so but they are wrong.

Man, they bug me.

So now, with the dining room closed off, we are reduced to using the kitchen, which has a table and benches, which would be fine, but that's not the real issue.

The real issue is that now that we are married, we have dropped our masks. I don't want to pretend any more that I like a big meal at night with long, intimate conversations and I certainly don't want to cook a big meal every day. While we were dating, I was trying to impress Primo with my wifely skills: cooking, cleaning, sock darning. But now, hahahahaha, we're married and he's stuck with me and I don't have to show off any more.

What I like to do is eat my main meal at lunch and then have an apple and cheese or an apple and peanut butter in the evenings. Which is exactly what I do when Primo is traveling, even though he complains that I am supposed to save the Good Cheese for when he is home. Yeah. Right. He's eating out at nice restaurants and I'm supposed to subsist on crummy cheese? We don't even have any Bad Cheese in our house. We have the Good Cheese and the Really Good Cheese and I'm not supposed to touch any of it because I'm supposed to share it with Primo.

But I don't even want the fancy meal when he is home. Well, I wouldn't mind the fancy meal, but I don't want to eat it at 8:00 p.m.

I'm hungry way before then. Primo likes to get super hungry before eating, but I like to maintain a steady state of stomach comfort. I see no benefit to feeling hungry. Isn't that what our subsistence farmer/hunter/gatherer ancestors worked to escape? Voluntary hunger is a concept that I just don't get, which is why I always keep Emergency Chocolate in my purse and in the car. I intend to avoid the tragedy of being hungy in public places if at all possible and if it means a few extra ounces in my purse, so be it.

So these are the essential eating problems:

1. Primo likes to eat late, I like to eat early
2. Primo wants a big meal at supper, I want it at lunch
3. Primo is the SLOWEST EATER IN THE WORLD

Let's talk about number 3. I like to eat - it's one of my main hobbies, which is why exercise has to be my other hobby because spending money on new clothes a size larger is definitely not a hobby - but I don't like to drag it out. Sit down, eat, leave. Or, when I am alone, open the fridge, pull out the container of Thai Basil Chicken, eat as much as I want from the container (with the fridge closed - Primo is the fridge door open leaver, which makes me nuts), return container to fridge, return to book.

I view eating as a necessary biological function.

Primo looks at it as a Major Social Activity.

I agree with him - when there are other people besides us involved. I love having supper with friends.

But when it's just us? No. I do not want to spend an hour eating supper. It takes me ten minutes to finish and then I am supposed to watch Primo eat, which (love you, honey!) is dull, dull, dull.

I am also supposed to watch him do his wine rituals, which involve swirling wine around in his mouth and sticking his nose in the wineglass. Maybe if I appreciated wine, I would understand, but from my perspective of a former diet Coke drinker, it all seems silly.

So we have these conflicts. And I don't know how to resolve them, because they are zero-sum.

* Where he paid for the ticket, unlike the Moroccan millionaire, Gomez, who was simultaneously cheap and extravagent at the first time - he didn't buy my ticket to Paris but we went Ferrari shopping. Gomez is one of those people who have never not had money and I guess it just never occurred to him that not all of us have inherited vast wealth and actually have to worry about what we spend. Primo has not inherited wealth nor is that likely to happen, but he works his butt off and does not spend unwisely, unless you want to count all the wine in the basement and the almost weekly bargains from Menards of things we do not need like plastic bags that are guaranteed to make produce stay fresh for two weeks or longer. We use our produce before it's two weeks old, I tell him. Please return the bags. But they are only $2 after the rebate! he argues.

** If you have not tried these, you do not know what you are missing. Make them right now.

In which we eat a lot of fish but not $35 worth

2012-01-26T15:09:00.000-08:00

I think I've told you guys that Primo and I went to Morocco shortly after we met. I had been laid off from my job and had friends working in Rabat. He had vacation and frequent flier miles. The perfect combination of time + resources. The time was mine, the resources were his.

In retrospect, I should have been looking for a job rather than gallivanting around the world, but I was so confident that employers would snap me up that I thought I could delay the search a few months while I relaxed from the enormous stress of being employed and being able to pay my bills.

Employers didn't snap me up. I got married and stopped looking for work. Now I am discovering that a six-year gap on a resume does not entice employers. This is a problem. This is why I need to write and sell a bestselling novel - so I can contribute to the financial well being of this household and so Primo can quit his job, which has become a trial, and become a full time revolutionary or something like that. I have had my few years of staying at home. I guess it's his turn now. Plus I am bored staying at home. As a lounge around the house gold-digging wife, I have no reason to hire someone else to clean my house and have to do it myself and I hate cleaning house. If we were both working, we could pay someone else to clean the house, although the cleaning lady never cleans the house as well as I do, and not feel guilty and wasteful about it.

Anyhow. We went to Morocco the February after I was laid off. Then we went again a few years later - I was still unemployed - and got more adventurous. The second time, which I suppose was our honeymoon, as it happened one month after our wedding, we went off on our own to a small town on the coast. First, we spent the weekend with Steve and Megan and their kids at the beach. On Sunday, Steve and Megan went back to Rabat and Primo and I took the bus to Essaouira. We should have taken the Good Bus, but it cost a lot more (I think it was ten times as much) than the regular people bus. "I traveled through South America on local buses," I told Primo. "We can do this."

The problem with local buses is that they are filled with local people who sometimes do not have the same access to water to which we are accustomed and who are not spoiled with space as we are, which means that one is squeezed into a bus next to people who don't smell so good. I know. First world problem. At least we have indoor plumbing to go home to.

But the local bus was cramped and hot and slow and took forever to get Essaouira. The usual salesguy stood at the front of the bus and tried to sell us stuff. There was some sort of religious item he was pushing. When it made its way back to us and I took it to examine it, he snatched it out of my hand with some sharp words whose meaning escaped me but whose intent did not. I wasn't supposed to touch that stuff.

There is something about buses and bus stations that attracts vendors. A captive audience, I suppose. When I was waiting to board my bus at the La Paz, Bolivia, bus station, it of one of the nastiest bathrooms I've ever seen.

Oh now you want to hear about the bathroom. Of course. It's only natural.

The women's restroom consisted of a few holes in the ground. These holes were not separated by walls. They were right out there in the open. There was a wall around the restroom, but once inside, you did what you needed to do in plain view.

I was facing a long bus ride across Bolivia to Puno, Peru, and knew there would not be many chances to pee, so I did what I had to do. Not only did I do it - squatting over the hole while an Aymara grandmother and a little girl watched me, I did it with my big backpack on my back and my daypack in front of me. I did not want to put either of them on the floor. You know I am not that squeamish about that sort of thing (except for having to use a dirty shower), so you know that floor had to be in bad shape. I will say, though, that if I had to go through that every day, several times a day, I would have thighs of steel.

Oh. I didn't even tell you the main La Paz bus station story. This was the time that I saw the snake-oil salesman pushing snake oil and lizard oil. If you've ever wondered if snake-oil salesmen really sell snake oil, wonder no longer. They do. This guy had several buckets containing dead reptiles and snakes. (Is a snake a reptile? I can't remember.) He was touting the curative properties of the fat of these animals - good for cancer, back pain, liver problems, heat problems, skin, whatever.

He called for a volunteer from the audience. A man came forward and removed his shirt at the salesman's direction, then squatted. The salesman stuck his hand into one of the buckets and removed it after he had grabbed a hunk of rendered snake fat, which he then rubbed into the volunteer's back.

"My back feels better!" the volunteer exclaimed as the women in their full skirts and black hats surged forward to give the salesman their precious coins.

Maybe I should have bought some. Who knew it was so good for everything?

Back to Morocco. We arrived in Essaouira. Like other towns in Morocco, Essaouira is an old city with tiny, winding streets that don't fall into a conventional Midwestern planned city model. There are no right angles. It's all twists and curves and dead ends. Old stone and plaster walls, thick wooden doors adorned with the hand of Fatima and huge wrought iron hinges. It's really beautiful, but you better bring bread crumbs.

We hired a guy with a hand cart to take us to our hotel in the middle of the city and good thing we did or we never would have found it. He threw our bags into the cart on top of a few thick sheets of dried cod, a food like tripe in that I know how to say it in many languages just so I can make sure never to eat it, and pushed his way through the djellaba-clad crowd, yelling, "Balak balak!" which meant, "Get out of the way!" It was the human voice equivalent to the nasty beeping you hear in the airport when the cart is coming through with the old people.

We got to our hotel, which was a beautiful, elegant old building with a lovely rooftop patio that overlooked the ocean. The walls were bright white and accented with wrought-iron handrails and blue tiles. From our room, we could see into the narrow street and watch the women, heads covered with a scarf, bodies covered with a djellaba - Megan said that she liked to throw her djallaba over her PJs in the morning to run to the bakery - hurrying away.

We got up the next day and wandered around. Essaouira is famous for its fish and the fish market. On the south end of town, in a little square, the fishermen drop off their catch at about a dozen booths. Diners choose the booth, examine the fish, which has been cleaned and placed on ice, select the fish that they want to eat, and wait at the picnic tables while the cooks grill the fish.

We had noticed a sign in the middle of the square stating - in French, which I speak very badly but speak anyhow and Primo speaks well but won't speak because he doesn't speak it perfectly - that the fish was priced by the kilo and by law, the prices of the various fish and shellfish were x, y, and z. We had thought, Well, that's the price and that doesn't seem to bad.

We selected our fish, got a real Coke made with cane sugar (is anyone else sad that the Dublin Dr Pepper bottling plant has been acquired? maybe there are other places to get soda made with cane sugar in the US, but I don't know of them), sat at a table, watched the cats waiting for their share of fish, and then ate a delicious meal of fish, fresh baguette, and tomato, onion, and parsley salad. The sun was out, the ocean was beautiful, the sky was blue with puffy white clouds, the temperature was perfect. It was a lovely day and a lovely lunch.

Until we got that feeling.

You know that feeling. That feeling of realizing that you paid too much. I am talking about the tourist tax, of course -- the extra a foreigner pays because he 1) doesn't know how to bargain, 2) doesn't want to bargain because hello it is considered rude in our culture, 3) doesn't know what he should be paying and 4) doesn't speak the language so can't bargain even if he wants to.

We paid 300 dirhams, or about $35 for our fish. That doesn't sound like a lot (well, I think it's a lot for lunch, but I'm a real cheapskate), but consider we got two first-class train tickets for a 70-mile trip for $20 and that you can get a big schwarma (like a gyro) with lots of meat for $3.

It didn't occur to us to ask the weight of the sardines, langostine, and calamari we had chosen and do the math ourselves. It wasn't until after we left and saw the sign again that we realized that we had paid way too much -- that our lunch should have cost about $6.

When I was in South America, I became a master of bargaining, telling taxi drivers that I was foreign, not stupid, and that I wasn't going to pay the gringo price. Here, I was 13 years out of practice, I didn't speak French well, and I was dealing with Moroccan traders, who are master negotiators, as we had learned during our great Rug Purchasing Adventures. This chick from the Midwest didn't stand a chance against thousands of years of camel traders.

I was angry. It's not that it was so much money - although we never have $35 lunches at home - it's that I felt cheated. I don't like being taken advantage of. But what were we going to do? I complained and whined and Primo got tired of hearing me.

Then that night, we paid too much for spices. Our fault, I know. I should have known my prices. I should have listened to Megan, who told me to do all our shopping in Rabat because that's where we would find the best prices. Ha. Like someone who had lived there for four years would know.

The next morning, the guy at the internet cafe wanted to overcharge us. Sure, it was only a dollar, but by then, we were getting a little tired of the gringo target on our backs and the socialized pricing, especially with the internet thing because they had prices posted and I had kept very close track of the time.

They told us 20 dirhams for the computer time when it should have been 10. The guy insisted that Primo had spent an hour and five minutes on the computer, which would have thrown him from the ten dirhams for an hour into the 15 dh for an hour and a half.

I had worked 55 minutes, with ten minutes lost because my computer crashed and then the guy couldn't get the new one to switch to the English keyboard. (They were French keyboards, which are not easy to work in. There is a program that will switch to an English keyboard - not the actual keys, of course, but what letter shows up when you strike a certain key, which is fine for someone who is a touch typist but not so good for someone who looks at the keyboard when she types, but it was still better than having to seek the letters I wanted on the French version.)

I was loaded for bear. I was mad as heck and I was not going to take it anymore. Very politely but very firmly, I insisted that we owed them only ten dirhams. They rolled their eyes -- good grief, a woman telling us what to do, but I persisted. Again, politely but firmly. Very firmly. Until the guy gave us ten dirhams back.

Flush with victory, Primo and I strolled to the fish market. We found the sign with the prices and a phone number for consumer complaints. I wrote down the phone number and the prices, then we went to the stand where we had eaten.

I wanted our money back. We had been overcharged and I didn't like it. Primo, who will take items back to Target or Menards for a one-dollar price adjustment three weeks after he has made the initial purchase (not a special trip, but on his way to somewhere else), had suggested we just let it go. What's one to do when one is a tourist in a foreign language?

But a twenty-nine dollar overcharge? That was more than one should have to stand. That was egregious. I might have let the internet overcharge of a dollar go if I hadn't been overcharged by 29 dollars.

I had to try.

I marched up to the guy who had sold us our fish the day before. My lovely French sounded something like this: "Yesterday, one eats here." I showed the list to the guy -- "one eats seven sardines, four langostines, and of calamari. One drinks the coke. One has of the bread. One has of the salad. One takes not of the water. The price it should to be 50."

The guy insisted that as we had ordered off the menu, the list prices did not apply.

I persisted. "The sign there it say that the price she is fix. That is the price one should to pay."

No, no, no. A new guy came over. I insisted. "It must be done that one pays the price she is fix."

The manager surrendered. Fine, madame. You eat here today whatever you want and there is no charge.

We ate. It was delicious. And it wasn't until now that I realized that we still overpaid for the two meals put together.

In which we have our own Gift of the Magi with Sly and Doris

2012-01-19T06:47:00.000-08:00

You have all been wondering, "How did Christmas go with Sly and Doris this year? What present could they give that would top a framed photo of themselves and a cast-iron cat?"

No present could top a framed photo of themselves and a cast-iron cat. But that doesn't mean they didn't try.

First, we had the usual birthday drama. My repeated attempts via Primo to kill all birthday gift giving have met with failure. Doris won't give it up. I guess I don't care about her giving it up as much as I care about us giving it up. Couldn't we please just stop sending things to people who already have more crap than they will ever need? Present detente, please.

She sent link after link to Primo, asking him if I would like this or that.

Primo has known me for six years. He knows my taste. He doesn't even need to ask me if the fuzzy scarf with the pompoms is to my liking. He knows. He knows I would recoil in horror.

After several turndowns, however, and after ignoring Primo's gentle hints that if Doris really felt compelled to give me a gift, perhaps renewing my Cooks Illustrated magazine subscription or giving us tickets to a play might be something I would really, really like, Doris made an executive decision that what I really lacked in my life was a $68 bud vase hand painted with butterflies and blue asters.

I am not knocking hand painted vases with butterflies and blue asters. Too much. Some people like that kind of thing. I like leopard print. Some people might rightfully call that tacky. I might even call it tacky. I do keep it under control by limiting it to my beautiful new Spanish shoes and to my gloves, but I would happily drape myself in leopard print from head to toe. Everyone has her thing.

Mine is just not flowery adornment on household items. I like things to be elegant, simple versions of what they are. (With the leopard print exception, of course.) I want a vase to be heavy crystal. I want a table to be buffed, rich maple. I want pearls to be lustrous and un-accessorized. It's just how I roll. I don't want hummingbirds and hibiscus painted on my tables. I don't want flowers painted on my vases. I don't want bunnies and pom-poms on my scarves.

And there is nothing Doris has ever seen of me or of my home to give any indication that I would like such a thing.

So she sent me the vase. And I had to write a thank you note thanking her for the gift and the thought without saying anything too complimentary about the vase so as not to encourage her.

Of course I sent a note. If nothing else, she took time, effort and money to try to please me. It is ungracious not to acknowledge that. Although you guys already know that I am an ingrate. I am, however, an ingrate with good manners. I always write a thank you note. Always.

Then I hunted through the entire unaallavolta website to find something that I actually would like. It was not easy.

Yes, I know I sound like a bitch. But Primo has tried and tried to get them to stop, to no avail.

I finally found a red evening bag that was not made with Chinese slave labor, but what I really wanted was a magazine subscription renewal.

Then came Christmas. Primo spent Thanksgiving with his mom and dad. I did not join him. That was Primo's gift to me. I have not been to Sly and Doris' for two years and it's been a great two years.

I know you think I exaggerate, but Sly and Doris were insulted that I did not go. Not that they wanted me there, but they want to be the ones to reject me. Doris told Primo that it was my job to "kiss [their] asses to be accepted," just as she had had to do with Sly's family.

I asked Primo if it wouldn't be a better reaction to say, "My in-laws treated me horribly so I vowed never to be that way because I want my son and his wife to want to spend time with me," but when someone drinks four ounces of bourbon every day at 4:00 just to get started, perhaps the capacity for rational thought disappears.

Primo spent ten days at their house this summer, doing their chores, and then five days at Thanksgiving.

When December rolled around, his mom asked him why he wasn't going to be there for Christmas. We had decided at the last minute to go to Spain so Primo could get enough miles to keep his platinum status for 2012. He got my ticket with FF miles and all the hotels with hotel points, so it was a relatively inexpensive trip.

"Florida is warmer than Spain," Doris noted in her email to him, "and just as glamorous and festive." She said we could rent her housekeeper's condo rather than stay with her and Sly.

Primo turned her down. In her Christmas letter, before she got to the part about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, she noted that she and Sly were going to be lonely on Christmas because nobody would be visiting them.

Shocking that nobody wants to spend time with people who complain all day and start drinking at 4:00 p.m.

Where was I? This is not a post complaining about their drinking. I was talking about gifts. Which is something only an ingrate does so feel free to look upon me with disdain for even discussing this. I know it's poor form. But it's an addiction. I can't help it. I'm a victim.

Primo has been unhappy with the state of the pepper mill at Sly and Doris' for a while. "It's a crummy pepper mill," he said. "I'm going to send them a good one for Christmas."

We got them new knives a few years ago. By the time Sly and Doris die, we will have upgraded their kitchen completely.

"That's fine," I said. We had gotten my mom theater tickets to Jersey Boys - very good seats - so I didn't feel I was in a position to complain about a $40 pepper mill. Although I will note that the plane tickets and rental car to Sly and Doris' place - oh, heck, you know how I feel about all that already.

The day that the pepper mill arrived at Sly and Doris', we got our present from them: a gift certificate to a spice store in Texas.

Which is crazy on so many levels.

1. We live in the city where Penzey's is headquartered. Penzey's, for those who do not know, is one of the biggest spice stores in the country.

2. We do almost no mail order except for Primo's woot.com addiction. OK, we do mail order, but not for things we can buy at a store 1.4 miles from our house.

3. Who buys $50 worth of spices at once?

Not that the store sells only spices. It also sells cookbooks, including cookbooks for cat food, in case we should decide to start making our own cat food someday, which is highly unlikely, aprons, fish-shaped platters, bulldog bottle openers, storage canisters with chili peppers painted on them, and dog-shaped butter dishes.

It also sells the $40 pepper mill that Primo sent to his parents.

Which is the only item on the company's website that we might ever have been interested in buying.

Which we surely would have bought for Sly and Doris had we known, but for the first time in his life, Primo was early with a gift - we were not driving to the post office at 4:55 to drop off Doris' birthday card in a next-day envelope - and had it all taken care of in advance.

Does anyone want a bulldog bottle opener? I can get you a good deal.

In which I punch a neighbor in the nose and my mom is glad I did it

2012-01-12T11:25:00.000-08:00

My dad was not a violent man. He was not quick to anger. I never saw him get in a fight or a major argument, although my brother surely tried his temper more than once.

He was quite fond of political debate, though, and argued, via my daily message service between them, with my seventh-grade Texas history teacher, Mr Wilson, he of the doubleknit polyester jumpsuits in many colors, about whether one votes for the party (Mr Wilson) or the man (my dad, a GDI). Mr Wilson tried to convince us seventh graders that we should affiliate ourselves with a party for that was the path to political power, but the only power I wanted as a junior high student was the power to transform myself into a popular girl with Farrah Fawcett hair, gauchos and a wraparound sweater, an event as likely to come to pass as the sun falling from the sky. And yet I dreamed.

I wondered why history was sooo boring, although Mr Wilson's drone as he talked about the battle of San Jacinto or about Santa Ana making his escape in an enlisted man's uniform or how Texas retained the right to divide into five states might have had more to do with the dreariness of it all than with the subject matter, which, now that I have read a lot of Texas history on my own, is not dull at all.

More than politics, the main complaint that my dad, a Russian history major, had with Mr Wilson, was that he (Mr Wilson) was making history seem boring. Texas history! Boring! Only the worst of the worst of teachers could make Texas history seem boring.

Yet even with all of that, my dad never found it necessary to hit Mr Wilson.

My dad did, however, teach me to fight. "Don't put your thumb inside your fist," he counseled. "You don't want to break it." He was a practical man. He showed by example that not punching other people is the better way to go, but he also understood that sometimes, a punch might be called for.

And indeed, I have found a judicious punch in the nose the appropriate solution in a few cases. Sometimes, war is the answer and anyone who thinks it is not is a hypocrite who is perfectly happy to rest on the blood of soldiers without acknowledging the necessity of their methods. Do you really want to still be an English colony? Do you really want the South to be a separate, slave-holding nation? Do you think Hitler should have been allowed to take over Europe and murder all the Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals?

I have not punched anyone for decades, but most of the times I did, I do not regret. It wasn't necessary to stop a genocide or to protect my property, but it did feel good. Yes. Punching someone in the nose can feel good. As long as you are not punched back. That's the key. Hit first and then get away.

The first time I punched someone in the nose, I got in my shot and it was over. It was not necessary. I didn't need to hit this girl and in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have, but at the time, it seemed like a good idea.

My best friend Lisa and I were maybe ten. Our families had gone out for pizza. Lisa and I were through eating, so we went outside to run up and down the sidewalk. Holding hands. For that is what little girls do with their best friends: they hold hands.

Some older girls saw us and started name calling. They called us "fags," which was a word that meant nothing to me as the concept of homosexuality had not yet been introduced to me. I knew all about fallopian tubes and vas deferens, thanks to the Time Life sex education books my parents had bought when I was in second grade, but the actual mechanics of sex eluded me and the idea that there might be so many variations was not on the horizon. I didn't know what a fag was and I will bet they didn't know what it meant, either.

I was ten. Back then, kids didn't have to learn about condoms and venereal disease and alternative lifestyles in fourth grade.

Yet I knew just from the way they were saying it that it was not a compliment.

We stopped in front of the name callers.

"If you don't stop saying that, I'm going to punch you in the nose," I said. (Advice: if you are ever in a real fight where you are truly threatened, don't tell the person you are going to hit him. Just hit him and run.)

The one girl bent over so her face was right in front of mine, then very slowly and deliberately said, "Fag."

So I punched her in the nose. And made her cry.

Yeah, it felt good. But yeah, it was completely unnecessary. Better to walk away from that kind of situation than to hit someone. Still, I'll bet she thought twice before she name called again.

The next time I hit someone, it wasn't necessary, either. But it still felt good, even though I didn't get away with it. That's the problem with hitting: it's so satisfying when done right.

We lived in a cul-du-sac in Lubbock. Nice neighbors all around us. G-mother and Alan, our adoptive grandparents with the candy drawer and the TV next door. We were not supposed to watch TV over there. The reason my parents did not have a television was not because we were poor, which is what everyone would ask when they found out. "Are you poor?" would be the horrified response, as nobody could imagine any possible reason for someone who could afford it not to have a TV.

Even though Primo maintains my family was poor because we ate out only about once a year and didn't go on flying vacations or to Disney World, which is crazy because in the mid-70s, only rich people did that sort of thing, we didn't have a TV because my parents didn't want us to waste time watching it when there were soccer games to be played and books to be read. When we were visiting my grandparents, we got to watch Wild Kingdom and Walt Disney, but as soon as Sonny and Cher came on, the TV was either turned off or we were sent out of the room.

When I was in eighth grade, my parents bought a TV. It was rarely on. We were allowed to watch Happy Days, which my parents liked, especially my dad, as he had gone to college in Milwaukee. My mom and dad would watch Mary Hartman Mary Hartman after we had gone to bed.

We had it for one year, then we moved to Central America. No point in having a TV when you live in a place with nice weather year round and the ocean a few minutes away.

This TV deprivation led me to some bad decisions as a college student and as an adult, when I would watch complete trash, just because of my earlier TV hardships. At the same time, I was not getting drunk every weekend (or at all) as a college student because if I ever wanted a taste of my dad's beer, he would let me have some. TV, not alcohol, was the forbidden fruit at my house.

The moral of this story is that you should let your kids have a little bit of everything so that they don't go crazy when they are on their own.

Back to our cul-de-sac. Next to G-mother and Alan was a family with three little girls. Then there was Renee's family. Renee was a teenager who wore halter tops, bell bottoms, and blue eyshadow and was an object of awe to us all. She smoked. She had a boyfriend. Who had a car.

And that's where the conflict was.

Renee's boyfriend liked to drive really fast in our little cul-de-sac. The cul-de-sac with the three little girls who played in their yard. (This was a long time ago when children actually played outside. I miss those days. There are kids in my neighborhood, but I almost never hear them because after school, they go to after school care instead of going home and playing outside.) With my sister, who was in third grade - not a big kid - who also played in the yard.

My dad asked Renee's boyfriend to slow down. "There are kids here," my dad said. "You need to be careful."

The boyfriend did not slow down.

The next time Boyfriend was spinning his wheels in the cul-de-sac, my dad called the police. Who came, gave Boyfriend a talking to or a ticket or whatever.

Renee was not happy about this.

I was out playing in the yard (because even seventh graders played in the yard back then) when Renee was out one day. We started talking and she started talking smack about my dad calling the cops on her boyfriend and I said you better shut up or I'm going to punch you in the nose and she didn't so I hit her and she hit me back and gave me a black eye.

Of which my mother has a photo. That she took after whispering, "I'm glad you hit her."

I was, too.

In which I have not much to say

2012-01-05T08:14:00.000-08:00

My chickadees, it has been a busy few weeks and I have not had much time for writing here. Many apologies.

However, I will leave you with a "You've got to be kidding" tidbit for the day.

After Doris' Christmas letter, which ended with an entire paragraph bemoaning the state of the world and the politicians and the evils of the Other Side and how the world is run by Old White Men (like the one she is married to? is she morally opposed to Old White Men?), she sent Primo an email on Christmas day that ended with these exact words. I promise this is a direct quotation:

Everything sucks and I get despondent.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you, too.

In which I find on facebook my high school boyfriend who didn't want to kiss me

2011-12-29T06:44:00.000-08:00

You guys, I have to tell you about something that just happened that has made me so happy. Do you remember when I told you about my high school boyfriend, Ken, who later turned out to be gay?

He kissed me only the one time and when he did, he told me I tasted like macaroni and he didn't like macaroni.

But except for the not-kissing part, I really liked Ken. He would drive me to school and home from swim practice, which was great because nobody, I mean nobody at my school had a car. My dad was stationed at Howard AFB in the Panama Canal Zone. The military would ship one car per family. To have more than one car, you had to pay to ship it yourself, which was not cheap. Or I suppose buy one in Panama. I don't know what prices were like, but Panama had no auto manufacturing industry that I knew of, so these cars had to be shipped as well.

Not that it was hard to have only one car in the Zone. On base, everything was in walking distance. By walking distance, I mean within a mile or two because unless you have health issues, you can walk two miles. I was at a hotel in Miami for a job interview in 1997 and wanted to find someplace for lunch. "Is there anything I can walk to?" I asked the clerk. I wouldn't have minded driving, but the company had not rented a car for me, so I was stuck.

"No," the clerk said as she shook her head sorrowfully. "Nothing close enough to walk."

When the HR lady picked me up the next day, I saw a shopping strip with restaurants three blocks from the hotel. Which is certainly close enough to walk.

Off base, there was excellent public transportation. My friend Julie and I took the chiva bus home from swim meets all the time. The only problem was standing at the bus stop in our shorts and swimsuits, hearing the Panamanian men yelling, "Chica americaaaaaaaaa-na!" and making that weird sucking, kissy noise with puckered lips that is supposed to accomplish I don't know what because it sure wasn't attractive.

Ken's uncle sent him videos of U.S. TV shows. We got U.S. TV on Armed Forces TV, but a season or two late. Any time someone new would start at school, we would grill her about what was happening on General Hospital. All we knew was that creepy Luke with his ugly hair was chasing Laura. We were all shocked to learn that she broke up with Scotty.

Ken and I would watch Mork and Mindy and a few times, we played Pong, which even back then, despite its novelty, held no appeal for me. Now that I am a middle-aged lady living in the Midwest, I have even less interest in video games.

We would hang out at his house even when his mom and dad weren't home, which makes me think that somewhere, on some level, they might have known. With my next boyfriend, we necked at the movies and during lunch behind the chem lab and in his car on dates. We necked so much that I got whisper burn on my chin. All we could think of was necking. But Ken and I didn't kiss. I should have known there was something off, but I had never had a boyfriend before so I didn't know what was supposed to happen.

Perhaps the ideal situation for parents would be for their daughters to date gay boys because there would be nothing to worry about.

I liked him. I was less attracted when he shaved his head for ROTC Rangers, but I still liked him.
But he ditched me - more or less - right before the Christmas dance. The plan had been that he and I would go with Julie and her boyfriend, but then he never formally asked me to the dance and I guess we were broken up. We stopped talking and I met the new boyfriend with whom I necked during lunch and life was fine until the new boyfriend didn't ask me to the prom and went with that red-headed girl in my gym class. They spent the night in a Panamanian jail - I don't remember why - so it worked out in the end.

Ten years later, I ran into Ken and his parents, who had always loved me - I remember being at a party at Julie's house and Ken's mom circling Ken and me as we danced, taking photos - at the Seattle space needle. I had just quit my job to attend grad school and was taking a six-week tour through the northwestern U.S., a trip that included several nights of sleeping in my car at campgrounds in the mountains, which was not so smart of me because guess what? even in July, the mountains are darn cold at night, an idea that is almost incomprehensible to someone who lives in Texas and might pull out a winter coat in January.

A person who only uses her winter coat in January probably does not think to take a warm coat with her on a trip in July.

I know better now, of course. I travel with a blanket, a candle, a small shovel, water and food in my car. But that's because my dad ordered me to do so when I drove from Texas to Minnesota in December. The two Air Force Academy students had died in a blizzard either that winter or the winter before, trapped in their car. My dad said that the heat from one candle plus some blankets would have been enough to keep them warm. I have not verified this information with any other sources, as I trust my dad, who grew up in northern Wisconsin, to know what he was talking about when it came to surviving cold weather.

I was in Seattle. Had gone to the top of the space needle. Looked over, saw a nice-looking guy, looked twice because hey he was a nice-looking guy, then looked thrice because I thought, Wow! That man looks so much like Ken! How weird is that!

Then I looked four times. Then I looked at the two people with him. And those people! They look like Mr and Mrs KenLastName!

I looked again.

There was no doubt.

I walked over to them. "Ken?" I asked.

Startled, he stared at me.

I turned to his dad. "Mr KenLastName?" I asked. "It's the Gold Digger! From Panama!"

Their jaws dropped. Then they smiled. A little reunion! So far from Panama!

Mr and Mrs KenLastName insisted I join them for dinner. They were animated and chatty, Ken was withdrawn. But here was my chance. I took a deep breath, then plunged in.

"Ken, why did you ditch me right before the Christmas dance?" I asked.

He flinched. Thought. "I don't know," he admitted. "I was dumb."

I thought no more of it. A year or two later, I got a Christmas card from him telling me he was getting married. Then I heard nothing. Several years after that was when I googled him and found the posting on the gay athletes site. I knew it was Ken because he has a very distinctive last name and the post was about swimming and we had met when we were both on the swim team.

I was happy because I realized that his lack of desire to kiss me had nothing to do with me and everything to do with him.

I googled him again recently and found him on facebook. I hesitated. Should I friend him? I didn't know. I didn't know if he would want to hear from me. I didn't know what the protocol was for friending former boyfriends. Facebook keeps suggesting I friend Calvin, my college boyfriend to whom I was engaged but then changed my mind. I do know that that one is not a good idea. FB can shut up with its stupid suggestions.

I decided not to initiate anything.

But then this week, I was working on the book that has to become a bestseller so Primo can quit his job and become a full time revolutionary, although he is not interested in camping or roughing it, so he needs to be a revolutionary with excellent financial backing so he can stay at nice hotels with good breakfasts and accumulate his hotel points. I included a scene about the character discovering her high school boyfriend was gay, blah blah blah and I started thinking about Ken again.

I went back to facebook. Looked him up. Sent him a message. Waited.

I got an immediate response, along with a friend request.

He wrote the loveliest note, telling me how nice it was to hear from me and that it was our conversation in Seattle that got things moving with his telling his parents and coming out.

It feels good to get that off my chest since I feel that I owed you an honest explanation.

I wrote back that I had discovered years before that he was gay, which was a relief to me, and that I was happy he was happy.

He answered that he had wanted for years to tell me that there was nothing wrong with me.

I thought you were a beautiful girl back in HS...I still think that you were back then and are still now.

It wasn't me. It was never me. And he knew it and wanted me to know it. Best of all, someone I liked with whom I share a common biography is back in my life. The End.

In which I get rid of a pain in the head

2011-12-22T09:32:00.000-08:00

I don't think I've told you about my Medical Drama. Don't worry. It's nothing serious. Just annoying.

For years, I have had headaches. I finally went to the doctor and he called them migraines and I said, No, a migraine is when you throw up and have to be in a dark quiet room all day and he said, No it's not. He also told me there is no such thing as a sinus headache and the sineaid I had been taking for years not only did not help my headaches but probably made them worse.

He wanted me to see a neurologist but I thought $$$$$! and said, No, you fix it. It's just headaches.

He sighed, rolled his eyes, and said to quit taking so much OTC medicine because that causes rebound headaches.

When a friend at the gym suggested I try imitrex as a painkiller, I asked my doc for an RX and he gave me one.

When another friend told me about topamax, which is supposed to prevent headaches and which has the side effect of absolutely killing the appetite, I said, Sign me up.

My doc gave me the topamax, which did nothing to stop my headaches but did kill my appetite to the point that one day at work, I got dizzy as I walked up the stairs. But why? I asked myself. Then I realized that all I'd had to eat that day was half a cup of yogurt for breakfast and then three asparagus spears for lunch. The drug completely removed my desire to eat.

Within a month, I could actually see my abs, which up to now had always been covered by a fluffy Milwaukee Roll. Of course, I didn't call it a Milwaukee Roll back then because I was still living in Memphis. I suppose then it was a Memphis Roll. All that good BBQ and corn pudding and cheese grits.

The muscles themselves were solid, as I had been exercising for a while, but I had never been able to see them before. It is possible to have muscles with a layer of fluff on top. That's what happens when you exercise + eat. I have discovered that it is not possible to exercise enough so that I can eat whatever I want. So I have made peace with my Memphis/Milwaukee Roll.

But I had to stop the topamax because it wasn't performing the required task.

My doc sent me to an ENT for something else. The ENT did a CT scan of my head. No tumor. Then I gave up and went to the neurologist, who shook his head and told me to stop taking all the OTCs.

When I moved to Milwaukee, my family doc refused to treat my headaches. "I don't do those," he said. "I don't know enough. You have to see a neurologist for that."

I went to the neurologist, who bills out at $800 an hour and I am not complaining about that because I would happily pay $800 never to have another headache again as long as I live.

She took a long case history, gave me a dozen photocopied pages that I glanced at and then tossed. I didn't get headaches after eating aged cheese or chocolate. I got them from glare, changes in barometric pressure, dehydration, and then sometimes just because. It was the just becauses I wanted to figure out.

We tried different preventive drugs, none of which worked to stop my headaches but all of which had lovely side effects like making my hair fall out in clumps or making me gain weight.

Primo and I visited my aunt Rita in northern Wisconsin. I got an email from her the week after we left. "You weren't kidding about the hair loss!" she wrote. "I found hair all over the bathroom floor!"

I felt bad. I had cleaned the shower after I was through, but I didn't see the hair on the floor because I don't wear my glasses to shower.

I went through thousands of dollars of drugs and doctor bills. The co-pay - the CO-PAY - for the lyrica was $140. On the market, it would have cost me over $1,000.

I considered participating in a research trial where they put a little plug in your heart. There appears to be some connection between people who get migraines and people in whom that little hold between the chambers doesn't close at birth. But I decided I didn't want a tube run into my heart.

The neurologist gave up. "Try acupuncture," she suggested.

I found an acupuncturist near my house. When I got to the clinic, the clerk asked me for a urine sample. I looked around: the sign noted that I was in a drug rehab center.

"No, no urine sample," I said.

"But you have to," she stated.

"No I don't," I told her. "That's not what I'm here for."

I wanted to say, "Do I look like an addict?" but then I thought, Well maybe I do. Maybe there are addicts who aren't emaciated and have good teeth. Aren't there Hollywood addicts who go into treatment all the time in between movies where they look fabulous?

She shrugged. Whatever.

I sat and read the sheaf of papers. I had to sign a contract agreeing to keep my appointments. I rolled my eyes. Again, not an addict.

It reminded me of when I went to the dental school in Memphis for my implant. Note that's singular and at the dental school. We are not talking about implants, but an implant, as in a fake tooth to replace the tooth that had to be pulled after almost 20 years of causing me trouble, starting when half of it broke off when I was flossing.

My teeth have betrayed me my whole life. I have taken care of them, even paying for my annual cleaning and exam when I was in grad school and didn't have dental insurance, but they have done me wrong. Perhaps I don't have good teeth. Maybe that receptionist could sense how many cavities and crowns and root canals I had had. But I have good teeth in that not meth mouth way.

At the dental school, after I'd had the surgery to put donor bone in my gum, as my own bone was lacking - and I just read Stiff, which is about research on cadavers, and have a pretty good idea where that bone came from, the dental student was very insistent that I remember to return for my appointment a few months hence.

As he saw me write the appointment in my purse calendar, he looked at me: suit, heels, overall good teeth, decent haircut. "Maybe I don't need to remind you and remind you to come back," he said.

"No I don't think so," I answered.

I didn't sign the contract. I wasn't trying to kick a habit.

Not that I don't have habits to kick. I want not to reflexively, if internally, criticize misspellings when I see them online or at the grocery store. I want not to look with derision on sloppy dressers. I especially want that one, as I am in no position to criticize. It is 2:46 in the afternoon and I am still in my PJs and robe and have not even washed my face. I have, however, made a batch of homemade mustard - cross your fingers on that one - and gotten everything out to make the coffee snaps in the Joy of Cooking. Judge not lest ye, etc, etc. Plus you never know what someone's situation is. Maybe someone is staying with a sick child at the hospital and hasn't had a chance to do anything for days. You can hardly expect that person to spend an hour dressing to the max.

Or maybe that person is just lazy as sin, as I am. I go to the store in my gym clothes because the store is on my way home from the gym. It makes no sense to drive home, shower, change, and then return to the store, does it? Actually, it's because I am so environmentally sensitive. That's it.

I want to assume the best of people, not the worst, even of the people who get in the express lane at the grocery store with MORE THAN 12 ITEMS! "Can't you read?" I want to snap at them. Then I have to remind myself that sheesh! is it like you are in such a hurry that you have to get out with your cauliflower, half and half, and cilantro right now?

I looked around the clinic. I saw a man in a white lab coat hurry by me. He was wearing a yarmulke and he had those curly sidelocks. Then another man, also in a lab coat, also with a yarmulke and sidelocks. I looked at the door: a mezuzah was attached to the frame.

I glanced down at my shirt. It was rather low cut. As in, it showed the cleavage I do not have. Was this the wrong shirt to be wearing to a clinic run by orthodox Jewish men? Probably. I tugged my shirt up and my skirt down.

The acupuncturist, Seth, came to get me. He, too, was an orthodox Jew. An orthodox Jewish acupuncturist.

He waved his hand when I said I hadn't given a urine sample. "Not necessary," he said. Ha. I knew it.

Seth and I chatted. He asked me about what I ate. Here we go again, I thought. But when he told me to go a week without dairy - "Even though that's so last century," he told me - and then a week without gluten - "That's the food allergy du jour," he said and track my headaches, I thought, Well what do I have to lose?

He also told me to try yoga. Then he stuck a tiny little needle in the top of my foot and left it there for a minute. "I don't expect this to do much," he explained. "Acupuncture is not very effective for pain that is genetic in origin."

I went home and followed his instructions. A week without dairy. Which was hell as I love cheese. And half and half. And frozen custard. But I admitted to myself that it might be a fair tradeoff never to have another headache.

But the headaches didn't diminish.

I cut out the gluten. Do you know how many foods have gluten? Soy sauce has gluten! Soy sauce!

Still no change.

I returned for more poking, dressed more modestly this time. While the four needles rested in my feet and hands, we talked about Memphis, where he was going to be traveling to complete a PhD program. "Oh the barbecue!" I raved.

He looked at me. "I take my own food," he said.

"But Central BBQ is not expensive," I told him.

He shook his head. "Not kosher."

Ah! Of course.

"But Memphis has a huge Jewish population," I said. "Not one kosher BBQ restaurant?"

"I don't know," he said. "But it is a big pain in the neck to make BBQ kosher."

This was last summer. I read yesterday about a kosher BBQ restaurant there. I need to call Seth and tell him.

He pulled the needles out. I left.

And started to notice a decline in my headaches.

Which seemed crazy to me, because I don't really believe all that acupuncture stuff. Although I do have a friend who swears by it, so maybe it does work for some people. It just seemed nuts that a few little needles would stop my headaches.

What other explanation could there be? I examined the changes in my diet and behavior over the past two weeks.

One big change was it was warmer outside. We had the windows open. Could it be a weather thing? Would this be my excuse to move back south?

No.

I had been going to yoga, which is a lot harder than I ever thought it would be. Why should I be surprised? 1. I have been bit in the ass so many times by things I have thought, Well a high-school dropout can do this so why can't I? That's how I ended up with some (note that is more than one, which shows that I am incapable of learning from experience) really bad self-inflicted haircuts. 2. Have you ever seen a yoga instructor? They are in amazing shape. AMAZING.

It was a great workout, but I discovered that the downward dog, it does not work for me. As in, when I am in that position, the blood rushes to my face and into my eye sockets and the little capillaries around my eyes burst so that it looks like I have tiny measles just across the middle of my face. As much as I sort of enjoyed the post-workout pain of yoga, I don't want to have to wear a mask in public so that people don't think my husband is shooting my eyes with buckshot or whatever you call those tiny little bullets.

Could it be the coffee? I had cut back from two cups of coffee every morning to one. It was just too warm for more than one coffee.

Caffeine? I wondered. Nah, that was too simple. Too easy. If caffeine caused headaches, surely one of the many docs I had seen over the past ten years would have suggested I stop drinking it.

But it was worth a test. I bought some decaf and switched. I stopped drinking diet Dr Pepper in the afternoon.

My headaches stopped. Completely. I went three months without a headache. I used to have two to three headaches a week. I went three months. Without one headache. Then I had a few because there were some big weather changes and because I thought, This time, I can work on my computer without closing the blinds first! I'm just going to be a second. That's not enough glare to start a headache! Only it was. But that headache was my own stupid fault. So four headaches in four months is not too shabby.

Which made me happy and made me a wee bit mad, because if it was that simple, why on earth had somebody not suggested it ten years ago? I could have saved thousands of dollars in medical and drug bills and I wouldn't have had to deal with hair fallout. Plus I wouldn't have felt crummy several days every month from the headache or from the painkillers, which sometimes work but always have their own side effects.

The moral of the story is: try cutting out caffeine before you go to the $800 an hour doctor.

In which Yves' cheapness makes me not very sad when he breaks up with me

2011-12-15T13:15:00.000-08:00

I know I just wrote about how wonderful Yves was when I threw up at the romantic cafe, or at what was supposed to be the romantic cafe, but he had a dark side and that was his cheapness.

Not that I don't welcome a good thrifty attitude. I myself, as you know, am from the Tribe of We Who Do Not Waste, and regard spendthriftness and financial mismanagement as about the worst things you can do outside of breaking the ten commandments. Murder and adultery are worse than wasting money or spending money you don't have. But not much.

A friend is doing an estate sale for a couple who is losing their $1.1 million house to foreclosure. He is a stocker at a grocery store and she used to be a mortgage broker.

"But how did they get a mortgage for a house that price?" I gasped.

My friend looked at me. "Are you serious? She was a mortgage broker! She got her own loan."

I was still confused. "But how did they pay the mortgage without enough income?"

"They have thousands and thousands of dollars in credit card debt," my friend said. "They just kept borrowing."

I could never live like that. I could never sleep knowing that I didn't have enough money to pay my bills. I already have sleepness nights worrying about my 401k and how it has not done a thing in the past 15 years and thinking that I better keep Primo healthy and happy for at least another 20 years because if he dropped dead right now, there would not be enough money from the life insurance to take me to 97, my expected age of death, and it's sure not like anyone wants to hire me.

But Yves took thriftiness to the next level. Washed his clothes in the sink because he didn't have a washing machine. OK, he was in an apartment and there wasn't room for a washing machine, but at least take the clothes to a laundromat or a cleaner! Kept track of all our expenses during the trip through the south of France on a spreadsheet. When he wanted to see me on a business trip to Memphis, after he had broken up with me nine months previously, he asked me to tell him quickly if I would see him, as there was only one more cheap seat on the Saturday flight from Paris to Memphis.

Mind you, this was a business trip. Not that I am saying one should be a bad steward of an employer's money, but he was making the arrangements for this trip two months in advance. Two months. I think there might have been other seats available.

Not to mention that there were so many ways that company wasted money that an extra $100 for an international plane ticket wasn't even a flea on the tick of management that was sucking the shareholders dry.

Not that I'm bitter about having worked -and been laid off from - a place so badly managed that in the six years since my layoff - and the layoffs of thousands of other employees - the stock price has not gone up at all. Not that I'm bitter that even though the CEO presided over a 34% decline in stock price while I was there (which meant I never got to cash in my options, even though it wasn't my fault that the stock market hated the company) and even though he presided over thousands of job losses and even though there was no improvement in productivity, he still got a $1.2 million bonus.

So yeah. Ask me if I care that Yves might not get the cheapest ticket.

But the main thing he did that annoyed me to no end was when he came to visit me in Cedar Rapids. He had been to Memphis for work, along with his colleague Hubert. A month before he came to the U.S., he called to ask if he could visit.

Sure! I told him. I would love to see him!

This was before he sent me the e-card for my birthday and then broke up with me a week later.

"Just tell me when to pick you up at the airport," I told him.

Oh, that wouldn't be necessary, he assured me. He and Hubert were going to drive from Memphis to Cedar Rapids!

"Drive?" I asked. "Are you sure? It's really dull. Just a bunch of cornfields."

I didn't know what I was talking about, he told me. He and Hubert wanted to see America and this was their chance.

I shrugged. "Whatever. Don't tell me I didn't warn you."

Hubert would drop Yves off and then go on by himself to Chicago for a few days, whence their return flight to Paris.

Yves would stay with me.

"Better check the Cedar Rapids-Chicago flights right now," I warned. "There are only a few each day."

A month later, on Friday afternoon, they arrived.

"What a boring drive!" they told me. "Nothing but cornfields!"

I just looked at them. Really? They had thought I didn't know my own country?

We went to lunch, then, as promised, Hubert left.

"When is your flight? I asked.

"Oh, I'm not going to fly from here to Chicago," Yves told me.

Mystified, I asked, "Then how are you getting there?"

I was thinking maybe he would rent a car or take the bus.

"I thought you could drive me!" he beamed.

"What?" I demanded. "What are you talking about?"

"You can drive me! I checked the fares and it's really expensive."

"You're not even paying it!" I shouted.

"It's so expensive." His voice trailed off as I shook my head.

"It's 250 miles to Chicago! Are you nuts?"

"But I thought you would want to spend more time with me," he said.

"It's TWO HUNDRED FIFTY MILES! That's FIVE HUNDRED MILES round trip!"

I was so mad. The last thing I wanted to do was to spend an entire day driving someone to the airport and then returning home.

But it was too late to change his plans.

"It's two tanks of gas," I seethed.

I don't remember what we did on Saturday. Probably watched the lint fall out of his wallet and then found a penny and stretched it into wire.

Sunday morning, we got up early. I had called my friend Lenore, who lives in Chicago, to see if we could meet her for lunch. We left Cedar Rapids and drove for five hours over VERY BORING TERRAIN to Lenore's house. We walked to a small pizza place by her house. When we finished eating, the waitress brought the check.

It sat on the table.

I waited for Yves to pick it up.

I know. What we learn from history is that we don't learn from history.

I should have grabbed it. What was wrong with me? But Lenore beat me to it. Why didn't I offer to split it with her? What was wrong with me? I was probably distracted by my fuming that Yves The Self Proclaimed Millionaire wouldn't buy lunch for me and my friend after I had just driven him TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES to catch a damn plane.

I owe that woman a pizza.

I dropped Yves off at the airport and drove back home. Another 250 miles, for a total of 500 miles in one day, in case you're not good at math.

Six weeks later, he sent me the pathetic e-card. A week later, he broke up with me. My only response to him was, "You own me gas money for the trip to Chicago."

In which I get too busy and then can't pee and it's really awkward because I am with my boyfriend visiting his mother

2011-12-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

Warning: This post involves bodily functions. If talk of such offends you, stop reading now.

Years ago, when I lived in Houston, I met this really nice guy at work. We're going to call him Gerard. Not his name, but it will do. Gerard was sweet and nice and interested in me. I had broken up with my college boyfriend/fiance' and hadn't dated since, although there was the Disaster in Cincinnati where I thought I would be clever and sophisticated and witty with the older [31 to my 24] man when he bit a loose thread off his scarf and I asked sultrily if that was the only thing he could do with his teeth and suddenly everyone around me fell into shocked silence, including Older Man, who had known me for a month or two and had never seen this side of me, a side whose effectiveness was cancelled immediately by my fast and furious blushing as the full implications of what I was asking hit the front part of my brain. I mumbled something and backed away, wondering to myself where that had come from.

Fortunately, I was in Cincy only for a few months on a temporary job assignment. The Disaster happened the night before I was moving back to Texas. Whew.

I can't remember if the guy my boss set me up with was before Gerard or after Gerard. What I do remember was realizing that it's not really a good idea to get your honey where you get your money. Nothing wrong with working with someone you date. It's working with someone you used to date that's the problem.

And thank goodness there was no drama with the boss' friend. Salvatore was still in love with his old girlfriend and had no interest in me. There were some lackluster double dates with my boss, her husband, Sal and me, but it was really more Sal hanging out with his friends - my boss and her husband, and me hanging out with my boss and her husband, and we all happened to overlap. That could have backfired in a really bad way. But Sal didn't really care about me and I didn't really care about him, although I did care that he didn't care about me because who wants to be rejected by anybody? It is better for the ego to be the rejector than the rejectee.

Although being the rejector is no piece of cake, mind you. When you reject someone nice, whom you like, you get all the trauma of a rejection with none of the sympathy.

As it was, dating Gerard and then not-dating Gerard was not the best thing for me. Fortunately, I moved from Houston to Austin when we broke up, but I still had to work with him.

But all that aside - the story I want to tell you is about the time he took me to meet his family in Denver. He asked if I wanted to go home with him for the Fourth of July and said he would pay for half of my plane ticket, which seemed like a really good deal to me at the time and was very generous of him, considering we were both very entry level in our jobs with the corresponding entry-level salaries. No man had ever been so generous to me. I was easy to please.

My standards are higher now. When I met Primo, he paid for all my plane tickets to visit him. Granted, I was unemployed when we were dating and he had a gajillion frequent flier miles, although he often paid for tickets rather than redeem miles because he said the miles were worth more.

This was back before alimony when Primo had extra money. Now, he is paying alimony and we own a house, which means things like roofs and driveways and wet basements become money pits in orders of magnitude one could never imagine as a renter and make me long for the days when my biggest housing problem was the Crazy Laundry People Upstairs. Those were the days: no shoveling, no grass cutting, no home repairs. Just watch Bridezilla and What Not To Wear all day long. Freedom.

Primo was shocked and disgusted when he learned that the Moroccan Millionaire had not paid for my ticket to Paris for the Moroccan Millionaire Rendezvous. I had staunchly maintained that I was an independent woman who could not be bought and hence would buy my own ticket, but it would have been easier to maintain that stance had Moroccan Millionaire actually offered to open his wallet. That's the thing with millionaires - at least millionaires who get that way because a rich relative dies, not because they have earned the money themselves - they have no idea how hard it is actually to earn money. They think it's just there and that everyone has it and they don't have a clue.

But enough of that. Gerard very graciously offered to pay for half of my ticket and that's pretty much what clinched the decision.

So apparently, I can be bought.

Except I really liked Gerard. He was a very very nice guy. And he kissed just fine.

We flew to Denver. His sister, Evangeline, who lived in San Francisco, picked us up and we stopped at Gerard's favorite Mexican restaurant on the way back to his mom's house. I had never met anyone like his sister before.

She was a hippie.

You know: lived in San Francisco with her bearded Birkenstocked professor husband. Didn't shave her legs or under her arms. And even though Evangeline was already forty, her little girl was only four! ONLY FOUR! That meant that Evangeline had had a baby when she was thirty seven!

To complicate matters, Evangeline wanted another baby. She was concerned, though, about being the only mom in kindergarten who was over forty. I was shocked, shocked, that someone that old would even think about having a baby. It was so old! She was right to be concerned, I thought.

But I kept my thoughts to myself.

Oh youth.

Gerard's dad was very ill. His mom wanted to get things settled with the will while Gerard and Evangeline were in town. She had laid out all the family silver and jewelry and anything else she thought Gerard and Evangeline might disagree about on the dining room table and about the living room. Her instructions to G & E were to figure out what they wanted now while she was there to referee, which is not a bad idea. Even when families don't have things that are worth money, they have things with sentimental value.

I could totally see my siblings and me arguing over who gets the yellow ceramic bowl that my mom used for making oatmeal chocolate chip (I never could figure out why my mom's cookies weren't like the other kids' chocolate chip cookies - I wanted the regular kind, without oatmeal, but oatmeal is a great extender) and for popcorn balls. It's just a regular ceramic bowl that you could get for under ten dollars today. But we all have good memories that go with it. We all also want the kitchen table. We may have to duke it out.

The rest of the time, Gerard and I got busy. We were in separate bedrooms of course because although Evangeline was a hippie, Gerard's mother was not and she knew what was appropriate and what was not. What's appropriate is separate bedrooms and then sneaking down the hallway at night.

Here's what happens when you get a little too busy - way more than you are used to because usually, you have a job and besides, you have a twin bed, which does not facilitate things: you get a little bit - um - bruised and then you can't pee.

I tried and tried and tried and I couldn't. Imagine having to go really bad and then you can't because it hurts. It is misery. I stopped drinking water. Still couldn't go. I sat and sat and sat in the bathroom, trying to distract myself, looking at the ceiling and whistling the "I'm not really here to pee!" song so my body would be tricked into peeing. Didn't work.

Finally, I said something to Gerard. Not that I expected him to be able to solve the problem. "Hello boyfriend!" you say. "Let me share something really intimate and embarrassing with you!"

That was back when I was 24, before anyone made a regular practice of farting in front of me. Some people take marriage as a license not to hold in the farts any more. That part was not covered in our pre-marital counseling.

But turned out that Gerard's dad was a urologist and Gerard, who was a biology major and pre-med in college, knew a thing or two himself after years of medical conversations with his dad.

"Sit in a tub of warm water," he suggested.

I didn't ask if I was supposed to pee in the bathwater, although that seemed to be the implication. You guys know where I stand on other people's tubs and showers. Sitting in a bathtub that had been used by other people and then polluting it myself? Oh gross.

Then there was the other issue of what the heck was I doing soaking in the tub in the middle of the day? How was I supposed to explain that?

Yet I was desperate. There is no pain like an unreleased full bladder.

So into the tub in the middle of the day I went. I took a magazine to distract myself, as the "I'm not really here to pee!" song had proven ineffective.

After 15 minutes or so (could be less, could be more - this happened 23 years ago), I felt a blessed relaxing. I scrambled out of the tub and did what Needed To Be Done. I did not pee in the tub. I have standards. Drained the tub. Got dressed. Rejoined G & E and the rest.

But I felt sure everyone knew what had transpired. What would the hippie think about what G and I had done? And my problem? I was so embarrassed.

The shame at what had transpired, coupled with my desire not to be reminded of that shame by seeing Evangeline or G's mother again, is probably not what inspired my breakup with Gerard. But it probably didn't help.

In which I figure out something technical that some of you might be interested in

2011-12-07T14:41:00.001-08:00

One of my readers, Munira in Pakistan (yes I am international) asked me to set up an RSS feed, which was kind of like asking me to do my own brain surgery, but then I remembered The Google and I went to The Google, the source of all instructions, including how to repair my own Kenmore washing machine with a broken agitator and how much cake flour to substitute for regular flour, and found out that it wasn't that hard.

So if you are interested in having an email sent to you when I get around to posting here - I am in the middle of my first big rewrite of The Novel and thanks to all of you who gave me such great ideas on what to do with the in-laws at the end - just look at the upper right-hand corner of this page. All you have to do is enter your email and then some magic happens. Electrons are amazing.

In which I have a romantic lunch that starts with zucchini tart and ends with throwing up

2011-12-01T02:02:00.000-08:00

Remember Yves, the millionaire boyfriend (he claimed to be a millionaire, but would a true millionaire not even have his own washing machine?) who proposed to me nine months after he broke up with me?

We took a trip together -before he broke up with me - through the south of France. It was actually a lovely trip. He did all the driving and I decided where we were going. We got to see little villages you can't get to by train and he knew that crazy French driving rule that you yield to the driver coming from the right even if you are on a major road and the other driver is on a minor road. When Primo and I were in France last year and drove from Paris to Mont St Michel, I expected death from the right the entire time on the road, which seemed like four straight days but was probably less. Which was probably oh one afternoon. But one afternoon on French roads can feel like an eternity.

We (Primo and I) also discovered the joy of driving up a hill in Rennes 1. without snow tires 2. during a snowstorm with 3. other drivers without snow tires. Yes, it does snow in France. The only time it snowed during our week there was the day we had to drive back from Mont St Michel to Paris. The rest of the time, we had cold rain. France in November. There's a reason it's easy to find a hotel room in late fall.

Next time Primo and I go to France, we are taking the bus. Let someone else worry about the rules.

But Yves and I had a nice time going through the little villages and small cities and up to the top of Les Roches. It makes it easier to travel when you are with someone who speaks the language and knows the rules.

The only sour note - apart from the time

WAIT! THIS IS GROSS! YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP IT! Start reading again after the last set of all caps.

apart from the time when we were in the hotel in Arles where the toilets used about four ounces of water each flush I AM WARNING YOU STOP READING RIGHT NOW IF YOU GET GROSSED OUT DON'T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU

and we all know that sometimes four ounces isn't enough, which is why the hotel provided a toilet brush

YOUR LAST CHANCE TO STOP

which Yves DID NOT USE so when I went into the bathroom, I saw quite clearly that he was an evening pooper who ate a lot of fatty food and not much roughage.

And that's as far as I'll go except to say that cleaning someone else's poop was not what I had in mind for a romantic vacation. He didn't leave his towels on the bathroom floor, but this was far, far worse. Picking up someone else's towels won't make you gag.

Related story: I used to swim at the JCC before I would go to work. That was back when I had a job and some degree of worth in the open market. Now I am just a parasite, consuming without contributing. If Primo dies, I am stuck. There is not enough life insurance to last for the next 50 years of life I undoubtedly have left, at least if there is anything to genetics, and the marketplace has made it quite clear over the past few years that it has no use for my talents. I better keep that man alive and working.

I would go to the JCC at 5:30 a.m., swim, shower, then go to work.

One morning, I arrived at the gym. I put my purse and sweatpants in a locker, then carried my towel and bath kit to the shower to leave it. I opened the door to the showers and a smell hit me.

It was the smell of poop.

Which as everyone knows does not belong in a shower.

I tiptoed to the first shower stall - there were four - and pulled back the curtain.

Someone had smeared poop on the wall.

I felt myself start to vomit.

I backed away, grabbed my towel, and ran out to the front desk.

"Someone smeared poop on the shower walls in the ladies' locker room," I told the attendant.

Her eyes flew open. "Oh!"

"You need to have someone clean it up."

She nodded vigorously. I went into the pool, swam my lazy 1,200 yards, and returned to the locker room.

When I opened the shower room door, the smell was still there. The shower had not been cleaned.

I grabbed my towel again, wrapped my body for modesty's sake, and marched out to the attendant. "It's still there!" I said.

"I told them," she protested.

I returned to the showers, used the stall on the very far end, which was clean, got dressed and left.

I came back at lunch to use the weights. Out of curiosity, I checked the showers.

Still poop laden.

I couldn't believe it.

I found the attendant and hissed, "IT'S STILL THERE!"

She shook her head. "I told them."

"You didn't check to make sure it was done!"

"That's not my job," she snapped.

"Yes! It is! It is your job to make sure it has been handled! All you had to do was walk thirty yards and check!" I stomped away to find someone who would actually give a damn. For five hundred dollars a year, I wanted clean showers. Was I asking too much? I don't think so.

She was unconvinced. "Besides," she said, "Our cleaners aren't paid enough to clean poop."

I whirled back. "Yes, they are! I cleaned poop for $3 an hour. If it is your job to clean the showers, then you clean the damn showers." [I did, when I was a lifeguard during college and the boys thought it was funny to poop on the men's room floor and the City of Converse would not let us lock the bathrooms and require patrons to request the key.]

One of the coaches overheard me. I told him the story and he was appalled. He glared at the attendant and promised, "I will make sure this is taken care of immediately." And he did.

Wow. That's a lot of poop talk for a story that is not about poop.

GROSSED OUT PEOPLE RESUME READING HERE

No, this story is not about poop. It is about vomit.

So the only sour note was the time we stopped for lunch at an idyllic little cafe in the country. The narrow road was lined with elm or chestnut or whatever kind of tree it is that lines country roads in Europe. We don't have many of those - tree lined roads - here. Possibly none. My neighborhood's streets used to be lined with elms that bent over and met in the middle of the street, but that was before Dutch elm disease. Now I just have a maple that drops its leaves overnight three weeks after all the other trees on the street have dropped and two weeks after I have had to rake everyone else's leaves out of my yard. This year, I just waited for the wind to blow my leaves from my yard into the other yards and darn if it didn't work.

But in Europe, they have old roads lined with trees. The sun shines between the leaves and branches and casts dappled light on the road. It was a warm, beautiful day. There might have been cicadas humming, although maybe not as we took this trip in May and I think May is too early for cicadas. Not that I am a cicada expert or anything, but I think they are a late summer thing.

We pulled over and walked to the cafe. The garden was just starting to bloom. A few people bent over the outdoor tables, holding hands across the bread and butter. This was a romantic place. Good. I needed some romance to make up for the you know what. (I'm not going to say it for the sake of the people who skipped the gross part.)

We sat. Looked at the menu. The special looked fabulous: starter of a zucchini tart, then poached fish with asparagus, then a chocolate mousse. Yum. I ordered the special, Yves ordered the steak frites.

We were starving. We hadn't eaten anything since our very light breakfast of bread and cheese and that had been five hours ago. I don't like to go more than ten minutes between snacks, so I was ready to go.

They brought out my tart.

I ate daintily, as Yves and I were still in that stage where we were trying to show each other our best face. Or at least I was. Yves had apparently gotten over the "She must never know I have bodily functions!" horror.

Primo and I still do not pee in front of each other. Yes, we have seen each other naked and our bodies are not as pretty as they were 20 years ago. He has pulled a white hair out of my chin and I have cleaned his infected leg wound, but we close the bathroom door. Every time. There has to be some mystery.

But Yves was either clueless or far less modest than I.

I ate daintily. I finished my small slice of tart. Yves at his small appetizer, whatever it was. I was going to say a salad, but then I remembered that the French don't eat their salad at the beginning of the meal. Or so I've heard. When Primo and I were in Paris, we were not eating multi-course meals. We had a lot of bread and cheese and just one fancy restaurant meal at Le Relais de Venice with the birthday money my mom sent me. I think there might have been salad, but what I remember is the steak and the great sauce that came with it. I even ate the french fries, which I only eat about once a year, just so I could have more of the sauce.

We waited for the next course.

And waited.

And then my stomach started to rumble.

I started to feel - not well.

I started to feel like I was going to throw up.

I rarely throw up. I had food poisoning in Albuquerque in 1986 and again in Memphis in 2003. I threw up both times. I can't remember much more throwing up besides that in my adult life except for the time when I decided to go to Europe after grad school even though I did not have a job. I was so stressed about doing something so irresponsible that I threw up and burst all the blood vessels around my eyes, making it look like someone had given me a light beating.

I burst those same blood vessels again a few months ago after several minutes of Downward Dog at the yoga class my orthodox Jewish acupuncturist who works at a drug rehab clinic had recommended for my headaches. Yoga not only did not stop my headaches (turns out that quitting caffeine was all I had to do for that) but gave me more, plus that lightly beaten about the eyes look.

I am a Delicate Flower.

Point is that I rarely throw up.

But I knew what was about to happen.

"I have to go to the bathroom," I blurted to Yves as I ran. I got there just in time. Chewed tart hurtled out of my body. I kept retching even once my stomach was empty. I vomited so hard that my stomach muscles, which are rarely used, started to hurt.

I flushed twice, wiped the specks off the seat, flushed again, then sat on the toilet to rest.

Throwing up is hard work.

I washed my hands, then rinsed my mouth. I looked at myself in the mirror: I was pale and sweaty. Not a good look for me.

I walked slowly back to the table. Yves stood. "What happened?" he gasped.

"I threw up," I told him.

"But why?"

"I think the eggs were bad in the tart. It's the only thing I can think of. It's the only thing I've had to eat for hours."

He frowned. He looked up, raised his hand and summoned the waitress.

"She is sick because of the tart. We are leaving. Cancel the order. I pay for my appetizer but not for hers."

The waitress tried to protest, but Yves would have none of it.

He threw some bills on the table, gently took my elbow, and carefully guided me to the car, where he reclined my seat. "You just rest," he commanded. "You just feel better."

A few hours later, we stopped for chocolate. I felt much better. But no more undercooked tarts for me.

In which I spend way too much time with a colleague who turns out to be a complete flake

2011-11-24T03:03:00.000-08:00

This guy Rolando and I started working for the paper company on the same day in Miami. We were paid the same amount. I know this because he foolishly made a copy of his offer letter and left the original on the copy machine and oh like you wouldn't have looked. Honestly. Of course I looked.

We banded together in defense against some of the other people in the office, one of whom was a sweaty, pale blond guy who spoke no Spanish yet was in charge of Latin America sales and who told me during my interview that he would never live in Miami (he lived in Boca Raton) because he had children.

I was quite puzzled, as there were many people in Miami who also had children, including my next door neighbor Mousson, whose 15 year old son Rudolf overfed my cats when I was out of town, telling me, when I gently suggested that he might have given them too much food, "But zey were 'ongry! Zey were crying!"

Then I realized that Pat was just a big fat racist jerk and that his opinion meant nothing to me.

Rolando and I tried to become friends, but I realized soon that there was no hope. The first sign was the day he saw the book Army of Angels in my briefcase. I rode the train from Miami to Boca, where the office was, 60 miles away, and had a lot of time to read every day. This was in the mid 90s, when people were not expected to work 24 hours a day just because they had laptops and cellphones. I read. I even had time to read The Economist every week. Three hours on a train every day will do that to you.

But Rolando was not a reader. He was not a student of history. I'm not sure what he was.

I don't want to sound like an intellectual snob. I know there are many bright people who have not been exposed to things that you would think everyone is exposed to. The great IT guy who was always so helpful to me in Memphis had never heard of Anne Frank.

He had never heard of Anne Frank.

How do you grow up in the U.S. and not know that?

But he was a product of Memphis City Schools, which, for those of you who do not know about Memphis City Schools, is not the best school system in the world. The county mayor once gave a speech in which he said that every day, when he woke up, he thanked God for Arkansas and Mississippi just so Memphis wouldn't be in last place.

Rolando asked what the book was about.

"Joan of Arc," I answered.

"Who's that?" he asked.

Oh Lord.

Rolando had gone to private school. His dad was a bigwhig with an international company. Rolando had gone to the good schools in Venezuela and Colombia and the U.S. He got his MBA at Northwestern, which did not admit me, not that I'm bitter about that. Actually, I'm not. I still went to a top school and I paid only $5,000 for two years of tuition and fees.

Plus it probably didn't help my chances at Northwestern in my interview when I asked the alum who was interviewing me what made Northwestern ten times better than U.T. that they charged ten times as much tuition. The alum was not amused and sputtered that you couldn't look at just tuition. I shrugged. I was paying for this. I wanted to know. But Northwestern made it easy for me and didn't admit me. Whatever.

But Rolando, who was educated and who had gotten into a school that had not admitted me, did not even know who Joan of Arc was. For dumb.

But that's not what made him so flaky.

One day, when I mentioned that my friend Susan and I were going to the Keys on Saturday morning to go canoeing, he asked to join us. Sure, I told him. Just be at my house at 7:00 a.m. That's when we're leaving.

Susan and I waited. No Rolando. We waited some more. Still no Rolando.

I finally called the phone number he had given me. He was staying with his parents until he found a place and I didn't want to call so early, but I was worried that maybe he'd had an accident between his mom and dad's house and my house and wouldn't you want to know if you were a parent?

His mom answered. "He's still sleeping," she told me.

"Screw him," I told Susan. "We're not waiting."

That's still not the flaky part.

Rolando and I had to go to Cincinnati for two weeks of training. We decided not to fly back to Miami for the weekend in the middle but just to stay up there. "There's some cool state parks in Kentucky," I said. "We could go to the park, stay in the lodge and the company would pay for it."

Our boss said fine. He didn't care. As long as we spent less than tickets back to Miami would have cost.

We checked out of the hotel that Friday before driving to the park. Rolando had a $150 phone charge on his bill. He had called the plant in El Salvador on the hotel phone.

"Why didn't you use the company calling card?" I asked.

He shrugged. "It probably wouldn't save that much money," he answered.

"What!" I said. "You really think that the company wouldn't negotiate a better rate than the hotel charges?"

"Nah," he said.

He had another $40 on his bill for laundry.

"What laundry?" I asked.

"My socks," he said.

"Socks? But why?"

"I didn't bring two weeks worth of socks," he said. "I had to have them washed."

"But you could have washed them in the sink!" I told him. "Or there's a washing machine in the hall! You could have washed them yourself for a dollar!"

"Nope," he said.

I was stunned. Such disregard for company resources! Not that I hold any love in my heart for that place. Just yesterday, LinkedIn sent me the suggestion that I join the paper company alumni group.

"Just as soon as I join the 'All the guys who have ditched me' group," I muttered.

But I was always a good steward of my employer's money. Why would anyone deliberately waste money? Especially when it was not necessary?

We drove to the park in Kentucky. The lodge, unfortunately, had only one room available. We were going to have to share a room for two nights. Ick. Not pleasant, but not un-doable. I would just rather not have that level of familiarity with a co-worker. Fortunately, I had brought my usual frumpy pajamas with me. Not that I think he found me in any way alluring. I had met his girlfriend, who was 15 years younger than he and I were and about 20 sizes smaller than I.

By the time we got there, it was too late to do anything but eat and go to bed. Rolando had a long conversation with his girlfriend - on the room phone - while I read a book and tried not to listen.

The next morning, he got out of bed, wrapping his sheet around him to walk into the bathroom, holding it closed with one hand while he grabbed his clothes with the other.

He had slept nude.

When he left the bathroom, after his shower, the sheet and his towels were on the floor.

Leaving your wet towels on the floor is so damn rude.

I said something to him and he told me that the maid could pick them up.

Yes, he was a spoiled rich kid.

Hotels have signs now saying that they are so conservation minded and they care and they will only change the towels daily if they are left on the floor. Towels left hanging are a sign that the customer wants to re-use them.

I have no problems whatsoever with using the same towel more than one day in a row. It is horribly wasteful to wash them every single day. But it is a bit disingenuous of the hotels to claim that they care so much. They are just counting on most peoples' natural courtesy and good home training to hang up their towels. Still, it's smart marketing and I don't blame them for it. I do wonder, however, about people who can just toss a towel to the floor and leave it there. How were they raised?

After breakfast, we went for a hike.

Rolando hated it.

Trees! And limbs! In his way! Bugs! BUGS!

Oh for pity's sake. I hate hiking and am about as big a whiner as you will ever meet if I have to walk up hills when it's not part of a gym class, but this was not bad at all. It was just pretty mountain countryside with very clearly marked paths. Birds, flowers, trees. Hiking lite.

We trudged back to the lodge and had lunch. Went back to the room, which the maid had cleaned, although I had hung the towels because I just couldn't stand it. Rolando went to look out the third floor window - and jumped back, shrieking.

"What's that? What's that?"

I looked up from my book and squinted. "Oh. A squirrel."

"But it's jumping!"

I looked up from my book again. "Yeah."

"IT COULD JUMP INTO THIS ROOM AND BITE US!"

"I doubt it," I answered dryly.

"IT COULD BE DANGEROUS!"

"No," I said.

"We should leave," he announced. "I don't care if we have another night here. We should leave."

I thought back on the time we had already spent together: nude sleeping, towels on the floor, grouchy hiking and now, irrational fear of squirrels. How much more of this could I take?

I closed my book and stood. "Great idea," I said.

The End.

A request for help

2011-11-20T14:48:00.000-08:00

Hello my lovely readers. What would you find to be a satisfactory ending to a completely fictional not based on reality at all novel about a woman with mean in-laws who somehow created the wonderful man who is her husband?

The gist of the story is that in-laws meet prospective daughter in law, don't like her even before they meet her, make no effort to know or like her and never give her lunch when she visits.

They send horrible presents and yell at their grandkids for eating the white meat at Thanksgiving. DIL stands up to FIL (to be) when he is mean to his granddaughter. DIL realizes FIL is just a big bully and she is no longer scared of him. She still thinks he's a jerk, though.

They tell their son two weeks before the wedding that they are not coming. If you've read from the start of this blog, you know all this. Their son says if they don't come, they'll never get to see their grandchild - much to the son's surprise and the future DIL's surprise, she is pregnant. They are OLD, people, so it is a huge surprise. You might as well call them Sarah and Abraham.

In laws grudgingly come to the wedding and eat all of son and DIL's good cheese during their 9 day stay with son and DIL, even though they claim to be lactose intolerant. They get drunk at the wedding supper. Meanwhile, DIL has a miscarriage while they are there.

But son and DIL survive in laws and they leave, never, one hopes, to return. Son tells DIL on their wedding night that his parents will never live with them.

Months later, son stands up to parents when they get upset that he is not planning to go to their house for Christmas, tell him he is "abandoning" them and that he is a "bad son." Son tells parents he is not going to take that kind of talk any more and that they can go to hell. (Or something like that.)

Son and DIL live happily ever after.

That's what I have. Well, I have 224 pages of this story in far greater detail. But I need feedback on the proposed ending. (Son standing up to parents.)

Jen on the Edge and I have already decided that a fiery crash killing in laws would not work.

For those of you who have read the whole Sly and Doris saga from the start, what would you like to happen to wrap this up?

I thank you for your feedback.

In which I learn that logic sometimes just doesn't matter, or, How I grew to love the US Post Office

2011-11-17T08:30:00.000-08:00

I didn't realize how amazing the US postal service was until I moved to Chile for two years. Although the post office in Chile is open until 7:00 p.m., which is an innovation I think we could use in the US, in other ways, the service was bad. Things were stolen from the mail all the time - I had friends from the US sending me candy and goodies that never arrived. They thought I was just being rude, not writing a thank you note for the Halloween candy they had sent me, but I had never gotten it. Somewhere, there was a Chilean postal employee (or a Chilean customs employee) eating my candy corn, which ticked me off because I couldn't get candy corn in Chile.

I also could not get chocolate chips - but guess what? you can chop up a candy bar pretty easily, Crisco (substitute lard, which is better than Crisco anyhow), or ziplock bags. Fortunately, when my friend Lenore came to visit, she brought an ample supply of all of those things, along with peanut butter, which was available in Chile but only to the very rich.

Before I moved to Chile, I took for granted that a cheerful, clean, uniformed mail carrier would bring my mail to my house every day.

After I had been living there for a while, I discovered why the Peace Corps told us to have our mail sent to the Peace Corps office in Santiago, whence they would have it sent to us via courier. They knew.

I discovered why when I was living in the house with Mandy, the Scottish undergrad studying Spanish and Portuguese, and Sarah, the American woman getting a PhD in political science and doing her research on the political structures of the Mapuche. Mandy and I became great friends, but Sarah bugged me because she would sit at the supper table, picking her toes and then reaching for food with her fingers. We didn't eat together much.

They got their mail delivered at the house. I never paid any attention because I got my mail at my office, via courier. I would see their mail on the stairs and think nothing of it.

But one day, Mandy and Sarah weren't home. Someone was banging and banging on the door.

Not that I was used to having any peace in that house. In the morning, someone would turn on the three school busses that were parked overnight across the street from us (no, I have no idea why - maybe that's where the drivers lived?) and let them idle for half an hour.

Although that sound is not as annoying as the horrible "I am backing up" beep that equipment in the US is required to make and that causes me to ask if anyone has done a true cost/benefit analysis of the value of that sound, as in, how many Americans are we willing to let die because they are too slow to get out of the way of machinery backing up if it means we can sleep past 7:00 a.m. on a summer morning, the rumble of idling busses is also loud enough to wake a person.

I tried to ignore the banging, but whoever it was would not go away. I finally had to answer. I signed and left my tiny room, which was not even large enough for a mattress and contained just a sleeping bag and my clothes - no door because alcoves don't have doors - and walked very carefully down the very narrow, carpeted, slippery stairs.

Once you have slipped and fallen down the stairs, you never trust them again.

I opened the door. There stood a disheveled, boozy-smelling man holding a few letters. He was wearing old black pants and a brown sweater with holes in it. No hat. No uniform. No insignia.

"I have your mail," he said.

Then why hadn't he just left it on the stoop, as he usually did?

I reached for the letters. He snatched them back and gave me the Latin American finger wave.

You know the Latin American finger wave, don't you? It's when you rock your forefinger from side to side with the hand held parallel to your body. The North American finger wave, or, more accurately, shake, has your hand perpendicular to your body with the finger going from 0 degrees down to about 60 degrees. The Latin American finger wave goes 60 degrees from upright in each direction.

And what it means is, "Absolutely, positively no. Uh uh. No way. Don't even think about it."

If you do the Latin American finger wave at a boy who is pestering you to polish your shoes (which I rarely did, as I would pay any kid who wanted to polish my shoes), he will back away, no questions asked.

The man gave me the LAFW.

"No," he said, as he withdrew the letters. He pointed to the doorframe. "You owe me 170 pesos." (About 50 cents at the time.)

"What are you talking about?"

"Look," he demanded. I looked. There were hash marks on the door frame. "I've delivered all these letters and you haven't paid."

I had no idea what he was talking about. "Ten pesos a letter," he said impatiently.

"Are you nuts?" I asked. "These letters all have stamps!"

"The stamp is just to get it from one post office to another," he said. "But you have to pay for delivery!"

I didn't believe him. The whole idea was crazy. But he wouldn't give me the mail and I knew that this wasn't something I could wait out, plus I was worried he would bang on the door again the next day and I would never have any peace. I gave him the money and threw the letters on the kitchen counter.

The next day, I went to the post office and asked one of the clerks. "The postman told me I have to pay him for delivering stamped letters!" I said in disbelief.

"Well of course," she said. "The stamp just gets it from one post office to another."

I shook my head. "Why doesn't the stamp include delivery?"

She rolled her eyes. It was so obvious. "Because all the houses are different distances from the post office! How do you decide how much to charge for the stamp if you don't know how far from the post office the house is?"

In which I get my purse repaired

2011-11-10T08:31:00.000-08:00

On that trip to Morocco where Primo and I both bought rugs and wasn't that a surprise, my first mission was to repair my old purse. Don’t laugh. My accessories are very important to me. I buy secondhand so I can afford to buy quality. A used high quality purse is a far better deal than a new poorly made one. But even high quality items wear out and then we must repair them if possible because we are of The Tribe of We Who Do Not Waste.

And this was the perfect purse. It met all my specs. My sister mocks me and my purse specs, but I know what I want and why should I settle for less? I want a purse with a strap long enough to go over my shoulder and leave my hands free because unlike the queen of England, who apparently carries nothing but a hanky in her purse and has people to do everything for her, I open my own car doors, pay for my own things, and carry my own grocery bags. I do not want to have to put my purse down just to remove my keys. But I also want shorter handles to hold in my hand in case I want to carry the purse that way.

My purse needs to have a flap or an easy snap closure so that when I toss it onto the passenger seat as I am getting into the car, the contents do not spill out.

I need room for things. I have prescription sunglasses and regular glasses, a Swiss army knife, a camera, a smartypants phone, a wallet, aspirin, bandaids, a handkerchief, a comb, a calendar, lip gloss, face powder, a small notepad, pens that no I will not lend you get your own pen, and emergency chocolate in my purse. Tiny little purses do not work for that much stuff.

Plus I want to have my stuff organized, so I want dividers and pockets. But I don’t want bling. I don’t want tacky.

The black snakeskin purse I had bought at a fancy consignment shop in Memphis met all my specs and had served me well for a few years, but now was getting worn on the edges. I had discovered the Rabat leather repair guy when my sandals broke on my first trip to Morocco. The leather guy, whose shop was three blocks from Steve and Megan’s apartment, had fixed them in two hours for about three dollars.

I had tried to have the purse repaired in Memphis, but none of the shoe or leather repair stores could do it. They claimed they didn’t have the equipment. Fine, I thought. I’ll just take this purse to a third-world country where they don’t want me to throw it away and buy a new one instead. I’ll show you.

I took the purse to the leather guy. He had a tiny little storefront with a counter that opened onto the street. When I showed him the purse, he looked back at his equipment and shook his head. “C’est pas posible, madame,” he told me. He did not have the proper equipment.

Crap. I had brought the purse all this way just to fail?

“Try Fez,” Steve suggested. “Fez is known for its leather works.”

Now we had to go to Fez, which wasn’t a hardship, as it is a very neat place and we had planned to visit anyhow. Primo and I took the train there. On the way, we met a young Moroccan man sitting in our train compartment. Ahmet spoke almost flawless English, explaining that he had been to the US for his heart surgery. “I love New York!” he said. “I love U.S.!” His voice dropped. “You know New York Yankees? My favorite!”

He offered to show us around. I told him we had a guide for the next day, but we didn’t have plans for the afternoon. It is necessary to have a guide in Fez to avoid being lost in the labyrinth of the medieval city. From the air, Fez probably looks like a few spiderwebs laid on top of each other. I didn’t have breadcrumbs or a big ball of string, so a human guide was the next best thing.

After we dropped our bags at the hotel, Ahmet gave us a great tour. We saw the water seller in his red costume and big red and yellow hat, holding out his tin cup from which many people would have drunk, which meant we went thirsty. We dodged the medina taxis, which are donkeys, and their leavings. Vendors beckoned to us from their stalls of raw meat, sheepsheads, and spices. Cats sat resolutely in front of the meat stands, looking up at the counter and hoping for a handout.

He didn’t take us to an expensive restaurant and then abandon us as the guide had done when Steve and I had gone to Fez during my August visit and he didn’t even take us to a carpet store, which seems to be standard operating procedure for Moroccan guides. You think used car salesmen are bad? Try a Moroccan carpet dealer. They are pros and we are amateurs, as Primo and I learned later.

I asked Ahmet to take me to a leather guy and showed him my purse.

“I take for you!” he said eagerly.

I was reluctant to entrust my precious snakeskin purse to him and demurred, but Primo said, “I think it will be fine.”

I hugged the purse to my chest. Was it safe? Would I be abandoning my purse to an uncertain fate? Even when I was employed and had money, I had an unnatural attachment to my shoes and purses, probably because they are the only items of bodily adornment whose size is constant regardless of if my size is constant. No matter what, I always take an 8.5 shoe and purses have no size limits.

Now that I had no income – and with every dollar Primo spent on me, I was even more painfully aware that I needed to rectify that situation – I was really concerned about my accessories. I didn’t want to lose them because I could not afford to replace them.

“No, really, I take,” Ahmet insisted.

“How much?” I asked.

“Not very much,” he promised. “I bring back after supper.”

I reluctantly handed my purse to him and gave him 100 dirhams, which is about $12. If the purse couldn’t be repaired, it was worthless to me anyhow, and if Ahmet absconded with the $12 – well, we had gotten that much at least out of our tour with him.

We walked around the hotel and watched the sunset from a hill overlooking the city. The fields were a mixture of green and brown and were dotted with sheep. Three little boys unsuccessfully tried to herd one group of sheep. The stone walls of the city glowed golden as the rays hit them as the sun descended, then fell into shadow.

Where was my purse?

Primo and I found a small café where we got real Coke, the kind with cane sugar, and these fabulous sandwiches of ground lamb and onions fried on a griddle with an egg cracked on top at the last minute and then piled onto a fresh baguette. The only time we got sick from eating the food in Morocco was when Primo had salad at the American club. None of the other food bothered us.

I fretted that my purse and money were gone, never to return, but Primo assured me that Ahmet was trustworthy.

As we walked back to the hotel, ready to surrender for the night, two hours after I had given my purse to Ahmet, we saw a figure running toward us and waving. It was Ahmet. And he had my purse.

“I go in hotel to find you but you were not there!” he said. “Here!” He thrust the purse at me. “And it cost only 50 dirhams. Here is the money.” He handed me the change.

I looked at the purse. It looked brand new. Ahmet’s guy had repaired it perfectly. And in two hours.

I had been wrong to doubt him. My purse was perfect.

I opened my wallet and looked at Primo. He nodded. “Keep that change,” I told Ahmet. “And here’s some more for your great guide services.” I handed him another 100 dirhams.” I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing – he hadn’t asked for any money – but he had shared his knowledge and time with us and hadn’t tried to cheat us. It was worth it.

In which Primo and I both buy Moroccan rugs and spend way more than we should have

2011-11-03T10:48:00.000-07:00

There is almost nothing worse than regretting a purchase not made. You can almost always find a use for something you buy that you end up not wanting – if you can’t return it, you can eBay it or give it as a wedding present, but if you don’t buy that great rug in Morocco, you will regret it maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and then for the rest of your life.

Such was my thinking when I did the research on oriental carpets before Primo and I went to Morocco. I had been through Crazy Hassan’s sales pitch the first time I went, but had resisted. I didn’t need a rug, didn’t want one, saw nothing that moved me. But I decided that should I fall in love with something, I wanted to be prepared – have some numbers in my head.

This despite the fact that I was unemployed. My desire for consumer goods was stronger than my desire for long-term survival. If I was going to be a bag lady, I would be a bag lady with a great Moroccan rug.

Yes, you are allowed to laugh at my stupidity.

I did my internet research, then Megan took us to a government-run co-op with fixed prices in Rabat. We took photos and notes – by gosh, Primo and I are both engineers at heart and he’s one in real life and we were going to approach this scientifically. “You can look in Fez,” Megan warned us, “but don’t buy a rug there. Everything they have there, you can find in Rabat and it’s a lot cheaper in Rabat. Do not buy a rug in Fez!”

Of course, we forgot everything she said when our guide (not Ahmet, but the one we had reserved for a full day) took us into that Fez carpet shop. Just to look. “We don’t want to buy a rug,” I told the guide.

“Oh is OK. This is rug museum,” he told me, as he held the door open and waved us in.

That’s when we discovered that buying a rug is like buying a car – you check Consumer Reports, write down your specs – and then fall in love with the way the car feels, its sound system and its color.

Primo, who truly had no intention of buying a rug, saw one he liked. He just liked it. The same way he had liked the bowl at the pottery place earlier in the evening. As a matter of fact, he had done something I had never seen him do before. He said, “I want this.” And he paid what I considered to be a rather high price for a piece of pottery. But when you like a piece of art, you like it. And it’s a lovely bowl.*

The same thing happened with the rug. He liked it. It is gorgeous. And unique – not antique – apparently, by definition in the rug world, it must be older than 100 years. This one is not over 100, but it is old.

“Let me handle this,” I muttered to Primo. “I’ve done this kind of thing before.” I was shrewd. I had bargained my way through South America, telling taxi drivers in Quito and La Paz that I was not going to pay the gringo tax so they better give me a better price. It didn’t always work. Sometimes I ended up walking, but I didn’t pay more than I should.

But I had never tried to buy a rug from a Moroccan rug salesman.

First, I denied any interest. “No, we are not interested in buying a rug. Yes, that’s lovely. But we are curious. How much would a rug like that cost?” I waved casually at the rug Primo liked.

“For you, I make good price,” Mohammed, the rug salesman, told me.

“And what would that price be?” I pressed him.

“Would you like some tea?” Mohammed asked. He clapped his hands and spoke sharply to one of the assistants who were unfurling rug after rug on the floor.

Then I rejected the hospitality that would inspire in me a compulsion to reciprocate. “No,” I told him. “No tea.” I don’t like regular tea, but the Moroccan tea of boiling water poured over a glassful of crushed mint leaves and then garnished with four tablespoons of sugar is pretty good. Still, I didn’t want us getting involved in a long social visit. I just wanted to know how much the darn rug cost. “What does the rug cost?”

Mohammed ignored me. I don’t know if that’s how he treats all customers or if that’s how he treats women. I supposed it didn’t matter. Either way, he continued to show us more rugs. They were all gorgeous. They were all without a price.

I saw one I liked. “How much would this rug cost for someone who was interested in buying a rug?”

Mohammed snapped his fingers at his assistant, who unrolled more rugs. “Look at this one.”

And we continued. Me asking how much the rug cost, Mohammed unfurling rug after rug. Finally, after what seemed like hours but was probably only 15 minutes, Mohammed answered the question. I pointed to the rug Primo liked and asked again. “How much would a rug like this cost?”

“Five thousand dollars,” he answered.

I gasped. Primo gasped. “We cannot pay that price,” he said.

I knew in the US that Oriental rug prices can be five thousand dollars and more, but I also knew that in Morocco, they were not getting that kind of money.

“Don’t buy a rug in Fez,” Megan had warned. “But if you do, offer them 25% of what they ask.” Twenty five percent of $5,000 seemed so low. Typical amateur mistake – we let the salesman set the reference price.

“Our price would be an insult to you,” I told him politely.

“Please. Just tell me. I give you a number, now you give me a number.”

“OK. One thousand dollars.” There. That should shut him up.

It didn’t.

“Four thousand five hundred,” he countered.

“One thousand.”

“I must sell a rug. Look, today I get the bill from my son´s school.” He showed us a fax from the University of Pennsylvania – a tuition bill. Not my problem.

“One thousand.”

“Four thousand.”

I was tired and hungry and annoyed that we had wasted half an hour or two hours or however long it had been looking at rugs we had no intention of buying and certainly could not afford. We turned to leave. “Goodbye,” I said. The willingness to walk away. That is the secret to any negotiation.

“OK, OK. Twelve hundred dollars. That is my best offer.”

I looked at Primo. He shrugged. I threw out my response. “And one thousand for the other one.”

“OK,” Mohammed answered.

OK? Crap! I had just spent one thousand dollars and Primo had spent more than that on rugs we had never planned to buy. How had that happened?

We paid – Mohammed took American Express and Visa – while the assistants were sewing the rugs tightly into woven plastic bags. “I have these delivered to hotel for you,” Mohammed assured us. “No charge.” I would think not, after the profitable evening he had had, although I worried that maybe he was lying and we would never see the rugs again.

No, I am not a trusting person at all, but then, I’ve never lost money in a Ponzi scheme or to a con man.

The rugs were waiting when we returned to the hotel. We took them back to Steve and Megan’s. The next day, Megan took us back to the Rabat rug co-op, where all the products have price tags.

“Look!” I said. “That´s like the rug we got.”

Primo walked over to the rug to examine it. “Stop!” he said. “Don't come any closer.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“You really, really do not want to see the price tag. Just trust me on this.”

“Oh no!” I said. “How bad is it?”

He quickly assured me. “Oh, it’s not that bad! Don’t worry about it.”

Except he was not being exactly truthful. We returned to Morocco again after we got married and got a third rug. In Rabat. With the coaching of a friend of Megan’s who had been a Peace Corps volunteer with a Moroccan textile co-op and who knew rugs.

We paid $400 for our third rug.

* Which shattered into pieces during shipping back to the US, all of which he painstakingly glued back together.

In which we open the door to the asylum and slam it closed again

2011-10-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted anything about Sly and Doris. It has been pretty calm because I have had almost no interaction with them for the past two years. Primo's Christmas presents to me have been that I do not have to go with him to visit them, which works out well for all of us except Primo, who has to suffer alone.

I did send Doris an email for her birthday, which was the day after their refrigerator broke and the same day as Sly had surgery. I wrote this:

I'm sorry to hear that this day has been so difficult for you but am glad to know that the surgery went well. I'm really sorry to hear about your refrigerator! What a mess. It seems as if life can never go smoothly. I hope you were able to rescue most of your perishables and that this is the last of the drama for a while.

Doris responded:

Dear Golddigger,It meant a great deal to me that you would send a message regarding our extra stress at this time. The guy who delivered the new fridge arrived a little past nine--he was alone and extremely competent in measuring just what had to be moved to facilitate bringing the new fridge in and old one out. He helped enormously by emptying the old and assisting in filling the new. He left just 10 minutes before we left for the hospital. The cats were three hours past their suppertime--such meowing.Thanks for thinking of us, Doris

I answered,

I'm so glad the delivery man was helpful. That timing sure was tight.Our cats are not happy when their supper is delayed, either. They will let us know.I've been meaning to tell you: I love those grocery bags you gave me. I use them all the time. They are perfect for groceries and library books. We took them to Germany and to France - it was great to be able to tuck something small into my purse in case we found something we wanted to buy. I used to carry a backpack just in case, but much prefer these bags. They are so convenient and pretty.

Which inspired this note to Primo, who shared it with me (of course - I am his wife):

Dear Primo,
I decided not to send this message to Golddigger without your clearance. Let me know what you think.

Dear Golddigger,
I hope that someday you will welcome my wish to say, Love,Doris. It has hurt so much not to be able to narrow our ideological gaps. You and my son love each another. I want to love you as well. Enough said tonight, I'm not all together.

You might want to tell Primo that throughout his day not one health care worker, including docs, RNs, and subordinate personnel knew enough to say "lie" vs. lay. When we saw Maria for a brief time on Sunday, we asked how things were going at college, and she enthusiastically responded "good," instead of well. We didn't correct her. I remember how you chided us at the dinner table at Stephanie's house when Dad mentioned/corrected Maria about "these ones." One is either fur or agin maintaining English usage standards. The most egregious example I ran into recently was a quotation by billionaire, Mayor Michael Bloomburg of NYC wherein he talked about young people "graduating college."

I stormed upstairs as soon as I read this. I was so furious I could hardly breathe.

"Does your mother really think it is ideology that separates us? I couldn't care less about her political beliefs! She's the one who doesn't like what I think! But you and I don't agree and I'M MARRIED TO YOU. Obviously, political ideology is not as important to me as it is to her."

I stopped to draw a big breath.

"And the thing with Maria WAS NOT ABOUT SAYING 'THESE ONES'! I wouldn't have jumped on your dad for correcting an actual error that she'd made, even though I think he is mean about it and it's inappropriate. I stood up for her because she had not made a mistake. She had said "lemon EXtract" and your dad said she had said "lemon exTRACT" and was jumping all over her for it!"

"I know," Primo said. "I was there."

"So they've twisted it so that I am the villain here! Your dad couldn't possibly have made a mistake! Oh, this makes me SO MAD!"

Primo was laughing. I guess he was right - what can you do with this stuff but laugh? We're dealing with crazy people.

"I already told my mother not to send this to you."

"She better not," I stormed, "Or I will have to set her straight."

"And I told her that that incident was about lemon extract."

"Did you tell her that it is crazy to be obsessed with language when you are in the hospital and people are cutting you up? That perhaps what's more important is are they doing a good job on the medical stuff?"

He shook his head. "No point."

In which my glasses are stolen in Honduras

2011-10-13T12:01:00.000-07:00

I think I have told you guys I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile and that when I completed my two year stint (it's two years, people, TWO years - you authors whose characters join the Peace Corps and come home again after a year or decide month by month whether to stay longer - you have it all wrong. Please. A tiny little bit of research - peacecorps.gov - will give you the basics), I came back to the US over land.

One hundred forty nine hours on buses, trains and a few planes, including the 22-hour ride from Salta to Formosa (Argentina) - the ride with the guy who threw up and no air conditioning.

This was also the ride where the little kid in the seat in front of me had one of those noisy toy guns. It made a squealing, whirring sound every time the kid pulled the trigger, which was about every four seconds. At the beginning of this ride, before I realized that the ticket seller had lied to me and it was a 22-hour trip and not an 11-hour one, I thought 11 hours of a kid making that kind of noise was not a good prospect.

I looked around at the other passengers. Nobody else seemed to be bothered. This does seem to be a Latin American trait - they are pretty easygoing when it comes to kids.

Even though I had already lived in Latin America for two years and had become far less Type A than I used to be, I had not adopted that "que sera que sera" attitude when it came to children. As in, I did not think it was fine for the person next to me on the bus to have a seven year old in her lap when that meant that said child was pushing into my space. I didn't think it was OK for kids to run up and down the aisle of the bus, screaming.

But I was the stranger. It wasn't my country. I had to suck it up. When in Rome, etc, etc.

But 11 hours? With that noise?

No.

I stood, leaned over the seat, got the kid's attention, and asked him to hand me the toy.

He did.

Sucker.

I sat down and opened my book.

The kid watched me, stunned. Then his mother finally turned around, distracted, no doubt, by the peace and quiet that had descended upon us.

I handed the toy back to her and said sweetly, "Please don't let him play with this on the bus. The noise is very disturbing to the other passengers."

The mom was so shocked - perhaps that anyone would be bothered by her kid and yes I know parents, of necessity, become deaf to the constant racket that seems to accompany children - that she did as I asked.

Wait. That's not the main story. The story I want to tell is about when someone stole my glasses out of my backpack while I was wearing my backpack.

I had taken the bus to San Pedro Sula, which is a pit in the middle of Honduras. How can a country that has the lovely city of Tegucigalpa also have La Ceiba (pit) and San Pedro Sula?

The buses in Latin America vary from the very nice ejecutivo buses in Chile, Argentina and Mexico, with comfortable cushioned and reclining seats, a toilet, a TV and bingo. Blackout bingo. Not five in a line bingo. You don't want to shout "Bingo!" when you have only five. We played bingo on the plane in Peru. Don't have a movie? Or don't have time for a movie? There's always bingo.

Vary from nice buses to the old Duchess County ISD school buses that are no longer suitable for transporting American schoolchildren but are now perfect for Latin American adults, their children, their chickens, and their pirated cassette tapes. Three to a seat on the school buses. People and chickens in the aisles.

The bus to San Pedro Sula was probably one of the old school buses. Very crowded. As I got off the bus, my big backpack on my back and my small daypack clutched in front of me, I heard someone whisper, "They're robbing you."

To which I paid no attention because I was trying, in the crush, to get out of the bus.

It wasn't until I opened the pocket on my backpack that I discovered my glasses were missing.

My glasses! Who would steal glasses?!

I whirled around, looking for someone wearing my glasses. Only, because I didn't have my glasses on, I couldn't see very well. I began to cry tears of rage. I was DONE with Honduras. I had already been robbed in Tegucigalpa and then been cheated by a cabbie in La Ceiba.

My hat had been stolen from my head in Tegucigalpa. I was standing on a street corner, minding my own business, when I felt a "whoosh" on top of my head. I put my hand up to check and discovered that the hideous $2 baseball cap I had bought in Paraguay was gone.

If you're going to steal, at least steal something nice.

I ran in the direction I thought the thief had gone, trying to remember the Spanish word for "thief." "Ladron, ladron!" I shouted.

The crowd parted way.

I couldn't run well because 1. I can never run fast or well because I am a lazy, slow person and 2. I had my big backpack on my back.

I demanded of an onlooker: "Did you see who stole my hat?"

Yes, he told me, but he didn't stop the thief because what if he'd had a gun?

Oh for pity's sake.

In La Ceiba, the cabbie I asked told me that the only ferry out to the Bay Islands was in 20 minutes so yes, I had to go with him. He careened over the dirt road to the port, took my money, and left me at the isolated terminal, "terminal" meaning "a bench on the beach with no place to buy anything to eat or drink and no place to pee."

It took me half an hour to realize that no, the ferry was not leaving in 20 minutes and it took me another four hours to realize that the ferry was leaving in five hours.

My Honduras experiences had not been so good.

When I discovered I had been robbed again, just a few days later, but this time of something far more difficult and expensive to replace, I reached my limit. I started to cry. I flagged down a cab and gave him the address of my hotel.

(I use the word "hotel" loosely. I was staying at the South and Central America Handbook's "F" and "G" lodgings, which was the class of room with a shared bathroom and maybe windows. Maybe not. I paid between $4 and $10 a night. The $10 places weren't necessarily fancy - they were just in Argentina and Costa Rica, which are expensive compared to the rest of Latin America.)

I told the cabbie what had happened.

"Well, it is getting close to Christmas, you know," he told me.

So the thieves were getting their shopping done early by stealing my glasses?

He continued, "Don't worry! I know all the thieves around here! I know where they will take your glasses to sell. We can get them back."

I guess there is a big market for used prescription glasses in Honduras.

Then he drove ten blocks to get to my hotel, which was actually two blocks from the bus station.

Thief, meet thief.

He did, however, say that he would bring my glasses back to me and leave them with the clerk.

Liar.

I checked into my "G" lodgings, dragged my backpack up to the cinderblock room with one tiny window up in the corner, a single bed with what I hoped was clean sheets - sometimes it is better not have one's glasses - and a cement floor that also did not bear too close a look, dropped my things, and returned to the desk to talk to the clerk about my glasses. He did not offer much hope, but I kept thinking, "Who would want my glasses? They won't do anyone else any good!"

I left the hotel in search of food. I couldn't find a cab that wasn't going to charge me the Gringo Tax. Frustrated, I started to walk. Then I heard a kid say something in English. His parents were naturalized US citizens from Honduras and he had been born in New Orleans, where they now lived. They were in town visiting family. The mom asked if they could give me a ride.

Thrilled to find someone who was actually being nice to me, I accepted.

If this were a different kind of blog, this would be where I told you that they kidnapped me and tortured me and I barely escaped with my life, but this is a rainbows and butterflies blog, where everyone lives happily ever after (mostly), so guess what? They took me to Wendy's and bought my supper and were appalled that my glasses had been stolen. Then they took me back to the hotel. Where the clerk looked at me as if I was crazy when I asked if the cabbie had brought back my glasses.

I spent the rest of the trip either squinting when I was inside or trying to see through the dark lenses of my prescription sunglasses. I can tell you that the experience of watching the movie "Clueless" in a Mexico City cinema is not enhanced by watching it with sunglasses.

In which our basement floods

2011-10-06T14:44:00.000-07:00

Have I told you guys about our Annual Basement Flood? I think I have mentioned it in passing in other stories, but I have not told you the Flood Story in its entirety.

We have an old house.

We have an old house with old plumbing in a city where the city officials are reluctant to release the overfull storm sewers into the lake because of some stupid reason like the storm sewers are combined with the regular sewers (really good planning a few decades ago, hey?) and they don't want to put poop in the lake. I say, put the poop in the lake rather than in my basement.

But we discovered ten days after we closed on the house but three weeks before we moved in that the sewer drain in the basement backs up when it floods outside. Not enough to fill the basement, thank goodness, but enough to wander over to the rec room, the 20% of the basement that is finished, with a carpet, and soak the carpet.

The cement floor remains dry.

How lucky are we?

So. Flood Number One.

We had closed on the house and were moving in gradually from Primo's apartment. My stuff was in storage. On a Saturday early in June, we had horrible rain. Primo was out of town for the entire week. I went to the house on Monday to take a load of breakables and to continue cleaning the house, which looked clean to the naked eye but to the eye with glasses, it was gross. We bought the house from a bachelor who 1. never covered his food when he warmed it in the microwave and 2. removed his shirt to sit in bed with his back against the wall instead of the headboard. I would also guess that cleaning the baseboards and the tub had not been a priority for him.

When I walked down the stairs into the basement, I heard one of those sounds that you really never want to hear in your life: what carpet sounds like when it has been wet for two days in 90 degree heat.

The good part about all this was that Primo and I had hated the basement carpet when we looked at the house, but didn't think replacing a perfectly good, one year old carpet just because we thought it was ugly was a prudent use of our limited resources. We were going to be Very Brave and endure the ugly carpet. Such are the burdens we bear but such is our nobility that we bore them with nothing but a sigh.

The carpet was unsalvageable. Such is usually the case with hot, wet carpet.

So I called the insurance company (I had gotten the sewer backup rider just three weeks before oh I am brilliant) and I had the contractor who was already doing some minor things for us take the carpet out of the basement. I started calling carpet stores to get estimates on the red plaid carpet Primo and I had really liked in another house.

Then I called Primo.

Who freaked out.

Because that's what Primo does in a crisis.

Well, in a crisis that does not have to be addressed immediately. If it is a RIGHT NOW crisis, he is perfect. There was that afternoon last month when he casually strolled into the kitchen and asked for the fire extinguisher.

But why? I asked.

Oh because the gas grill was on fire and he needed to put it out before the garage caught on fire or before the grill melted.

Those were some of the best steaks we've ever had. Sear your steak on a grill that's literally flaming hot and you get a darn good steak.

But in a crisis that can be handled in steps, he goes into full freakout. Freakout + Distance = Extra Freakout and I had to remind him that I had run my own life and had owned my own house quite well before he and I ever crossed paths and I thought I could handle arranging to have a destroyed carpet removed from the basement.

We had the particle wood (don't be so cheap when you are remodeling a house) door frames replaced with oak, which was very wise because oak will expand and then shrink back when it floods. Particle board will not. This is very important if you are going to have a flood every year, as we do. We got a new red plaid carpet that we love and is heavy-duty industrial, made for commercial bar use, which means that it, too, is perfect for an annual flood. And I refinished the basement stairs, which are maple, rather than covering them with carpet. It is a crime, people, a crime to cover beautiful wood floors and stairs with carpet.

The next year, again in June, Primo came home at about 2 a.m. one night and woke me up, which he is usually very careful not to do. It was time for Flood Number Two.

"Get up," he announced flatly. "The basement is flooding."

Flooding on nasty carpet before we moved in was one thing. But flooding on our almost-new carpet that had a stereo, a TV, and a sofa on it was something else. I ran downstairs to survey the situation. Ran back upstairs and grabbed all our bath towels, then threw them on the carpet to blot up the water, which again, was not flowing to the bare cement but onto the carpeted section. The small carpeted section.

"What are you doing?" Primo shouted. "Those are the Good Towels!"

I replied that it was easier to wash and/or replace towels than it was to replace a carpet.

We sopped up the water as best we could, left the towels in the laundry room sink, and went to bed. First thing in the morning, I called the insurance company and an adjuster was there in three hours. I love you, USAA.

He looked at our basement, looked at the rug, the drywall, the doorframes, and told us that he could get some big fans to dry the carpet or we could do it ourselves.

As we had just filed a $2,500 claim 12 months prior, and as the cost of the fans would just reach our deductible, and as the customer service person at USAA assured me that if we did get black mold in our drywall or under the carpet later that that would be covered, and as the adjuster pointed out that he had a call to make at a warehouse where the roof had fallen in from the rain and there was about $2 million of water damage, we decided we could do this ourselves.

As instructed, we got a carpet cleaner from the hardware store, two fans, and a bunch of plastic sheeting and duct tape.

By the time we picked all that stuff up, my mom had arrived for her annual visit.

Oh yes - part of the Annual Basement Flood is that it must coincide with moving, company, or an out of town trip.

My mother blessherheart spent three hours sucking water up from that carpet. Primo also used the opportunity to buy himself a wet vac because you know there are so many times when you need one and then you don't have one so why not just buy one? Primo used the wetvac. Once we had sucked about five gallons of dirty water out of the carpet - how can a carpet that is vacuumed weekly get so dirty in just one year? - Primo used his crack engineering skills to create an airtight room that he then populated with two dehumidifiers and two fans.

He had to leave a tiny little space at the edge of both sealed doors so the cats had a way to get to their litter box. Then we had to teach the cats how to push the flap of plastic sheeting away from the wall and go on through to the furnace room where the litter box resides.

I don't know why we just didn't move the litter box upstairs. Maybe we thought it would be easier to teach the cats how to go through plastic sheeting than to learn a new location for the box.

The Pretty Cat, however, is not taking to this pushing through the plastic sheeting stuff. She doesn't like it at all. Primo has to pick her up and force her through as she ducks her head and claws at him. Noooooo!

The Smart Cat breezes through.

What finally convinces the Pretty Cat is when Primo turns on the dehumidifier by the furnace room door. Pretty Cat looooves noise. When I turn on the vacuum cleaner, she runs into the room to supervise. When the guys came to clean out the laterals to the main sewer with their noisy machine, she sat right next to the machine and purred. Pretty Cat loves noise so much she would marry it. The noise of the dehumidifier lured her through the flap. She sat next to that dehumidifier for hours. It was her kitty sauna.

We left the fans and the dehumidifier for three days. Everything dried. Done, we thought, as we mentally dusted our hands together.

We didn't want this to happen again. We called the sewer cleaning guys - the ones with the noisy machine - and had them run the line through the pipe. I asked them how frequently this should be done.

Me: When should we have our lines cleaned again?

Plumber: You're going to hate me for sayin' dis, but ya know, it could be two years, it could be five years. Da best ting to do is to wait until it floods again and den ya know how long ya need to go before ya clean.

Me: I think I'll have you guys come back in three years.

That was 2009. Then came Flood Number Three.

Last summer, we made it through June without a flood. We thought Yay! Our flooding days are over and the Hundred-Year Floods that we've had two years in a row are going to go back to being once every hundred years and we'll be dead before the next one.

In late July, two nights before we were going to the lake cottage and on the night that Primo's best friend from high school, Tyler, and his family were at our house for supper, as we were giving them a house tour and were on the second floor, we heard the Flood Frog beeping.

The Flood Frog is a little gizmo that Primo bought on woot.com that I thought was just another stupid waste of money but I guess I was wrong. The Flood Frog is a little plastic frog that has a sensor embedded in the bottom that beeps if it gets wet. We have it resting right next to the sewer drain in the furnace room. If water starts to back up from the drain, we know immediately.

Knowing doesn't help prevent the problem, but it does give you more time to worry about it.

It had been raining for the past several days, so we had prepared. The city engineer had told us about a device that blocked the sewer drain, an idea that was great in theory but ignores the fact that water is more determined than cement. Because of all the corrosion and dirt in our drain, we couldn't find a device to fit, so we improvised and stuffed rags down the opening.

DO NOT DO THIS.

Do not do this unless you want to find the tiny cracks in your basement floor, most of which are underneath the carpet, and which serve as the egress for the water that cannot get out of the sewer drain.

We heard the Flood Frog beep and ran to the basement, Tyler, his wife, and their three small kids behind us.

Not only did we have wet carpet right by the door to the furnace room, we also had wet carpet at the far end of the rec room.

Primo started cursing a blue streak. I always think of that line from A Christmas Story, where the narrator talks about how his father wove a tapestry of profanity that hovers over Lake Erie to this day. Primo was weaving his own tapestry.

1. Third year in a darn row that our basement floods.

2. In our attempt to prevent such flooding, we have made it worse.

3. We are leaving town in two days.

He had reason, I think.

Tyler drew himself up and said that he would appreciate it if Primo would not cuss around the kids.

Primo glared at him.

My opinion on this sort of thing is perhaps you could just remove your children from the situation. That's just me. Or maybe teach them that sometimes grownups say things that children are not supposed to say. I don't have kids, so I don't have a dog in this fight, but I would think it would be more rational to prepare children to live in the real world than to expect any adult who comes into contact with your children to walk on eggshells.

Primo and I have this down to a science by now. I have the hardware store on speed dial. I called them immediately and reserved the last available water sucking carpet cleaner. Primo got out the wet vac while I went to pick up the carpet cleaner. Primo directed Tyler to help him move the sofa. I got back and we started sucking water. One of the kids even helped. He thought it was fun. I was glad to have his help.

Once we had sucked up all the water we could, Primo set up the dehumidifiers and the fans and taped the plastic over the doors.

And then we ate supper.

Very late.

There was much wine involved.

In which Primo and I argue about whose parents have the right attitude about money

2011-09-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

This is why pre-marital counseling is important. Because they make you TALK ABOUT THE MONEY. When you don't talk about the money, you marry someone and then find out that she hasn't filed a tax return for years. Or that she has never gotten a social security number for her younger daughter. Who is ten. Or that she really doesn't make any money at her allegedly fancy job. But now it's too late. You're married and you're stuck with her, even though if you had known these things, you might not have married her.

I'm not talking about Primo and me, by the way.

But you probably figured that out.

Well anyway. I don't remember exactly when this happened, but Sly and Doris' CD player breaks. Fortunately, for them, we have an abundance of CD/DVD players at our house. More CD/DVD players than we have TVs or stereos (but not as many as we have remotes) so Primo mails the extra player to them.

"Are they going to pay for the shipping?" I ask.

"Why does it matter?" Primo responds.

"Because it cost twenty dollars to send that thing."

"That's nothing," he says.

"It's not nothing to me," I say. I, who paid for my own college through scholarships, loans, and working 60 hours a week in the summer and 20 hours a week during the school year because my parents did not have the money. I, who took my lunch to work most of my career because spending $5 or $7 or $10 to go out was wasteful when I could spend $1 to make my own.

Primo says I was poor when I was a kid, but I disagree. We lived just fine, but just didn't have luxuries, like going out to eat. His parents had the money to pay for his college. He worked, but he worked for beer money.

Consequently, we have very different ideas about money.

When my mom and Dr J were here for our wedding, Dr J forgot some clothes in the guest room closet. My mom asked me to send them to her house. When she sent me money for my birthday a month later, she included $6.73 to cover the shipping for Dr J's stuff.

"That's just silly," Primo said.

"Perhaps," I answered, "but my mother would never presume to spend our money."

My mother is the not penniless but needs to be careful widow on a very fixed income and Sly and Doris are the comfortable pensioned retirees who can afford cable, a gardener, a maid, booze*, frequent eating out, and the private school tuition** for one of their grandchildren.

It is my mother to whom it occurs that perhaps Primo and I are not made of money.

And it is Sly and Doris who assume that of course we have money to throw at them.

Which we do not.

And even if we did, that is not how I would want to spend my money.

* A lot.

** OK, they are helping with the tuition.

In which Sly and Doris say the same old same old

2011-09-23T10:42:00.000-07:00

Primo: Your mom sent us money for our anniversary. She didn't need to do that!

Me: I know.

Primo: She really didn't need to do that. She doesn't have that much.

Me: I know! I have had this conversation with her more than once. She insists.

Primo: My parents didn't even acknowledge it.

Me: [That's better than getting cheap Chinese pressed wood nesting tables with hummingbirds and hibiscus painted on them.]

Primo: That's their way of letting me know I made a mistake in marrying you.

Me: No it isn't. Their way of letting you know you made a mistake is to tell you that you made a mistake.*

* Which is what they did yesterday in their conversation with Primo when they opened the Complaint Vault and reiterated that

1. I should have figured out that they didn't like me and earned their approval and liking, although

2. there really isn't anything I could have done to change their opinion of me and it's too late now anyhow,

3. Doris has "reached out" to me on many occasions and I have rejected her, even though neither Primo nor I can think of a single example of such rejection, as I have answered every (seven) email she has ever sent to me and she has never called me on the phone,

4. they cannot believe I have a friendship with Stephanie because she and I are not intellectual equals because as everyone knows, intellect is the only important thing in a relationship, not niceness or common interests and

5. Primo made a mistake marrying me and he only thinks he's happy, but he's not really happy.

In which I kiss a married man but I didn't know he was married the entire time we were flirting over the phone at work

2011-09-15T01:22:00.000-07:00

Before grad school, I worked in Austin for this company. This was back in the olden days when to conduct business with someone, you actually had to speak to that person instead of emailing him. As my company was an international company and even the domestic operations were wide flung, I found myself needing to talk to company employees in other locations about our mutual interests.

There was this guy in Oregon who was working on an account with me. He was very funny and we played off well against each other. (Are you sensing a pattern here? If a man is funny, I am willing.) We flirted and flirted and flirted because over the phone, everyone is good looking and everyone is interesting and these were the days when there was time to goof off at work because you spent half your time waiting for your secretary to type your darn letters already and wouldn't it be better if there were just a way to do it yourself so you weren't caught in this ridiculous loop of editing typewritten after typewritten draft as you struggled for the best way to tell someone your company was raising their premiums like 17%, which is a ton of money and nobody, I mean NOBODY wants to deliver that letter because most people don't like being the bearers of bad news. Unless someone is a heartless jerk, I promise you that he is not enjoying telling you about a price increase.

Back to - let's call him Sancho. Back to Sancho. We flirted and talked about our lives and where we had gone to college and what we liked to do for fun.

The one thing Sancho neglected to mention was that one of the things he liked to do for fun was to hang out with his wife.

Every year, my company held a big sales conference. If your sales were high enough, then you got to go and hang out with the other stellar sales people at a resort in Palm Springs where I thought my $15 per diem breakfast allowance would let me eat like a queen, but then I discovered that in Palm Springs, $15 buys you a bowl of oatmeal and leaves you just a tiny bit of change.

One year, my sales were high enough. Even though Austin was the smallest market in my division, I was in the top 30% of sales, not that I'm bragging or anything, but I was a pretty good salesperson considering I am one of the least salesy people you will ever meet. My boss, who is still my friend, could sell ice to Eskimos, but me? I was all about the facts, laid out objectively, along with the pros and cons and an explanation of how I would handle the cons because let's face it, no matter what, your company is going to screw up and your customer is going to be upset, so when that happens, how are you going to fix it and return your customer to her deserved state of happiness? Don't ever believe someone who tells you that his product or service will never have any problems. Everyone has problems. Will they fix them is the question.

Sancho attended the same conference. I didn't know what to look for, as I had not seen a photo, but I was eager to meet him. I found him that first day by searching nametags. My first words to him, after I 1. looked at his nametag and 2. looked at his left hand, were a blurted, "But you didn't tell me you were married!"

He mumbled.

There were parties every night. The first night, a bunch of us, including Sancho, were at the resort disco, dancing, drinking (this was back when I still thought tequila was my friend, which it is not) and having fun. My division's VP, Bart, was there, dancing to "Wild Thing." I thought he was too old to dance - he must have been in his mid 40s. Had he no dignity?

Bart complained of a headache. In my constant attempt to advance my career by sucking up to the higher-ups, I told him I had some aspirin in my room. I could get it for him.

"I'll come with you," he said.

I stopped, stymied. Bart had a reputation. He was known as a ladies' man. He was handsome, in that old man, mid-40's way, with his gray hair, periwinkle blue eyes and his old, mid-40s face. Sha. Like anyone that age still had sex? Gross.

He scared me. I didn't want to fool around with him and I didn't want to be put in a situation where my own reputation might be compromised. Remember this.

But he insisted on accompanying me to the room. We arrived. After I put the key in the lock, I turned to him.

"Stay here," I instructed him. I didn't want him coming into the room with me! What would people say? He had a reputation.

He stayed in the hall. I fetched his aspirin. Gave it to him. We returned to the disco, incident free.

There was Sancho.

Did I mention I had been taking tequila shots with my friend Elise? And that my judgment was impaired?

Actually, it's not judgment that gets impaired when you drink, is it? You still know right from wrong, but avoiding wrong just doesn't seem so important. It's like being on a diet and knowing that eating that second piece of pie is a bad, bad idea but it's a bad idea for the future and overall but right now it seems like a really good idea. So the judgment is intact but the desire to act based on good judgment is not.

Sancho. Tequila. He had been drinking as well. For some reason, we left the disco and ended up in a stairwell, where we started kissing. Even tequila'd up, I knew better than to take him back to the room.

"I shouldn't be doing this," he said.

Which was absolutely true and I hope that this one incident shamed him so much that he never strayed again. But in the meantime, we kept kissing and I am ashamed to say that it took a hotel security guard telling us to take it elsewhere to make us stop. If we went elsewhere, we would really be choosing to do wrong. An incidental kiss in the stairwell? Hmmm. But making a decision to continue the kissing elsewhere? No way to excuse that. Not even any way to excuse the stairwell kiss.

He avoided me the rest of the conference. And we didn't speak on the phone anymore. It was done.

In which Sly criticizes Paul McCartney's singing

2011-08-25T08:27:00.000-07:00

Sly is a singer. Or used to be. We asked Sly and Doris if they would sing at our wedding and they declined. Oh, they were out of practice. Right. But I didn't really care. The request was about making them feel included, not because I really wanted them to sing.

I wanted to elope. If I had to have a wedding, it was going to be as no-frills or at least as no-Sly and Doris as possible. No music, no flowers, a simple red and white dress that I have worn again.

Sly considers himself quite the expert on singing and singers and he may well be. Well, he does know about singing. Classical singing. And classical music. Primo says there was no pop music in his house when he was a kid. Just classical. All the time.

Which might explain why Primo is such a pop music fan now. He even likes Britney Spears. How do I know that? Because early in our relationship, he played a Britney Spears CD. And he wasn't even doing it ironically. He really likes her. Our conversation went like this:

“Is that Britney Spears?” I asked in horror.

“Uh huh,” he answered absently.

Not even a trace of shame in his voice. Not one drop.

“You have a Britney Spears song on your CD?”

“Well, I didn’t make this CD,” he explained. “But I do like this song.”

“You like Britney Spears? You are admitting to this?”

“I like pop music,” he shrugged. “I have some Britney Spears CDs at home. Yes, I like her.”

“You know this means I have to break up with you, right?”

Rolled eyes. “It could be worse. I could like some headbanger band, like Crocus or, or, or….”

He couldn’t think of anything worse.

But at least Primo acknowledges that Britney can sing. His taste might be suspect (See: Primo and his flowered shirts) but he does not apologize for it and he does not try to diminish the talent of those who make a living singing.

Sly, on the other hand, cannot bear to see anyone be better than he. Or be considered better than he. He refuses to acknowledge that someone, somewhere else might have talent. What do you expect? He can't even take talent in his own son.

So when Paul McCartney came up in conversation one day, his dismissive comment was, "If only he could sing."

Right.

In which we try to figure out what Sly and Doris have planned for their cats

2011-08-18T11:33:00.000-07:00

March 2010 At Sam's dad's memorial service, we discover that one of the issues Sam and his brother faced was what to do with their father's dog. Mr SD died. His dog did not. Fortunately, Sam's brother and sister in law decided to keep the dog. They already have two. What's one more? That attitude works when you are talking about nice pets.

Primo and I have been working on our wills. My big concern that my hard-earned money not go to Sly and Doris, which might happen if Primo and I die at the same time and we do not have a will. Well, I have had a will since I was 25, but Primo didn't have one.

One of the first things I put into some special instructions to my sister (our executor) was what to do about the cats.* And this was before Sam's dad died. You can't abandon your pets and you shouldn't make your executor find a new place for them to live. There are enough other things to deal with.

But when I read Sly and Doris' will, I saw no provision for their cats.

Primo is the executor of their will. They think it's a privilege. I think it will be a pain in the neck, given how much crap they have, although even if Primo weren't the executor, he would still probably be stuck cleaning out that house.

Their cats are awful. Well, one of them is. Medea, aka as "Puff" in another post, is a bitch. She bites and scratches and attacks. Snow, the other one, is just boring. They are both longhairs, which means lots and lots of shedding.

We already have two cats. Two gently, sweet cats who are half the size of Medea and Snow. Two cats who don't know how to fight. When they play fight each other, their claws are always retracted.

Medea would have them for breakfast.

We are not taking those cats.

I will give them to a shelter before I will have them in my house.

I ask Primo to ask his mom and dad what provisions they have made for the cats. "Make sure they know that we are not taking them!" I say.

Six months later, Sly asks Primo if we will take their cats. Now.

Primo says No way Jose.

* Give them back to the purebred cat rescue place where we got them along with $2,000.

In which I find out that Ted was kicked out of seminary for having an affair

2011-08-11T17:10:00.000-07:00

You guys! I thought I had published all the Ted stories. But I just found a draft of another part of the saga. What a jerk he was. Sheesh.

If you don't remember him, click on the "Ted" label below to refresh your memory. If you don't feel like reading all that, then here is a summary:

Very charming guy I met at an alumni event. Clergyman in a denomination where dating and marriage are allowed, hence trustworthy, right?

He charmed me. We slept together once. And then he ditched me, very cruelly.

So here's what happened after he ditched me (other than my discovering he had been dating the woman he married a year later all along):

I make a list of all the things I never liked about Ted anyhow. He has bad taste in movies: he thought Runaway Bride and The Matrix were great. I thought Bride was stupid and I walked out of Matrix halfway through. He has bad taste in music. The radio stations he listens to play the worst of the worst.

OK. I realize that I am defining "bad taste" as "stuff I don't like," but isn't that how everyone does it?

I remember that he was rude to his mother the time I met her. She was asking him what I thought was a perfectly innocent question and he told her curtly to drop it. This is not a nice attitude toward women. Even if your mom is a jerk, at least be nice to her in front of other people.

Mary Linda called me one night shortly after Ted stopped calling. She said, "I'm not sure I should tell you this. I asked Mary Ann what she thought and we decided you need to know."

I braced myself.

"I was talking to someone who is a family friend of [Ted's parents]. She told me that the reason Ted was kicked out of seminary was that he had had an affair. Her comment was that he leaves women in far worse condition than he found them. And that nothing is ever his fault."

I was stunned. I didn't believe it. He didn't tell me he was kicked out. He implied he had chosen to transfer to the local seminary.

He had made a big deal of the fact that he considered honesty to be the most important factor in a relationship. His whole reason for breaking things off with me was that I had been "dishonest" with him. I decided I would ask him about it and let him tell his side of the story. But he didn't call.

The coup de grace is when I find out he owns a house. I surmise that he and his ex-wife bought it and that he has it rented out now. (It's amazing what you can learn on the internet.) I drive past the house to check it out.

It is in horrible condition in a neighborhood that is obviously all rentals. I know what he paid for it and am shocked at his poor financial judgment. There are a lot of things I can forgive, but mismanaging money is not one of them. Not only did he pay a lot for an ugly house in a run down neighborhood, but the house is in disrepair, so he is not even taking care of his investment.

Hmm. Could I really have spent a lifetime with someone like that? No, nein, nyet.

In which I get my bellybutton pierced so I will have a flat tummy but it doesn't work and all I do is pass out

2011-08-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

Have I ever told you guys about the time I got my bellybutton pierced?

I was 39, I think, and saw my youth flashing before my very nearsighted, astigmatic eyes. I also saw photos of young women with pierced bellybuttons and flat, smooth bellies.

Obviously, the piercing caused the flat, smooth belly. I didn't get an A in probability and statistics for nothing. Correlation and causation are the same thing, right?

But I am not big on getting shots or being stuck. Almost every time I have ever had blood taken, I have passed out. This might have something to do with the fact that at the blood drive during my freshman year of college, which was the first (and the last) time that I gave blood voluntarily, I ignored the blood peoples' warning to eat breakfast before I had a pint of my precious bodily fluid withdrawn from me.

Oh that! I thought. They mean other people! I'm special. My blood sugar doesn't work the way everyone else's blood sugar does.

I merrily lay down, extended my arm, and then watched and felt as my O- blood passed through the tube lying on my forearm.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

That was the pulse of the warm blood. Passing out of me. Over me. Away from me.

I am getting a little lightheaded just writing about it. And this happened in 1982. Which, for those of you who are bad at math, was a long time ago.

I passed out.

When I came to, I looked up, panicked. I didn't recognize any of the faces. I didn't know what had happened. But even as the words left my mouth - "Where am I? What happened?" I thought, Don't say it! It's a cliche'!

That's exactly how I felt. Maybe that's how clichés get started: because they describe how something really is.

Ever since then, my body has reacted the same way almost every time, even with just a tiny amount of blood to be taken.

Blood goes out, so do I.

When I had blood drawn as part of my Peace Corps physical, I didn't pass out until 15 minutes later, as I was walking down the hall to the next exam. I stopped, leaned against the wall, then slid all the way down to the floor, my head falling down between my legs.

OK, not really because I am have no flexibility at all. I am hoping my yoga class will take me to the point where I can actually touch my toes without bending my knees. My head rolled down and I was slumped over, but I didn't look like a rag doll. I probably looked like a wooden puppet - bent over in some places but no graceful, elegant, flexible fainting.

I had a minor thingy done in my doc's office a few years ago. No blood involved, but cutting and scraping. I warned him I might faint.

I did faint.

He told me I had a very good vaso-vagal response.

I was quite proud.

I also fainted when I had my eye exam and they did the part where the machine touched my eyeball, but you can understand that: A MACHINE TOUCHED MY EYEBALL! Now I refuse that part of the test.

I faint. I am not squeamish about blood in or on someone else - if there is an accident, you want me around because I am the one who will perform CPR or call 911 or keep the motorcyclist with the head injury from wandering out in traffic.

That happened once: my boyfriend and I were stuck in traffic on Lamar in Austin and I noticed that the guy on the motorcycle next to us had just been knocked over. I jumped out of the car, ran to the guy, got people to help me lift the bike off him, yelled at someone to call 911, and then kept the guy from wandering off. I snapped at my boyfriend to do something and help me because the biker outweighed me by 80 pounds.

Do what? my boyfriend asked.

You're a doctor, I said.

I'm an optometrist, he answered. What should I do? Check his eyes?

Back to the bellybutton.

I had a little fainting problem.

But there would be no blood here! And the bellybutton was before the doc's office and the eye exam. I had no evidence that non-blood related pokings could cause loss of consciousness.

And the truly important thing was that I wanted a flat tummy that could be shown in public without fear of ridicule. If I got a belly button ring, my belly would be flat. It would not be slightly fluffy as it is now and was then. Flat, maybe even with some rippling abs.

A girl can dream, can't she?

My friends Leigh and Ilene accompanied me to the tattoo/piercing salon a mile from my house. The parlor was in an old Queen Anne in Cooper Young. Black light posters. Black lights. Tattoo designs hanging from the wall. Knick knacks on the mantel. Purple doors and trim. Not my taste, but not my house.

Leigh drove. Ilene provided the medical expertise, evaluating the cleanliness of the operation and giving me her doctor opinion of it. She and the piercer discussed piercings in places I had never heard of being pierced and really did not want to think about but ouch. Really? REALLY?

The piercer prepped. Washed his hands, put on gloves, got the needle and the ring out of the autoclave. I hope there was an autoclave. I don't think Ilene would have let me proceed with unsterilized equipment.

I lay down on the stainless steel exam table, lifted my shirt. He pierced. It hurt a little. But I was fine - on my back, looking at the black light posters on the ceiling. If such posters weren't there, then they should have been. Why don't docs put something interesting on the ceiling to read? Patients do spend some time on their backs and a little bit of distraction would be nice, although in my current doc's defense, he is pretty good at the small talk and launches straight into the Packers as his hands are messing around with my hoo-hah. I'd rather talk about football or any kind of sport than keep a "I'm not really noticing that a man who is not my husband has his hand up my hoo-hah" silence.

I sat on the piercing table for a while. Ilene and Leigh looked at tattoo patterns and talked to the piercer. I decided I was OK so we left. Got into Leigh's car. Three minutes and three blocks from the parlor, I fainted. Almost fainted.

"I think I'm going to pass out," is what I said.

Leigh stopped the car. Doctor Ilene jumped out of the front seat and opened the back door so she could see me. Did her doctor stuff and revived me.

Later told me she had never dealt with a fainting before. She's a pediatrician and I guess sick kids don't pass out so much.

Ilene insisted I take the front seat so I could recline. She got into the back seat. Leigh started the car again. Two minutes and two blocks after that, Leigh said, "I'm getting television."

"Tunnel vision," I corrected her. Didactic and a pain in the ass, even post almost fainting. Don't you love being around people who correct your grammar and word choice? Even when they know what you meant? But just want to point out that you made a mistake? Yeah me too. My only defense is that I was still a little woozy. I usually make corrections only in my head, not out loud. I have been working on it for years and am a lot better than I used to be. I'm surprised nobody ever slapped me before.

"Stop the car!" Ilene said.

Ilene can see the big picture.

"No, I'm fine," Leigh answered slowly as she waved Ilene away.

I thought about what Leigh had just said - the television/tunnel vision part - and realized what was going on.

"Stop the car!" I said.

"Yes, stop the car!" Ilene yelled.

Leigh stopped.

"I can make it home," she insisted. "I'm just a little dizzy."

Leigh was having a sympathy faint with me.

Ilene did her doctor magic and then threw Leigh into the back seat. "I'm driving," she announced.

Two fainters, one doctor. Pathetic.

The bad news - other than my inability to stay conscious - was that the piercing wouldn't heal. The waistband of my skirts rubbed against it. Every time I hugged my boyfriend, the ring hurt. I couldn't hug him close.

The baddest news is that my belly did not get flat, taut and smooth.

It stayed fluffy.

All that effort to no avail.

After six months, I climbed up to the attic where I kept my toolbox, found a needle-nosed pliers, and pulled the ring out.

I still have a fluffy tummy.

In which Primo cannot take advantage of a long boring drive to get the weekly phone call with his parents over with

2011-07-29T09:36:00.000-07:00

Me: Did you make The [obligatory to Sly and Doris if you don't call us you don't love us and we will punish you but darned if we ever bother to call you weekly] Call yesterday [while he was on the road for 90 miles and had his fancy new phone thingy in the car to go with his new smartypants phone]?

Primo: No.

Me: Why not? It would have been an efficient way to get it over with.

Primo: It was close to when they have their Drink.

[Which of course is not a drink but the beginning of an evening of drinking such that they rarely remember conversations they've had once they are an hour into Drink, which means if Stephanie, my sister in law, calls them to offer to pick up things at the grocery store for them, they are 1. ugly to her and 2. accuse her the next day of Never Calling Them. Remember when they stayed with us for NINEDAYS at our wedding how they went through a half gallon - maybe a gallon? - of bourbon and a liter of brandy in six days and two bottles of wine a night? And yet they don't have the money for oh, someone to come in a few times a week to do light housekeeping and cooking.]

Me: So?

Primo: They don't like it when I call then.

Me: Even though that might be convenient for you?

Primo: Exactly. It's not about me. It's not about what might be convenient for me. It's always all about them.

In which my cleaning lady breaks bad on my white sofa but it's sort of my fault

2011-07-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

I hired Esperanza, she who did laundry and cleaned windows, and things went well for a while.

I recommended her to my friends.

My friends liked her at first.

Then there were problems. Big problems.

Esperanza let my friend Holly's dog out, despite being told repeatedly that she had to latch the gate when she came in and keep the door closed. The dog got out, the dog got out, the dog got out - and finally, the dog was hit by a car. And died.

Which was bad enough, but Holly didn't fire Esperanza (it is very hard to find someone good help), who then left the door open and the cat got out. The cat was not killed, but that was when Holly decided ya basta. Esperanza had to go.

I should have fired Esperanza in solidarity. I would have gotten major friend credits (I fired my maid because she was a bad maid for you!) and my sofa would not have been destroyed.

My sofa. One of my first adult furniture purchases. I bought it at an estate sale in Houston. It needed re-upholstering but a person who is buying used furniture is probably not in a position to be paying for such fancy stuff. An old white sofa with great solid 1920's bones - I could throw a blanket over it and it would be fine.

For many years, it served me well. When I went to the Peace Corps, my friends Eric and Nancy stored it in their house after warning me that they had three cats who loved to claw on furniture.

"It needs re-upholstering anyhow," I shrugged.

True to the promise, the cats made short work of the sofa. When I moved to Miami, I discovered the wonder of little old Cuban men who worked in their garage and did great work for low prices. I found fabric remnants and a Little Old Cuban Guy (I also found a LOCG for my washer and dryer and for shoe repair - oh, how I miss Miami, home of the LOCG) who picked up the sofa from my house and then returned it a week later, looking almost new.

Then, when my employer told me my services were needed in another city, or, put another way, that my paycheck would now be delivered to Another City and that was where I could pick it up. The movers put a two-inch tear in the upholstery.

Hardly a big deal, but their insurance paid for the sofa to be re-upholstered yet again. This time, I got fancier and got much nicer fabric because well - because someone else was paying for it and that's just human nature. The sky's the limit when it's someone else's checkbook is my motto.

When my mother found out that I had picked white fabric (with a subtle jacquard weave of red and gold), she sighed and said, "I'm never going to be a grandmother, am I?"

Nope. Never really cared about having kids.

The new upholsterer had some tricks that even the LOCG didn't have and did things with the springs and the cushions that made the sofa comfortable for the first time. With the leftover fabric, he made four matching pillows. My sofa was complete.

So when I came home from work one day to find that someone had scribbled on one of the pillows with a black pen, I was not happy.

At first, I thought maybe my then-boyfriend or I had sat on the sofa with a pen in our pocket, but then I realized that the pattern was not that of an accidental, one-time pen leakage. Then I saw that another pillow was defaced in the same way. And the sofa itself – several lines about eight inches long right in the middle of the seat back and little circles in each of the buttons.

Three pillows. With ink stains. With the ink-stained side turned toward the back of the sofa.

The odds of that happening randomly are

1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/8 = 12.5%

That is, the odds of each pillow being turned with the ink side down are one in two. These are independent odds: the position of one pillow does not determine the position of another. To get the overall odds, multiply the independent odds by each other.

Oh man I hope I'm doing this right. It has been 20 years since I had probability and statistics. I did well (in grad school, when I actually attended the class, as opposed to college P&S, where I went four times and got only a C can you imagine?), but 20 years is a long time.

Whatever. What this number - 12.5% - tells you is that it is highly unlikely that all three pillows ended up ink side down by accident.

Conspiracy.

I called Esperanza. “Esperanza, I just found that someone drew on the sofa pillows with a pen. And on the sofa. I think it was Isabel.” Isabel was Esperanza’s two-year-old daughter.

“Oh, yes,” Esperanza said. “Don’t worry. I’ll clean it next time I come.”

“No!” I said sharply. “Don’t touch it. I’m going to take the pillows to the cleaners and see what they say.”

“OK,” she said cheerfully.

“You could have ruined it. It cost $1,000 to have that couch covered. I need to know the best way to do this,” I snapped.

“OK,” she said.

“I expect you to pay for everything,” I continued.

Silence.

“It was your daughter who did this,” I told her.

“OK,” she said again, not so cheerfully this time.

“Do not bring Isabel with you here any more if you are not going to watch her,” I said.

Here's a word problem: Your cleaning lady has caused $1,000 worth of damage. You pay her $60 once every three weeks. How do you recover your money, especially considering you probably don't want her to be your cleaning lady any more?

The dry cleaner shook his head sorrowfully when he saw the pillows. "No ma'am," he said. "Ah cain't get those stains out."

This was the last straw. Esperanza's cleaning had already slipped - she had gone from deep cleaning to maintenance cleaning mode. Yes, I wanted my windows washed every three weeks. I was paying what amounted to $20 an hour, which she may or may not have been declaring on her taxes. For 20 tax-free dollars, I want washed windows every time. Yes, I am a bitch that way.

Some of the things she had done that I don’t think someone should do if she is being paid $60 to clean a house included

• Leaving the pictures knocked askew after dusting them
• Leaving bookcases, cedar chests and beds five inches from their normal positions
• Leaving dirty rags on top of the radiator
• Leaving dirty rags in the kitchen sink
• Not cleaning the lint trap in the dryer
• Not bothering to put the trash in the trash can outside and leaving it against the side wall instead (my cleaning ladies just couldn't get that trash where it belonged)
• Dusting pictures so vigorously that the plaster crumbled around the nails, requiring me to re-plaster, re-paint and then re-hang the pictures
• Hiding the dishes (well, OK, maybe not hiding, but not bothering to put like with like, so I can’t find anything – if all the Tupperware is in one place, don’t you think that’s where you would put any other Tupperware?)
• Leaving a dryer full of clothes because she is in a hurry
• Not cleaning the cobwebs from the ceiling

Esperanza wasn't answering her phone and then she wasn't returning her messages. When I got a message from her that she was having problems with her husband, I thought, That's it. That's enough. I don't want any more drama. I hadn't wanted to tell her she was fired by answering machine, but when I couldn't ever speak to her, I finally left a message with her fifth grade son not to return and to drop the key in my mail slot. I was done. Any bad housekeeping in the future would be done by me, for free.

In which I get a new cleaning lady who does windows

2011-07-14T16:39:00.000-07:00

I told you guys about Marisol, my cleaning lady in Chile. It was a few years again before I had another cleaning lady. It took me 18 months to find a job once I returned to the US from my Peace Corps stint. Companies were not begging to hire me. Something about the reputation the Peace Corps has for being a haven for chain smoking, Teva wearing, kumbayah singing hippies.

Sure, there are chain smoking, Teva wearing, kumbayah singing hippies in the Peace Corps, but not many: cigarettes are expensive for a Peace Corps volunteer! And is there any sane person who can hear that kumbayah song without wanting to punch someone? It reeks of Marty Haugen, Gather hymnal triteness. Protestants are lucky: they get the good music in church.

No, I was in the Peace Corps where we made brownies and went to the movies and talked about how we were going to frame our Peace Corps experience on our resumes. We were in it for the adventure and the career enhancement. If we changed or saved the world in the process, that would be great, but my great takeaway from my two years in the Peace Corps was that the world does not want to be changed or saved.

Back to the cleaning lady. It wasn't until I'd been back at work and saving money for a few years that I felt that I could afford a cleaning lady. I was at a point where I was going to indulge in major luxuries: fresh flowers, new underwear (including gym socks), and a cleaning lady. I was tired of living poor.

My real estate fairy godmother/landlady Mary Linda recommended her two cleaning ladies, who worked as a team.

Susan and Cindy were nice. They had thick Arkansas accents, which was logical because they lived on the other side of the river in Arkansas. They did a decent job - better than Marisol. Nobody was using my vegetable brush to clean the toilet. My house was surface cleaned once every three weeks: dusted, vacuumed, tub and toilet cleaned, floors washed. It was nice to have one weekend a month where I didn't have to do that stuff.

Then came the day when I patched the plaster around all the outlets I'd had installed when I bought my house. My bungalow had been built in 1922 when one outlet per room seemed extravagant.

Digression to related story:

When I was in Chile, several of the women from my group, most of whom did not have electricity or indoor plumbing in their country homes, went to Washington D.C. for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival as exhibitors. One evening, they had supper at the home of the Chris, the woman at the Inter-American Development Bank who managed the grant my organization got from the IADB. When the women got back to Chile, they were telling the rest of us about all the appliances in Chris' apartment: a washing machine, a dryer, a microwave, a dishwasher, a TV, an answering machine.

"Wow," one of the Mapuche women gasped. "There must be outlets all over the place!"

End digression. Back to my house. When I moved in, I had an electrician install an outlet on every wall and a phone jack in every room. In retrospect, the phone jacks were unnecessary, but had I known that in 2001, I would be a rich woman today from my investments in cellphone stock.

The electrician was careless and had knocked holes bigger than necessary in the walls. He did not patch the plaster after he installed the plates.

I, being a complete non-confrontational wimp when it comes to holding people to the standard to which they should be held if I am paying $1,200 for a job because what if they get mad at me?, never said to him, "Hey. You need to finish this job and patch the plaster."

Nope. It was far easier for me to spend a few hours removing the plates, spreading wet plaster in the hole with a putty knife, waiting for it to dry, sanding it, painting it and re-attaching the plates than to tell someone to do his darn job.

I had finished the plastering etc. and had vacuumed the plaster dust from my beautiful wood floors. Oh how I loved that little bungalow. Loved it and would move back there in a second. I had put the vacuum cleaner, a mid-century Electrolux that the previous owner had left in the attic, back in its attic home. That's where it had to live: Old houses have almost no closet space and I sure wasn't going to waste clothes and shoe storage areas on cleaning equipment.

It wasn't until I was getting ready for bed that night that I noticed the plaster dust on the floor in the bathroom. I had forgotten to vacuum it.

Oh tosh, I said to myself. What a mess.

Then I remembered that Cindy and Susan came the next day. Cool. They would be washing the bathroom floor anyhow, so I would just leave it.

I was not in the habit of leaving my house in mess for the cleaning ladies. First, I am not a messy person. I do not like clutter. My house is usually pretty tidy, although marrying a man who descends from hoarders has made my life a little more challenging. Second, I did not want my cleaning ladies wasting time putting away my clean dishes and throwing away newspapers. I wanted them to do the stuff I really hate doing, like cleaning the bathroom and washing the floors.

I got home from work the next night and discovered that the plaster dust was still on the floor.

The normal procedure for cleaning a floor is to sweep or vacuum and then use a wet mop or a rag.

Cindy had neither swept nor mopped. Neither vacuumed nor ragged.

For $60, I can not clean my house myself.

We had already had a few incidents that I had overlooked, so much did I hate cleaning my own house. I came home from work one night to find the trash next to the back door in the kitchen with a note explaining that Susan couldn't get the back door open.

Yes, the key was tricky.

But - it was also possible to take the trash out the front door and carry it around to the trash can in the back yard. Going out the back door was the easiest way to the trash can but not the only way.

I fired them.

Only I did it the chicken way: I told them that I had to cut back on my expenses. I should have told the truth but then, I wasn't their manager. I wasn't responsible for their professional development.

Then I had a problem: I had become accustomed to the leisurely life of a woman who does not clean her own house all the time. I wanted that one out of three Saturdays back.

I asked around. My friend Maria Antonette recommended her cleaning lady. I had seen Toni in action cleaning her own house and I knew she didn't play. Her standards were high and her house was spick and span.

I asked Esperanza, her cleaning lady, to come in for an interview. We walked around the house as I pointed out what I would have her do.

She looked at my windows, which I think I had washed once since moving in and then only on the inside - the outsides were dirty - and asked me how I preferred her to clean them.

We were speaking Spanish, so I asked her to repeat her question, thinking I had misunderstood.

"How do you want me to clean the windows? With newspaper or with rags?"

I stopped. Turned. Looked straight at her.

"You do windows?" I asked.

She was as baffled as I was. "Isn't it part of cleaning a house?"

Wow. She hadn't been in this country long. I recovered quickly. "Yes, it is. Of course."

Then she asked me how I wanted her to do the laundry, explaining that her husband, who worked at FedEx, which was why I was pretty sure she was not an illegal alien, was very picky and she separated everything.

I asked again, in astonishment: "You do laundry?"

And again, I got her baffled response. "Isn't that part of cleaning a house?"

So yes, I hired her, even though she told me she would have to bring her infant daughter to work with her. How much trouble can a baby in a carrier be?

The first day she cleaned, when I came home from work, she was waiting for me. She wanted me to inspect to make sure she hadn't missed anything.

My house sparkled. The light reflecting from the inside of the windows made it look like I was inside a diamond.

I gasped. "It's perfect!" I told her. I was so impressed at how good the windows looked half clean that the next day, I got out the ladder and cleaned the outsides of the windows.

I had high hopes for a beautiful relationship.

Unfortunately, that was the high point. I should have fired her after she let my friend's dog get killed, if not just for solidarity then just because her toddler daughter never would have had the chance to scribble with black ink all over my newly reupholstered white sofa.

But I'll tell you about that later.

In which my cleaning lady uses a vegetable brush to scrub my toilet and the mystery of my frequent illness might have been solved

2011-07-05T01:50:00.000-07:00

I know it seems like a rich lady, first world problem to complain about How Hard It Is To Find Good Help These Days, but that's not going to stop me. It is hard to find good help. It is hard to find someone who will clean your house as well as you would, that is, assuming you are a good housecleaner.

If you are a crummy housecleaner, it is pretty easy to find a cleaning lady who will do a crummy job. I have employed such women before.

It's not just a first world problem, either. It's hard to Find Good Help when you are a Peace Corps volunteer. I had a cleaning lady when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile.

Yes, you read that right. I was a Peace Corps volunteer with a cleaning lady. (I also had a gardener.)

Don't laugh. You, too, would get a cleaning lady if it cost you ten dollars for half a day's work and your alternative was to wash your clothes by hand in the bathtub.

Note I did not say your alternative was to take your clothes to a laundromat.

The only laundromats I ever saw in Temuco, my Peace Corps town, were the kind where you drop your clothes off and pick them up, clean, ironed and folded, three days later. It cost more than ten dollars for the service.

For ten dollars, I could not only have someone come to my house and wash my clothes, I could also (in theory) have her clean my house.

Maybe you wouldn't get a cleaning lady for only ten dollars. Which, I might note, was four times the market rate for cleaning ladies in Temuco because I felt like paying someone only $2.50 for half a day's work was a bit much. Maybe you think hiring someone else to clean your house is exploitation.

I don't.

I think it is honest labor and that as long as you are not making your cleaning lady take daily photos of your nude, pregnant body or ordering her to get you a glass of ice water when or requiring that she pick up your dirty underwear off the floor (tacky), as the employer in the novel Minding Ben does, then your are not being exploitative. Cleaning is a job. Being a slave and a personal servant <> cleaning.

My grandmother was a maid before she got married. She worked in Chicago and in Milwaukee. Had a half day off on Saturday, which she would spend walking around town. She would walk to save the streetcar fare and spend the nickel savings on a candy bar, which was her meal.

My great aunt on the other side of the family was the head housekeeper for a wealthy Milwaukee family. Aunt Katy never married. She was in charge of a large household staff. Not too shabby for a woman who probably did not go past 8th grade.

My friend Julie has a cleaning lady. She says her friends are troubled by this - they think she is exploiting the cleaning lady.

What are the work options for an uneducated woman in this country? People don't become housecleaners because it's fun, but because they don't have many choices. Feeling guilty about hiring someone else to clean your house is unproductive. Feeling guilty about hiring someone else to clean your vomit? To clean your bloody underpants? To clear your clogged toilets? That's worth feeling guilty about. Clean up your own bodily fluids and pay a plumber to do the toilets if you'd rather pay $200 an hour than figure it out yourself.

But feeling guilty about hiring someone to do laundry and vacuum and dust and wash the floors? Dumb. Pay a fair wage, give her vacation pay once a year, be nice and move on. It's a job. That's all.

Back to my cleaning lady in Chile. I hired Marisol when I realized I did not want to spend my entire Saturday washing blue jeans, socks and underwear in the bathtub. Washing clothes in the tub is a pain in the neck. I was willing to pay someone, especially once I discovered that hanging out at the laundromat for two hours while my clothes almost cleaned themselves in a nice machine was not an option.

Which makes me think that perhaps a laundromat is a great business idea for Chile. Except it's not - who would go to the laundromat when she could pay someone to wash clothes in her house? Never mind. Capital is more expensive than labor in many places yet.

Although you do have to look at the total cost of ownership of bathtub washing.

Do you know the word "threadbare?" Have you ever tossed it off casually to describe your paint clothes or old gym socks?

You don't know what threadbare is.

Threadbare is when your blue jeans have been scrubbed on a rough pine board once a week for a year. All the blue has been scrubbed out and all that remains are the white vertical and horizontal threads. There is a technical term that weavers use but it escapes me right now. The warp or woof or something. Anyhow, threadbare blue jeans can be see through. Yes they can. And socks only last a few months when washed on a board.

So when you are considering whether to take those clothes to the expensive wash service (that uses machines, I would expect), you need to include the cost of replacing the board-washed clothes frequently.

The other cost you have to include is replacing your gym clothes when they catch on fire because you have hung them to dry on the device that fits around the chimney of your wood burning stove.

Here's a story about wood burning stoves.

1. Jamming a wood stove full of logs does not make it burn all the way through the night and provide for a nice, toasty house in the morning.

2. Jamming a wood stove full of logs just makes the fire burn hotter.

3. Which means that if there are gym clothes hanging right above the stove on the device that fits around the chimney, it is pretty likely that the clothes will start to burn.

4. Which means that you, who are about to fall asleep, smell something and think to yourself, "Did I leave the iron on? It smells like clothes burning."

5. And then you remember that 1. you don't have an iron and 2. even if you did, you would never leave it on so 3. what's burning?

6. It's the gym clothes that are burning.

You have to include all the costs when you are making a decision.

My roommate and I hired Marisol. I thought it would be easy. "Marisol, please wash our clothes and clean whatever is dirty."

To me, the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling were perfectly visible. The grime on the walls and doors was visible. The dirt was screaming, Clean me!

It's not like there was clutter all over the place or a kitchen full of dirty dishes. I did not want her spending her time tidying. I wanted her to clean. I can tidy. Tidying is easy. Cleaning is a pain in the neck, which was why I was paying her to do it.

But Friday after Friday, I would come home to find the cobwebs intact. The walls grimy.

Finally, I started leaving her notes: Marisol, please clean the cobwebs on the northwest corner of the kitchen ceiling. Please wash the kitchen floor.

The day I left her the note to clean the grime around the doorknob and returned home to find an 8" circle of pure white around the knob and gray on the rest of the door, I realized I needed to be even more specific.

Marisol, I wrote, the doorknob looks great! Now please clean the rest of the door.

What I really wanted was a cleaning lady with initiative. One who would seek dirt and destroy it.

Perhaps her father had never played Seek and Destroy with her when she was a little girl. When we were getting ready to move out of our house in Spain, my dad gave me a bottle of 409 and a rag, explaining that my mission was to seek the dirt on the walls and destroy it with the 409. The house had to pass inspection or else. Or else I don't know what, but it probably wouldn't have been good for my dad's career.

I guess that's fair. Why should the people moving into the house after you have to clean your mess? I have adopted that attitude with every move, leaving every house and apartment spotless.

Alas, I have never moved into a house vacated by someone like me. I have never moved into a house being vacated by an air force brat. If I had, the house would have been clean.

Now we are getting to the main point of this story and I cannot believe I have never told it on this blog before as it is one of my all-time favorite stories.

One Friday, I stayed home from work. I was sick, which happened a lot when I was in Chile. Something about living outside your own culture that is really hard on the immune system. I think the culture shock in Chile might have been worse than culture shock in the middle of Africa. Chile looked western. Looked middle class. I was in a three bedroom, two bath, brick tract house. My town had Mercedes dealership. On the main plaza there was a movie theater, a coffee/chocolate shop, two department stores, a bank, a church. I recognized everything.

But I recognized only the surface. This was still a foreign country and they did things differently. Every time I thought I understood what was going on, I discovered I had completely misunderstood. The popcorn was not salty, it was sweet. French fries were served with mayonnaise. (That was an easy adjustment to make, believe me.) Stores didn't take returns. Shopkeepers controlled scarce resources - why should they care if the customer was happy? Only really rich people had a checking account, so I had to go to the gas office and stand in line for 40 minutes to pay my bill.

I'm not saying that they do things wrong or badly in Chile, just differently (one benefit: the post office was open until 7 p.m.), and always feeling as if the ground is not solid under your feet* takes a lot of energy.

So I was sick a lot.

This Friday, I stayed home. Saw Marisol come in, start working. Wondered why she didn't do the laundry first so it would have more time to dry before the usual afternoon rains came.

My friend Paul wondered the same thing about his cleaning lady: She didn't seem to plan her activities with the critical path in mind. First you chop veg for the soup, then you get the soup started, then you clean the kitchen floor. You don't wash the floor and then do a lot of messy work in the kitchen.

I watched Marisol work and realized that she did more than I thought but there was still wasted activity. Whatever. As long as she did what was on the list, I suppose. I wasn't there to micromanage. I mostly just wanted clean clothes.

I returned to my book and only looked up again when I saw her kneeling next to the toilet, scrubbing it by hand.

Her hand was in the toilet. Even though there was a toilet brush behind the toilet. She was cleaning the toilet with a hand brush.

Why was she cleaning the toilet with a hand brush?

How odd. Marisol, I called. I didn't realize you brought your own cleaning supplies.

I don't, she answered, puzzled.

Then where did you get the brush that you're using?

This? she asked, as she looked at the brush. Oh, this is from under the kitchen sink.

From under the kitchen sink.

Marisol, I said slowly. That's the brush I use to scrub vegetables.

Oh! she replied cheerfully. Well, I'll put it back, then.

No, I told her. That's OK. I'm not going to be using it for vegetables any more.

And I didn't.

By the way, I have not been seriously sick since then. Just saying. It takes work to build an immune system.

* In little hotels, the bath mat would be turned so that the suction cups were facing upwards. I asked my friend Monica what that was about. "So you don't have to stand in the water!" she told me.

In which the cute English grad student/track coach kisses me and I leave because I am so shocked, then never get a second chance for another kiss

2011-06-30T01:21:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, it's not so smart to google old boyfriends or men you thought were cute but way out of reach but who then kissed you anyhow and boy did that surprise the heck out of you.

Not because you find out horrible things about them, like they were really serial killers or child molesters, but because you discover that they have aged and gone bald in the 25 years since you last saw them and how can that happen? And if they have aged that much, what the heck has happened to you?

Where did that stupid gray hair come from? And how come your husband looks even more handsome as he gets gray/silver but you just look older? How come it takes forever to recover from a sports injury? Why doesn't all the extra fluid drain from under my eyes and the rest of my face until just before it's time for me to go to bed again?

These questions make my head hurt.

Back to finding old boyfriends. Old boyfriends and the guy you thought was a major hottie and your friends thought was a hottie and who took you completely by surprise when he kissed you because HE WAS A HOTTIE.

I stayed in Houston for a few years after I finished college. Houston, back then, was not a bad place to be as long as you didn't have to drive far and as long as you had air conditioning during the day.

It was also a good place for an employed but indebted young person to be as real estate was dirt cheap. I paid $280 a month for my cute one-bedroom apartment on Bissonnet with the 50s-era teal bathtub, sink and toilet. I was two miles from work and didn't have to get on the freeway.

Back then, I didn't like the freeway because of the congestion and it was a pain in the neck. Now, I don't like it because of the congestion and THE SPEED! OMG THE SPEED!

I have become a little old lady hunched over in the driver's seat, my hands white knuckled as I clutch the steering wheel, hoping that nobody honks at me. I hate getting onto the freeways here because they are 1. crappy and 2. poorly-designed with 3. left-side entrances. Hello blind spot on my right.

I will take twice as long to go home from dropping Primo off at the airport if it means that I don't have to go on the freeway. I am 47 years old and I have almost become that person going 40 in the middle lane with my left turn signal blinking even though I have no intention of changing lanes. Oh the anxiety that turn signal causes in the people behind the signaler.

So I had this cute apartment in Houston and was paying cheap enough rent that I could pay my student loans as well. $183 a month for loan payments, $280 for rent, $50 for car insurance, a hundred or so to my mom for my car payment, throw in some phone and electricity money, and even on $20,000, which did not go nearly as far as I thought it would once the government took its share - boy was that a shock when I got my first paycheck - I almost went to HR to tell them someone had made a big mistake, I had some money left over for food.

Peanut butter sandwiches, but that is food.

A few doors down from me lived Vincent.

Vincent was a hottie.

All my friends thought so. They knew him from having seen him on campus, where he as an assistant track coach. I probably didn't see him because I wasn't wearing my glasses. Also because I got nowhere near the track. Sports and I are not exactly friends.

He was a grad student/track coach. Brains + body.

A grad student in English. We spoke the same language.

I met him - How did I meet him? Probably because he was outside washing his 20 year old green Volvo, which is the car of choice for liberal arts grad students. Washing that car and working on it, which is a really sexy activity - a man who can fix things! The ability to repair household appliances and other items that have motors is even sexier than the ability to recite "Dover Beach" by heart.

Did I mention he was shirtless? And that the view was mighty fine?

That golden, muscled chest. Muscled from using his body, not from spending six hours a day in the gym lifting weights. Practical muscles, not show off muscles.

One of my friends was over at my apartment, recognized Vince and introduced us.

Vince decided he liked me. We would chat when we encountered each other in the parking lot. Occasionally, he would knock on my door and we would hang out and talk about writing and literature. He's the one who told me to read Harlan Ellison after I told him I was sick and darn tired of Literature and never wanted to read anything hard again. A summer of science fiction would do me good.

He's also the one who told me who Donald Barthelme was. Barthelme was in charge of the University of Houston's creative writing program and Vince thought he hung the moon.

I have never read a word that Barthelme wrote, but it has been useful to have that name in my quiver for when I am around Serious Literati. I nod knowingly as they chatter about Meaning and Deconstructionism and Post Modernism, thinking, I know how to spell that name! and then I take the first break in the conversation to excuse myself and find the food.

I have to leave because in addition to thinking, I know how to spell that name, I am also thinking, Wow you are a pretentious twit. I'll bet you don't know anything useful, like how to fix a car or how to calculate how long it will take the rabbit to die if the poison is leaking into the room at the rate of x units/minute.

I like talking to other English majors sometime, but it is engineers and men who can fix things who rock my world.

Vince was the perfect combination of literary, intelligent, handy, and gorgeous.

Which meant he would have no interest whatsoever in me.

Why would a literary, intelligent, handy and gorgeous man be interested in someone as ordinary as I? I was going to say, Someone as ordinary and chubby as I was, but I was not chubby at the time, seeing as I had some money for food but not a lot. I had also discovered that if one runs the four miles around campus almost every day after work, one can eat almost anything one wants.

As long as what one wants is only what one can afford. And as long as one spends most of her day at her desk at work, far, far from her refrigerator.

I have learned since getting married and adopting my gold-digging lifestyle of not working that if one spends much of her day at her computer on the kitchen table in a house where her husband likes to keep frozen custard and cheese and potato chips, even if one goes to the gym four days a week and even if one is signed up for a half marathon for which she is halfheartedly training, one cannot eat all she wants without experiencing repercussions.

These are the benefits of aging: gray hair, puffy eyes and easier weight accumulation.

But apparently, Vince was interested.

I didn't have a clue. (Yes, I know this is a theme with me.)

He would come over and hang out. He wanted to spend time with me.

And then he asked me to the movies.

Only I thought he was asking just did I want to go to a movie with him because you know, he didn't want to go alone?

Sure why not.

I had no idea this was a date.

When I was a freshman, a guy down the hall - let's call him Bill - asked if I wanted to see the Tom Petty concert with him. I thought he just had an extra ticket that he didn't want to go to waste. Which was why I was so confused when he seemed to be trying to put his arm around me while Tom was singing that the waiting was the hardest part.

The rest of the evening went about as well. After the concert, we were trying to find Bill's car in the multi-floor parking lot. Despite what anyone might tell you, I have an excellent sense of direction and when left to my own devices and not nitpicked, I can find things.

But I kept going to the same spot and kept finding the car not there. "This is where it should be!" I told Bill in frustration.

He was already cranky because this had been a date and I just didn't know it, a fact he would later complain about to our mutual friends, although if I had been on a date with someone who didn't know it was a date, I think I might have kept that information to myself. His crankiness was not improved by our inability to find the car and my insistence that it was here. HERE!

And then we went down one floor.

And found the car exactly where I said it was. Just displaced by 15 vertical feet.

Poor Bill. If I had known it was a date, I would never have agreed to go to the concert. It hadn't occurred to me that he might be interested because I had no interest in him. Blesshissweatyhandedheart. You don't look for interest in others if you are not interested yourself.

I was interested in Vince, but in the theoretical, wouldn't it be cool if (then) Tom Cruise or (now) Denzel Washington or Daniel Craig dropped by and asked me out to dinner. In the "that's the level of reality I assign to this possibility" way and remember, I got an 'A' in probability and statistics. Although not until grad school. In college, I got a 'C,' which was entirely my stupid fault because what made something an easy A was that if you went to class and did the work, it was fairly easy to do well, not my method of, "I need only to go to class a few times a semester because this stuff is so obvious."

The good thing about having lived an oblivious, clueless life full of mistakes is that it gives one lots of material.

Where was I?

Oh yes. Vince asked if I wanted to go to the movies. I said sure. Why not?

We went. We sat next to each other. I had no, He likes me! vibes. None.

Not that I was looking for them because - Vince. Me. I was no fool.

We went back to his apartment. Sat on the couch. Talked about something deep and intellectual I am sure.

And then he kissed me.

What was this?

Where did that come from?

I was so shocked that I mumbled something about needing to iron a blouse for work the next day and went home.

Shortly thereafter, Vince went to England for the summer. He gave me his vacuum cleaner. He wasn't going to need it where he was going. He wrote me a chatty, funny letter about his experiences waiting tables under the table and visiting the Tower of London and Stratford on Avon. I read the letter and thought, Well that was nice, and then I thought no more.

While he was gone, I moved to Austin. I took his vacuum cleaner with me. A sign of true love that I had overlooked? I give you my minor appliances. My cleaning tools.

That fall, I returned to Houston for homecoming. My friends had advised me that perhaps Vince's kiss had been an expression of romantic interest. I had had time to recover from the shock and to think, Well this wouldn't be so bad.

Except for the part that I was now living in Austin. He was back in Houston.

They're not that far apart. Fourteen Dairy Queens on I10 between Houston and San Antonio and I know this because my friend Heather and I stopped at every single one of them on a trip to my mom and dad's one weekend. The Bon Ton Bakery with the kolaches is halfway between Houston and Austin, shortly after you pass through La Grange, home of the bordello. There is food on the way and it's only a three hour drive. This could work.

I was in Houston. I'll stop in and see Vince, I thought. Rekindle that flame.

I stopped in. He almost had to ask me who I was. Whoa. I guess I had aged in the six months since we'd seen each other. We chatted uncomfortably for a few minutes. I noticed his carpet was dirty. His doorbell rang. He gestured to the door. I have to go, he said politely.

The time had passed. The opportunity was lost. I had blown it.

In which I find out that the guy who visited me in Miami had a crush on me but I didn't have a clue but maybe our mutual friend was imagining things

2011-06-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

When I got back to the US after my stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile ("Peace Corps lite," we called it because we were in large cities that had coffee shops and movie theaters and electricity), I stayed with various amazingly generous friends in Austin until I had a job and got a place of my own in Miami.

I stayed at Tom and Sherri's for a few months, then spent a month at their friend Cindy's place while Cindy was out of town on a business trip. Cindy had a roommate, George, who was a very nice, very quiet guy who put up with having a stranger live with him for a month. George and I didn't do too much together. We had nothing in common except we were friends with Tom and Sherri. But he was nice. We would chat occasionally, but we each really just minded our own business.

George is the main part of this story, so remember what I just said.

The one thing I remember from staying in that house was that there was dog hair in the bathtub because Cindy blessherheart used to bathe her dog and then not clean the tub. I can put up with a lot - it takes a lot to gross me out - but I am kind of particular about where my naked feet go, especially when they are attached to my naked body. I won't even take my socks off for yoga because the idea of putting my naked feet where others have trod bugs me.

Note that I will, however, put my naked hands on that same mat. I am not consistent. I don't know why. I will also happily buy used shoes at consignment, but only if they are odor free and in good shape. So there you go. I have inconsistent squeamishness.

That said, I don't think most people would be happy about a dog-hair filled tub. Lots of coarse black hairs that blocked the drain. Ick.

I am also not a fan of mildewy shower curtains and have just one word to say to people whose shower curtains are black and slimy: bleach. Just spray some bleach on it. You don't even have to scrub. You don't have to live in grossness.

Look. If I, who can pee in a hole into the ground in the "bathroom" at the La Paz bus station while an old Aymara lady and her granddaughter watch me because of course there are no walls or stalls and then not wash my hands because there is no sink, can be grossed out by something, it's pretty gross. My standards are really low. See heed me when I tell you to clean your dang tub.

Know that I feel a wee bit bad criticizing someone who was so generous to me. For what it's worth, this was over 15 years ago and I have changed all the names. I am indeed grateful that Cindy let me stay in her house. It was very nice of her. And maybe she was in a rush before going on her trip and just didn't have time to clean the tub and it's sure not like I had anything better to do and it was nice, actually, to be able to do something for her and make a contribution to the household by doing some cleaning. There. I feel better.

Then I moved to Miami.

What I discovered about living in Miami is that people in Miami have a lot more friends than people who live in cold places. As in, I have never had so many people want to visit me in the middle of winter in my life.

Which was fine. I had a guest room. I liked seeing people. Most of my friends are excellent houseguests, as in, they didn't leave their towels or the bed linens on the floor and didn't leave their trash all over my house. I made a few extra copies of my housekey, gathered a collection of information about local attractions, stocked the fridge, and told my guests I would see them when I got home from work. If it was the weekend, I said I'd meet them for dinner. No, I had no wish to accompany them or to take them to Miami Beach. I had done that. Been there. My Saturdays were not for being a chauffeur but for doing my laundry, going to my swimming workout, and grocery shopping. Stay at my house, yes. Get my services as a tour guide, no. I was working until 9:00 p.m. or later most nights. My free time was for me.

After I had been in Miami for about a year, Sherri emailed me - George was going to Florida to watch the shuttle launch and wanted to know if he could stay at my house.

Of course he could stay! I had stayed in his house for an entire month. I was delighted to have a chance to return the favor.

He was going to have a car - drive up for the launch on one day, then go to the Keys the next. Fine. Use me as a hotel. I don't mind. It's a little bit of work, cleaning the bathroom and making the guest bed, but again, George had been very generous with me and I owed him.

All went as planned. George arrived. Gave me a lovely hostess gift. (He has excellent manners.) Stayed one night, went to the shuttle launch, returned. While he was gone, I got a call from a Peace Corps friend, W., who had a long layover in Miami the next day on her way from Washington DC to Argentina. Did I want to hang out?

Sure! The next morning, I told George that I was picking my friend up from the airport to hang out with her and that I might not be home when he got back from the Keys.

He asked what W. and I were going to do. I shrugged. Go to lunch. Talk. Nothing special.

Maybe he could hang out with us? he suggested.

I was taken aback. "I thought you were going to the Keys," I said.

He told me it was too overcast to do that.

Oh sheesh. I had been looking forward to time with someone who knew me and whom I knew and I wasn't happy about incorporating a relative stranger into the mix. But what do you say? He was a nice person. A guest in my house. "No! I don't want you with us!" I didn't have it in me.

After I picked W. up at the airport, the three of us went to lunch. It was fine, but W. and I didn't have the conversation I had wanted to have - you know, where we talk about men and gossip about our mutual friends.

W. left that evening and George left the next day. Life returned to its sad normal of 13-hour days at the sweatshop of Ryder corporate finance.

A few weeks later, Sherri emailed me. How did it go with George?

Fine, I told her. He saw the shuttle. Whatever.

No, she asked. I mean, how did it go?

I still didn't understand.

Her exasperation came through the monitor. He likes you! That's why he wanted to go to Miami!

Well knock me over with a feather. Talk about playing it close to the chest - share a house with someone for a month and you don't have a clue that his interested in That Way. Was I clueless or was George too understated?

I am generally clueless, but George had given me no hint whatsoever. Coming to Miami did not count as a hint. I was a hotel. Not a destination in and of myself.

And of course George had said nothing. Not a word. There had been no flirting. No statement of intent. Nothing. I am not a mind-reader and even if I were, I would not have been looking for this sort of information in George's blesshisheart mind. Nice guy, but no chemistry and I had learned my lesson about ignoring my chemistry instincts after the disaster with the guy I dated right before I went into the Peace Corps.

There is no better way to ruin a perfectly nice friendship than to try to push it to romance. The kissing never gets better. Ever. It's either there or it's not and there is no sense forcing it. Your friend who says, Oh no! It can get better! is a liar - she left her husband three years after she told you that.

I had to tell Sherri that I was not interested. Which is something I hate to do because I always feel as if I have been forced into it because the guy involved has refused to properly interpret my signaling. As in, if I had been romantically interested in George, I would have given him some indication. You know - like asked if I could go to the Keys with him or tried in any way to spend more time with him.

Although - and this just crossed my mind - maybe George had said nothing to Sherri and she was trying to matchmake. That's better. I like that a lot better than 1. I was clueless or 2. I had to reject a really nice guy. He probably had no interest in me at all. Whew.

In which I make a severe miscalculation about my bladder capacity on the Bus to Cartagena (OK, not Cartagena but still to a place in Latin America)

2011-06-15T16:15:00.001-07:00

Have I told you guys about the time I made the Mexican bus driver stop so I could run into the bushes and pee?

No. I haven't. Because I try not to tell the same story twice here.

And yes I know this is a pee story and some of you don't like that sort of thing but everyone pees. Everyone wants to know how the astronauts pee. The first exhibit I wanted to see when Primo and I went to the space museum in Huntsville was the one explaining how the astronauts did what had to be done when they were in space.

My mother doesn't like it when I blog about the toilets in foreign countries, but once you've exchanged a 1000-lira Turkish note for a piece of toilet paper about the same size as the note, which makes the thinking person wonder, Why not just eliminate the middleman and use the currency for toilet paper? and then managed the fine art of balancing just right over the hole in the ground (hint: butt should be lower than the knees), you are over your squeamishness. Now you just want to know what toilets are like all over.

After my stint in the Peace Corps, I was living in Austin, unsuccessfully looking for a job because apparently, employers thought Peace Corps = "Teva-wearing, dope-smoking, unbathed, kumbayah-singing hippie."

Which is definitely not me. Oh sure sometimes I don't shower every day, but that's because 1. I am lazy 2. my husband is stuck with me because he would be too mortified to go through a second divorce and 3. the air here is super dry in the winter. But I wear cute shoes. I might not shower every day, but I draw the line somewhere. I wouldn't be caught dead in Tevas or Crocs.

I was in Austin. Looking for a job. Couldn't find one. What a better time than when one is unemployed to hop on the bus to Laredo, then walk across the border and get a bus to Guanajuato? Great idea, huh? That's what I thought.

Buses in Mexico are easy. Mexico has good roads and the tourist-class buses are comfortable and have toilets in the back. I am not crazy about the practice of forcing passengers to watch whichever movie the driver feels like popping into the video machine, but earplugs can block a lot of car chases and gunfights.

On a 13-hour bus ride from northern Chile to Santiago, I was forced to watch Ghost, which led me to the very bad decision of getting my hair cut like Demi Moore's.

I look nothing like Demi Moore. I do not have her fragile beauty and her thick, dark, lustrous hair.

I am a sturdy gal whose ancestors gave me the gifts of a strong body that could give birth in a potato field, then keep harvesting once the baby was tied to my back. I have fine, flyaway hair that when it is not covered with Clairol #24 Clove is at best a mousy drab, only now it is graying mousy drab.

The Demi Moore haircut? Did not work on me.

Bus movies = evil.

Back to Mexico.

After I had wandered through Guanajuato's cobbled, colonial streets lined with thick walls broken by heavy oak doors and gone to the mummy museum where the disinterred, mummified corpses of those whose families couldn't keep paying the cemetery taxes are displayed, I got bored and decided I needed to go to Dolores, the small town whence El Grito de Dolores, the start of the Mexican War of Independence.

I walked to the bus station and got my ticket but still had 30 minutes to wait. I decided that Staying Hydrated (remember - this is the town where corpses mummify instead of decomposing) was important, so I bought a two-liter bottle of water.

And proceeded to drink most of it.

Before I got onto the bus.

Which, much to my surprise, did not have a toilet.

I was an old pro at Latin America bus travel, having just spent ten weeks returning from Chile, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer, back to the US over land.

I took a bus from Salta, Argentina, to Asuncion, Paraguay. The ticketseller in Salta told me the ride was 12 hours and that the bus was air conditioned and had a toilet.

Liar.

The bus was not air conditioned. That would not have mattered so much if we had been going over 15 miles an hour and had generated a breeze, but it is hard to go fast when you are on a road that is mostly sand. We stopped for a break and I asked the driver to turn on the A/C.

He shrugged. "No A/C," he told me.

"But it says on the ticket! It says right here!" I demanded shrilly as I showed him my ticket, which did indeed say there was A/C, A/C that I had paid extra for as a rival bus company had cheaper tickets on non-air conditioned buses.

He shrugged again, drew on his cigarette and turned away from me. He didn't care. I could ride. I could not ride. All the same to him.

In a way, the lack of air conditioning was not so bad, because the heat that caused me to sweat out all my fluids so that the lack of a working toilet ceased to be a problem. The gap-toothed, sweating man sitting next to me who sucked down beer after beer never seemed to need a toilet, either.

Perhaps the high point of that trip was when the man behind me threw up in his seat and the driver refused to clean it up. It wasn't his vomit, the driver said.

When Lars, the Danish nurse who was sitting next to vomiting man and with whom I had bonded over our mutual discomfort in the northern Argentina heat and our mutual hatred of the noisy four year old sitting in front of me, asked the driver again to clean it up, the driver pointed out that the vomit was not actually in Lars' seat so what was the problem?

In Bolivia, the buses didn't have toilets at all, but we made frequent rest stops that really weren't for passenger convenience. They were beer breaks for the driver. My friend Kelly and I, on an earlier trip, took the bus from La Paz back to Chile. Only half an hour into the trip, the driver pulled the bus over at a cafe. "Twenty minutes!" he yelled over his shoulder as he got off the bus.

Kelly and I went inside the cafe to wait. Twenty minutes passed. Then thirty. Forty. We were looking for the driver. "Is that him?" she asked. "The guy over there? With the empty beer bottles in front of him?"

Yes, it was. Our driver. On his third beer. Ready to drive 11 hours on unpaved roads to the Chilean border.

On my overnight ride to Cochabamba (overnight is the only way to travel in Bolivia because you really don't want to see how narrow and twisting those unpaved mountain roads are), we stopped at a solitary cafe' on the altiplano. No toilets.

"Out back," a man told me when I asked.

I looked behind the cafe. I saw the mountains, looking flat in the moonlight. Small round shadows on the plains drifted and floated toward the mountain and away from it. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized that the shadows were Aymara women, squatting in their full skirts and petticoats. Squatting, standing, and leaving little dark circles in the dirt.

What was I supposed to do with my used toilet paper?

Air conditioning, indeed.

The next cafe' did have a bathroom. The toilets had no seats, which was common in South America, which makes me wonder if the toilets were sold without seats or if there is a strong secondary market in toilet seats down there and if so, what are those seats used for because it's certainly not toilets. There were showers but no bulbs in the light fixtures. The illumination came from candles stuck in sand contained in cut-off two-liter soda bottles.

I was used to traveling on Latin American buses.

But I hadn't planned appropriately for a Mexican local bus.

Two liters of water? In a half an hour? Before a bus ride?

Ten minutes into the ride, I thought, "Hmm. I could pee were the opportunity to present itself."

Twenty minutes into the ride, I thought, "I need to go now."

I looked at the back of the bus, seeking the toilet because of course there would be a toilet because how else would people pee?

No toilet.

No toilet and the road was getting bumpy.

Thirty minutes into the ride, it started to hurt.

I went to the front of the bus and politely asked the driver how far we had to go.

He waved his hand and said casually, "Not far! Not far!"

I smiled tightly and returned to my seat. I knew what the Latin American, "Not far!" meant. It is a synonym of "Four more blocks," which in Chile, was the substitute phrase used to mean, "I have no idea where this place is you seek but I am afraid if I admit such to you, I will seem either rude or stupid or both, so instead, I will lie to you and then we'll all be happy."

I tried to wait. I tried to think of anything but peeing.

When that didn't work, I started looking around for a bucket or an empty 64-oz Slurpee cup or anything that could capture and contain liquid.

Nothing.

I asked the driver again. "How much longer?"

Again, he waved his hand. "Not far. Not far."

I waited. I waited.

It's only 57 km from Guanajuato to Dolores, but in Latin America, you don't convert the kilometers to miles and estimate your time based on 55 miles per hour. Otherwise, you get too depressed. Instead, you just look at the number and ignore the units. That is, think of 57 kilometers as just 57. That's an hour. At least. Throw in the rest stop the driver makes a few minutes into the trip because you know he's tired and you're at an hour and 15 minutes.

A few minutes is a very long time when your bladder is about to explode. You realize that Einstein was right when he talked about that time stuff and how a minute with a pretty girl is not the same as a minute on a hot stove. Something like that. I just had to pee.

Finally, I couldn't take it any longer. I returned to the front of the bus and hissed at the driver, "If I can't pee right now, I am going to die."

Proper Mexican women do not talk like that.

Heck, proper American women do not talk like that.

His head swiveled, his jaw dropped, and he stared at me. There must have been some fierce determination in my face or perhaps desperation that made him take pity on me.

"OK," he said. "OK." He gently pressed the brakes. Stopped the bus. Opened the door.

I ran. There was a line of bushes about ten yards from the road. I scooted behind them, pulled down my pants, and squatted. As the pain left my body and well-being flooded me (honestly, that feeling of getting to pee when you have needed to pee for so long is almost better than [wxyz]), I glanced up and over the bushes to the bus. Every window had at least two faces pressed to it. As I pulled up my pants, walked back to the bus and returned to my seat, they all stared at me without saying a word.

"Thank you so much," I told the driver, my chin high. I felt great. I would not be daunted.

I would also not drink two liters of water just before getting on a bus again. There is only so much kindness you can expect from strangers.

In which the cute guy in my Portuguese class turns out to have sweaty hands and poof my crush is killed

2011-06-09T13:57:00.001-07:00

When I lived in Miami, I didn't have a TV, so I needed things to do in the few short hours when I was not at work in the salt mines known as Ryder corporate finance. When a person does not have TV, she is forced to do things. Horrible things. Things to fill her time. Things like read. Like tutor algebra to high school students, which she thinks will be solving quadratic equations and factoring polynomials but instead turns out to be times tables and converting fractions. Like take violin lessons. Like go to Returned Peace Corps Volunteers parties.

Like take salsa dance lessons. Like learn to speak Portuguese.

It is far far better to own a TV than to be forced to entertain onesself. How on earth did I survive my adult life until I met Primo and married him and his big-butt TV?

True confession: I did have a TV when I was in grad school. I had bought it shortly before grad school so I would have something to distract me while I polished the brass candlesticks that my mother had "let" me keep when she and my dad moved to Saudia Arabia. I jumped on them because what 20something decor is complete without large Turkish brass candlesticks? That need to be polished? A lot?

Once I had the TV, I got into the 30something habit. (And yes, I am watching my library's website to see when they get their copy because I am not willing to pay $25.97 to amazon.com just for a fleeting pleasure. I could save that money for shoes! or purses! Although the dark and brooding Michael. So sexy. So whiny. Maybe he's worth $25.97.)

There were some other shows I had to watch. Me, who used to snicker at her grandmother for dropping everything to watch As the World Turns every afternoon, had become an addict and remains one to this day. I have become my grandmother and am an ardent Friday Night Lights, Downton Abbey and Glee fan. I do like me my soaps.

I even have Primo hooked (ha! Hook 'em!) on Friday Night Lights. At first, he didn't want to watch a

1. Stupid

2. TV show

3. about Texas

4. and football,

but five minutes into the first episode, I knew he would like it and forced him to watch with me. I used my usual "You only have to watch 30 minutes and then if you don't like it, we'll turn it off" tactic, which served has served me well for musicals (Oklahoma, My Fair Lady) and some romantic comedies.

Here is the My Fair Lady strategy:

Me: Thirty minutes. That's all. If you don't like it after 30 minutes, we'll turn it off.

Primo: It looks stupid.

Me: Maybe, but it's Thanksgiving weekend and you don't have to work and you can spare 30 minutes to watch a movie with me.

Primo: Fine. [Grumble, grumble, grumble.]

Thirty minutes later. I grab the remote and turn off the movie.

Primo: What are you doing?

Me: I said only 30 minutes. It's been 30 minutes. Your suffering is over.

Primo: I don't know.

Me: What do you want to do? Should we put together a puzzle?

Primo: It's not that bad.

Me: No no no. I said only 30. That I wouldn't make you do more than that.

Primo: I guess I could watch the rest of it. It doesn't suck.

That technique has gotten Primo hooked on Friday Night Lights. Here is how hooked he is:

When we realized the library did not have Season 3, we bought it.

That's right.

We paid money for a TV show. We don't even have cable, y'all. If you don't count our property taxes and our amazon.com prime fees, we do not pay for movies and TV. We get them from the library and from amazon prime.

Where was I? Oh right. Hooked on TV shows. So I gave my TV to my brother when I went into the Peace Corps and never asked for it back because I wanted more out of life than vicariousness. Is that a word? I wanted to live my own life, not watch someone else's. Now, of course, I am perfectly happy to watch someone else's drama. As long as it isn't my drama, I'm happy. Vicarious is fine with me.

And now back to Miami and the Portuguese class and the sweaty-handed guy Claude.

Oh the Portuguese class. When I signed up, I thought I could go straight into Portuguese II because I already spoke Spanish, but the world-weary clerk told me that mami, in Miami everyone already speaks Spanish.

Then she would not take my registration form unless I completed the "race" box, which annoyed me to no end because seriously, Miami public schools adult education program? Does it matter what my race is if 1. I want to learn to speak Portuguese and 2. I am paying you money to teach me?

But the clerk, she does not care. She is like the clerk at the marriage license office when Primo and I applied for our license. I filled out my section of the form, ignoring the stupid "race" box because again, it's relevant to my marriage how? and pushed the form across the counter to the clerk, who was busy busy busy looking at her fingernails. She slowly looked at the form, then pushed it back to me, telling me that I had to answer the question.

I should have

1. told her to look at me and decide for herself what I was or

2. written "human," because is that not what we all are in the end?

Alas, I had not found my inner revolutionary at either point, so in both cases, I chickened out and wrote an answer, although who knows? Maybe I do have some other ethnicities in me of which I am unaware. People 300 years ago got around more than we think. I could be a little bit of everything.

In the Portuguese class, where I was slotted unceremoniously into the Portuguese I section and where it did indeed turn out that everyone in the class already spoke Spanish, which was not a problem except when the conversation turned, as it always does in Miami, to that maldito I spit on heem Castro, the conversation was no longer in Portuguese, which was what I wanted to learn, but rapidfire Spanish, which I already speak albeit not with a Cuban accent, which meant I had to concentrate very very hard to understand what the heck anyone was saying.

But I learned some Portuguese, enough to get by, and enough that when the teacher assigned us our end of class speech assignments, I could turn the tables on her.

Why do American men prefer foreign women? was the topic that she, a carioca, assigned to me.

Oh heck to the no. Uh uh. I was not going there. Betray my kind? No thanks.

Instead, I wrote about why foreign women preferred American men.

American men are not the most handsome, I noted. Italian and Argentine men are the most handsome.

They're not the most sophisticated. That's the French. Maybe. I don't know.

But they're the nicest. American men are the nicest. Sure, men do bad things to women in all cultures, but in the US, it is not socially acceptable to have a mistress.

After the speeches, a professora made us sing "Over the Rainbow" in Portuguese. I don't want to step on any toes here, but that is a vile song in English, much less a pretty language like Portuguese. I think she hated us.

But that's not what this post is about.

There was this guy, Claude, in my class, in both Portuguese I and Portuguese II. I spent all of Portuguese I trying to figure out how to get him to talk to me. In Portuguese II, I somehow succeeded. And I somehow convinced him to go to the Sunday evening salsa class in Miami Beach.

Gosh I miss Miami. In January, it is almost always warm there. It's mid April and we are having thunderhail here. It snowed three days ago. I have a space heater pulled up next to me. I can't get decent Cuban food here. My Spanish has gone to poop.

And finding a decent salsa class here is nigh impossible.

In here's defense, we do have killer bratwurst, cheese curds and frozen custard.

Primo has been promising to take dance classes with me for a couple of years. Yet he keeps loopholing out because of class conflicts with our theater tickets or travel or whatever. There are not enough salsa classes to overcome our other obligations.

But in Miami, there was a class every Sunday night in Miami Beach. The teacher's name was Luz. She was the best dance teacher I have ever had.

After the salsa class with Luz, I took a swing dance class that did not require one to sign up with a partner. I was the only unpartnered person in the class. The way the teacher is supposed to handle this situation is to have everyone change partners every few minutes. You're supposed to be learning the steps, not how to dance with a particular person.

But this teacher - "Bad Teacher," or "BT" for short - didn't do that. Instead, she told me to practice by myself.

Practicing alone is not a good way to learn to dance.

When BT would see someone doing the step wrong, rather than gently correcting that person, she would stop everyone, look at the ceiling, and announce, "SOMEONE is not rocking back on the two count."

We would all look at each other, at our feet, and at BT, wondering if we were the SOMEONE of whom she spoke.

Luz was not like this. Luz had us split into a line of men and a line of women to learn the basic step, then she would have us practice with each person down the line, correcting us as we went along.

I had told Claude about the class and he for whatever reason said he would accompany me. I picked him up at his apartment, which was not far from my cute little Coconut Grove WWII-era duplex that has since been knocked down so that a crappy condo can be erected in its stead.

We went to the class.

I danced with him.

Reader, he had Sweaty Hands.

I know, I know. How can I, a flawed human being, demand perfection of another human being? How can I demand dry hands when I don't even have slim, toned thighs and naturally curly hair?

But Sweaty Hands! Ick!

My crush, she was over. Finito.

I didn't think Claude was interested in me at all. I thought he just wanted to learn to dance.

But when I dropped him off, he asked if I wanted to come up to his place for a drink. I think he might have said "coffee," but at that time, I did not know what joy coffee would bring to me and so my first thought would have been, "But I don't drink coffee."

Actually, I think those were my words to him. "I don't drink coffee."

When Person A extends the Sweaty Hand of Friendship or Seduction to Person B, the proper response is not, "I don't drink coffee," unless Person B is not interested in Friendship or Seduction.

Or unless Person B is so darn rude, clueless and unsophisticated that she blurts out the first words that cross her brain.

The world's most sophisticated women are not to be found in the United States. Or at least they are not to be found in my car.

Claude looked at me, startled at my abrupt response/rejection of his Sweaty Hand of Friendship/Seduction. Um OK, he said. See you in class.

And that was the end of my Portuguese salsa dance adventure with Claude.

In which I have to hear my friend Janelle getting busy

2011-06-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

Have I ever told you guys why I hate skiing? Other than the obvious - that it is 1. an expensive sport where you 2. have to wear clothes that make you look fat and 3. be cold?

The first time I went snow skiing - and the second to last time because somehow, the magnitude of the disaster didn't really sink in - I did not enjoy myself. I got altitude sickness, which was bad enough, but it was the nighttime torments that were truly awful.

But let's talk about altitude sickness and the advisability of maybe taking some ski lessons like your friends, who were serious skiers and who had no interest in hanging out with novice you, who had never been on snow skis before, kept suggesting.

No! No lessons for me! How hard could it be, anyhow?

Those are the famous last words that have preceded every haircut I have ever given to myself. I would like to say that I learned the self-haircut giving lesson a long time ago, like when I was 12, but that would be a lie. I have taken scissors to my own hair within the past three months and I am less than three years away from an AARP card.

Omigosh. I hadn't really thought about it like that. I am just now getting used to the idea of being in my 40s and now I have to start getting ready for 50? Does this mean I will never be thin and with good skin and hair, all at the same time, ever? Has the chance passed me by?

I think so.

Crap.

That means I am going to have to work on being a nice person instead. I'd rather just diet.

Back to altitude sickness. I ignored my friends' advice to take some lessons and followed them to the top of the hill instead. They zipped down merrily and I stood there, trying to think of what to do next. I had poked around some on the lower slopes but this was a little bit harder.

Did I mention the altitude? We had come from Austin, which is not a high place, to Utah, which is. I hadn't had a lot of sleep. I think - this was over 20 years ago - I think I might not have eaten breakfast that day, which would be highly unusual as I Do Not Miss Meals.

You know those people who say that they forget to eat? What a bunch of crap. I have never forgotten to eat in my entire life. I have been prevented from eating and it's been miserable, but I've never forgotten. Indeed, I carry emergency food in the car and in my purse - peanut butter stuffed pretzels, dried pears, Kashi mocha granola bars, almonds and red licorice - just in case I'm out and it's a mealtime. I will not be stuck without food.

But I think I had skipped breakfast. So there I was: up high, not a lot of sleep, and no food in my stomach.

Guess what?

That's a combination that leads to feeling like crap which leads to the utter and total humiliation of being taken down the mountain by the ski patrol because you feel too crummy to ski.

And then you have to wait in the lodge because you 1. don't have a key for the condo and 2. even if you did, you can't remember where it is.

I hate skiing.

And I hate the condo part of skiing. There was a group of us. My friend Gwen and her husband. Gwen's brother and a friend of his. My friend Janelle and her husband. My friend Alexander. Me.

Here were the sleeping arrangements:

Bedroom #1: Gwen and husband

Living room pullout bed and whatever I didn't really pay attention: Gwen's brother and his friend

Bedroom #2: Janelle and her husband

Loft off Bedroom #2: Alexander and me

Alexander and I were not an item. (Not from a lack of interest on my part, I assure you.) The loft was a little cubby up high in the wall off the bedroom. You had to climb the ladder on the wall to get there. No door. It opened right into the bedroom. There were some mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor. Alex and I each had our own sleeping bag. No hanky panky. Alas.

First night. Alex and I had climbed into the loft. Janelle and her husband turned out the lights and went to bed. A few minutes later, I heard a noise.

A noise I hadn't heard in a while because I had a rather lackluster love life, although I realize in retrospect I got around a little more than I probably should have. Oh the perils of setting low standards for onesself.

But I knew that sound.

It was the sound of sex.

It was "We're trying to be quiet" sex, but it was sex nonetheless.

I lay there, horrified. I didn't know if I should say something to Alex or not. What is the protocol in this situation?

They didn't stop.

I pulled my pillow over my head. I didn't want to hear it.

The next morning, Janelle acted as if nothing was wrong.

The next night, we went through the same thing again. Quiet, then, sound of sex, then pillow over head.

This happened every night of the trip.

Did I mention Janelle and her husband had been married for 20 years?

Knowing what I know now after just 2 1/2 years of marriage, I should respect someone who can do it every night. But every night while I had to listen?

And WHO WANTS IT EVERY NIGHT? When I was in college, I thought daily sex would have been the bomb, but in college, you don't have to clean bathrooms or make supper or go to work or cut the grass and you have a heck of a lot more energy. In real life, you want to read your Belinda Carlisle autobiography and then go to sleep.

I was miserable on that stupid trip. I couldn't ski and I was too broke and too dumb to take lessons. I felt like crap. And every night, I had to dread hearing someone else's love life while a man on whom I had a massive crush lay next to me.

When we returned to Austin, somehow the subject of Janelle's nocturnal activities came up. Somehow the information that I had heard them came up.

She didn't even have the grace to be mortified. She just laughed and said that her husband always got romantic on vacations and that they had tried to be quiet.

I made a mental note never to be anywhere near them at bedtime again.

In which I wear a teddy, high heels, pantyhose and a coat to pick Primo up from the airport and nothing else

2011-05-22T14:15:00.000-07:00

It's a good thing I didn't have a flat tire is all I can think of now. Or that my radiator didn't blow up, which it had done before. Maybe it didn't go because I had already gone through the trauma of getting home from work with steam pouring out of the hood of my car and stopping every few miles to put more water in it. And then I got lost in the south side of town and it was pouring down rain and I ran out of water from the jug I kept in the trunk and a man came up to me as I was just sitting here on the muddy side of the road and, after telling me that I was definitely not in my neighborhood, asked if I needed help and I was a little apprehensive because hello, he was a stranger, but dang, I really didn't have any other options.

He popped the hood and looked and confirmed that I did indeed have a bad radiator and that I should drive straight to a garage to have it replaced, which is what I should have done that morning on my way to work when I first saw the billowing clouds of steam emerging from a place where you never want to see steam. Did I mention that I saw said billowing clouds of steam right as I was passing Sears Auto? Oh how dumb was I?

The Strange Man asked for some more water for the radiator and I told him I had none. We both fell silent. What to do? What to do? This was a rather desolate part of town. It was raining. No place convenient to fill the jug.

Except the big ditch by the side of the road. "But that water is dirty!" I protested.

He just looked at me. "Ma'am, that radiator has to be replaced anyhow. You just need to get home."

He filled the jug with rain water and poured it into the radiator. It worked. I chugged along home at about 20 miles an hour, staying on the side roads because if your car is going to fail, you definitely do not want it to fail on the highway.

I'm talking to YOU, my old Subaru, whose drive belt snapped on Highway 183 in Austin as I was on my way to see a customer. This was in the days before cellphones, so I had to leave the car and walk to the Whole Foods 100 yards away to call Triple A, who asked me where the car was and I said, "Right here by Whole Foods!" with an implied "Duh!" but then I realized that the person I was talking to was not even in Austin and didn't that shake my world view that something as simple as ordering a tow truck was no longer a local operation.

My similar recent experience was hearing John Tesch, on his radio show, talking about dental hygiene for pets and explaining that some pets need braces.

Braces? For a pet?

He went on to say that the braces are not for cosmetic purposes but because some breeds of dog have congenital teeth problems, to which I would say, Get a dog that doesn't need braces.

Braces. For a dog. Honestly. I'm just finally getting used to the idea of needing to brush the cats' teeth. For which they do not appear to make the appropriate toothbrushes. I went to Walgreen's just to get a little kid's toothbrush and all they have are Dora the Explorer and Dumbo toothbrushes, which cost $4 apiece. Just a generic small toothbrush would be fine with me, thanks, and I'll bet many parents do not appreciate having to spend that much on a disposable item.

Back to the teddy and the car. Given all the car drama I have had over my life, you would think I would know better than this and it's a good thing nothing bad happened this time, but I will never do this kind of thing again.

Primo's birthday was coming up. He is very hard to shop for. When he sees something he wants, he buys it. Within reason, of course, although I would argue that nobody needs 300 bottles of wine in the basement.

But we do not lack for stuff. We are over-stuffed. I would like to divest of a lot of our stuff, but I do not control all that now that I am a married woman. When you marry, you don't get to to be The Decider about how much crap enters your house. That is sad.

I thought I would make a Grand Gesture. Lingerie! What man doesn't like lingerie?

But where does one buy fancy lingerie? My underwear usually comes from Target and before you laugh, they have some cute underwear and why pay a lot for something that wears out at the same rate regardless of the source? I always laugh when I see white t-shirts in fashion magazines priced at $200. For a white shirt? That is going to stain as soon as the wearer eats raspberries? No. You buy your white t-shirts at Target and just get five each season.

Back to the underwear. Target does not or did not at the time seem to carry seduction lingerie, which is a category of its own.

I had to go to the mall, which I hate, because you have to find parking and then walk past all the stores that don't interest you or worse seduce you and your thin, unemployed now for a year wallet and yes I mean Godiva Chocolates and Origins Soap. I am powerless in the face of fancy chocolate and fancy soap.

So I parked right at the Dillard's entrance and went straight to the lingerie department, which I think is actually called "intimates," as if "lingerie" is a bad word. Or maybe it's just harder to spell.

The saleslady was so nice. She helped me find a red teddy which of course did nothing to flatter me in the cheap mirrored, florescent-lit dressing room, especially as I tried it on over my underwear, which is how you are supposed to do these things.

You would be surprised, though, at how tacky some women can be in the dressing room. I worked at Macy's for only a month and even in that short time, I saw complete chaos in the dressing room. As in, is it really too much trouble to put that evening gown back on the hanger after you try it on? One of the full-time salesladies told me that she had found - um - various human fluids and solids in the dressing room before. Oh ick.

When it came time to pay, I hesitated. This red teddy was not inexpensive. I hadn't worked in a while. I was living off my savings. But I decided Primo was worth it. I paid. The lady wrapped it and put it in a bag.

Then I drove straight to TJMaxx, where I found a similar item for one fourth the price. Oh snap.

I tried to time the Dillard's return for when the saleslady wouldn't be there because I didn't want to face her after she had been so helpful. But I also didn't want to waste the gas on making another trip. Dillard's was on the way home from TJMaxx so there you go.

She was there. I was mortified. But I decided honesty was the best policy, so I just told her I had found a similar item cheaper elsewhere. Maybe she didn't care. When I did returns at Macy's, I didn't care why someone was returning something as long as it wasn't because the product was defective. A good product can be re-stocked, a bad product cannot.

Speaking of that, if you want to return the elegant (and I use that term loosely) denim jacket with the studs on the yoke and collar a year after you bought it (with the tags on it and with a receipt), I will ask my manager if it's OK. When he says fine, return it for store credit, I will do so.

What I will not do is re-sell it to you for the one penny value the jacket has now acquired in the inventory system. After three months, products roll out of inventory and you can't return them by just scanning the bar code, etc, and pulling up all the data. You have to key in the item number and price. The system assigns a value of one cent to old inventory, hence the term "pennied out."

But just because the system says the value is one cent does not mean that that is now the sale price. Do not ask me to sell it to you for one penny. I would rather set it on fire than do that. If you wanted it, you could have kept it at the price you paid. And don't tell me that the other clerk does it all the time because that's just baloney.

Maybe the Dillard's lady didn't care. Maybe she just shrugged and thought, "Eh. Whatever." I hope so.

So now I had my red teddy for only $10. I had a nice spring coat. I had high heels. And Primo was flying in.

I put on the teddy and tried to put on the shoes, which were not very comfortable without pantyhose for I come from the pantyhose to work tradition and have bought my shoes accordingly. I removed the teddy, put on hose, then donned the teddy and shoes again. Looked in the mirror. Rolled my eyes. Oy. Really? But in for a penny.

Put on my nice flowered spring coat that I have not gotten to wear once this spring because it's been too cold for a light spring coat and drove to the airport. Prayed that the car would not die and I would be there on the side of the road in a coat I dare not remove lest I frighten small children.

Made it to the airport. Saw Primo waiting outside of baggage claim. Hugged him when he came to the car. And flashed him.

Which he liked.

Refastened the coat immediately. I am not good at this flashy sexpot thing. I am more of a white t-shirt and jeans person myself. But - he liked it. He liked the chocolate cake I had made for him. He was a happy boy. But he doesn't seem to mind my usual bedtime getup of red and white striped knit pants from Lands' End plus his yellow Beer Bike t-shirt from college. Primo, fortunately, is very easy to please.

The teddy has lived in my dresser since then. Four years, I think it's been. I finally put it in the Goodwill bag. I know if I tried that stunt here in the frozen north, the brakes would fail and I would careen into another car and then the ER people would laugh at my getup or I would get a flat and have to change it in the snow. We keep blankets, coats, gloves, and a snow shovel in the trunk for most of the year here. I do not need to tempt fate. It's back to Target underwear for every single day. Married + cold climate = no more teddies.

In which the scent finally leaves my dad's clothes

2011-05-18T17:22:00.001-07:00

For years after my dad died (in 1997), I had this dream where I would hear his voice calling me from the kitchen. It was the kitchen in my place in Miami. I lived there after he died and of course he never visited. But I would hear his voice clear as day and I could even see him standing there and I would wake up and run to the kitchen because maybe his death had been a bad dream and he wasn't really dead.

Every time I got to the kitchen, it was empty. I would be left bewildered at how I could have been so sure that he was alive. I had heard his voice! It was his voice. I had heard him. And yet there was nothing.

And each time I woke up and found out he was really dead, it was like he had just died. You never get closure. Those grief counselors they send to schools every time something awful happens? Do they do any good? Talking about death does not change it. Telling someone you feel crummy doesn't make you feel less crummy.

You never get over losing someone you love. You just get used to it. But sometimes, even when you think enough time has passed that you accept that this is just how life is now - Life Minus One - you will be shocked at the sharp, fresh pain that stabs you. That pain should be dull and small by this point, but it's not. It's almost as bad as it was the first time.

Your mileage may vary, of course. I suspect that if a parent or sibling who was never All That dies that those left behind don't mourn so much. Maybe they feel guilty about things that were unresolved or feel guilty that that don't mind that the person is dead, but they don't have a big empty gash inside of them that never quite heals. That, too, is sad, because who wants a crummy parent who won't be mourned? Then the mourning is for the relationship that never was.

And of course I am talking out of my elbow here because how can I possibly know how someone else feels? I have no idea. I can just imagine. Let's just say that there are some people in my life whose absence I will not mourn as much as others and I would think that others would have similar situations.

I digress. I have lived over one third of my life now with my dad dead. I have almost 14 years of memories that don't include him. I don't look around my house now and think, "Oh! I remember when Dad repaired that dripping faucet!" I don't think, "That was the year Dad got the turkey skin out of the trash." My home now doesn't have cues about my dad.

All I have is a photo on my dresser of my dad and me from 25 years ago, taken in the front yard of our house in San Antonio, a few years before my parents moved to Saudi Arabia. I am standing behind my dad with my arms around him and clasped around his neck. We are both wearing red, which was not something I did much in those days even though really, I look good in red. My hair is John from the nice beauty shop in West University blonde; my dad's is silver.

We are both smiling broadly and naturally but with our eyes open, a rare instance indeed for both of us as we are both not photogenic at all and quite awkward in front of the camera. Usually, we have forced grimaces, but my mom caught us at the perfect moment - laughing but before our eyes squinch shut.

We look happy.

There are reminders all over my house of my mom. When I vacuum in the basement rec room, I think about my mom spending three hours pushing the carpet cleaner back and forth to suck the water out of the soaking wet basement flood carpet.

Oh yes. We have annual basement floods. Have I told you about them? Perhaps I'll write about them later, but let's hope that I don't have any new material this summer because the floods put Primo in full freakout mode. Fortunately, they are followed by full engineer mode and we have saved our carpet each time, but it is a pain in the neck.

I see the irises in my front garden that my mom brought me from her garden and that originally came from my grandmother's garden up north. I have a bottle of leftover soy milk in my chest freezer for her next visit. Fortunately, lactose intolerance is something I have not inherited from her. Most people would probably agree that chubby thighs, a small bosom, and a tendency to migraines would be enough of a heritage to inflict on anyone.

When my mom visits, we talk about my dad. We tell Primo about him and Primo politely listens. Primo somehow turned out to be a very nice person, despite everything, and for that, I do thank his parents. They did one thing right at least and that's all I'll say about that for now.

Primo watched the videotape my mom gave me of my dad's last days. Someone lent us a video camera when my dad was in hospice for the last week of his life and we taped my dad telling stories. He lies there, bald and shrunken, 50 pounds underweight, in his hospital bed. In one shot, my brother, sister and I gather around him, unsmiling, with flat eyes. It's hard to radiate joy when your father is dying. But my dad, of all of us, makes an effort. He tries to smile and put a good face on it.

When he is telling stories, he genuinely smiles. He talks about hitting a big seagull once when he was riding his bike down a long hill in Panama. The bird got the short end of the stick as Force = Mass times Acceleration, which would have been

Force = [My dad's then-170 lbs] x [about 9.8 meters/second squared and I say "about" because that is the rate of gravity in an environment with no friction, but as my college physics prof always advised us, I am ignoring friction even though friction is real and you can't ignore it and also disregarding the fact that my dad would have been descending at an angle as opposed to dropping straight down, so you would have to throw in some other math there to make it come out right - so about but definitely less than 9.8 m/s2]

Force = whatever the math works out to but definitely more force than an eight-pound seagull could absorb without losing some feathers and the contents of his bowels

My dad laughs as he tells this story. Primo turns to me and says, "Wow. Your dad really had a strong [regional] accent," which is true and which is something I had never noticed before because he was just my dad, you know? But now that I hear that accent a lot, I recognize it a lot easier. Ainso?

I visited my mom earlier this month for a few days. She had a minor outpatient surgery to improve her vision and I went to help out during her convalescence. My "helping" turned out to be griping about having to get up at 5:15 a.m. to take her to the surgery center. After that, I got the ice pack from the freezer and put salve on her eyes. And made her supper and did the dishes. And kept her company.

Don't you wish you had a daughter like me?

It should have been my dad doing all that. Not that I minded - well, I was not crazy about the getting up early part - but you're not supposed to be widowed when you are only 54, as my mom was. Even 68, as she is now, seems young to be a widow. Lots of men older than that still hanging out, taking their slow walks around town in their sensible brown shoes and stopping to talk to me about the apple blossoms that have finally appeared or when to plant tomatoes or the millwork on the old Victorian house down the street.

One afternoon, while my mom was taking a nap, I went into the big closet off the guest bedroom. My mom has decades of her clothes in there - things she will probably never wear again but cannot bear to part with. One item is a beautiful belted, tailored yellow dress she made from a Vogue pattern, which, for those of you who do not sew, is the fancy, expensive brand of clothing patterns. But the dress is lovely and has bound buttonholes, which, again for those who do not sew, are a real pain in the neck but a sign of Quality.

If I had put that much work into a dress, I would not get rid of it, either. I would make a little shrine around the dress showing that I used to be able to sew like a pro. There is almost no point to sewing one's own clothes any more as decent clothes are available at a more than reasonable price at consignment stores and nice fabric is so expensive and who wants to do all that work with cheap fabric? It's like when I knit - I buy real wool because I am not going through all that with acrylic.

She has her clarinet from high school, when she got a One at State. Her dolls from when she was a little girl. Needlework from my grandmother.

And my dad's clothes.

Not all of them. Enough. A few suits and sport coats and a track suit.

She has moved three times since my dad died. The clothes have moved with her. Every time I visit her, I go into the closet to run my hands over my dad's clothes and to smell them. For years, his scent lingered. I would bury my face in the silk sport jacket and inhale.

How do you save the smell of someone you love? Every time I smell the combination of moth balls and lavender, I am back at my Granma Sylvia's house. Primo and I had a month-long breakup during our courtship. I didn't wash his bath towel the entire time. Instead, I kept it hanging on the shower curtain rod and sniffed it every time I went into the bathroom. I could pick my mom's pillow out of a dozen random pillows. I still put on Polo cologne every time I am in a department store because that is what my college boyfriend wore and he smelled so good.

This time, the smell was gone. My dad's scent was gone. I can't even remember what it was like. Maybe a combination of clean sweat from riding his bike to work, airplane fuel (he was more or less an aircraft mechanic), and Old Spice. The Dad Smell. It's gone. It will never come back.

In which I get to walk out of a living slam book session in a snit

2011-05-14T13:51:00.000-07:00

After I had been a Peace Corps volunteer for a year, the director of my agency, Pilar, said we were going to do a review of the previous year. Great idea! It's always good to look back at what you did and whether it worked or not and then decide what adjustments, if any, to make to your strategy.

I was the business advisor to a group of Mapuche women in southern Chile. This group of 135 women had a small store where they sold the traditional Mapuche textiles that they had woven by hand.

My assignment was to make them profitable, which was not so easy as I had no authority whatsoever to make my four co-workers at the store do what needed to be done, like not accepting any rug or blanket unaccompanied by a purchase order or not accepting any product not meeting a minimal quality standard. Or not continuing to extend credit to the women (for buying yarn and dye) when they never paid us back. Which would be bad enough under normal circumstances but is even worse in a period of inflation and when your IADB stipend is denominated in dollars and the dollar is losing against the peso. Little things like that.

It wasn't that my co-workers didn't want the agency to be profitable, but when you get paid whether your store is profitable or not - we were funded by a grant from the Inter-American Development Bank and that money paid the rent and my co-workers' salaries - it's not so necessary to make the tough decisions. Why make women cry - women who desperately need the money from their rugs and blankets - if you get paid whether you reject their product or not?

Let me digress right now and tell you that one of the most satisfying moments of my life was a few months ago when Maria, my counterpart at the agency, found me on facebook and told me that I was right and she was wrong and that she should have listened to me.

We are talking about something that happened 16 years ago. I had told her repeatedly that Pilar, the director, needed to do things differently for the agency to succeed and that I would help Maria prepare the documentation to show Pilar what had to happen and why. But Maria always resisted and I eventually dropped it. She resisted because she was the one who had to stay at the agency and she was the one whose living depended on this job. I was dabbling. I was there for two years and gone. I had no skin in the game, other than an interest in adventure and building my resume. But for Maria, this was all real. She did not want to challenge the status quo. It was safer that way.

That said, I was right and Maria was wrong. She told me that after I left, Pilar destroyed the agency and it was all because of the things I said. I took no satisfaction from knowing that the agency had ceased to exist - I would rather have been wrong - but still. My opponent. Vanquished. Ha.

So Pilar called a review meeting. I prepared some notes - analyses of sales and operations and things that had worked and what we could try in the next year. I was ready. I was ready. Oh we were going to do great things.

Pilar pulled chairs into a circle. She sat. My three other co-workers sat. Our three unpaid college interns (my idea) sat.

Pilar started.

Gold Digger, she asked. What do you think you could do better next year?

I pulled out my notes and started to talk. We need to do this and that and tha-

She interrupted me. Here's what Gold Digger did last year that I didn't like, she said to the others.

What?! This is not a review!

She turned to me and glared. I don't like the way you got upset when I sat at your desk.

The incident to which she referred was actually multiple incidents. Pilar had her own desk. She had her own office. But she didn't like it in there. She liked the having of her own office because she liked the trappings of power, which also included having our receptionist place all her calls for her, even though she maintained that her Struggle was against the Patriarchy and Western Imperialism and Hegemony. She struggled against all power except her own.

She didn't like to be alone, though, so would hang out in the office that Maria and I shared.

I do not like sharing an office. I like power as much as the next person, but even more than power, I like solitude so I can get some damn work done.

But Pilar wanted to be where the action was and that was in our office, which was also where the computer resided, which meant the three interns were there as well, as the use of the computer for their school projects was one of the few job perks we could offer.

Several times, I returned from lunch to find Pilar sitting at my desk. In my chair.

For those of us who do not struggle against Western Imperialism and Hegemony every day and for whom the concept of property rights is as mother's milk and who would never ever sit uninvited in a colleague's chair, we know what a major breach of office etiquette this was.

I have never ever ever sat in a colleague's chair at work. Until this point, no colleague had ever sat in mine. In the movies, when they want to show someone being totally disrespected, they show the disrespecter sitting in the disrespected's chair.

The first few times, I merely asked Pilar to get up.

She was never in a hurry to move.

The last time, I came back from the little corner bakery where I would time my visits for when the rolls came out of the oven, saw her sitting there, and snapped, Pilar, get out of my chair. Now.

She got all pissy with me.

I suggested that if she did not like being in her office that she and I could arrange a trade.

She did not like that idea. But she didn't sit at my desk anymore. Clearly, though, she harbored a grudge about my reaction to her desk usurping because she brought it up in the review.

I thought we were going to talk about how to make this place run better, I said.

Pilar glared at me again. I also don't like the way you take everybody's stuff off your desk, she said.

Again, a property rights dispute. I would come into the office and find Maria's purse on my desk. And the interns' purses and books on my desk. At first, I would politely ask them all to remove their personal items from my desk.

Then I got not so nice. At first, I just carefully removed everyone's stuff and put it on the floor. Then I started putting my purse on Maria's desk but she didn't care. After all, she had room: her purse was on my desk. Then I lost patience and one day just swept my arm across my desk and knocked everything off.

I know. I was a bitch. I should have tried to Understand our Cultural Differences and Tolerated and Celebrated Our Diversity.

But I dare you. I dare all of you to remain calm when someone else is 1. sitting in your chair, 2. putting her purse on your desk and 3. eating your porridge.

Pilar turned to the others. What do you want Gold Digger to change about herself? she asked them.

The beauty of being a Peace Corps volunteer is that you are a volunteer. It's very hard to get kicked out of the Peace Corps. I think you might have to murder someone. Or you have to insist on performing The Vagina Monologues despite your country director's warning not to do so. It's all fine and dandy to bring Awareness to the Downtrodden, but if you tick off 1. your boss and 2. your very conservative Muslim host country in the process, you will not last long.

Oh - and if you ride a motorcycle, you're gone. Even with a helmet. Or maybe you just can't ride a motorcycle without a helmet. It's been a while so my memory, she is not so sharp. Peace Corps made that rule when they realized that the number one cause of death for Peace Corps volunteers was motorcycle accidents.

If, however, you are just rude or insensitive or stoned on nutmeg all the time - oh yes I know of which I speak because I have Peace Corps friends everywhere - or just don't do your job, you will be tolerated.

I was rude to Pilar but in my defense, she started it. Seriously. Turning the review session into a living slam book? This was a self-criticism session. I might as well have been in China or Cuba. Comrades! I have sinned against you and the Party! Communism 101.

I didn't have to take that. I had accomplished enough in my first year - increased revenues and profits dramatically - that I could rest on my resume laurels.

I stood. I'm not staying for this, I said. When you guys are ready to discuss how to improve this agency and make more money for our socias [the dirt-floor, outhouse in the back, subsistence farming poor Mapuche ladies], let me know. Until then, I have real work to do.

And I walked out in a snit.

Oh it felt good. Almost as good as knocking the crap off my desk.

Have you ever walked out in a snit?

I don't recommend doing it if you have to have a job, which, as most of us are not heiresses, do, but maybe try it in a volunteer position. It feels very very good to say Take this slam book session and shove it.

It feels even better to find out, 16 years later, that you were right. About everything.

In which my sister is completely, totally right about child rearing and her boyfriend with the fifth-grade son is wrong, wrong, wrong

2011-05-02T05:42:00.000-07:00

My friend Anita always warned me never to say, "MY kid would never do something like that" because if I ever did have kids, they would 1. not only do Something Like That but 2. do it ten times worse. She also implied that those without children should not be in the business of judging the parenting skills of those who do have children, but mes amis, that is the main hobby of people who do not have children. To judge the parenting of the bad parents. You do not have to be a parent to know bad parenting when you see it.

NB: My friends are all excellent parents with delightful children. There is no reason to criticize their parenting. I judge and criticize the parenting of strangers only.

Back to our regular programming.

Sometimes, there is vindication. My sister, Jenny, found herself dating the wrong guy for a while.

Sigh. My sister. Pretty, warm, outgoing, liked by everyone who meets her. Deserves better than she has dated and that's all I'll say about that, although I will also say that Jen, I am sorry I told mom and dad that you were living with that guy 15 years ago. I thought they knew! I had no idea you had constructed an elaborate web of deceit, including separate phone lines back in the day when separate phone lines meant something. You know - when the phone was actually attached to the house.

These days, someone could be living in a crack house and you would never know because any time you would call, you would get the person's cellphone or her smartypants phone and not the house phone, answered in your friend's/daughter's absence by the nearest crackhead, maybe Duane, maybe Ginny, who would slur, in between puffs of the crack pipe, "She's not here, dude." And then never give her the message. And you would wonder what the heck is going on over there because every time you call, you get a different stoned person. But that wouldn't happen because you would be calling on a cellphone.

Back to Jenny. Who is not a crackhead. Who is violently anti-crackhead and against abortion but would be just fine with shooting druggie mothers who are delivered of sick, addicted babies who show up on my sister's ward in the hospital.

Jen was dating this guy, Brad, who was a very nice guy but I didn't think was worthy of her, as I have thought of most of the guys she has dated. She deserves greatness! But dating Brad she was and I have to say that he treated her very well. He was a nice, responsible guy. Sweet. Just no spark. But her life. Not mine.

He proposed after they had been dating for about a year. I have to give him major points for style. Brad was the fire chief and took the fire truck to Jenny's apartment building. He got on the ladder and extended it to her fifth-floor apartment. Or maybe extended the ladder first. Whatever. Holding a dozen roses in one hand, he knocked on her window with the other.

As his entire crew watched, he handed the roses to my sister. Then pulled a ring out of his pocket. Asked her to marry him.

She said she would think about it.

Ouch.

But she was right to do so because they had had a lot of conflict over one particular issue.

Brad's son, Billy. Which is not his real name: nobody is named "Billy" any more. Sad, really. If you call a three-year-old boy "Teddy" instead of "Edward," his mother will snap at you that his name is EDWARD. She is absolutely correct, of course. He is her kid. She named him. She gets to decide what he is called. It is presumptuous to re-name someone else. I get that. But wow. All these little little kids with huge names. I like nicknames. Sue me. I never had one - well, except for the nickname my grandparents used - so I was always envious of the kids who did have nicknames. I wanted to be Lizzie or Steph, not The Gold Digger. I suppose I could have started calling myself "Goldie," but it's not really Done to give yourself a nickname, is it?

Brad was a widower, so he did have that going for him. Ex-wives do tend to muck up the works - definitely the finances. And an ex-wife where there is a kid involved - well, now there is a lifetime connection that can never be severed. If you are getting involved with a man with a kid, it might be better for him to be a widower, at least for logistics, although it's sure not better for the kid.

Brad's wife had been dead for several years. His way of coping with being a widowed dad was to indulge Billy, who was about ten, in everything. Who wants to fight with his kid when the kid doesn't have a mother?

But my sister saw that this was going to be a problem. When Brad was promoted to chief, they had a big ceremony at the station. Jen was at Brad's helping him and Billy get ready. Billy came out in jeans and tennies. My sister told him to go back and put on nice church clothes - there would be photos and this was a big deal for his dad.

Billy refused and Brad backed him up.

Billy would eat almost nothing but broccoli. Which is so bizarre I can't even begin to fathom it, but such was the case. My sister, who has some awareness of good nutrition and a balanced diet, would try to get Billy to try other foods, maintaining that man does not live on broccoli alone.

Billy refused.

Brad backed him up.

Billy was the reason for their fights. Brad told Jenny that she had no idea what she was talking about. That she knew nothing, nothing! about raising children and especially about ten year old boys.

My sister informed him that she had a masters degree in neonatal nursing and that her coursework included classes in child psychology and other aspects of child health and rearing. She noted that she had been babysitting since she was 11 and that many of her charges had been young boys. She might have noted that she had more experience with ten year old boys than Brad did.

Brad was not interested.

Fine, she said. Fine. If you don't believe me, then at least talk to a counselor about the issues you have with Billy.

By some miracle - maybe it was when Jen told Brad she had to think about marrying him - Brad did go see a counselor.

Who - vindicated! so sweet! - told Brad that every single thing my sister had told him about Billy was correct and that Brad was doing it wrong.

Oh those are such sweet, sweet words.

But she told him no anyhow because she didn't want to spend the next eight years arguing about Billy.

Smart girl.

In which I get in touch with my inner manager for a change

2011-04-26T15:18:00.001-07:00

When Primo and I moved into our house, the basement-flooding, heat-losing, 1928 brick moneypit that we call home, we needed a fair amount of work done. The penultimate penultimate owner had been a little old lady who became too frail and probably too cash strapped to do much maintenance.

The penultimate owner was a contractor who bought the house from her, discarded all the coal in the basement, ripped out the nasty carpets and replaced them with more nasty carpets, cut the gas line to the kitchen where it would have been useful for say a gas stove for those of us who hate cooking with electric, and installed new brass or bronze - whatever - switchplates while ignoring the cracks in the driveway and the carpenter ants in the balcony.

The owner who sold the house to us was a young single guy, Tad, who never shoveled the sidewalk and never wondered why the sidewalk was shoveled anyhow or at least never wondered enough to ask our next-door neighbors, who were the proximate cause of the shoveled sidewalk, as Eric's dad loves his snowblower and would clear Eric and Regina's sidewalk before the crack of dawn and would do the neighbors' sidewalks as well. That is, until he got tired of never being thanked, which meant that once we were in the house, Mr Eric's Dad did not clear our sidewalk. Thanks a lot, Tad.

Tad's other activities, besides not shoveling the sidewalk or thanking the person who had, were to sit in bed without a shirt and lean against the wall. Not against the headboard but against the wall. When a shirtless man leans against a wall every night or so for 15 months, eventually he leaves an oily man print on the paint, a print that is bright and clear once the bed and the man are removed.

Tad's other other activity was to use the microwave for everything - the oven was brand-new spanking clean - without covering his food, which would not have been such a problem except the penultimate owner, Mr Contractor, got the microwave at the scratch and dent center, which I am normally a big fan of, but the reason the microwave was there was because it was missing the interior plastic sheet that covers that little honeycomb screen in the door.

Must I get explicit and describe for you what happens when a person, Tad, heats his uncovered Spaghetti-Os in a microwave with an exposed honeycomb screen? There is tomato sauce and other stuff stuck on the inside of my microwave door that I will never be able to remove because I cannot clean through honeycomb.

What Tad did not do was diligent or even any maintenance.

It was left to Primo and me to replace the balcony that was being eaten by carpenter ants. You would think that carpenter ants + wood would be a good thing but no it is not. You never want someone to say the words "carpenter ants" and then say something about your house. It is a bad, expensive thing.

It was left to us to rip out the nasty carpet and polish the beautiful wood floors.

It was left to us to get the furnace checked. Actually, we waited until our furnace broke in mid-December on one of the coldest nights of the year before we thought to do this one. Oh sure we'd looked at the service record attached to the furnace, which we pass every single time we clean the cat box, and had mused to ourselves, "Well that's interesting. It's been over ten years since that furnace was serviced," but we had never actually considered taking drastic action like having the furnace serviced so we wouldn't be without heat on one of the coldest nights of the year. But if Tad had done it right, then we wouldn't have had plugged tubes so I'm throwing this one on him.

It was left to us to scrape the deep rust off that metal thingy that goes under the bricks at the top of the window opening. Apparently, if you leave these things to rust, they will eventually cause the mortar going on the diagonal from the corner of the window to crack and fall out and then your house will fall down.

By "left to us," I mean, "left to us to find someone who knows how to fix these things and charge us a lot of money to do it."

We had hired a man recommended by the pastor of Primo's church to help us move from Primo's apartment to the house. We called him "Amish Al" to distinguish him from our friend Normal Al. Amish Al had an Amish beard. Normal Al is clean shaven.

Amish Al was great when we moved into the house. He was strong and had his own tools and knew how to assemble Primo's big obnoxious desk and how to take the door off the hinges to get some things inside.

He had only one failing: he showed up too early, which is a common problem around here. I have mentioned my dad's cousin who showed up for lunch half an hour early. I no longer have Dad's Cousin over for lunch; instead, I meet him at a restaurant. He is always early. The past few times, he has called me half an hour before our scheduled meeting time to tell me he is at the restaurant. I tell him that's fine, I haven't left my house yet and I'll see him at 1:30 as we planned. The other day, he didn't call, but when I got to the restaurant ten minutes early, he had already finished his lunch.

When we moved out of Primo's apartment, I told Amish Al to arrive at 1:00. "We don't need you before then," I said. "Primo is not picking the truck up until 12:30. One o'clock or 1:30, even." I didn't need someone standing around on the clock when the clock was mine.

Amish Al showed up at 12:30.

Primo and I were just getting ready to eat lunch.

I had already moved all the food to the house. All the food except the last little bit of freezer crap that I normally wouldn't eat but was there and I will eat bad food before throwing it out, which is fine as a survival strategy if you are expecting famine but not so good if you want to stay in your thin jeans.

We had enough food for two people.

I should have told Amish Al that we weren't ready for him and to come back. But that seemed dumb. Then I made the mistake of asking him if he had eaten lunch because I was confusing the roles of employer and hostess.

He hadn't eaten.

Even though Primo was staring daggers at me, I offered to share our lunch. I should have told Amish Al there was time for him to go out and grab a sandwich. I should have. But I shared our lunch. Which Amish Al found too spicy for his taste. Really, Amish Al? You're complaining about a meal to which you were not even really invited?

But Amish Al did a good job of actually moving, so when we were looking for a handyman to scrape the rust from the whatever you call thems and then paint the metal, I called him. Primo was all, Why do we have to do this now? I have too much work! This is stressful!

And I was all, This needs to be done so we might as well get it over with before winter.

I impressed on Amish Al the importance of not arriving before 8:30 a.m.

"Primo works late and he sleeps late," I said. "Please do not ring that doorbell before 8:30. Not one minute early."

It must have killed him to wait until 8:15, which was when he did ring the bell. "I got here early," he told me.

The rule is if you arrive early, you drive around the block or sit in your car and wait. That's the rule. But nobody seems to know that here.

I have to admit it's not just here. I organized an alumni event for my college when I lived in the south. We were having a little party at Gayle and Jim's house for the incoming freshmen in our area. "Our area" included some towns 100 miles away. The party started at 6:00.

At 5:00, I was at Gayle's house helping put out dishes and silverware when the doorbell rang. It was a new freshman and her family from a town 80 miles away. An hour early. They must have decided they couldn't just take in the sights around town or wait in the coffeeshop. Instead, they came to the party, which was not a party yet. This would not have been a problem except instead of offering to help, they (well, the dad, mostly) expected to be entertained.

The next year, they showed up early again. That's when I realized the dad was just a complete boor.

Amish Al rang our bell early. Primo just sighed and went upstairs. I showed Amish Al what needed to be done and then came back inside.

He completed the rust removal. He did just fine on the rust removal.

Then he started the painting.

Primo went outside to look.

He ran back inside and hissed at me, "He's getting paint on the bricks!"

"So tell him to stop!" I said.

"It's your job to supervise! I'm working! I told you I didn't want us to charge forward on this!"

"Supervise?" I said. "Why on earth should I have to supervise?"

"Because he is getting paint on the brick!"

Here is my philosophy on painting: I should not have to explain to someone that he needs to stay in the lines when he is painting an object. As in, if I hired someone to paint the kitchen, I would not expect to have to say, "And remember: no paint on the refrigerator!"

But perhaps that level of detail and micromanagement is necessary.

As he stomped up the stairs, Primo yelled, "You need to handle this!"

Here's how good I am at confrontation:

Not good.

Oh sure yeah I am a bossy know it all who knows how everything should be done, but my style is to talk behind someone's back rather than address the actual situation. I am great in imaginary confrontations, where I seethe my disdain and contempt at the person who has done me wrong, but in person, I tend to suck it up.

For example, I just picked up a shirt from the tailor. I got this cool shirt at Goodwill for $7. It's black with pink ribbons sewn horizontally at one-inch intervals from top to bottom. It wasn't until I got home that I realized that the shirt had been mismarked and was much larger than I thought. It would fit me with some minor alterations - the zipper would have to be re-set, which would be tough because of getting those ribbons to match. It would fit my boobage-gifted sister as is.

I took it to the tailor and explained that 1. I didn't want to spend a lot of money to have it altered because it was from Goodwill and 2. if it was going to be too expensive or if it couldn't be done properly, I would just send it to my sister. So don't do it if you can't do it right! That was my message or so I thought.

A week later, I picked it up.

It hadn't been done right. The ribbons did not match in the back. And I was being charged $17 for it not being done right.

I said meekly, "So these don't exactly match, do they?"

The tailor looked at me impassively.

I muttered passively aggressively, "I should have just left it alone."

The tailor looked at me impassively.

I was waiting for him to say, "You are correct! This is a crummy job! I will do it over! And I will charge you less!"

But he did not say that so I gave him my American Express card and stomped out of there.

I am not exactly Miss Stand Up For Myself.

But. When it is a choice of a stranger being upset or my husband being upset, I pick the stranger.

I went outside and told Amish Al to stop working. "Amish Al," I said. "You are getting paint on the brick. That is unacceptable."

He looked puzzled. "Oh," he said. "Well I guess I'll clean it off."

"No! Stop! I'll take care of the painting. Wait here."

I went inside and got his money. "Thanks for what you've done," I said.

"So might you have more work?" he asked.

I felt sad because I knew he really needed the work and up to the brick painting, he had done such good work, but he had, in that one move, shown himself not to be trustworthy of working on our biggest financial investment. Plus I knew Primo would have a hissy fit if I hired him again.

I lied. "I'll call you," I said.

In which someone is having a romantic evening in Rome but it's sure not my friend Lenore or me

2011-04-22T11:15:00.001-07:00

The summer after I graduated from business school, instead of doing the smart, practical thing and getting a job, I, fed up, fed UP I tell you with how The Corporate Man was Keeping Me Down, didn't even bother to look for work and used the rest of my money, the money I had not used on UT's fabulously low tuition and on my rent for Michelle McMichael the crazy landlady's place or on the car-vacuuming, marijuana importing neighbors duplex and went to Europe for the summer.

I had wanted to go to Europe for the summer after I finished college, but I had a job that started June 3 and what kind of idiot English major takes a trip instead of accepting a job? An idiot MBA will do it but not an idiot English major. English majors are far more realistic and practical than MBAs is what we can learn from this.

Still, I was anxious about the financial impracticality of my upcoming adventure and even worked myself into such a state of anxiety one day that I threw up. I threw up so hard that I burst all the blood vessels around my eyes and had red eyes for a day or two and then black/green/purple/yellow eyes. I was lovely.

Lovely and -- going to Europe. I had exams the first few days of May, then a seven-day interval before my last final, in microeconomics. I asked my micro prof if I could take the exam early so I could get to Barcelona earlier, but he said no, what if everyone wanted to take the final early? I shrugged and said what if? Then he rather implied that I might cheat, even though I scored the highest mark on the midterm in the whole class.

I had had a hard time with the material, so had studied and studied and studied. I was the last person to turn in my midterm because I had checked and re-checked everything. I thought I was the dumbest person taking the test.

This professor was not a fan of mine. I sat in the front row because I was a front-row sitter. I had learned my lesson from college, where I often did not wear my glasses to class because - get this - they were ugly glasses. Not wearing glasses = not being able to see the board, which is a necessary thing for oh, calculus and chemistry. Little wonder I became an English major, hey?

Anyhow, I was a glasses-wearing front-row sitter in grad school because by golly, I was paying for this myself (I also paid for college, but that was loans not cash out of my savings account and you pay a lot more attention to paying money you've earned than you do to money that has not yet been earned) and I was going to be darn sure I learned. One day, the prof was explaining in a very painful and convoluted way an algebraic process that was really just taking the derivative in calculus. I leaned over to the guy next to me, whose undergraduate degree was in mechanical engineering, and whispered, "Isn't he just taking the derivative?"

The engineer, who was from Argentina, whispered back, "Siiii."

The prof stopped. Walked up to me. Asked if I had something to share with the class.

Oh yes. Even in grad school, they treat you like third graders. Although we were acting like third graders, so there you go.

"Yes," I answered. "I want to know why you don't just say, 'Take the derivative.'"

"Because if I did that, half this class would pass out," he said.

Ever the smart aleck and has to have the last-worder, I said, "You're supposed to have a year of calculus as a prerequisite for this program."

He rolled his eyes at me as he returned to the blackboard.

Back to the midterm and we'll get to Rome, I promise you. The class after the midterm, I sat nervously, waiting for my score. I was early to class because that's how I roll. The professor saw me sitting there and walked up to me, holding a sheet of paper in front of him. He stood still in front of me, holding the paper out for me to see. It was a list of test scores, from highest to lowest. I looked in the middle of the paper for my social security number and score, but didn't see it. I went all the way to the bottom of the paper and still didn't see my number. Then I looked back up. At the very top of the list, with a score only two points from perfect, was my number.

I looked up at him and smiled.

"I'm reviewing the test today," he said.

"Do I need to stay?" I asked.

"I should think not," he answered.

And yet he thought I would cheat on the final? The scores were curved. I would never sabotage my own score that way.

I'm getting to Rome. I'm getting to Rome. He wouldn't let me take the test early, so I waited and took the darn test and then left for Barcelona the next day. I skipped my graduation.

Yes, I skipped my own graduation.

People.

You know how there are always these letters to Dear Abby in May about how Oh no! I won't have enough tickets to invite Great Aunt Joan to my son's high school graduation and she'll be soooo offended?

Great Aunt Joan is not offended.

Great Aunt Joan is thrilled.

I made a solemn vow after my college graduation that I would never attend another graduation again, either for myself or for another person. Circumstances dictated that I attend one graduation a few years ago, but with God as my witness, I will never ever ever sit through another graduation again as long as I live.

I will watch paint dry first.

Seriously, is there anything more mind-blowingly dull than watching a graduation?

No there is not.

I finished my tests, skipped graduation, and got on the plane to Barcelona, where my friend Lenore met me, and from there we took the train to Rome, where we were going to stay in her friend Bob's apartment while he was on vacation elsewhere. We had reserved seats in a compartment into which extra people, who did not have reserved seats, squeezed themselves and smoked. The window would not open. The corridors were filled with smokers. It was hot. Hot, smelly smokers. Not enough room. Oh how I treasure those student travel days.

After a very long, sweaty trip, we arrived in Rome. I had read in my guidebook that the Rome train station was rife with pickpockets and I was on guard. While Lenore went to call someone about getting the key to Bob's apartment, I found a strategically sound spot to stand and guard our luggage. My back was to the wall so I had only 180 degrees of area to patrol.

A tall Ethiopian man, holding an unlit cigarette, approached from my right. He gestured to me and I turned to look at him. Did I have a light? he seemed to be pantomiming.

I shook my head.

He pantomimed again.

I impatiently tried to explain that I didn't smoke and I didn't have any matches. Sheesh!

That's when I heard someone shouting on my left.

I turned to see a little Italian man grabbing the elbow of another Ethiopian man. Ethiopian Man #2 was holding my backpack. Which contained my laundry, an apple, some cheese, and my camera, back in the days when cameras were actually worth something.

I snatched the backpack from EM #2 and punched him in the arm.

The little Italian man scolded me. I don't speak Italian but I got the gist of what he was saying: Lady you need to pay attention. PAY ATTENTION!

Nothing like being chewed out in a language you don't speak by someone you don't know.

Lenore and I made it to the apartment. We were pretty tired after being cooped up in the reserved, we paid extra for our own seats but got crowded by seat cheaters, compartment. We boiled some pasta and ate it with butter, then went to bed.

Shortly after we had turned out the lights, we heard a noise. A thumping. A loud, rhythmic thumping. A loud, rhythmic thumping on the wall behind our headboard. A loud, rhythmic thumping that we would feel very lightly in our bed* but was enough to make the crucifix above Bob's bed move. (I don't think Bob was particularly religious - I think the crucifix might have belonged to his landlord. Or maybe there was no crucifix at all and I am remembering one simply because it makes for a better story.)

Then the moaning started.

Is there anything better than listening to someone else's oral delight in sexual activity as it happens?

You know - like those movies we watched in 7th grade history: You Are There. I just googled that phrase. I am not losing my mind. Walter Cronkite did an entire series of You Are There. It happened. I was there.

Lenore and I lay there, waiting. For you know. For it to be over.

And soon, but not soon enough, it was.

The next night, the same thing. Plus an encore presentation at 2:00 a.m.

Lord. Have. Mercy.

At the time, that did not seem so remarkable.

But from middlish-ageness, with job stresses and late nights working and taxes due and sleep so very, very precious, it looks completely different. This was before viagra. Although we have no way of knowing if the same people were involved in each event, if you know what I mean.

Every night while we were there, Lenore and I were treated to a show.

Our strategy was to wear ourselves out walking around Rome all day long and back up the long, steep hill to the apartment so that by nighttime, we were so exhausted that nothing could keep us awake.

We never did ask Bob if that was normal or if his neighbor had also lent out his apartment.

* If there is only one bed in a sleeping place, women friends will just share the darn bed. Men, I think, are more likely to insist that one man sleep on the sofa and the other sleep in the bed.

In which I gasp in horror and astonishment as a co-worker uses a word he thinks he made up but is a real word not used in polite conversation

2011-04-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

For a while, I worked in let's say Omaha at one of my company's factories there. I was there only for six months and then was supposed to move on. It was supposed to be a special project, developing a long-term strategy for the factory to take it beyond its current use as a milk carton folding equipment manufacturer, which might sound like snoozeville but really is not.

When is the last time you bought milk in a carton?

Ha. See? You buy your milk in a plastic jug. But remember when milk used to come in the same kind of carton that orange juice comes in now? That carton is called a gabletop carton. The carton flat is made at a combination cutting/printing plant that takes huge rolls of very expensive containerboard and prints them with one hopes a nice four-color roto design and cuts them into two-dimensional forms that are later folded and glued into milk cartons.

As you might imagine, the milk companies do not fold and glue these flats by hand. No, there are machines that assemble the boxes for filling.

My company had a factory that made the machines that assemble boxes for filling.

But a factory of this sort can make other machinery. My job was to explore the options: were there applications in the perfume market? In the processed food market? Where? I had six months to figure it out and help the plant manager develop a strategy.

The reason we needed the strategy is because the market for milk carton folding equipment was nosediving.

Plastics.

Plastic jugs. Plastic jugs were the culprit. Plastic jugs are not folded and glued on milk carton folding machines. Instead, they are blow molded on blow molding machines.

The blanks for the milk carton cost many dozens of cents, especially with nice printing.

The plastic per milk jug is just a few pennies per.

A blow molder?

Cost about $100,000.

So you. You might not be a business person, but analyze this:

You have just spent $100,000 on a blow molder (your fixed cost). It costs just pennies for the plastic for each milk jug the blow molder makes (your variable cost).

Are you going to keep putting your milk in paper cartons (at maybe 40 to 50 cents each) if you have a new $100,000 piece of equipment standing in your packaging plant? Or are you going to say, "Dang I've spent $100,000 on a piece of equipment that doesn't cost much to operate so I think I am switching to putting my milk in jugs?"

That was our problem.

One month after I had moved to Omaha, which is a lovely lovely city and I would move back in a second, my division got a new VP who said, This is our new strategy and you better do it or else you know what.

Which meant all of a sudden, I had nothing to do.

And I wasn't clueful enough to hang out in the plant and ask the machine operators, members of the autoworkers union even though what they did had nothing to do with cars (this is what I remember, 12 years later, but I can't find anything about it on the website, so maybe I am wr - wr- wr - not right about that), what projects they might have had for me or better yet, what problems they might have had that I could help solve, although there was this inventory analysis that I should have done and would have been a piece of cake with the spreadsheet and programming knowledge I have developed since then.

I blew it. Too shy. For dumb. I love manufacturing and processes and I would love to get my hands on that kind of thing today. When you're middle-agish, you don't care so much about what people think and are a little more intrepid.

The plant manager (PM) still wanted to work out a new strategy for the plant, even though we had our long-term marching orders. I facilitated meetings, developed presentations, and tried to make myself useful.

There was a management retreat. The PM wanted me to attend to facilitate, develop an agenda, etc. He had far more confidence in my abilities than I did. He had hired me out of the Miami office after we spent one day working together and one evening at supper (with a bunch of other people - sheesh - not like a romantic thing).

A week after he returned to Omaha, my boss came into my office (sigh - back when I had my own office) and told me that PM wanted me to come work for him in Omaha. I called PM and asked if he wanted to interview me or at least see my resume, but he said no, he knew enough. If only I could impress recruiters like that now.

Back to the management retreat. We went to this very nice golf resort. I got my own little cabin because I was the only woman. The five men shared a larger cabin and that's also where we had our meetings. I arrived the first morning to find about ten pounds of candy strewn around the room in small and medium bowls. Good candy, too. Three Musketeers. Reese's Peanut Butter cups. Almond M&Ms.

There were golf posters all over the living room. Not my choice of decor, but it was a golf resort. What do you expect?

We started the session. I was taping huge sheets of paper on the walls and writing on them with magic marker. We took a candy break and one of the guys, Gary, the plant accountant, was goofing off. He was describing their golf game the night before and how he had hit the ball into the smegma.

"Into the what?" I asked.

"The smegma," Gary told me. "You know - the tall grass near the pond, like this." And then he gestured toward one of the posters, which did indeed show tall grass near a pond.

"I don't think that's what that word means," I told him.

I did know what that word meant and I would rather I did not. A previous boyfriend - an eye doctor with a lot of arcane and trivial knowledge - had explained it to me once, perhaps as we were having an argument about circumcision and my position that it was mutilation no matter if it happened to a boy or to a girl but more likely just because he wanted to tell me something a little icky.

"No, that's it," he told me confidently. "I know because I made it up."

"Noooooo," I said slowly. "It's a real word."

All the other men were looking at us now, including my boss, the plant manager.

I should have dropped it. I should have just shrugged and said, "Whatever," then pulled Gary aside later to tell him what it meant.

But I didn't. I was a little rattled by the whole thing and not as poised as I should have been.

So I told him. In front of everyone, I told Gary what it meant. I was clinical, but I told him.

His jaw dropped.

Everyone's jaw dropped.

They looked at me kind of funny. Me, the only woman in the group.

The blood left Gary's face. "I didn't know! I mean it! I didn't know! I'm so sorry!"

"I know," I told him. "Don't worry about it."

He babbled. Apologized. I told him to stop. I left the room, took a bathroom break, gave the conversation a chance to change.

When I returned, nobody mentioned it again. But later that afternoon, Gary found me and pulled me into the kitchen, next to the caramel corn.

"You have to believe me, I didn't know," he pleaded. "I have three daughters. I really really didn't know. I wasn't trying to harass you."

What? He thought I thought he was trying to sexually harass him? What on earth was HR telling people?

"Don't worry! Really!" I insisted. I had thought it was just kind of funny, although a little uncomfortable. "I know you didn't mean anything by it."

I returned to Omaha that night, not because of the smegma incident but because PM had only wanted me there for one day of meetings - the single cabin was a bit expensive and I really couldn't stay in the big cabin with the guys.

We had the weekend to recover, but that next week at work, Gary sought me out again to apologize, explaining again that he had three daughters and was not a harasser. Poor guy. He really and truly had had no idea. Had probably heard the word once without hearing the context or definition and it had stuck in his subconscious, just waiting for the perfect moment to emerge and embarrass him.

Maybe I should have sued. I would be sitting pretty right now on my ill-gotten gains on the account of someone who spoke neither out of malice nor out of knowledge.

In which Primo reads this blog for the first time in a good long time

2011-04-13T07:32:00.001-07:00

Primo: I thought your [double secret probation] blog was supposed to be about me.

Me: It is, mostly. But I have run out of material [which is why I am reaching back into my tortured, murky past and pulling out dreck to share with youse].

Primo: You could write about how I was a jerk about the bronze switchplates.

Me: Nope. I don't write about that kind of stuff. [When Primo is a jerk, that is. I do write - on my regular blog - about how we gently disagreed on the matter of how the bronze switchplates in the kitchen and the bathroom should have been cleaned, with Primo maintaining that Brillo pads were not the right way to go, even though "Brillo" comes from "brillar," which is Spanish for "to shine," and with my maintaining that Brasso was not doing the job so I had to escalate to steel. Which scratches bronze. In case you didn't know.]

In which I have a one-night stand with a guy in grad school and then I meet his girlfriend

2011-04-01T13:04:00.000-07:00

Yes. Sleazy, sleazy, sleazy. Don't hate me. I am ashamed of what I did and have reformed. I do not sleep with anyone else's boyfriend or husband these days. Just my own.

First semester of grad school, I met this guy. Let's call him Zach, which nobody my age is named, but is a handy name. There is a tranche of men now in their early 30s, to whom I taught swimming in the summers when I was in college, who are named the "J" names: Joshua, Jeremy, Jason. There are also a bunch of Blakes in that age group.

The women in that group are Alexis, Crystal and Brooke.

What TV show was popular five years before I started teaching? What movie star was popular?

I think the Madisons/Madisyns/Maddesens were a few years after that. Although I should talk: I'm named after a Mousketeer.

I had them all in my swim classes. I taught four and five year olds how to swim. Or, better said, I taught four and five year olds how to hold their breath underwater and how to open their eyes underwater and how to jump off the side of the pool into the water. I did not, unfortunately, teach them how to tie their shoes and neither did their mothers, which meant that I spent my meager five-minute break between classes tying shoes. I was very happy the year that velcro fastenings appeared. Suddenly, I had my time back.

Back to Zach. I don't remember how I met him, but we would encounter each other in the atrium at UT's grad school. He was getting his master's degree in accounting, so we probably didn't have any classes together, as I took only the two required MBA accounting classes, financial and cost.

Financial accounting is the income statement, cash flow, and balance sheet. Cost accounting is figuring out how much overhead to allocate to each widget and how much to stock of the chocolate ice cream vs the vanilla vs the butter pecan so that you make money on all of them when you charge the same price for each scoop. Chocolate ice cream with nuts is a lot more expensive to manufacture than plain vanilla. Where do the overhead allocations go? How much does it cost to make each widget? If you don't know what your production costs are, then you can't set your prices accurately and you don't know if you are making any money.

But. I do not have an accounting mindset, at least not a financial accounting mindset. You have to care that everything adds up perfectly if you are an accountant and I just don't care. It will all work itself out is my attitude. Sure, I call Sendik's if it looks like they undercharged me $45 on a case of wine that Primo ordered and I picked up, but if they over or undercharge me by a dollar, big deal. Who cares. It evens out in the long run.

I am a strategy person and prefer to work in a manufacturing environment. Put me in a place where they make something and ask me to make it work better? Oh baby. You almost wouldn't have to pay me to do that kind of job. I do it as a hobby now: any time I walk into a store or other place of business, I am re-arranging things in my mind, developing a better checkout, billing or patient flow process. I am a nosy, bossy know it all and there are some jobs where that is an advantage.

If anyone who might ever hire me is reading this, do know that when I assemble a team to do a project, I make sure to have at least one or two accounting people in my group. If I were say a county clerk who was responsible for reporting vote tallies, I would make sure to have someone on my team who was an absolute stickler for detail who would review the unofficial results before releasing them so she could say, "Hey did you realize that the data for Brookfield didn't import? And that you left 15,000 votes out of the total?"

That's how I would do it if I were a county clerk, but I'm not.

I know my strengths and I know my weaknesses. I need someone to say, "But wait! Have you considered this and that?" My biggest strength is that I am not afraid to make decisions. It is also my biggest weakness.

I had met Zach. He wasn't that handsome at first glance, but he was very smart and had a dry, intelligent wit that appealed to me. I am so easy. Intelligence + humor gets me every time.

We spent a few months flirting. I think it was my prairie denim skirt coupled with the white blouse with blue and red flowers embroidered on it that did the trick. I looked so alluring. Honestly. Does anyone look good in that kind of outfit? Not even Chloe Sevigny on "Big Love" looks good in that stuff and she has a knockout figure. Maybe it was the too-long hair (my hair is very fine, which means it doesn't take length well) or the distinctly unfashionable glasses that a really good friend would have stopped me from buying but did I take a friend glasses shopping with me? No I did not and that was dumb. I looked tres geeky.

I knew Zach had a girlfriend because he had told me about her. She was an undergrad who was thinking about transferring to a school in Atlanta, where his post-graduation job was waiting. She was that serious.

I wondered why he flirted so heavily with me when he had this serious girlfriend. I thought maybe he wasn't as serious as he seemed. Or maybe he was just a jerk.

He went to Atlanta for more interviews or to talk about the job or something. He called me from his hotel. He paid attention to me.

One evening, he came over to my place to give me a cassette - an opera mix tape, I think, which is just nuts because I only like opera lite. Maybe I was just trying to impress him with my superior culturedness, which is silly because a round-heeled woman can have just about any man if s-e-x is all he wants and if he has low standards and morals. This was not an audition for a relationship. It was straight basic attraction.

We kissed and well you know.

Yes. Sleazy. I know. I know.

After he left, I found his watch on my dresser. I called him to let him know and he told me that he had done that on purpose so he would have a reason to return.

He did return. Only once. Ha. As if that "only" makes this not so sleazy.

There was a grad school happy hour at Scholz Garden, a bar near the school.

I went.

He went.

His girlfriend went.

Well this was awkward. Especially because she was so nice and so sweet and also so gorgeous - not just run of the mill gorgeous, but pale milky skin, green eyes, and long, thick, lustrous red hair, which really made me question Zach's judgment. And made me question my morals. What on earth was I doing?

That was it. It was over. Zach had a very nice girlfriend. I had met her, seen her in the flesh. She was no longer an abstraction. How do cheaters do it? How do married people who are fooling around with their friend's spouses take the tension? Aren't their consciences killing them?

Zach might have been a jerk, but I did not have to be party to his jerkness. Let him fool around with someone else. I was done. It is not a good feeling to meet a man's girlfriend after you have slept with him, especially if she is a nice person and if you have any morals at all. In the future, I decided, I would leave this kind of messing around to other women.

Which I did. No more partner to cheating for me. Not even kissing, which is what I had done before grad school. A kissing incident with a married man. Oh dear. I'll tell you about it later. For now, though, let me try to excuse myself by explaining that I ran with a fast crowd back then. I let myself be influenced by their bad behavior. No excuse. But I have reformed. No kissing, no s-e-x with married/involved men since 1991. Really.

In which I eat the Good Chocolate and then have to go all over San Diego to replace it

2011-04-01T07:15:00.001-07:00

I'm running out of drama, or at least I am running out of drama inflicted on me by other people. What remains is the drama I have inflicted and that is not as much fun to write about because I want you to like me and it's easier to like someone who has not done crummy things to other people.

Today I am going to write about a small drama that ended up OK, but I will tell you about something mean and sleazy I did to another woman. As in, I had a one-night stand with her boyfriend even though I had met her and liked her.

Tres sleazy, I think you will all agree. Yes, I am ashamed and sorry and I never sought her forgiveness because I would have been easing my own conscience at the expense of her pain of being betrayed by her boyfriend, who had talked about marrying her.

Today I am going to tell you about the time I was staying with my Peace Corps friends Janet and Marty at their house in San Diego. They had very generously offered a spare bedroom and meals while I looked for a job in southern California. You may remember that I ended up working for the UT alum at his factory in Tijuana in the heroin district, a story that inspired an angry Tijuana commenter to claim that there was no heroin in Tijuana and I was a big, fat liar who was trying to discredit Mexico and Mexicans and whatever. I deleted him. I believe in free speech and if you don't like what I say, you are free to get your own blog and talk trash about me.

This was pre-internet days. Job hunting was done the old-fashioned way - by looking at ads in the newspaper or calling your alumni office for the names of alumni in the area who might be disposed to hire another alum.

All that work to find a job meant that I was not doing much work to find a job. Instead, I was spending a lot of time alone in Janet and Marty's house, riding my bike to the beach, cooking supper for all of us (at least I hope I did that - this was a while ago and I don't remember much) and looking in the fridge every five minutes to see if something new and interesting had appeared.

There was something interesting in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator.

An entire unopened, cellophaned box of Belgian chocolates.

Fancy chocolates.

Unopened.

I watched that box for days, hoping that it would miraculously open and I would be free to sample a chocolate or two.

It did not open.

Did not open. Did not open.

Finally, one day, I did it.

Janet and Marty were at work. I was alone with the dogs and the chocolate. The dogs were smart, but they couldn't talk. My secret would be safe. Except for the opened part, of course.

Reader, I opened it.

I opened the box of chocolates.

Tore off the cellophane. Lifted the lid. And ate of the Forbidden Chocolates.

Oh they were so good. They were filled with hazelnut praline.

Delicious Forbidden Chocolates.

But now I have a problem.

There was no way to conceal my transgression.

No problem! I'll just replace the box!

Remember. Pre internet. In those days, to replace Forbidden Chocolate, you had to open the yellow pages and call various stores.

Which is what I did.

Only to find out that not only were these Forbidden Chocolates but they were also Very Expensive Imported Belgian Chocolates.

Crap.

What to do? What to do?

I took the almost-empty box with me and set out to find Replacement Chocolate. I went to store after store. Most of them didn't even have Very Expensive Imported Belgian Chocolates.

I started to sweat. This was what I got for eating Forbidden Chocolates. My friends had opened their home to me and this was the thanks they got? A Forbidden Chocolate Eater in their midst? Could a guest be more ungracious than to consume the Very Expensive Imported Belgian Chocolates without invitation?

What was I going to say? Oh the shame, the shame! of violating a social norm.

I pulled into the parking lot of Trader Joe's. I'd heard about the store but had never shopped there. Might as well check it out. I like grocery stores. I like food, so what's not to like about a place that sells food? When I travel to a foreign country, I like to wander the aisle of the grocery stores and see what's what. In Bristol, we found a grocery store where vegemite and peanut butter were behind the counter, along with the cigarettes and booze. Who would think to shoplift peanut butter? Not me. But then, maybe I would, being the budding criminal that I was.

I wandered the aisles. Found frozen foods, a category where I usually do not shop as I prefer fresh and unprocessed. Why buy frozen pizza when it's so easy to make your own and homemade tastes so much better?

And there. Above the frozen french fries. There it was.

The Very Expensive Imported Belgian Chocolates.

The exact same box that I had opened at Janet and Marty's house.

Saved. Saved! I didn't care how much it cost, I wanted those chocolates.

I pulled the box toward me.

And discovered they cost about $5.

They were not Very Expensive Imported Belgian Chocolates, at least, not at Trader Joe's.

They were Rather Inexpensive Imported Belgian Chocolates.

Even now, they cost only $26 a pound on amazon.com. Well, $26 a pound is not an "only," but it also won't break the bank.

I bought the chocolates. Replaced the old, now-opened box with the new, pristine box. Kept my mouth shut. Haven't eaten Forbidden Chocolate since.

In which I work for a grad school professor and develop a crush on him and then he goes all crazy on me so we never talk again

2011-03-22T13:21:00.000-07:00

During and after grad school, I worked for a professor, Marvin, who was just the cutest, funniest thing in the world. I did odds and ends for him: sorting through the piles of mail that accumulated on his desk. Well, that was most of what I did. Try to find his desk underneath the mail. He was not big on opening or answering his mail. There were unopened checks that were over three months old.

Marvin started having me do some work to support his expert witness business. I scrawled my invoices on the backs of envelopes. "2.5 hours @ $20/hour, $50. Signed, Gold digger." So fancy. So professional. They don't teach you invoicing in grad school. Obviously.

Although maybe they shouldn't need to teach you invoicing. Maybe they think if you have an ounce of common sense, you will know that handwriting an invoice on the back of an envelope is not comme il faut.

I worked for Marvin for about a year after grad school. Then I went to his 50th birthday party - did I say my very mild crush was appropriate? no I did not - and met his wife. (I liked one of his PhD students a lot lot more, but Wyatt had no interest in me whatsoever and was instead captivated by a bosomy, long-haired classmate of mine. But that's not this story.)

Marvin's wife, apparently, did not like me and I did not understand why because even though I had a crush on her husband, it's not like he was interested in me and besides he was married and only a sleazeball messes around with a married man. Plus he was also my mother's age and that's just a little bit creepy - getting involved with a man who is your mom's peer? Gross.

I thought Marvin was cute and funny and brilliant, but I really liked him for his $20 an hour. Yes, I was using him for his money.

A week or two after the party, when I called to ask Marvin if he had any more work for me because I missed that money, he told me he wouldn't be able to employ me any more. "My wife doesn't like me hanging out with nubile 29 year old women," he said.

Me? Nubile? Ha.

But when the wife talks, the husband better listen or else you know what. I understood.

I went to Chile. I returned from Chile. I went to Minnesota and stayed with my mom and dad. I went to Washington DC to look for a job.

Those international development jobs are for those kids whose parents still give them an allowance. Who else can afford to take a job for $20,000 a year in DC? I surrendered and made my way back to Austin after my short stint working at the factory in Tijuana where they hired guys from the heroin halfway house and where, unbeknownst to me, I was living in the heroin trading district.

I got back to Austin and went to the placement office at school to seek employment. Ran into Marvin. He asked me if I wanted to work for him again. Well yes money would surely be nice. Then he told me that his wife could use some help on some projects she was doing. I should come to their house and work there.

Which was fine. That eliminated The Wife Problem, because The Wife was there with me as a chaperone and besides, my (mild) crush was long gone.

I worked and did random things for both of them and they would leave me alone in the house occasionally which was fine because I am mostly trustworthy.

Mostly.

But I am going to say this.

If you embark on a project, Mrs Marvin, where you are going to record all your poops on 3x5 index cards, noting everything including color, shape, and floatingness, then maybe you should not keep those cards in the top drawer of your desk where your occasional employee might look for a pen.

Once you've seen that kind of thing, you can't unsee it.

Marvin was a sweetie, though (and Mrs Marvin was always very nice to me, but the poop thing - ick), and was my reference when my possible employer called him a few weeks after my interview.

What did they ask you? I asked him. The job was in corporate finance, so maybe they asked him if I knew the Black Scholes pricing model? Oh man I hadn't priced options in a few years.

Not that I have ever needed that skill since, either. When I worked for International Paper, I got stock options every year. And every year, the market price for stock dropped lower than my strike price, thanks to the fabulous management ability of the company's leadership. By the time my options had vested, they were worth $20 a share more than the market price. My mother asked me why I would buy stock from my employer when I could get it cheaper on the open market and I explained that I wouldn't. That only an idiot would buy stock in IP, from any source. Not that I'm bitter about that $48,000 I never got to realize.

Marvin shrugged. They wanted to know if you show up for work on time, he said.

That's it? That's all? I asked.

Yep, he said. That's all.

I cocked my head, puzzled. I had a 4.0 gpa from a top-20 school and they don't think they can assume I show up on time?

He looked at me, shook his head, and answered, Oh you'd be surprised.

Later, when I was working at IP, I found out that a guy they'd hired with me had been fired after two months. He had an MBA and an MS in Chemistry. And didn't bother to show up to work until 10, 11 a.m., explaining that he'd been out the night before. Who knew?

I got the job and moved to Miami. My new boss there, Paul, had gotten his MBA from a program where Marvin had taught one semester. I guess they liked him enough that they flew him up once a week for his class. Paul had taken a class from Marvin and really liked him and respected him: Marvin is a hotshot in his field, although I lost a lot of professional respect for him when I googled him the other day and discovered he had put on his resume that he had gone to an international conference in Cuba and had spent an hour with Fidel. That's not something polite people who know anything about what an evil man Fidel Castro is ever admit in public, much less put on their resume. Once you know what goes on in that place, you burn your Che t-shirt and you don't brag about how charismatic Fidel was when you met him.

At the time, though, working for Paul in Miami, I didn't know about Marvin's little Fidel crush so I still respected him and liked him.

Then he called me one afternoon. I cannot remember why - maybe I had called him to tell him about Paul or he still owed me money or I had a 1099 question. Whatever. We were speaking on the phone. He asked how I liked Miami and I said that the little I had seen of it when I wasn't at work was great but that my job stank and why on earth would anyone want to work in M&A and corporate finance?

Then I said he and Mrs Marvin were welcome to visit and use my place as a hotel: I had a guest room and was living in Coconut Grove in walking distance of all kinds of fun places.

That's when it got so weird that it has taken me three weeks to finish this post.

He asked if I had a boyfriend yet and I told him sha! as if! and he said maybe he could visit me by himself.

I answered that if he came alone, it would be better if he would stay at a hotel but I'd sure like to meet him for lunch.

No, he insisted. He would come alone and we could practice sex--

Stop! I shouted into the phone. Marvin! Stop!

He continued. His words were slurred, making me wonder if he had been drinking.

No! I told him. You are a married man!

I slammed the phone down. I was shaking. Had I provoked this? Had I encouraged him in any way?

When I was still in grad school, I had to talk to my marketing professor. I went into his office and closed the door. He walked behind me and opened it again.

"What's that about?" I asked.

"I need to keep it open to protect myself from allegations that I might have harassed a student," he explained.

In what was not my most tactful moment, I looked at him incredulously. "I don't usually make a habit of attempting to seduce men my father's age," I said.

Later, when I was working for Paul, he started to tell me about a fight he had had with his wife. "Stop," I told him. "Do not tell me this. You guys will work this out and then you'll be mad at me because I know about it."

He blinked, thought, said, "Man, you're right."

I really do not seek intimacy with married men. I really do not try to seduce men who are in some kind of authority over me. I do not have those daddy issues. So I was confused about Marvin's propositions.

Maybe I was unaware of the strong seduction vibes I emitted. Maybe I was a siren that Marvin found irresistible. I don't know. But I was horrified at what he said to me and had to shake the horror out of my ears by sharing it with someone. I walked into Paul's office and told him the whole story.

He, too, was appalled. "I had so much respect for him," Paul said. "Now everything's changed."

Marvin never called me again. I have never called him. I almost never think of him, but when I do, it is with some anger. All that nice friendship, down the drain of one bad phone call.