A Tricky Place In Which to Dwell

Yea to the National Health Service for their contributions to my well-being! It's working!

England is very concerned about my well-being, though I don't take it personally: they're concerned about everyone's well-being. There are signs- good, strong signs made of something durable and impervious to damp- regarding how many vegetables you eat, and what you should do if you're bullied, and the fact that your food is sourced from a few counties away (I know, it's parishes, not counties. I prefer to think of them as Shires, since everything here is within a Shire- just go ahead and picture the Hobbitses, it's easier than trying to put the Democratic Theology or Theocratic Democracy {plus bonus Royal Persons}in the same bed together.) The UK cares so much about its' subjects' well-being that it uses the word "sourced" in the signs and banners and spots that remind you to feel good about your food, rather than potentially insult your intelligence by using the phrase "comes from." I feel content with my lot in a way that I never did in the US- though that might be the drugs talking.

I'm pretty sure it's the drugs talking. I'd prefer it to be the beer talking, but I don't regularly drink becuase I'm taking drugs for my Chronic Pain Condition, which is from a nail put in my head when I was bullied in High School that's just slowly worked itself into my cranuim, past my Prefrontal Cortex and into the Medulla Oblongata, or "Middle," where it consistently pokes into the area of my brain where I think about High School. That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the pathological chronic pain- your brain refuses to stop thinking about the pain. When I got over here I swore (standing in my first-every backyard, looking at the fence around it. There wasn't a sunset or a raw potato and I wasn't even wearing a Civil War Era dress, but I swore nonetheless,) that I would change medications and I would do so with an eye toward ultimately taking less of them. And I have! I switched one of my anti-depressants for another one!...and I realize that this doesn't sound like progress. It is, it is; it's such dreamy, half-satisfied progress that everything seems livelier, less effortful, and zippy. I dropped another one althogether. I'm so sort of blissed out by the fact that I've done it- I moved here from the US without anyone losing their eyesight from random stress-reflex flailing while I was packing some knives, without sending off four or five copies of any divorce papers to my already-moved spouse, just to make sure he got the point; without losing any teeth from either lack of vitamin C or from just giving up and falling face-forward onto the concrete sidewalk, mouth first. It's hard to sort out which is the greater source of happiness: my survival or my chemical intake. I'm pretty sure it's the chemical intake that's dictating I not worry about it.

I miss people. There: that's the thing, the one thing, that makes my gently muddled mind become uncertain of the justification that I should not worry and also be happy. There are people I miss, and I miss them less than I should. Pills, or just me? Am I completely enslaved by the lovely Seratonin and Melatonin and many other similarly named hormones, and am I then less sympatheric to my beloved's voices and trials and failed attempts than I one was? I though myself a lout many times before, before I came here and met my little navy-blue-and-white encapsulated buddies, for not being a good friend. Self-flagellation about how much less effort you put into your relationships in comparison to, say, Charlotte on Sex in the City is a given for those of us who just cannot put in that much effort. No matter how hard it is to button your shirt and no matter how many extra minutes it takes us to brush our sensitive teeth and touchy gums, those of us who contend with some extra Substance P (which, by the by, is a neurotransmitter that is located in the spinal fluid whose sole joy it is to transmit pain signals to the brain. People with FM have more of it, generally, but the fascinating thing about that to me is that it's named Substance P. Whomever it was that discovered it must have had a busy day, and by the time they got to the naming bit they must have looked at their array of tubes and disposable safety goggles and little puddles of spinal fluid on the laboratory floor that were still left to clean up, and said to their impatient PhD candidate intern, all ready with the pen and official naming paperwork: "You know, it's late; let's just write down...uh...Substance P. Yeah. There's the P for Pain, so that's good enough- the judges at the Nobel Institute don't need a fancy name anyway, right? The important thing is the quality of the work. Now here's the mop,")...those of us who have to contend with perhaps three times more Substance P (also could be the name of a seventies-era laboratory-based street drug) must feel guilt about it. Sorry, but we have to. It's as requisite as acquiring full-time under-eye baggies from the ongoing lack of sleep that usually comes with hurting all the time. And since I miss people, since I'm now really really far away from  them, I feel like I should be really whipping myself for not rallying and swooping into a letter-writing frenzy, complete with country cute stickers that I got at the carbon-neutral Tesco in our next town over and sketches of the house in colored pencil...but I'm not. I feel OK.

I miss people, but not enough. It's the drugs, unless it's not. The tricky part is deciding which of those things is me and which of those things is induced. The not-tricky part, I guess, is conducting my day as I always have and just getting through it, one distraction at a time, one hour-long rest at a time. I apologize, my friends; I might feel differently but it seems that won't make much difference in the amount of chi I can expend. The thing that has become clearer, so clear it's like a beautiful hand-blown glass: the ones who stick with me, who have stuck with me, through my plodding communications over the years are very good people to be friends with. We chronics are lucky that way.

Decisions, Simplified

Yesterday the cat got out of the house. She snuck off, quiet-like, and dropped the story-and-a-half down to the ground so she could see what all the fuss was about. We'd been leaving the house and then coming back and then leaving again for as long as she could remember, and in between these machinations she'd bounce a ball on the wall and wait for it to bounce back, counting the days she'd been cooped up. Naturally the dog would have to chase it and there would be some perfunctory hissing and then he'd give it back and she'd toss it at the wall, counting. She would not have lost her place because she's a cat.

The best part about losing your cat is that everything snaps into action: your vision clears so that you can see the hawks circling, your ears pick up much more sound, including any high-pitched skreeeeeee from the neighbor's mower that could be mistaken for a cat provided said cat were being mangled, your breathing swells to accompany the panic-y thought of finding the animal and the ensuing attempt to pick it up. All this because your eleven-year-old's face is making a frown that will not turn upside-down no matter how many times you jokingly order it to do so. All the regular shit (and the irregular shit when you come right down to it) disappears like lightning and you can see what you have to do: tape flyers on everything. Yeah. Tape Flyers on Everything. You've been waiting. It's such parenting legend, such a milestone, that you can easily bring yourself to near-tears imagining how fucked up your kid is going to be if they don't lose their cat: how will they cope? Where will they learn the valuable life-lesson and current #3 Parenting Buzzword resiliency if they don't lose their/the family's pet? Will your child grow up not knowing the value of Taping Flyers to Everything? My God: what if your genius child goes to college not knowing- what if they start a band?? It'll be too late! No one's gonna teach them now! They'll end up practicing in your conservatory every night until 9:30 and insist that for their birthday you continue their guitar lessons  forever!!

I'm a big fan of anything that will keep me motivated right now. I'm switching medications. The old ones were being rude to me by demanding my liver and kidneys and skin flush them out but they were poor tenants, using up all the hot water and refusing to bring down the tea plates so that mice sniff around (not that I have anything against mice, but I'm writing metaphorically here.) I mean they were the drug lord's cousin, all smiles and yessing but then sitting around drinking all of the Yoo-Hoo and putting wedges under your desk when you go to the bathroom...wait...I mean the drugs were, like, crows and the crows' brothers were elephants (just roll with me) who would be disappointed when the crows wouldn't dance, not even the hustle (see? So worth it!) I'm swimming in this neurochemical pool of mild mood shifting, and when I can look at it straight it feels like I can't decide whether or not to be in a good mood. The new pills are working, and it's making me suspicious. 

Naturally I can't decide what to be suspicious of: am I normally in a good-enough mood and the chemicals are masking that and  forcing this new, complacent fair mood on me? Am I one of those people for whom a good mood is just not really possible without some external support? Is it all a hoax perpetuated on the privileged white woman's health insurance, individual liver function be damned (CUE BIG PHARMA CEO TWIRLING MOUSTACHE, GRINNING EVIL STEEL-TOOTHED SMILE?) I think it's most probable that I've just been experiencing stress. For years. Lots of big, life-threatening, world-shattering, pelvic-floor-weakening, down-the-wrong-neural-path-making, pulling-clothes-out-of-a-sooty-wet-heap-happening, funeral-frequenting, present-forgetting, name-dropping-and-not-in-a-presumptuous-but-more-of-a-forgetting-your-best-friends'-name-way-sort-of-dropping, giant sucking chest would of a life. Not all of the time but...you know...enough. 

There is a plan, though. I have a quest (sadly, there will be no genius illustrator/directors on this quest- but I'll smile if I crass any bridges.) I must teach my girl how to go door-to-door and ask the regular strangers if they've seen the cat, and I'll teach her how to tape flyers to absolutely everything. This is a life skill that she will never need, because of computers and such, but she'll learn it. It will make me feel good to teach it to her, and since we live in a neighborhood full of biddies who haven't had their nephews teach them how to use the internet yet, the quarter-pound of printer paper she used to make up flyers will actually help her get her cat back.

Things They Get Wrong

There is, for some godforsaken reason, a heatwave here. I am in the Fens, which is basically swampland- which is maybe why my partner took a shine to the place: he grew up in Chicago, built on a big swamp (the name "Chicago" is a derivative of the Native American phrase "Chika Chika boom boom", loosely translated to "location location location".) It was hot there, because it's the Midwest; but we Americans insist on settling places that should never be settled. We, as a nation, have the perverse compulsion to develop skyscrapers on extremely windy waterfront property and plop sushi restaurants in deserts. So we suffer the consequences of our decisions, like sweating out months of temperatures so high that the Europeans must translate the temperatures into Celcius just for their own peace of mind.

"I hear in Dallas they get to 50 in the summers, for days on end" they say.

When we moved here I was looking forward to being able to talk about the USA as one speaks of a forty-year-long fever. I'd get to describe the psychadelic dreams I'd had, like the Division of Motor Vehicles and beer that tastes like piss, and then I'd get to shudder and smile because I was free of it now that I'm here, in the glorious UK, where they are unapologetic about thier desire to keep certain people in fabulous jewelry their entire lives in exchange for said people's privacy, and  where the summer temperatures never reach over 75 Fahrenheit. And if they do it's for a day, and the populace wanders around looking at the blue patches up in the air where the clouds have pulled away from the sun as if startled, and they take off their wool shepherd's caps or floor-length aprons to wipe the imperceptible damp from their brows and reminisce about the last time it reached 75, which was invariably during the Second World War. It's stayed warm, though, and I think we'll have to live with that: seems the earth is getting hotter over here, too.

It's not bad, I hear it gets to 50 C in Dallas, so I won't complain about anything other than the bugs. They are all over the house, because the British don't believe in screens. I'm not positive, but I think they don't believe in screens the way I don't believe in Santa. And the house isn't situated in any body's Wood (quick tip: the don't snicker after you say "Wood." It's like they don't know what it means.) There is no thick canopy to protect us from the normally reluctant sun, so it gets warm in the house, which means we are forced to open the  unprotected windows, and within ten minutes the cat and dog are staring at different points in the air just above their heads with great, intent expressions. In the case of the cat the expression says "IwillkillyouIwillkillyouIwillkillyou you insignificant weirdly-legged speck that dares fly in the the no-fly zone above my fiefdom," and in the case of the dog it's "bug! bug! bug!...bug! bug!...uh...bug!" Both pounce; both succeed every third try; both attempt to eat it. There are forty day flies per pet per cubic foot per hour, though, and while it's entertaining to watch them hurtle themselves and discuss the different jump-and-claw-owner's-leg techniques they employ, it ends up being too many bugs and we wake up with their carcasses floating peacefully in all but one of the coffee cups. It gives you the heebie-jeebies.

I've taken to walking to our local village because I like walking and there's a footpath behind some fields that goes right there; I already had a slouchy wide-brimmed straw hat, so I figured why fight it. It's beautiful. Then I get to the village and go to the library or supermarket and cannot find any water fountains. Not even the gym we just joined- called a Leisure Centre here, because why be coy: no one's going to exercise- has any of the obnoxiously frequent water fountains that are all over the YMCA I patronized. The only one I could find was tucked into the locker room's corner, and looked just like a WWII-era sink because it clearly is one. There's a sign that says "public water" just underneath it, located at the very convenient five-inches-above-the-floor level; to get water you have to leeeaaan over and twist another knob and stick your face about six inches into its' well. Eventually water comes out, resenting you for not heating it up and putting tea in it. I'm American, dammit, and I refuse to carry a water bottle! It's slightly annoying, so I wont' do it!

The worst thing is that when you go into a pub and sit down at a table, you have to approach the bar itself to get a beer. Sure, it's tepid beer, kept that way because it's not the frothy urine produced in mind-boggling quantities in America, keeping our keggers affordable . And sure, there's about 5oo beers here that are on tap at every pub and tavern and convenience store, and even the crap beers are still the kind you'd read favorably about in Beer Moustache magazine.  You have to pick your ass up and move it to the bar so that you can purchase your drinks and then go sit back down. At my very first pub I politely asked for a beer from the waitress who came over and asked if she could get anything else from us besides our order; she was young and stood blinking at me for a moment before she said "sure, I'll bring that out." My husband told me that it's just not done. No exceptions, even though every one's thighs are sheathed in a light sweat at all times and we are all leaving damp patches on the bar stools (no, not that kind of damp patch! That is also just not done. I dearly hope.)

It's gotten to the point where I'm almost not enchanted with this country. Stupid heatwave.

The First of Many Trains Back from London

Our first trip to London was a winner. The sky was mostly clear, so it was sunny and hot, if you're a Brit. If you're a Chicagoan it was a bit warm (I'm already preparing the speeches I'll lay on friendly Briton's heads when they innocently engage in conversation with me about the horrid weather. Ahem: "Yeah, it's cold, I know- but I'm from Chicago and every year we have a number of days when the temperature drops, ok? Except in Chicago it drops 40 degrees in twelve hours, whereas you guys get a 40 degree difference over the course of a year, so...this isn't cold." ...I can't wait to make this speech and watch their faces when I'm done, grimacing with the effor of not pointing out that they use Celsius over here.)

 

So. London. The British Museum is so interesting and full of extremely accessible collections that you don't feel like running to the gift shop immediately upon entering the place. Walking- lots of it, sore-leg-making length walks, which I love and my daughter doesn't (yet.) I even had dinner with an old friend, and met my friend's boyfriend (Scottish) and his friend (English. ) I felt like a world traveler- a baby world traveler, but it's progress;  by the end of the summer I intend to be smoking French cigarettes in a t-shirt signed by a Tokyo street artist while waiting in line for the doors to open on day one of Saudi Arabia's LGBT Film Festival. But in the meantime,  there's the train back from London.

 

We got on and faked casually looking for good seats together, an attitude the other day trippers carried with them like reading material.  We sat. It was a slow ride,  but fortunately there was a small group of drunk people right behind us. This being Britain,  the seats were so clean I couldn't work up a good fume. The drunk people talked to everyone, and everyone handled it with calm indulgence, including the equally drunk Italians. There was a minimal amount of gesturing from them; still, neither group wished to give  up on their new drunk friends. This made for a hilarious exchange that went just like this:

English 1:"Ah you need Hamford? Is Hamford-Sawtry this line cuz if not me mates here-"

English 2: "This isn't the Hambourg line! They need lots of tunnel!"

Italian 1: "Your cities have a sign, which is everywhere. I think that England has too many. Friends?"

 

English 1: "What they say is that you're fat, but you're not fat-"

 

English 2: "Not them, the country! Italy is fat right at the top because of bad carbs!"

 

Italian 2: "I do not see planes here. What is this about planes? Shyness makes me mad."

 

English 1: "We're gonna sing. You sing. I heard you, your voice-"

 

English 2:"They weren't being shy, that was maps! I hope they had tunnel maps!"

 

English 1: "Yeah yeah, right, but singing will get them there."

 

Italian 1:"I understand singing. We aren't shy but I don't sing on planes."

 

English 1: "No, this is a train and everybody sings all the time-"

 

English 1: "What a waste! They can't be in two places, and you're makin 'em warble!"

 

Italian 2: "Warble is English for shy. I told you, we don't think shy things are good things."

 

English 2: "Fat cities, too! But you guys are all ok- just: tunnel tunnel tunnel!"

 

I'm confident that my translation is true to the core meaning of the drunk people's conversation, in that it had no core meaning anywhere, unless you count the segment about singing. The singing bit is true. It's a universal fact that if you're on a late train home from a major metropolis, either you will be drunk or the people behind or in front of you will be drunk- and you should remember to bring lozenges, because you will end up in a sing-along. Ours was prototypical: the intoxicated behind us sang loudly and cheerfully, and a few others joined in (maybe they knew what was playing next and were warming up.) Then the loudest behind us (English 1) found a song and shouted loud enough to be heard by the people from another train car who were getting off:

 

"Everybody has to sing to this one!!"

 

It was Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. Everyone smiled at the same time, and everyone became an honorary drunk.

 

"I SEE A LITTLE SILHOUETT-A OF A MAN SCARA MOOSH SCARA MOOSH WILL YOU DO THE FANDANGO!"

 

All the passengers had the same expression between lyrics- there was a great deal of concentrating on what was  sung next, because we all used to sing it in the shower/dorm room/other train when we were in college/high school/prison/indentured servitude as an intern.

 

"MAMA MIA MAMA MIA MAMA MIA LET ME GO BEELZEBUB HAS A DEVIL FOR A SIDECAR ME, WITH ME SAYS MEEEEE!!!!"

 

There is an instant right after that line is sung where there's nothing: a breath I believe it's called in music-learnin', and during the breath everyone looked at each other with a dare in their eyes. Then: guitar. Massive, colossal, fantastic guitar, and as one we passengers picked either head-banging or fist-pumping and did the solo proud. We were in full synchronization in that moment. It was a beautiful moment. I'm sure it was even more beautiful for the drunk people, because you've never heard so much hollering and laughing- it was as if everyone there had won the lottery at the same time.

 

I'm excited about the next trip to London and back. I hope to be a drunk person.  I have the song Come On Eileen all cued up and ready to go.

 

 

 

 

My Enlightenment

I intend to give everything to the Buddha, except that He eschews material possessions. Bastard. He should know that in giving I'm really receiving, and it's in a big way spiritually. So big. I will learn that in foisting off my stained towels and broken crockery on the needy, or the standing still (whichever,) there is liberation and release from the petty materialism and- I dunno- the unseemliness that comes with owning an entire decades' worth of "Best Of Kids Bop (Volumes 1 through XXVVIVILXVVIIIIXLX".) I wait for this slough of unseemliness, despite scripture's completely unclear position of giving unto the poor stuff they could actually use as opposed to giving them my vast collection of identical-yet-unmatchable black socks, or my Garfield vibrating head massager. (Too late, everyone: I gave it gratis to a passing five-year-old at a yard sale; it had attracted many a tester but not one offer.) I think it's all about the interpretation, because what group of broke peoples would reject such splendorous flotsam? Much of it is shiny, for God's sake!

I'll be casually walking down the street and I'll see someone with a shopping bag full of half-spent alkaline batteries, and my soul will get a little lighter knowing that I was the person who half-spent them, removing them from the remote the very second they falter and throwing them into the pile in the back of the fridge (note: that keeps them "fresher." This way, when you're done punishing them, you can take them out, blow on their little ends, and use them again. They learned their lesson.) I'll be eating my Thai food with my daughter at the nearest Thai place that still has lunch specials, and someone at the next table will be wearing the almost-lavender fleece half-zip with the unresolved grease spatter on it and I'll get just a bit closer to understanding the fullness of the universe. When I drive I might go past a person on their own quiet street, rearranging the cannibalized back issues of my favorite feminist magazine in the hopes that they might sell them for a few quarters- and I might rejoice in the weightlessness that comes with the shedding of one's long-held stuff. Finally I'll see, with initial disbelief followed with the appropriate amount of awe, a child with a pot-holder loom and three cloth loops and the long, potentially eye-poking bent rod that comes with it, and Nirvana will open its' doors (or I'll fall into it? Is there a swim involved? No one around here talks about how, exactly, you get into Nirvana. With Heaven there's a door, or gate, or horse jump, I think, and a big Soul that still looks like a person who judges you on the spot. I'll have to research it.)

In Nirvana, I'll walk up a golden flight of water lilies to a giant, happy Buddha with rosy gold cheeks and on one side of his head is a rosy gold lever (I'm at one with the Universe, now, so the lever could be on either side, or every side, or none...I can't wait!) When I grab hold of this lever- and it feels like grabbing hold of stardust or praise- I'll pull it down, and chunk chunk chunk! The Buddha's eyes will roll around and around until they come to a stop: three gold bars will glow contentedly in His three eyes (I know He only has the standard issue amount of eyes on his statues and all, but again: Me + Universe= Understanding. I am so stoked!) So, Big Buddha Head will open it's enormous smiling mouth, and I'll have to step back  and he'll have to say "Oh, sorry, didn't see you there-" before he begins vomiting money at me. I think it'll happen because He knows that I've renounced all my material goods (notwithstanding how good the goods may be) and so I'll be impervious to the power of all that cold cash. He knows I'll take it and won't want to immediately spend it on hair extensions for the cat and rare DVDs of depressing director's cut slaughterhouse documentaries or really nice confetti. I can squat down and rake up all the money pooling at my feet and put it in my shirt-bottom, apron-style, and wink at His Holiness, who will wink back and say "Come again tomorrow." I know he'll mean it, too, because he never invites random people to pull his lever because, on some level, it must hurt.

This will be fantastic. I hear that the outdoor markets in Cambridge are legendary for their assortment of T-shirts in subdued colors with "Cambridge" on them, and crepes because it's practically in France, and something called "bootlegs". I'm not sure what those are, but it won't matter; Buddha and I are buds and he will remind me while I'm negotiating with the nice man in the leather blazer for the Jabba the Hutt cookie jar...he'll let me know that it's OK to be collecting more stuff for my new home, because if I let go of my insignificant household items once, I can do it again.

Professional Help

It had become painfully clear: I was not going to get through this without a professional. The clarity of my position had dawned on me while I was down, laying on my couch or recliner or bed or whatever, occasionally gasping because I'd hurt myself in Aquasize (those weights are evil underwater- lulling you with their Styrofoam ends- I use the red ones and I pull a neck tendon every other time- I'm not weak- don't judge me!) I was really hurting in my joints; it was taking me whole minutes to remember what I'd been thinking about just a second before (what was I thinking about? I just had it...oh, it's gone...what's gone? What was I thinking about?) and I was vigorously picturing a scenario where I hurt myself permanently- I had it down to the description of the physical therapist whose job it was to say "There ya go! Look at you go, girl!" when I lifted my arm to shoulder height for the 20th time, slowly, slowly regaining the range of motion I'd lost from posting three letters all at once. Meanwhile there was a house to ship or sell or disassemble on to people's yards and post on internet sites.

And so I hired myself a Gal Friday for fifteen bucks an hour but no health insurance because this isn't Starbucks, you know. I heartily recommend it. You can ask them to do all sorts of random things, like vacuum or inventory or respond to fan mail (Dear ______, Thank you so much for your heartfelt words. I felt them in my heart, and so I know that adjective works there. You really got me thinking about _____. I feel like there's a play in there somewhere, with me as the lonely/determined/lobotomized (please circle one) Woman, and I'm fighting _____ with my _____. If you feel like it, you can write that play! Don't worry, my lawyers will find you. They are there in service of my very best fans. Until our day in court, I remain- Hearttbreakinly, Jenn.) I've asked my Gal Friday to do complicated information  searches that involve phone calls to Bearaus, and what makes me happy to recommend her for employment for anything is that she made those calls and isn't in therapy (as far as I know. She could be, but I wouldn't know- see second paragraph, first sentence vis-a-vis health insurance.) This flexibility in tasking is making me greedy, I think.
 
Is it too much to make her wash the windows I've been studiously avoiding since I bought my house? Is it demanding to ask her for her help in examining my infected pinkie toenail? Will I go so far as to ask her to "give me a hand" going through embarrassing bank files from the 1990's and then just sit there telling her inane stories about my years starring in horrifically adapted Shakespeare in Pennsylvania while she pages through them? Now, before I'd found this wunderkind I would have thought No. No, it's improper to ask your employee to sort through your various mystery tubes of ointment that you've collected over the years. No, a person would have to be a cad to ask a paid hand to rub their daughter's feet for an hour. No no, one really shouldn't drink bottom shelf vodka- neat- while you pay a person to fake your voice so they can tell your Visa card collections agent to go fuck themselves sideways (although they did call me, so...) Pre-GF I would have made the ethical judgement every time, or at least every other time; now I'm not sure those things are terrible. Not terrible terrible, you know- maybe a little horrid, sure, but they get paid, right? They are getting recompense for the humiliation and bankruptcy of the soul that comes with such mean menial work, are they not? This is America, after all. There's always someone else to take their place.

To counter the possibility of a creeping Republicanism in my relationship with my new friend, I will have to be vigilant: I'll have to make sure that I offer snacks; I'll have to take a genuine stab at being productive myself while she's here, even if that only involves dishes. I'll have to make sure there's excellent beer on hand for end-of-shift happy half-hours. What has really been highlighted for me by this relationship is the knowledge that I'm a lucky, lucky person: I have a chronic pain condition, and I have to finish up every job of the eight billion jobs there are to do before I move myself and my child across an ocean, and I have to parent said child- But. I have the resources to pay someone a little bit (not enough, of course; also I would have liked to offer dental,) and that means it can be done. Or done enough. Not many folks in my condition have that option. I'm grateful, and I've learned that if you are your own Gal/Guy Friday, follow the steps above (offer yourself snacks, be as productive as you can, beer), because you deserve it. Everyone does.

Hirable

I'm thinking about employment, because why not? I could join the throngs of people who are hopeful, or desperate or stymied, and are themselves looking. Perhaps they are more prepared, with their resumes and their re-hemmed business suits or whatever people wear to cattle-call interviews, sitting through the humiliation of waiting for their turn, their woeful five minutes with some asshole who's going to end up hiring from within. I'm willing to wager that they have loads more college debt than I do, and you can't buy that kind of blitzkrieged futrescape that gets people hunting through their closets for some rare DVDs to barter...for less than $100,000.

But thinking about becoming employed is not simple, because you have to figure out what your "skill set" is. (Or are-? "Skill sets"? Why can't we just call them "skills" any more?) And having been unemployed for a good while, and what with the whole "chronic invisible illness" thing (Interviewer:.could it be a sham? Because it's not visible!) and having the kind of smart, creative, vibrant ADHD kid to wrangle for ten years now (Interviewer:...ADHD isn't visible, either! I see through your lies! Good Luck With Your Search!) I figure...this should be a snap.

Here are my skills, so far... Handles Pain Very Well. This could be a great asset to any service that provides bedside fussing. The patient or grieved could hold my hand very, very hard- and I wouldn't cry. And that's not just because my medication is dehydrating and teardrops are just too much to ask of my ducts. It's also because I, along with countless other chronic pain sufferers, am as tough as rhinoceros hide. I can hear my birdish and poorly anchored finger bones crash inward when anyone holds it too hard, but I don't even flinch. I am almost French about it, looking bored and not bothering to use my manners: "you call this hard? Sigh...I am fine. give me a challenge and we shall see if this sensation qualifies as this 'pain' you are so concerned with." (Please picture me smoking while I say this, just to fulfill the stereotype. Thank you.)

Very Moody. On the surface, this appears a bad thing; any prospective employer would picture daily hallway dramas about deadlines and perceived slights and lady problems involving the cutest, youngest guy on my floor. They'd picture me on the floor itself, perhaps in my cubicle, perhaps under the table in the break room, where I'd be crying and/or raging, using the office's only three-hole punch to collate the manifesto that I'd written (on company time, no less) about office etiquette and "flex-time," whatever that was. I'd have to point out that it would keep the staff in a constant state of low tension, waiting for me to have a mood snap, so they'd keep their collective heads down and work instead of generate any sort of low-stress camaraderie. Also I'd be great in the customer service department, being sweet like sugar for the first two questions from a customer or client, then I'd switch over to barely repressed loathing and answering the next questions in a more and more sarcastic tone; then the client or customer would go away, leaving the company alone so that they wouldn't have to look any deeper into the possible faults of their product. What a boon!... So after I had explained all this, the manager person who's doing to hiring would offer me a job, starting at $2.55 an hour for the first year, after which I'd no longer be on the mandatory probation that kept me from getting a raise, and my wage would launch upward, rocketing up to $2.67 per hour. Plus benefits! I would get a medical plan, even- one that covers unnecessary trips to an ER for something that might easily have been handled at a plain old doctor's office, except that these benefits would not cover that. In the event that said ER visit happens, the company would graciously cover 10% of the adjusted total. Provided I used a fake name and address at check-in and didn't mention the company once during the entire process, of course...and here, also of course, I would throw their application papers and retinal-scan equipment all over the conference room and say- yell- that I would never take a job in a place that treated it's employees like so much sewage, and that they should be ashamed of themselves. Then I would stomp out to the maze of cubicles and shout "all of you who wish to be free of this corporate tyranny, follow me! You are worth more than the chemicals and fluid that make up your bodies- you are even worth more than the black market value of one of your kidneys! Let us storm off in a huff, together!" Having barked this call to embrace the freedom of the unemployed, I would grab the first three-hole punch I could see and run.

Also I would be a great soap opera villainess, all evil and incomprehensible  in one episode, then sweet and recalcitrant the next. Heck, I could do that in separate scenes in the same episode, even. During the audition process I won't mention the memory problems that come with this pain condition- but I'm confident that once on screen, I will be able to improvise plot lines and snappy one-liners, just like Dustin Hoffman in the movie Tootsie except with more career longevity.

Memory Loss. Now, this one is fairly obvious: anyone who wanted someone to officially look the other way whilst the company ransacks it's employees' pensions would be able to find a place for me easily. I could probably be tricked into cooking some books, since I'd lose track of one book, forget that I lost it, forget that I entered numbers into it- and then some lackey could slip a different book and a different set of numbers in front of me, and I'd wonder how it got there for a second (fairies? Please say it's fairies!) and then do it all over again. And yes yes, I realize that there are no actual books left in the world and that I would be entering the bogus accounting into a computer, but I chose to go old school with the metaphor because I don't remember how to enter information on a "field". It makes me think of fields, and the fields I have known- I remember those- and then I'm off into it, dreaming away the daylight, in full ignorance of the fleecing the shareholders were subject to. La la la.

So that job is also not good, and no one would hire me really because I've never been a bookkeeper (I mean, I don't even know what a "field" is.) Plus, because of the terrible things I did at work, I would go straight to Forgetter's Hell when I died, where Satan would constantly hide my car keys and then tell me I'm ten minutes late to my daughter's Show and that I said I would re-attach cardboard tree branches to the second graders. And where were the cardboard tree branches? Huh? Where are those? They're around here somewhere...then Satan would laugh (AH HA HA HA HA HA, etc.) watching all the morally reprehensible and chronically forgetful souls scuttle around searching for stuff they never had...but what might be a great fit is as a professional forgetter at a brain trauma ward. I would ask the person I was Forgetting with a question, and they'd answer the best they could, and that would make me think of something totally different. I might say "You're looking well today. Did you go on some outing or something?" Then the person might say "...uh, we did do that, yes. We did go out. There was a polka band, and someone thought it was a good idea to mess with the stunt bear." And I would reply "Polka dots are the best pattern on bears. There was a slide show once by my friend F- I can't remember her name right now- and the fanciest bear wore Polka dots." And they would go "Theater is awful. Dennehy was fair to middling in that one with the boulders hanging from everywhere. I liked the boulders more than Dennehy but I don't think that was entirely his fault."  And on and on- entertainment for hours! It's the greener choice, too, because we would never remember to turn on the television, and that saves energy!

I think the best job for someone like me might be distracting preschoolers. I could use all of the tools in my toolkit (see "skill set.") Bearing up under the kicks to the groin from whichever kid had been inappropriately exposed to a Jet Li video the previous weekend; Turning into a nightmare-inducing teacher's aide, clenching my teeth and bulging my eyes if so much as a peep was uttered during Nap Time (because the Gods of Sleep are sacred in every culture, and must be obeyed;) enjoying endless looping pretend stories that go on for hours...actually, that part sound pretty nifty. I'll just check the Classifieds tomorrow and set something up. Easy Peasy!

What Love Was

There was a woman in the trailer park whose father had bought her trailer for her; though she had done nothing in her life to earn the requisite cash she'd have needed to at least put down on a trailer, she referred to it as "hers." She was house proud- she had a garden, her own larger-than-normal bit of land, owing to the trailer's position at the end of a row. She'd planted chrysanthemums and irises right next to each other and it looked weird. The plants were randomly assigned, so that when you were in her garden you had to walk around the flowers, which were frequently hidden in robust clumps of weeds. Her name was Chryssie.

There was another person in the trailer park- a young man. He was definitely a man, no  longer the age where other adults referred to him as a "young man" to his face but who still called him a kid when speaking to each other. His name was Wolfgang. He'd inherited it from an uncle who'd passed away years before, and Wolfgang remembered this uncle as being  the kind who'd come over three times a year and drink something he'd brought, usually something in a single bottle and fancy, comparatively speaking. He'd make jokes that were funny every other time. So the young man had no objection to being named Wolfgang.  He would walk around Standish Estates and look at his neighbor's units and their picnic tables and their foraged stones that they'd put in neat lines bordering the paths to their doors (it was a popular look.)  He would slow down at Chryssie's trailer to watch her.

She was almost always outside when he walked, and for a while he imagined that she was doing it deliberately because she had a secret crush on him. She certainly waved hard enough when he walked by, using both hands and arms with vigor, moving them across space almost presidentially; also she smiled. "Hi Wolfgang! Hi there, I see you! Hiya Wolfgang! You should say Hi back- look at me, I'm waving so hard you should say Hi back!" she'd say, but all he managed was a small smile. Ostensibly he did this so that he didn't encourage the presumed crush she had on him.

There came a day when she wasn't there, and then one immediately after. This turned into a week, maybe eight days, and Wolfgang thought while she was absent. He realized that, of the two of them, it was more likely that he had the crush- he didn't feel the way he supposed a crush was supposed to feel- there was nothing tingling on him, neither high nor low, and he didn't lose track of his intent to walk his usual Standish Estates perimeter. However- well, he kept looking for her, and that must have been what a crush was like. He decided he had the wrong idea of what a crush was in the first place. He walked and searched for her at her place and then around, generally.

On that eighth day, he decided to pace. He'd done his round, and he just could not let his unease settle into mild detachment, so he paced back and forth in front of her trailer. When he saw Virginia Cravach looking at him as intently from her next-door kitchen half-window, he moved into Chryssie's yard, which was fenced (a luxury) and gave him semi-privacy. He shook his fists at Virginia's kitchen because he knew there was greater privacy in the world outside the trailer park. During the gesturing, a car pulled up in front of Chryssie's trailer. Wolfgang jogged the twenty feet from the end of her yard to her front path, and she was being helped out of the sedan by a man older than her by a few decades, at least. Chryssie herself was quiet and kept looking at the man with a sour expression to make him leave.

"Oh great, you're here already. Linda must have called the service while I was at Shadytown-" said the older man. "Could you just grab her here- by the arm is good, she associates it with the center and it's soothing."

Chryssie looked at Wolfgang slyly, a look that he'd never seen on her face before, and that was including every time he'd seen her in the ten years he'd lived there. She then said "I associate it."

Wolfgang piped up. "I'm not from a service." He felt he should have said more, but didn't.

"Oh god, I'm sorry." Older man held out his hand. "I'm Desmond, Chryssie's father. thank you so much for being here- thank you so much. I need to go. I hate that I need to go, Chryssie. but I have other plans for us soon, and you know I'm good for it."

"Aahh- plans" she replied.

Desmond smiled, and Chryssie suddenly smiled back and the sour expression wasn't even a memory on her face.  :"Plans! Plans, Chryssie!" Then he made an awful villain face and rubbed his hands together, saying "Plans for you, my dear." Then he got in his car. "It was nice to meet you."

Chryssie, after an appropriate pause, looked at Wolfgang. "Could you take me by the arm anyway? I do actually find it soothing, but I hate to admit it in front of him." Wolfgang could think of no reason to hesitate. "Thank you. Also it's not because of the center. Who could be properly brought down in a place called Shadytown, anyway? What a name."

"It's a ridiculous name. Why would they name a health center Shadytown?" He'd carefully left out the word "mental' before "health center". He hadn't been raised by wolves, after all.

"It's only called that because it has no shade. None. The Commons is just an overheated fish tank without water when it's sunny." She sighed. He was still holding her arm, and he gently put it down next to her side before he let it go. "Oh, that's all right" she whispered both tenderly and dispassionately. And that was it for Wolfgang: he fell, somehow- he fell for Chryssie, who was a bit older than him (he had no idea how much older) and just come back from a mental institution after being treated for nerves or depression or bipolarism. These were the mental illnesses he was familiar with, and he'd read about them in Time or whatever news magazine his other uncle subscribed to. (Wolfgang lived with his other uncle, who was named Sid after no one in particular. He'd lived with Sid since his mother died and left him the trailer- Sid had come with it, a permanent inhabitant with the only steady employment to speak of. It was a good arrangement, but a juiceless one: Sid preferred to watch the same stuff on television every night, and spent his weekends on the couch, watching more of the same stuff in marathon form. Occasionally Sid would go square dancing with his regular date, who seemed to be Sid's girlfriend except that she was never around and Sid never spoke about her. When she came over, and crammed her gigantic crinolines and cowgirl snap-down shirt into the trailer, taking up more than half the width of the living area, Sid seemed happy; still, no telling.)

So he fell, somehow. Again it didn't feel like falling or twinkling or giving his heart or anything else to her (he wondered how that expression came to be, since it was so bogus.) He did feel proprietary. He would be the arm-taker, now. He would be the one to soothe her and determine how she was soothed, and he would listen to her. He felt a strong need to listen to her and whatever she said, and to think about what she'd said. He supposed that he'd got it wrong about love all around, not just about what constituted a crush.

They were together for months, sailing along, together- visiting for days at a time, with no thought from either side of moving in. Chryssie was exuberant and weird and a good sport. Wolfgang was focused and smiling and kinder than he knew he could be, which he supposed was what love was (he was always adjusting his definition.) There were a few times when she herself grew quiet, and had a pained expression on her face, and drank. There was a lack of regular sleeping hours- she became narcoleptic and slumped into herself any time, doing anything. Wolfgang got out of bed and got dressed when she passed out like that during their "sexy times," as she put it (they had both been virgins when they decided to slip downward and consummate their unspoken love- they'd told each other the next morning when they woke up still on the floor, and they'd both found it hilarious.) But when she'd fallen asleep like that, he got up and got dressed and woke her half-way so that he could half-lift her into a cab.

He went to Shadytown with her in his arms. He wasn't alarmed. He'd read about this in Time or whatever, and he'd decided even then- even before they'd spoken- how he would act if and when the need arose. So he stayed calm, and he admitted her easily as the yet-more-calm lady who admitted Chryssie had her own pet name for his girlfriend. That was slightly unsettling, and he thought about being unsettled while he quietly waited for someone to come out and tell him what to do next. He sat in the separate waiting room and was gently shaken awake by someone in a lab coat sixteen hours later.

"You're Wolfgang" proclaimed Lab Coat. This person's demeanor was almost intimidatingly calm and definitely professional.

"Hey there" said Wolfgang. He felt very awake now.

"Thanks for bringing her in. It's the narcolepsy that's the surest sign of a peak coming, and I've never seen you for Chryssie before but you caught that right away."

Wolfgang blushed like a schoolchild. "It was pretty obvious."

"Good. So, anyway- she's here, she's in need of a stay for a few days. I think 'til Monday would help." Said Lab Coat. It was Wednesday. It seemed an inordinate amount of time to him, but he didn't say so- he just went home. Sid was there. He mentioned what had happened to Sid- in a glancing way, something about taking her to the doctor's and how he intended to shower and get a good night's sleep. Sid made soothing noises of his own. Wolfgang slept and paced, waiting until Monday. The morning came and he picked her up in another cab, which was paid for by a standing account of Chryssie's father's.

She was quiet and contemplative on the ride home. When he asked her, as he'd been meaning to ask her, in his most exact, most diplomatic words, what was wrong with her, she turned to him and smiled. She looked at him for a few minutes that way, just sitting there, like she was stuck. Wolfgang sat with the most dignified cab-seat posture he had, and waited and looked back. He didn't break eye contact. Then she said "it's schizophrenia, if you must know." She then leaned over and kissed him, and he was relieved and kissed back, which turned into a full clutch in the back of the car with the cab driver looking in his rearview with a mildly disgusted expression for the rest of the ride.

When they got home, Wolfgang moved his few things into her trailer and notified Sid that that's where he could be found now. Nothing else would change- just that he'd be with Chryssie. "You're already over there all the time. Congrats" said Sid. So: there were times, and there was sleeping, and there was wine, which appeared all by itself while he was sleeping, and which Wolfgang got rid of almost as soon as he woke up. He took her to Shadytown when she needed it- they had many a running joke about the name by the time she really, really took ill.

He'd set the alarm early, so that he could check for wine or wine coolers hidden about. There had been a building, an erection of some kind of bubble around Chryssie that was palpable, and visible- there was a sort of shimmering when she'd talked her self hoarse and fell asleep on an armless chair so that she slid sideways and Wolfgang had to catch her and haul her back to sitting on her couch. He had noticed it, and had ignored it; he was proud of how well he could read her and understand her needs and triggers and ecstasies before she did. So:  ignore the shimmer, ignore the aura she had that she'd never had before. He'd just gotten her back from Shadytown and didn't want to give her back, he wanted her in her bed and possibly with some delivered Mexican (they both had the stomach of a walrus and could eat bones, if necessary. It didn't bother them, which was an achievement for Chryssie considering how much prescription medication she'd ingested in her life.) So: he woke up, and she had a knife.

"Chryssie, did you cut something?" Wolfgang said, past alert, before fear.

She was cutting long lines into the wall in some orderly fashion- it looked like she was rendering a spread sheet in the bedroom's fake wallpaper. "Honey, I wasn't. I'm trying to cut this, but it won't go very deep. I picked a dull knife in case my hand slips, so my hand  would be intact."  She pulled the knife up- it was the dullest one in the place and he absorbed that information.

"What's going on?" he asked. Futility, because he knew, but he couldn't stop himself from wanting an explanation.

"Wolfgang Wolf Wolfie. I love your name so much, it's a fantastic name for a boyfriend. I don't think I mentioned."  This statement warmed him, so he watched her knife the bedroom and just asked her questions. He expected something to sound like reason or just her usual form of charm, which included her wandering thoughts. But it was more of the knife-woman, his Chryssie encased in her pod or bubble that waved like heat on a horizon. She began attacking the floor, in long and thoughtful pulls, and the carpet was no match; she talked about her plan and its' dissemination via the carvings. Wolfgang finally got off the bed. He picked up his phone and dialed Desmond. Chryssie was making the gouges smaller, and she stood up to get another knife- "a paring knife for the fine work here. It needs a paring knife. Fine fine-" but Wolfgang blocked her, and when she protested he reached around her waist to trap her. He kissed every time she tried to break in, on her neck or her nose or her ear, and she learned it and started pushing her head toward his every time he bent near. She clocked him on the mouth. It bled a little, and discreetly on the inside.

"What did you do that for?" In the little crash of mouth and skull, he had forgotten she was sick. He had a flashing thought that she was just picking a fight.

Desmond slammed into the trailer- unwise, considering the situation. "Wolfgang, when did it start?" he asked, all automaton, looking at his watch.

Chryssie began to rock her shoulders in a real effort to get out of Wolfgang's circle. He got a look at her face, her beautiful face, for the first time since he'd held her back- and realized that this was what love was: his heart breaking in two parts that were themselves breaking. One half was flooded with a compassion that demanded he stay with her until her face relaxed, and she could look at him without that rictus of imprisoned hurt- he would die at her bedside if it meant she might become happy- and the other was bleeding out his own life.

Are You RRREADY to RRRUMBLE??

One day, one blessed day, you may come to the decision that a long-distance relationship is an okey-dokey relationship. Your love is fair and fabulous, and so it can withstand the mild quirky bits of the separation and all of the communication snafus that will attempt to snarl things up. You are not alone. There are millions of others already doing just that: bucking that trend, building that intimacy that would not naturally be built were you in each other's space all the time, being centered and exuding love from your pores even when Skype is making each of you speak five seconds after the other has already started talking and also looking like you lost an eye since the two of you last spoke.

But one day, one ugly day, you'll get in a fight with your long-distance beloved. You just will. There is a particular energy that builds between those trying to keep it together via telephone and computer, like static electricity. And some day that static love frisson will surround the balloon life head of your talks, and it will have to come out in the air, and then it will hang in the air while one of you looks confused at the live video on screen while the sound catches up. In order to make it good- to ensure that your slow-motion fracas can go on for days, if not weeks- you'd best follow these steps.

1)  Make it Small!

A common mistake of the newbie is to hash things out and especially to keep things in context or in the big picture or whatever. That is such a common mistake that you might even feel good about it, like you'd just been chosen for some Olympic Fight Avoidance Team and your partner is your team mate- you might even be online, shopping for matching sparkly unitards complete with sequined headbands. What you really want to do here is forget all those high-falutin' dreams of gold-medal glory and start looking back at your discussion.

Pick some point (you may develop a method for choosing, but don't be afraid to wing it at first) and then pick at that point. Was it fair that they brought up your expensive stock car racing when you were really talking about your five-year plan? Did they actually refer to that racing as a "hobby"? Because that is just not cool, now that you think about it. Haven't you already had the conversation where you described how the burning rubber smell and the unhealthful heat and the team of spandex-clad co-eds spraying water into your mouth while you waste gas making the motor go R-R-R-RAAAAWRRRR is the only way you feel really free? How dare they say that's a "hobby"! The fact that it costs more per annum than the asking price of a small rural home is not the point! A"Hobby"!...If you look at it this way, you can bicker about the diplomacy of that particular choice of words for hours. And it will feel longer, which is just gravy.

2) Forget Your Progress!

Look, every couple has had it's fights, right? And every couple has figured it out, in some way. Perhaps you went to therapy for months on end and came out slightly more calm and much more broke. Perhaps you just decided the best way to go about this involved a fifth of whiskey per person and a series of shot glasses until one of you falls down first, enabling the other one to crow "I'm the winner!", throw up, and collapse on top of the body of that beautiful, wonderful person who is the loser. Maybe it involved a referee and a closed cage- I don't know what you kids are into these days. But I know this: for the kinds of fights that must be fought over long distances, you have to just let that go. Let it go.

The trusty Keep of Bitter Snipery cannot be conquered through politeness and thoughtful response. Revert to old, bad habits, such as mentioning previous fruitless bickering about something completely off topic ("This is just like when we went snorkeling. You were such an asshole. I swear every time we go to a reef and you get anywhere near some neoprene, it's just like snorkeling with Uncle Ted, because he was such an asshole.") Or you can make half-empty ultimatums ("If you mention my insignificant, completely controlled coke habit one more time I swear I'm going to have to consider whether or not this relationship is as solid as I thought it was." If you're Skyping while you do this, don't forget to make a haughty face!) Works like a charm!

3) Just Hang Up!

Someone taught you not to do that, didn't they? You listened while some well-meaning authority intoned about some golden rule and what constitutes being horrible, didn't you? We all did. And we believed, with our whole half-wit hearts that it was our duty to extract ourselves from a conversation by listening and responding with kindness to the jerk on the phone or the computer that we're trying to correct. If we must, said the nice lady/gentleman, we might write a letter filled with the all that vitriol- and then rip it up. Which is downright crazy.

Listen, well-intentioned people told you not to play with yourself, too, but you didn't listen to that bit of wisdom, did you? Of course you didn't! No one did! And the "be nice" rule is the same. Sure, it makes sense that one must give love to receive love, and you may feel just a wee bite of conscience trying to make you reconsider, but you must take that gnat-like conscience of yours and spray it with your anger spray. Then, just when the conversation you're having with your combatant lover is reaching its' apex and therefore its' possible resolution, get off. You can choose to inform them that you're about to hang up and then do so before they have a chance to "communicate their feelings"; or you can simply disappear. Either way is going to really, really piss off the one who's on the other end- and that's the whole point. The next time you are in touch with them, the tension will be tenser and the rage will be awful and the fight will continue, except the stakes will seem even higher! Woo!

...well, that covers the basics of long-distance relationship fighting. The rules listed above are really just guidelines, so don't be afraid to improvise. As long as you stick to your stupid, self-defeating metaphorical guns, you can be brawling with your loved one for a span of time that is measurable but will feel like many many eternities. Good luck, and remember: only one of you can win the luggage set, and by god, it's going to be you.

Party at My House!

The movers are coming in six days. They come for our stuff, which I think of as my stuff for practical purposes. It is mine; it is all in my control; I am fully responsible for it. Also, it is terrifying. I have moved to well into the point that some dude on cracked.com smarmily pointed out for me and for anyone like me: it's just a mind-boggling array of shit, and I will be happy- kicking my heels together, frozen-in-time-with-a-rictus-of-joy-on-my-face-just-like-in-that-Toyota-commercial-of-old happy- to let total strangers take my things away from me. As long as I can't see it five minutes after they've left, and provided they don't set fire to anything (anything other than my own stuff, I mean) they can ha-ha-have it.

People have been very kind- in-laws, blood relations, people I only see every three years, weirdos that I know only peripherally, friends- and they took my bait. I sent out an evite a few weeks back inviting folks to come over and help me sort through my precious old bar coasters and Alan wrenches to furniture that I never had, and they did. On time and everything. I opened the door to each of them, mouth already working except that no sound was coming out, desperately trying not to appear desperate, which I now believe cannot be done unless you are Helen Mirren. Not that I'm comparing myself to HM, because that would be pure rot. Pure, distracting rot. So once the person came in and I, ever the thoughtful host, forgot to offer them a glass of friggin' water, fer chrissake, I would say something like this:

ME: So, you guys, I think that I'm not Helen Mirren. I mean, I know I'm not Helen Mirren, I'm not fooling myself, because she was so good in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover- that was the first Mirren movie I ever saw. But I think I must have seen more before that, you know? I mean, were the type of geeky family that would watch Masterpiece Theater re-runs, and that was in the 80's when she was becoming Mirren. So I must have seen her before CTW&L, and that's why the line "Try the cock- at least you know where it's been" resonated with me so much...

FRIEND: Jenn, these are my kids. They are five and three-and-a-half.

ME: Are you telling me that they've seen a Helen Mirren movie? It must have been The Queen, because she's so damn good, and it's a great HM primer. Bit much for the kiddos, in my opinion, but what do I know? One could argue that there is no time that is too young for watching-

FRIEND: So, hey, what do you need us to do? Kids, why don't you go downstairs and play with the cat-

ME: Be careful, love bugs, she's a biter!

FRIEND: -or why don't I go down with them, because you have stuff there too, right? That needs to be packed, right? Jenn?

ME: ...Oh, right right! But it's not packing, 'cause the people are doing that, they pack it up for us, which is amazing, so I just need sorting, and I can't be in every room at once, so why don't you just get started on the DVDs? There are the obvious ones, like The Wiggles Christmas- hey, why don't you take that with you home with you, because you have children and you own a DVD player I'm sure, so there you go, I'll just bop downstairs and get it and make sure I put it in your purse-

FRIEND: - WHAT ELSE CAN I DO? There must be something else, honey, I can see a giant pile of coats and t-shirts and what appears to be wet towels over there in the corner. I could just throw that in the washer, or did you want that all folded? I could put it in separate piles, towels coats t-shirts- would that be ok?

ME: That would be great! I think that would be great, what a big help you are! I think that pile is my daughter's safety place, though- she might be buried under there, I haven't seen her in a while. So, again, be careful about the biting. Oh and hey! I just remembered I also have Ice Age 14: Trouble Tectonically (Again) downstairs too, so I'll just put that in your purse with the Wiggles and these clearly used but unmarked VHS tapes! Brilliant!

FRIEND: I am considering leaving now.

ME: Great, because we haven't done a donation run yet, and you could run it for me, and I could just weed out those dozen or so movies that the kids are really going to love- you've already got them watching R movies- it's really too much for them, sweetheart, you know that developmentally they aren't really ready to recognize great acting yet, which is something I know from this book right here, which I will put over by your purse with the box full of the DVDs! I was going to say that it's a different direction, to be sure, but maybe your children will like Fight Club, because I have two copies-

FRIEND: I was told there would be beer.

So the next few hours were torture for all of us, but no more so than for people who aren't me. I blathered like that for hours- I blathered well after everyone was gone, sick to their stomachs to see another human being reduced to such collateral idiocy. So, now, there are lists per room. The lists in themselves are terrifying; they are no more specific than my ranting about cookie cutters and taxation and paper cuts. An example:

Living Room

* Get bowls to put plates in/move- see studio; Antoine?
* Gouges
* S & D 1 truck stockade lamplamp; S & D 2 same
* CARD TABLE!!!!!!
* Neighborhood Assoc. needs paper jambos, must put jambos on curb second Tues but not with recycling so ask racist lady two buildings down schedule for jambos
* Def. move cabinet (**cat in there**)
* Sell cat
* Girl to dentist wed with goo snacks absent (she will know!!)
* fish fixtures frustrating: farm factory Ferarra @ Fulton (Thurs?)

Right now I'm wondering if I'll remember what each line means in one years' time. Could be fun to find out. Have to put "list packing" on the list, but for which room?

The Mouth

Etta opened her front door and stood there in the doorway, looking. She did this every morning, and she made sure to dress accordingly in a morning gown and men's dress shoes and something hand knit on her head. It amused her endlessly- it was a great way to start your day, she'd say to her other aged friends. They would look askance, down or around the room, having learned nothing since high school about dealing with awkward statements. Fine women all, thought Etta; but not forthright in the right way. They were always forthright in the wrong way, dependably; they would offer nasty casseroles and tell sympathetic stories about whatever the conversation was tut-tutting that day. Her friends were practiced and veteran in these ways, which was great when someone died but left them speechless when Etta made her pronouncements. It was a shame, she thought.

There was a listener in the group. Her name was Jackson, "as in Michael" was her standard response when asked if it was a family name or her hyphen name or what it meant. "Jackson doesn't mean anything, it's a name" she said whenever asked, and she'd get cross if someone didn't accept that answer as the full one. Etta liked Jackson and vice versa. Jackson sat with her eyes on Etta when Etta made her pronouncements, and she had gained Jackson's friendship by holding still for the whole spiel: "everyone should dress like a crazy person on a daily basis," Etta half-bellowed, adjusting for the deafness of the audience. "People are wary of you right away. You can do what you like with that feeling, like make nice with some neighbor's boy or take some body's trash cans back in for them. It confuses them- it's a hoot. watch the faces when you do it. Pure entertainment."

"Etta you're not being nice, doing that. That's pretty...I was going to say snide, but that's not it. Manipulative, there you go. You're terrible." Jackson said this when everyone else was checking their feet or their Rummy scores.

"True, but I always think that doing the favor for them cancels out the bad intention- the ill will, if you like. I don't like that phrase, but since I don't know any other that fits- there it is. You can just talk to folks instead, but dressed like that makes me feel like I've gotten the jump on things. Like I put the day on notice."  Jackson laughed, and the ladies at the table laughed with a one-second delay, following her lead. She came to Etta's house in the morning when they weren't at the YMCA for their aquacise and their card table. Jackson took her life, and the lives of others, in her own nubbled hands when she drove over. This was almost every day. "People wander in, have you noticed that? People just wander to your doors or sometimes right in your windshield. In your sight, I mean- as if you weren't on the road. I realize that the podestreens"- Etta also liked when Jackson mispronounced words, because it was inexplicable, and she liked the inexplicable things in life- "yes, I know they have the right of way. Or we have to yield that to them. They get to walk wherever, to be specific." Jackson sighed and shook her head for less than a second. "But Etta! What is wrong with some of them? Why would they walk in front of an oldie behind the wheel of a large car? I'm a stereotype! Right there people should be careful." Etta laughed and laughed, and Jackson shone a smile back and didn't take offence.

This morning Etta didn't stand around silently challenging neighborhood acquaintances to remark on her hat, as per her usual. There was a giant sinkhole right in front of her house, in the street, so thorough that she could practically see seeping up from it the smoke from the bomb that must have put it there. It was a Bugs Bunny image, but a compelling one, and she ran in to call Jackson before her friend drove over and straight into it, yelling at out her window to alarmist, arm-waving podestreens that they should just clear a place for her the whole way. She caught her on the third ring, and started talking right away.

"Jackson, you have to not come to the front of the house this morning, or probably not the afternoon either. There is an enormous mouth in the street."

Jackson took this in her placid way, but Etta couldn't figure out if it was the compressed type of Jackson who would give some lip service to the notion of not coming and then come to right there, travelling five miles per hour faster than usual or if it was placid because of her poor sleep habits and lack of a quality cup of coffee. "Ok, honey, I'll not come to the front of your house. Because of a mouth. You said mouth, right?"

"Yes, right, don't come to the front. Let me check the alley in back." Etta put the phone down and went to look at the disappointing pot holes in the paving behind her garage. "The back is fine. But this hole-"

"Oh, it's a hole." Jackson's voice was still maddeningly placid.

"Yes, it's a big damn hole, and I saw not one but two cars just get swallowed. The first was just parked there- I'm serious, don't come to the front, Jackson- and the second was some dummy who drove up to it like he was on a dare. One should not fuck with nature's mouths. One should recognize them for what they are, dummy dum dum." She sighed. "They got him out by throwing some rope someone had in there to the dummy and he just grabbed hold, and they pulled."

"It's a nice neighborhood you have there." Jackson was compressed, so Etta let her get off the phone so she could come over. "Not the front, and be careful in the back, because who knows?"

Jackson was careful, for once. She came in the kitchen door, almost silently. "Did you see it?" Etta asked.

"Not yet. Give me the tour, then." Etta walked Jackson to the front, and then they both stood there in the door jamb, mouths barely ajar so that a sidewalk observer might think they both had taken a bite of something simultaneously and then stopped chewing. "That's a mouth, yes. It cannot be described any other way. And nature's mouths should not be ignored, like you say" Jackson whispered, needlessly. "What to do, though?"

Etta had thought about this. "It's getting bigger, Jack. It's gotten rounder, and smokier-"

"I don't see any smoke, darling-"

"Look for longer. Don't let your eyes get unfocused and trick you or anything, but just keep them lasering at that mouth for an hour and you'll see smoke. Anyway- it's bigger, it's widening so that it's creeping closer to the other side of the road, because there are more cars there. Look: It came to the curb on this side, and now it's lost interest. Sidewalk holds no interest for our Mouth."

"It's looking for cars, then." Jackson tilted one hip out like a cool kid.

"Yes, that's it I think. I can't see it wanting people, anyway- it's just pulling in the cars, and so far it doesn't really go for people, unless they're just idiots who can't comprehend it."

"I don't know what one could misinterpret."

"Me neither" Etta agreed. Then they went into the kitchen to make coffee, which she never drank more than a half-cup but which her friend would chug like a record-holding career drinker. It always reminded her of pitchers of light beer for $5 on weekdays.

"Let's watch the news. Did you watch any? We should just take a look, maybe there's some scientist explaining everything for us" Jackson said after two mug fulls. They moved to the parlor, which had the front windows facing the street-now-hole and the television. They turned it on, and, after a moment, Etta said "holy shit" in a stage whisper.

There were mouths everywhere, in every area of the city: downtown was the worst, and there had been the most cars consumed by a three-to-one margin compared to everywhere else. The north side was also a Daliesque hell scape of pits and disappeared cars and people not understanding, staying too close and getting sucked in because they just couldn't believe this weird new road feature was doing what it was doing. One of the more profound stories was of a deliver truck packed with new refrigerators and clothes dryers- that one was on the West side, and that hole had just opened beneath the truck, full-sized and apparently ravenous, grabbing and holding the whole thing as if it were a doomed cruise ship. The two deliverers were taken down with it, since they'd had little to no time to forge a plan of escape. There were rescuers at the scene, dangling a rope ladder from an adjacent tree and yelling downward, since their ambulance had been swallowed, too.

The ladies ran to the front of the house for another, now adrenalised look: their hole had widened, and deepened, and there were no cars anywhere near it. That morning the street had been parked out, but either the owners were canny enough to identify an approaching force of nature and moved their own cars, or the mouth had taken them. It came right up to the sidewalk, which it had left almost entirely unmoved. There was one square that had a wee upward tilt, so small that it could easily have been caused by the previous evenings' pre-crater hard rain. Etta took it upon herself to walk right up to the edge. Her friend ran back to the pantry, took the ladder from it and jogged back up to the front door. She waited. Etta stood there, looking into it and then looking around, and then looking into it.

"There's no more cars, and I don't really want to wrestle with alternate routes at my age" she said. Jackson sighed and went kitchenward again. Etta stood. A WGN helicopter went by, and she waved at it with a serious expression on her face. Jackson came out the front door, carefully letting her leg hang back so the screen door wouldn't bang (because she hated the sound.) She had the coffeemaker, still steamy, in her hands.

"Here." she said.

Etta took it and heaved it into the hole all in one motion. It made a lovely arc, and the cord twirled around above it so that for a second, at it's height, it looked like art.  "I don't think that's enough."

Jackson went back and forth, taking anything electrical she could find, any technology, to bring to Etta: her iron ("I have no idea why I have this thing in the first place,") her straightening iron ("ok, good, I can't help but burn my face any time I try to use it anyway, I know it's strange what with the design being safe and compressed, but I do it,") the computer that Etta's son-in-law had brought and lovingly installed that she used all of once a day to check the weather ("uh-huh.") By and by there was nothing left to pitch: Etta's house was as bare as it had been when she and her husband had set themselves up in it, when one just waited for water to boil rather than using a microwave and they only had a radio to listen to because they could afford neither the television nor the floor space to put it on. Etta had shooed her friend back when she'd appeared with the old radio. "It still works on a few stations."

Jackson turned around, saying "and it was yours," meaning it belonged to Etta and her departed. There were things that nature's prerogative would have to forgive.

Nothing happened for a long while. They went back in eventually. They'd both thought there would be some sign, some tic of noise from the earth, but there was nothing so they turned and walked back into the house, where they sat down in the front room. It was dim in the room since the sun had gone westward, and warm, and so the two friends ended up dozing, sagging toward each other on the dusty chintz sofa. They were woken by chopper sounds, closer and louder than they'd been before, and more consistent. The ladies sat up- slowly, decrinkling themselves- and stood. They looked at each other before they went to the door.

"This had better be good" said Jackson. Etta nodded.

Outside there were two helicopters hovering close to the hole. The first thing the women did was wave at them, arms all the way above their heads and back as if they were each the President of the United States. It was a fitting gesture: the day was saved, because their ministrations had coaxed the mouth into closing. It was clamping itself shut and making the expected ticking noises, which satisfied Etta and relived Jackson. Then they went back inside and turned on the  old radio, which was glad to be of service, and heard: all around the city  people had seen footage taken from the first news copter of Etta chucking things up and in, and Jackson enthusiastically finding new appliances, running into the house and back tirelessly, stronger than many half her age. The populace had taken the hint, and things were disappearing into the mouths of the city. There was even some nervous tittering from a TV anchor about them not having jobs if no one had televisions to watch.

"Yours didn't have a mouth, did it? When you left?"

Jackson stretched. "No, but I think I'll go home just the same. I have some donations I can think of right in my basement. It's like they've been waiting down there, I never use them, but today I can let them go."

Etta smiled and stretched herself. "Well I'll see you in two days, then. Promise me you'll drive safe, maniac." It was the same thing Etta said to Jackson every Tuesday, but this time they went back and stood in the doorway, walking there calmly and silently. They stood and watched.

I Love You Guys

Being the one who is left, abandoned, made lone, is worse than doing the leaving. Which is a truism, yes? Which is something  we know, and with certainty. The perpetual need to re-learn basic lessons is baffling, though. One would think that one might get to the point when one says "Ah yes! I feel prematurely bereft, because I'm anticipating the absence of my friend/lover/family member/anyone else, and this is the part when I'm to begin shopping for pity party favors (pity party favors: to-go packs of extra thick tissues for crying, mixes of music that remind you of the soon-to-be-gone person's ring tone, giant box of Animal Crackers, fresh can of whipped cream to put on Animal Crackers, box of wine.) It would be more efficient, at least: one could just proceed with the Festivus of Poivre Moi and skip that startled feeling that denotes your sense of total unpreparedness. What? you think. Sure, I've felt this way before, but that was years ago, and it was when I broke up with That Fucker What Stole My Personalized Cue Stick, and it was before I knew He/She stole it! That was completely different!...and it is completely different.

This time, you just sit there and remind each other how awesome things were when you met, even though neither of you can really recall the details. Just "I remember your haircut! You wore it that way for seven years! I thought your hair only did the one style and refused to grow on principle!"... and "There was a house party. Was it at Sherla's? No, she was with Derrick at the time- that was before she flipped the coin... Yeah, she was with Suze for a while there- they almost bought the studio in ORLANDO, which I thought was just strange since she was a CPA and she was a genius with other people's money...OK, so the party was at Ki Ki's then. Ki Ki. Come on, Ki Ki! Sorry: Ferdie. Freddy. Gerdie? What was her name, and didn't she have the operation yet?...no that was Kidzie. Yeah, the nurse/"nurse", and I can't figure that out because you'd think after all day jogging after stretchers and listening to baby doctors tell you how it is, the last thing you'd want to do is slide on your five-inch heels...Good point, maybe that's exactly what you want to do... Anyway, anyway- party, party... Right, but now I'm not sure it was in someone's house. We went to that warehouse- it was a warehouse, and that was our first rave, remember? It was so small, there were twenty people there- we were so lucky, weren't we? There was only those half-tabs of X- oh, remember X?- so we didn't experience the nervous system shutdown the five others did. Maybe it was thirty people. So it must have been more like seven other people just spent fifteen minutes falling down, one limb at a time, and we had to drag them over to the pit that was in the corner of that warehouse- it was little, and we'd put our coats down and dragged them each into the pit and layed them on the coats...are you sure? That was a show we saw? Well shit!...Was your brother in that show?" and "I love you, and it might be in a gay way."

Then it's almost time. Then it's time. Then they leave.

So it's different because your anger is fruitless, whereas the anger you have toward some dumb ex is full of delicious fruit that is satisfying. You get angry with the timing and the taxi driver and the spouse they're going home to and the fulfilling job they have that requires they do this horrible thing to you. There you are, holding the Phone of Friendship which is sounding with the Busy Signal of Bereftness, which you can't just hang up because the Cradle of Resignation is under all of the laundry that you ignored while your friend was in town. You put the phone down, still beeping, on the Get On With It Table of daily tasks; the signal is like tinnitus, barely audible and constant. So you do what anyone, what everyone, does: you turn on the Telling Television to watch a Show of Cosmic Self-Anaesthetising...and your writing becomes god-awful.

The loneliness of losing a friend this way, in a way that's no really losing them, is humbling: if this were high school again, you would be the hanger-on, the apprentice pariah, the stag at the Prom, and your friend would be their splendid, magnanimous, quietly talented self with all of the friends. Among their friends are the school assholes who transmorgify into smiling, approachable humans when they're in line or at a party with them; the nerds, who together form a phalanx of the smitten; every teacher in the school, and every administrator; the Maintenance Engineers, who laugh with them about the formality of their titles ("what's wrong with being called a janitor? It's ridiculous!"); and you. They like you almost as much as you like them, which is a miracle. And, despite what many insipid movies would have you believe about your natural thirst for status and equal amounts of adoration from all and sundry, you are just fine with it. What difference does all this make, anyway? You are friends, and because of it, you are lucky.

Dollars of the Soul

My husband and I went out for Chinese years ago, and one of us got a fortune that said: If Cheap Things Have No Value, Valuable Things Are Not Cheap? I took it home and hung it on our fridge by one end, pinned under a Power Puff Girls magnet. I loved it for many reasons- I take delight in weird syntax, from a translation or locally sourced, because it's just like watching English change in the moonlight- but most of all because it practically spelled out the continuation. If you read it aloud you can't help saying "I mean, help me out here" at the end.

I've been trying to put a mental frame around that fortune for years. Until recently, I've been thinking about it in metaphysical terms: Indeed, I ask myself, if cheap things- cheap to me, cheap to my community of artists or friends or barely tolerated bus co-habitants, cheap to the Universal We- if cheap things have no value (and here I pause to pre-emptively congratulate myself on my huge, huge intellect,) are valuable things not cheap? Since I was thinking in the abstract and mainly silly Plane of the Important Ponderings, I would try to come up with the cheap things in question: to me, spitefulness; to the immediate community, self-medication with celebrity baby-bumps and pancreas-busting amounts of sugar; We, the ability to forget all about the man behind the curtain without even being asked...Then what would the valuable, potentially not-cheap things be? Me, self-acceptance, immediate community, a bucket-passing fire brigade; We...uh...an imagination big enough to dream up childhood vaccinations?...What was the question again?

If cheap things have no value, valuable things are not cheap? We are about to move to a different continent, and so there are a million things (about 998,210 more than I thought we had) in our house that need to be sold. And now I realize what it really meant: clearly the person who wrote it was also trying to sell everything they owned, and lacking a creditable means to comparison shop, they went to work and wrote it in cookie-fortune form in the hope that if enough of those cookies went out and were read by compassionate diners, a few of them might hunt him down to help him price the Ikea cabinet. I mean, it was their top-of-the-line when he bought it three years ago but now is missing a widget and has no badly-translated instructions to go with it- what is that worth? Craig's list is the only place where people who really need furniture and have bitty budgets go for the self-torture of shopping used and online- and Craig's list is unreliable. Ikea cabinets look exactly the same in every  picture. They are described with very different adjectives. You see a lot of "brand new" and "still in good shape" and "okay" and "worked great for us for fifteen years" in the descriptions, and you'll see many prices that don't really match up with your unrealistic pricing-hopes, even though you got real with yourself while drunk on lite beer and knee-deep in receipts from a cobbler's bill that you put on the MasterCard that you closed out seven years ago, and the pictures of these Ikea Kaarlupvstoorgaart cabinets are identical.

I believe the trick is to do it piece-by-piece, which is hell on your TV time. Who wants to be sticking price tapes on your broken two-legged tripods (Still works! $38 30 24 15 3!) when you could be watching anything at all in marathon form, courtesy of Netflix's library of unasked-for Friday night network sitcoms from the 90's? No one, that's who. Escape is not an option, though; not even stupid escape. So one must wade in, and one must find out which are the not inexpensive valuable things and which are the cheap cheap things through one's intuition. Which is a nice way of saying desperation.

Broken futon frame? Since it's not just broken, it's busted up- I will sell this as firewood. I may be able to get a cord of large-sized kindling out of it (for those not raised on a farm, a "cord" of wood is a smallish pile. The determination of what constitutes a smallish pile is reserved entirely for career farmers who will look into the distance, take a pull on their PBR, and declare one smallish pile a cord and a twin smallish pile right next to it "a little light." It's just what they do.) There are area rugs- and what area rugs they are, with their thin spots from the household pet's lovin' spot (love to the rug, not to each other- you degenerate,) and their spill-free corners...these I shall price at $150 each, and I may just get away with that price because I plan to sell it to my daughter's friends by telling them brilliant adventures that may happen to them if they have the things in their bedroom. Then I'll sit back and let the calls from their parents overwhelm my voicemail...Or $50 for two. It depends on which plan is less work... For the table with the heap of my daughter's various artworks that she doesn't want to pack up and take- the table is $.25 (three-year-old Ikea particle board is basically table-shaped dust,) the artwork ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Does that sound high to you? I can't tell, because it is both valuable and cheap. So, yeah, a cool million, payable in cash or monopoly money, whichever is the better offer.

What I'd like to do is have an open house, letting friends and family and friends of friends come and wander around the place for a while, sipping on the delightful adult beverage that will be served to them by my child in a clean white tuxedo shirt, and then have an auction on the entire thing. One lot, folks, and a great deal may be had with the bid of just $1000, think of all the be-yoo-tiful furniture from Sweden yours in your own home and the vases that came with the bouquets from 1800flowers and the Blackberry phone only five years old and the other Blackberry folks, that's right two Blackberries with their chargers and these five Trader Joe's shopping bags full of alkaline batteries, you'll never go batteryless again simply go to your bag and start licking the nipple-like tops to find the ones with charge left in them and there are these ugly-ass heirlooms that have no use but were kept to avoid guilt- do I hear $1000? A great deal here folks you don't want to hesitate do I hear $800? Come on now you will not find a better array of random house furnishings for $750, $700 do I hear $700 let's get this thing going for $500, $500 is a steal for these plastic toy-bases, and you can spend be-yoo-tiful family time with your spouse and your children trying to figure out which base goes with which broken toy, better than any picture puzzle- Can I get a bid of $400?...

It will be all right. I will be in the back, pacing while my brother-in-law mixes stronger and stronger drinks in the vain hope that someone will get drunk enough to pipe in with "I'll take everything for $15,000! Woo!" and then pass out, arm up, hand holding out an envelope full of fifties. And sure, even though that won't happen, it's nice to imagine it all being done and wrapped up in a little Britain-bound bow. It's more than nice- it's invaluable.

School, and the U.K.

Schools are like women: they are fickle; they will make you wait and wait; they will sleep with all of your friends starting the fucking second you leave town to go to Boise on business for three days, the slag. ("Slag" is British for "Slut" and "Hag" combined, except when followed by a prepositional phrase. I'm assuming. I've never actually heard that term used by anyone British, but you read a few pamphlets and watch a few episodes of MI-5 and you're willing to say anything that smacks of United Kingdomness, even if it has no basis in their actual linguistic practices. It's jimmy-sine gobsquattle, what what!)

So: Schools. I'm looking at some. They seem, without exception, fabulous. Each of them is housed in their own historical manses and abbeys and they each have their own wood, which is Brit for "forest." So, to repeat, each school in Great Britain comes with its' own forest. Many of the academies that I've been googling have their own Ents,who operate the canteens during 8th-year Girls' Rugby home games. Also these schools have a pool, as a matter of course. Some of the less-fortunate village elementary schools have to share the heated outdoor swimming pool with the village darts club, but each school I've looked at so far has listed a pool amongst its' facilities, much the same way one of ours might enthusiastically list girls-and-boys toilets. Their libraries are imperial, and if I were casting someone to stand in one of these libraries for, say, a fifteen-second public service segment on the telly, I would  cast no none less than Dame Dench to stand there. I might have her read something aloud for that fifteen seconds, and no matter what outmoded reference book about mid-nineteenth century tulip bulb technology she'd be reading aloud and no matter what reform school's holding cell/cafeteria she were standing in, it would be classy beyond any American measure. The reform school libraries here have armchairs. Because when you are reading, you need armchairs. The Brits know this, and provide.

Also their applications are relatively benign, with simple questions and easily-translatable initialised abbreviations and forward-thinking lines to fill out that actually match the questions... Getting to said applications is proving to be not as civilised. There are a great many cross-referencing web pages and almost inaccessible links that lead to completely inaccessible other links, as is only proper on any government-run website. I got on a page that told me to begin an application by putting in a birthday (not necessarily my child's) which then told me I had to log in, so I logged in and it told me in order to create a log-innable account I had to begin an application. All of that brings about a warm glow, much like the glow of an abuse victim who's found that new, special, abusive someone. Oh, you think. Look, they wrote some enraging code right into the program so that I could spend hours trying to trick the website into letting its' guard down and taking me to one of its' mysterious links. How sweet! Those British people are so polite they thought of all the aggravations of home. I didn't even have to ask.

And so these schools are like women. No, wait- I mean men. Boys. They are like boys at camp on Sadie Hawkins day, before the dance, when it was the girls' humiliating job to find dates by outrunning a boy- at first it's the Populars, those who's hair has been bleached in the sun by all the volleyball playing and joshing around with other boys in a completely non-sexual way, then it's the future Counsellors, made so by their reflexive naming of plants they pass during their walks to the Mess, then someone's brother, then the quiet freaky guys who only burn and peel and refuse to talk to anyone- and then tackling him like he's in the midst of stealing Gemmy's antique brooch and they the only one who can stop him. The schools dodge and weave and sometimes let you get close, but not get them. The bastards.

Who made that up, anyway? Who thought it would be good fun for us to desperately sprint around the football field until someone took pity on you and let you get their sleeve? I don't know who did, but I know this: it wasn't the British. Or if it was, they would have the decency to hide the smirking behind a book in one of their red-velvet and stained-glass libraries.