And for the past year or so, we haven't had blinds in the bay windows or above the sink. There were blinds there once, aluminum Venetian blinds stained with rust and bent in places. When the man came to replace the windows, he pulled them off, and I just threw them away, thinking we'd buy new blinds soon.
"Soon" turned, as it does, into seasons passing and nights growing shorter and an entire winter of eating dinner in front of windows that became mirrors at six in the evening, of learning to be fully dressed and wearing a hat when I came downstairs for breakfast on weekend mornings, to being on display for the two families living behind us. Not that they are total spies, but how could you not look in at night when the lights are blazing and there we are, living our lives like television characters?
I hated it. So in February, we got the windows measured for shades. I wanted Roman shades, not being aware that Roman shades cost more than a new sidewalk. I readjusted my expectations and picked out some pretty woven roller shades at half the price of the Roman but twice the price of What the Fuck.
And we waited for the money tree to grow.
Then earlier this summer, an unexpected freelance gig came along, and lo and behold, it paid EXACTLY the amount of the shades. Which I totally took to be fate. So we ordered the shades.
A nice man and woman came to Chateau Travolta yesterday and installed them. I gave them cinnamon rolls left over from the cul-de-sac sleepover last Saturday. And then I drew my shades.
I was shocked at how boxed-in I felt. Apparently I'd grown accustomed to having the world see in, because it meant, too, that I could see out.
Last night I found out about an unexpectedly large bill. I'd just returned from CVS, where I spent twenty-five minutes combining coupons with weekly deals to save $23. The pointlessness of blowing all that time to save a few bucks only to find out a mistake had cost us hundreds totally deflated me. And it was 107 degrees at 7 pm.
I sank to the kitchen chair. Tears sprang to my eyes. "I think I'm going to throw up," I said.
I sat there, breathing deeply, trying to calm my anxiety, when my daughter appeared at my side and handed me the teddy bear that lives in her room but was mine when I was her age.
I deleted all my boards off Pinterest a few months ago, because I was pinning mostly public art and got freaked out about copyright. You really aren't supposed to pin anything you don't have permission to pin unless you took the picture yourself, and everything I was pinning was art, so I got nervous.
I recently read a great article somewhere (I've forgotten where) about starting a pinboard for your books, if you're an author. I think that's a fascinating idea. Probably even more fascinating considering two of the three books I'm pinning for aren't published yet. Either way, it'll be fun for me. Let me know if this would make a book come more alive for you, and if you want, follow my boards! I haven't pinned much yet -- I just started. It'll happen the way the books themselves happen -- slowly.
This past week has been extremely draining for me. Yesterday morning I was in such a dark mood I actually cancelled meetings so people wouldn't have to talk to me.
Last night, I went to an Indigo Girls concert in Kansas City. I named my first horrible and forever unpublished novel after a line in an Indigo Girls song, and I moved to Kansas City after really listening to "Least Complicated." I like a lot of music, but there are certain singer/songwriters who capture the human condition so eloquently it takes my breath away. Listening to the music last night reminded me that I have a thing that I do that can bliss me out as much as the bass player of the back-up band, The Shadow Boxers. (I wish I had taken video last night, because I have NEVER seen a bass player this jacked before. I found a video on their YouTube channel, though, because you really need the visual to understand this post.)
It wasn't just the bass player, though -- I don't know how young these guys are, but they looked a lot younger than my 38, certainly younger than Emily and Amy. And when the audience sang along to some of the Swamp Ophelia songs, the guys looked like they were getting a straight dopamine drip. The wheels turning, yes, this is what it can be like after all that hard work and heartbreak. As artists we get so few of those moments and so many of the moments of rejection and struggle. You have to bottle the good moments in your head and sip slowly so as not to use that joy up before you really, really need it.
I desperately needed that reminder last night that I can access my shot of bliss when I want to, too. I just have to sit down and search inside myself for the writing. I'm lucky and blessed that I know how to find my joy -- I just need to clear my schedule and make time for it more -- not just here, though I love writing here -- I love talking with you guys -- but the fiction. The new novel. (The second novel is with editors, it's a long story and there's too much uncertainty, which is why I never write about it. Honestly, it pains me to talk about it, because I've come so far in these past three years, but will it be far enough? I can't explain how painful and important this is to me.)
I can't remember what made me remember the poem I wrote right before I graduated from the University of Iowa OH MY GOD SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, but I mentioned it to my friend Kristi last night in reference to some song lyric, and this morning I looked it up to see how much it sucked. It isn't my best work, but I can clearly see what I was thinking back then, so I thought I'd share it here in honor of the happy boys of The Shadow Boxers and my hope that people sing their lyrics with fervor. Good luck to you and keep loving life.
The Last Day
The last day of college collected no knowledge
different from all of the rest.
To the edge of ability
I tested virility
can't say it was the best.
The snowflakes come swirling with dreamlike unfurling,
covering the entire town.
Hot water rises with scented soap prizes
as I try to steam straight my gown.
They gave me two stars to represent wars
I fought with words and with pen.
To get their attention, attempting dissension
and failing to score in the end.
My work here is done.
My words have not won
the battles that ignorance wrought;
my lofty ambition
achieved no sedition:
I fear education is bought.
But hope will still flower
far from the tower
of ivory I've never seen --
thoughts of the younger
still here will blunder
and sleep in the places I've been.
And then while I was searching the Mac for "places I've been," I found this other one also detailing my obsession with other people who have lived where I've lived. What are their stories? Do they wonder about mine? What do we leave behind? A song? A poem? A smile?
Places We've Been
Lofted bunk on a college campus
somewhere in the Middle West,
I carved my initials in the closet
near where you rest your head.
First-floor walk-up in Chicago,
the corner of Clark and Halsted streets,
no parking, disposal or air conditioning --
do you find it had to sleep?
Historic building in Kansas City,
the very first space I called my own,
I taped poems to the cabinets
and never answered the phone.
Haven't built a house, always filled a space
vacated by somebody else.
I smell you, sometimes, before I drop off
to sleep, in the places you've been.
Today's a tough day. Hang in there, Aurora. Everyone go find your bliss -- every day is a gamble and a gift.
I was talking on the phone to my best friend when it happened. We were chatting about swimming pools and barbecues as my family hurtled along I-35 toward Des Moines.
The little SUV two cars ahead of us swerved and rolled, ending up in the ditch, two of its wheels straight, two bent, the back windows blown out.
Three cars stopped, including us. I hadn't been paying attention when it happened, just heard Beloved mumbling and noticed our rapid slowing. "I've got to go," I told Steph. "I think I need to call 911."
Beloved and I were not thinking clearly -- neither of us took the little angel, who was still in the back seat. I was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, no idea if the man driving the car was hurt or not, just wanting some authority figure to show up as soon as possible. They asked where we were. I thought we were in Missouri still, but we'd passed over the state line and were near Lamoni. I ran back to the closest sign, but it was a rest area sign, not a mile marker sign. I really had no idea where we were. I tried to use the GPS on my phone, but it wouldn't leave the screen I was on since it was an emergency call.
Finally, we figured out where we were with Garmina in our car. The little angel had gotten out of our car and crawled down to my husband, who stood talking to the man in wet shorts with a cell phone pressed to his head and shaking hands. I tried to get the man to sit down, but he kept talking about how his wife and 19-year-old daughter had flown to Minnesota and he was driving the car up from Houston to meet them because his daughter needed the car for her vacation because she was too young to drive a rental. His face fell. "I've ruined everything! I've ruined her vacation!" he moaned, his hands still shaking.
"I'm sure she won't care. She'll be happy you're okay," I said, trying to calm him down.
"Oh, I don't know. There's stuff she needs in this car. She's nineteen."
"Even a nineteen-year-old will be relieved her father isn't hurt after rolling his car," I said. "Please sit down. Please don't worry."
He wouldn't sit down.
A Lamoni police officer arrived and said an ambulance was on the way. The man seemed okay, but I think he was a little bit in shock. I worried about his neck.
The first car had left after we assured them we would stay with the man. The second car was a woman driving to Wisconsin to see her daughter dance in a competition. She was from a little town in Missouri just down the road from us. The Lamoni cop said he would question her, since she had been directly behind the man. He said we could go. I kind of wanted to hug the man and the woman, but it would've been weird. I wish now I'd hugged the man.
The man kept thanking us, but I felt bad leaving him there, all alone, states away from his wife and daughter with a totaled car and maybe some sort of injury. But the woman had searched through the grass and found his cell phone, and he'd talked to his wife. The woman told the wife her husband had been in an accident.
"Can you imagine it?" Beloved said as we got back on the road to head to my parents-in-law's house. "Getting the call from a total stranger?"
Oh, of course I can. I catastrophize about everything.
I've thought about the man several times since then. It's a miracle of car safety technology and smart people who wear seatbelts that he was as unscathed as he seemed. It seems unbelievable you can roll a car at highway speed and come out of it with nothing more than a pair of wet shorts. But I did the exact same thing when I was 14 driving on a school permit, except instead of a complete roll I was stopped by a fence post and ended up hanging from the ceiling by my seatbelt.
My brain is easily led to intrusive thinking. In the past, this has led me to restrict my eating, to exercise obsessively, to spend hours Googling sleep solutions for my toddler, to become obsessed with sunscreen for my daughter, to worry about the health and well being of my family. When I was a kid, I would become obsessed with the idea of my house burning down during fire safety week and couldn't go to sleep until I had mapped out exactly how I would escape my burning home with all my stuffed animals even though my window opened directly onto the earth.
When my daughter was a baby, we lived in an eighty-year-old home with huge wall grates. The holes in the grates were decorative and large enough for, say, a snake to climb through. So I became obsessed with the idea that a snake would get into our leaky, stone basement and somehow find its way straight up through the grate and up my daughter's crib. I thought about this a lot.
In my first apartment in Kansas City, I became so obsessed with the idea of someone climbing in through my first-floor window I nailed the windows shut. A fire hazard, for sure. But I couldn't sleep until I did it.
I'm a lock-checker, a make-sure-the-oven-is-off fretter. I've been known to turn around five miles from home to make sure I shut the garage door.
The bat thing was funny until someone pointed out my husband could've been bitten by the bat and not even know it. Then I made the mistake of looking up rabies and found it is fatal in humans if not treated immediately. I made Beloved call urgent care to see if they thought he should get rabies shots. They said no. He is not about to do it anyway.
I have thought of nothing but rabies for the past three days, of him dying two months from now and leaving me and the little angel all alone.
I know these are intrusive thoughts. He was not bitten, he swears he didn't touch the bat, and I believe him. He is not an idiot. He swatted it down with a broom, stunned it, captured it under the broom and got it between the broom the bag without touching it. I believe him.
I've got to stop thinking about him dying.
These are intrusive thoughts, and when I think of them, I can feel the adrenaline downloading into my bloodstream as it is this very minute. My heart is pounding, I'm breathing shallowly and I feel like I might throw up.
My daughter is watching Veggie Tales in the next room and I have work deadlines. I have no room in my life for intrusive thoughts.
There. I just took a deep breath.
Last night, I had a dream about having to cross five train tracks set very close together and traversed by high-speed trains that came within seconds of each other. You had to memorize the patterns in order to cross the tracks safely. I was sitting on what I thought was the ground before the tracks and someone turned a light on and I discovered I'd been sitting on a set of hidden tracks. I backed up and made it across, carrying my daughter, who was a toddler squalling to be let down.
That's what anxiety feels like, actually.
The anxiety operates the trains I'm constantly worrying about. They're not ghost trains -- there's plenty in life that can go wrong. Sometimes I think people with anxiety are actually just pragmatic realists -- you could die from just about anything. Thankfully most of the time, we don't, but it's true, you could. It's far better to operate under the illusion that nothing bad will happen -- that you'll get through the entire day safely and in one piece, because ironically, the more you worry about bad things happening, the more likely you'll make a dumb decision thinking it will make things better and actually endanger yourself in some other way than the danger you were trying to avoid in the first place. The fact Keith Richards is still alive proves God protects fools and children.
It's true my husband could've been bitten by a bat and not know it and end up foaming and leaving me a widow by the time my daughter enters third grade. The man drives 1500 miles a week -- it's far more likely he'll get plowed by a semi or choke eating a cheeseburger in the car. If I allow myself to think of everything that could happen to him, or my daughter or anyone I love, I'll spend my life rocking and crying.
I refuse to live that way.
Intrusive thoughts can be paralyzing. I'm forcing them out now, because I have no control, really, over when my cards or anyone's cards get drawn. Bad things can and will happen in the course of my life, because that's life -- the bad comes with the good -- and it does no good to anticipate everything horrible that could happen. Anticipating those things will most likely cause stress hormones to clog my arteries and overtax my heart, lower my immune system and perhaps bring on a terminal disease.
In the end, it's probably safer to fiddle dee dee and go look at talking animals on the Internet.
The neighbors are out of town. They've asked us to water their flowers since it will not rain in Kansas City again before the Mayan calendar runs out. We said, "Sure!"
The first night I went over to water, I found the hose in back to be already on with a device attached to the top. It looked like a quick adaptor, but when I tried to put the nozzle in, it just shot water all over me. So then I decided to take the quick adaptor off, because WTF?
BAD IDEA.
As I watched water come shooting out the sides as I attempted to unscrew the adaptor, I remembered my neighbor saying something vague about the hose in the back never turning off.
Huh.
I watered everything while growing more concerned. I couldn't leave the adaptor off for a week, but if I tried to screw it back on, I was going to get even more soaked. And I was wearing my glasses, and I really hate it when my glasses get wet. It wasn't until I had the adaptor almost on that it occurred to me I could crimp the hose to at least slow the avalanche of water currently drenching me from head to toe.
No, I'm not known for my common sense. Thanks!
Fast-forward to last night. Saddened by the knowledge I have to do this every night this week because I am the only one home, I headed across the street. The little angel trotted along behind me in her skort and cowgirl boots, because that's all she wears ever since she read that is Taylor Swift's favorite outfit.
In every marriage, there's a moment in which you get to be the one who is right. My moment came on Saturday night.
On Saturday, a series of events led to my victory.
A two-week heatwave was flaming out in a 105-degree burst of glory.
My brother- and sister-in-law and their two daughters were staying the weekend.
A door between the garage and the house was left open.
When I realized the door had been open, I went to look for Petunia. She's never left the garage before, but she has visited it when I've left the kitchen door open, and on the night in question, both doors to the garage were open in an attempt to release the atomic air trapped inside. Since Petunia is terrified of my youngest niece, I assumed she'd be hiding out in the basement.
Halfway down the stairs, I saw something flutter. No, FLAP.
I ran back upstairs and yelled to Beloved there was something with WINGS in the basement.
Beloved: "Wings? Really? Are you sure it's not a cicada?"
I may not be in Mensa, but I know the difference between a cicada and a bird or bat (I wasn't sure which one it was at the time.) There's a slight size differential.
This is a cicada. (image credit: Gardener41 on Flickr)
This is a fucking bat. (image credit: blmurch on Flickr)
Me: IT IS NOT A CICADA.
He dropped whatever he was doing and went downstairs. Seconds later, we heard a loud crash from the basement.
Beloved: JESUS CHRIST! BAT! BAT!
(I may have allowed myself a smile)
I went to get a broom to join my knight in shining armor downstairs. He was crouched in front of the door to the half-finished bathroom, which leads to a half-finished, well, room room that we use as a tornado shelter. Nothing in our basement is finished, so we don't spend a lot of time down there.
Beloved looked back at me, sheer panic in his eyes. I could see the bat flying back and forth between the room-room and the bathroom, looking for all the world like the bat on a string you see on The Muppets.
Beloved: I think he's getting tired.
My BIL came down the stairs and I sent him for a weapon. Then I gave Beloved my broom, because the man was trying to catch a bat with a toy butterfly net. I headed up to re-arm myself when I passed my BIL storming down the basement carrying a shovel. I was pawing through the garage when he reappeared.
BIL: "He says we need something softer."
Me: "Is he worried about the bat?"
BIL: "No, he's worried about the walls."
I handed my BIL two plastic baseball bats and grabbed a bucket. As we re-entered the house, we heard Beloved yelling at the top of his lungs.
Beloved: "WHERE ARE YOU GUYS? A LITTLE HELP HERE???"
We rushed down the stairs, baseball bats swinging, to find Beloved crouched on the floor. Just the tiniest bit of webbed claw showed out from under the broom and butterfly net. BIL and I stared in shock. The bat was chittering away like a pissed-off rat.
Beloved: "GET THE BAG!"
I had no idea what he was talking about, and neither did BIL. Then I noticed a paper bag behind BIL. I tried to hand Beloved the bucket, as it seemed way more useful and user-friendly than a paper bag, but Beloved had gone to a place that doesn't hear reason. He is not fond of bats.
Finally BIL handed Beloved the bag and they got the bat out into the yard, where PETA will be glad to hear it was released. I admit at the point at which I heard it cursing us out in bat language, I wasn't too keen to kill it, but I was also thinking CHILDREN RABIES CHILDREN RABIES CHILDREN RABIES, as mothers are wont to do.
The next morning, the bat was gone, so we believe he lived to tell his story on his own blog.
The two-week Kansas City triple-digit heatwave is preparing to break! Phew! I was pretty sure I was going to have to go to a desert soon to cool off.
WE ARE GOING TO FREEZE!
Despite the ridiculous heat, we've been spending almost all our nonworking hours outside. We eat outside, we play outside, we sit on the deck and read or play on the Internet outside. From time to time, I become aware of the heat wrapping around my body like a hot washcloth and the sweat seeping into my clothes. It's not the active sweat of a hard workout -- I always notice the minute I begin to sweat when I'm working out -- but the passive sweat of a body attempting to cool itself off as inobtrusively as possible. Lately it's been not until I get inside and my skin cries out for joy that I realize just how incredibly hot it is right now.
When I'm very cold, I'm a jumpy, grouchy mess, but when I'm very hot, I find myself floating along, almost disassociated from my discomfort. My body is definitely more calibrated for heat than cold. My mind and my soul don't want to spend one more minute inside than I have to before the cold returns to Kansas City and I explore every inch of the space inside my house in an effort to find something new to do that doesn't cost money until the weather breaks and I can go outside without shivering again.
It may be hot, but the weather's going to have to throw even worse than 105 to keep me inside for very long. I'd rather just float.
