medical shit part two
The strange thing so far about the bad Pap test is I don’t know how to feel. Sometimes it seems like it’s just an inconvenience that half the women out there have been through, and I’m silly for worrying about it. Sometimes it seems scarier.
Last week I got a number of phone calls from friends who read my blog, and almost all of them were about how some other friend or relative had been through this. The message seemed to be that the waiting sucks and the expense sucks and all the sitting-in-stirrups sucks, but at the end of the day it all gets taken care of and that’s that. But then came the one conversation with a friend who told me she had a slightly abnormal Pap recently, but was really worried about it because a few years earlier her friend, an athlete in her twenties, died of cervical cancer. So.
I put it aside all weekend. Mostly all weekend I just enjoyed the dry pine smell of high desert brush, and the freezing cold meltwater, and the big big moon. Mostly all weekend I felt deeply peaceful and… healthy.
Not so much, said the envelope waiting for me back home from Planned Parenthood. Inside were the test results, no different from what I was told on the phone. Except that the front page in the envelope is a check list eight items long, and the top item is “Negative for Intraepithelial Lesion (Normal)” and the bottom one is “Cancerous Cells,” and in between are the eight increasing degrees of Not Normal, and mine is number seven. Next to it, it explains: “This is a moderate to severe condition that may progress to cancer if left untreated. It is important to have this evaluated by colposcopy and biopsy.”
The Understanding Your Diagnosis and Management Options brochure that was also in the envelope – a brochure filled with multiethnic people looking at each other knowingly, and numerous pink illustrations of female reproductive organs – defines HSIL this way: “Cells show precancerous changes. Or, noninvasive cancer may be present.”
Overall, the best I can put together from the web and the conversations with friends is this: Paps can be abnormal to varying degrees. They can be a little abnormal, which is really common. They can be a lot abnormal, which is less common, which is what mine is. The more abnormal they are, the more likely that the follow up evaluation finds pre-cancerous cells that need to be removed. Sometimes, but not often, the follow up finds cancer.
So here I am back with what I knew before, which is that I have to hang out for two more weeks and then we’ll see, and we’ll do what needs doing. In the mean time I’m just going to try not to dwell on it. On the plus side, the following email (reproduced in its entirety) arrived in my inbox yesterday: After reading your blog, it appears as though your cervix and mine should go have a drink sometime. So at least my cervix will be maintaining an active social life.
July, She Will Fly
Shake It Like A Polaroid Picture is playing as we speed out of town, a good omen I’m sure, and Joshua looks over from behind his giant seventies sunglasses and I make my dance face and shake my hand in the blow of the open window. Like a Polaroid Picture. Got it just don’t get it till there’s nothing at all.
Jaime is one car back with Sharon shotgun, Sharon up from the Bay Area for a weekend of play, completing our small caravan rolling east on twenty six out past the Portland that I think of as Portlandy, out past the Deluxe Motel and the highway exit Burgerville, out past much of anything except the jam and curios shop where we stop for one giant root beer float, four spoons. We’ve been talking about Our Futures, says Jaime, what about you guys? Joshua and I laugh. We’ve been singing.
On The Road Again and closer and closer to Mount Hood – Mount Hood that looms and grows until it disappears behind the trees, and before you realize it you are winding up its sharp cone on a narrow road edged by a steep drop. Joshua hugs the center line and I sit back and soak in the view. No use panicking when you’re the passenger. The road switches back and back again a dozen times, through Government Camp and on up into clouds, and there is Timberline Lodge, straight from the Shining.
We poke around the main hall like a pack of designers, look at those beams, did you see the cast iron? and picnic on the porch looking out over the forest. Hikers and wedding parties and die-hard July skiers congregate in the parking lot. But we’re headed for Tumalo State Park, so this is just lunch. Blue sky and brake lights all the way down.
Somewhere just shy of Madras a car is overheated on the roadside – too much steep now that the Valley has given way to High Desert. Like seven inches from the midday sun. We double back to the only gas station around, an unexpected pump-your-own since we’re passing through a reservation, to fill up and toss a few gallons of water in the hatchback. Back at the stranded car the jugs get poured into a hissing radiator while we jump into the river. Just enough trees off the highway so we don’t need suits.
Camping at last, we set up Jaime’s dad’s boyscout tent, the two-toned canvas kind with fifteen pounds of frame, and unload the coolers and the grill. Here goes three days of desert: tubing down the Deschutes, mixing up verses of Townes Van Zandt, hatcheting kindling, reapplying sunscreen. Poker and frisbee and dusty dry wind. Potatoes and onions in a cast iron pan. Summer brew, cocoa. Burritos of course. Catching up on Sharon.
Saturday night I trade the camaraderie of the tent for the silence of the sky, and I wake up every hour, time-lapse style, to track the almost-full moon: up and then down again in the column of stars between two pines. It’s huge and hugely bright and I listen hard for some secret, but all I can get is What do you want from me? I’m the moon. It’s Enough.
One last morning and Joshua and Jaime and I send the others hiking and head ourselves down south through Lava Butte to the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, a drivable park friendly to the limping, up Paulina Peak with a view of all directions: the line where the trees meet the desert, the big blue craters of Paulina and East Lakes, the obsidian fields where the lava went next, the Sisters and Hood and Bachelor to the west. Here’s the landscape of a great state from one single spot, what it is and how it was made, geologic time and Indian Paintbrush. You must remember this. Not a word from any of it. There it is, Enough.
wednesday
Joshua just sent me this photo. It was taken a few weeks ago, but it's how I feel today.
introduction
It’s been bugging me lately, how my blog has become a silly recounting of day-to-day shit. My past blogs about the Balkans and Burning Man and marathon training all seemed more interesting or informative or something, and this one is basically just random musings about boys and bikes and I don’t mind, it's fun to write, and I like reading this kind of thing in my friends’ blogs. All the same, sometimes when I post yet another entry about my really pretty ride to work I gag a little on the inside. Too bad I don’t have anything of consequence to say, I think. Be careful what you wish for, right?
I had a pretty crappy day today, and I’m going to tell you why. And it’s going to make some of you uncomfortable and I’m sorry to switch gears like this, to get maybe a little too personal and a little less light, but this is what I do to feel better, and anyway maybe it will be useful to someone. Why does it feel so important to be useful? Don’t know. I’ll work on that some other time.
Anyway I had my annual a couple weeks ago. Do most guys know anything about annuals, besides that they somehow involve stirrups? In case not, this is how it goes: once a year you go to the ob-gyn, and you sit on a table in a little blue sheet and talk about breast exams and birth control, and then you lie down and the doctor looks around and takes a very tiny sample from your cervix, and the whole thing lasts hardly any time at all and is not actually all that uncomfortable. Then a year goes by and you do it again.
(Are you ready to go back to reading about bikes?)
Last year I got a call a few weeks later, which doesn’t usually happen, and the doctor told me that the cells on my cervix were looking a bit abnormal, and I should basically have a retest in six months. You wait because once in a while cells just go a bit wonky, and then they clear themselves right up. It’s happened to several of my friends, and it didn’t really faze me. I went back in December and things were fine.
So a couple weeks ago it was time again, and I had just sprained my ankle so Nikki drove me over to Planned Parenthood. We giggled in the waiting room and talked about sex. Everyone was nice the way that everyone at Planned Parenthood is always nice, and as I was filling out my paperwork afterwards, the Doctor said We’ll call if anything is abnormal – no news is good news. Today I got some news.
My cell rang in the middle of the afternoon, and the number said Restricted, and it was a woman telling me in an even tone that I have High Grade Squamous Intraepithelial Lesions. Also known as H-SIL. This means my cells are more than a little abnormal. It means that I have to go back for a procedure called a colposcopy, in which the doctor looks at things with a microscope and takes a few more significant samples. It means, according to one website, that there is a seventy five percent chance that those samples will show these sort of pre-cancerous cells, and I will then have to go back for another procedure in which these cells are removed. And then I will have to go back a few times after that, to make sure they haven't returned.
I was a little thrown and I started to cry a little in the conference room where I was taking the call, and I got my shit together enough to make an appointment for the next part. The woman said, We recommend you have this procedure done within sixty days. It costs three hundred dollars. Do you want to make an appointment now, or is this something you will need to save up for?
And that moment, right there, was the saddest moment of all. Because Planned Parenthood is the kindest healthcare in America that I’ve come across, this is our best case scenario, and can you imagine? Can you imagine hearing that little precancerous cells might be multiplying in your body, and having to say, I can’t make an appointment right now. I’m going to have to save up some money first.
It was enough, though, to make me feel lucky, which is not exactly what I was feeling just then. Because I have three hundred dollars on hand, and because I have a job that I can easily leave for the afternoon, and because I have a friend who will drive me to the clinic, even the one that’s in a distant suburb because they had an appointment available one week sooner. Which is still three weeks away, which is kind of unbearable. I would like to know, for sure, right now, and I would like to deal with it, right now, in whatever way it needs dealing with. But for these things I feel lucky.
In the mean time I’m just going to hang out for three weeks, I guess, and nothing is really different. It feels different, though. It’s kind of scary.
That’s why I wanted to write about it here. I apologize to those of you who swing by during the work day for a laugh, and who just ended up reading about my cervix. I get that it’s not something people really talk about. But so many of my friends are going through Big Things right now, trying to get pregnant or trying to fix something with a spouse or trying to deal with a medical issue, and many of us try to do these things all on our own. But not talking about them makes them scarier. And it’s lonely.
Thirty is an age where things are sometimes hard. Big Things that most of us didn’t have to deal with in our twenties. And I think it’s catching lots of us off guard, and it feels Wrong. This isn’t the way life goes, we think, remembering our twenties. It feels like maybe we are messing up, or getting stuck with unfair burdens. But I’m pretty sure that this is how it goes from here on out, and I don’t mean that in some negative way. I just mean, this is the Life part. You don’t have to talk about the bad bits but they’re not going away, and personally I prefer to live them with company.
So my cervix will be a new character on this blog, though hopefully not for long. Thanks for your good thoughts.
Harry Potter is great
but real life is even better. Allow me to illustrate:
On Saturday night I toasted Deb & Nopporn’s engagement with a rhubarb-gin cocktail at a chichi Mississippi Street bar named after a number. Deb and Nopporn are getting married!
On Sunday I lay about on the Sauvie Island nudie beach, which p.c. Northwesterners prefer to call “clothing optional.” A very naked man walked slowly by the edge of the waves, playing the bagpipes.
Tonight I am heading to Concerto de la Peur, a 1962 French film in which “Parisian drug gangs (one led by a blind, philosophical, trumpet-playing boss) are battling over turf leading to kidnappings, beatings, murders, betrayals,… stolen lust, striptease and a great cat fight.”
So there you have it, enchantment, gnomes, and dark magic. And in between it all I also finished the book.
Kreacher's Tale
I'm glad it's raining out because I'm doing what I'd be doing anyway: reading and then napping and then reading and then getting a snack to eat while reading some more, and since it's gray out I don't have to feel guilty.
I read the first Harry Potter book back when it was new and everyone was talking about it, and I thought... yeah, ok. That's an ok children's book. But then Beth got the audio version out of the library, and the British actor who reads it does so many voices that it seems a cast of dozens is reading the book, it seems like all the characters are alive and real and exciting. After that I was hooked. I read them in Brooklyn, and in my little cabin in the rainforest in Costa Rica. When the fifth book came out Beth and I were at her parent's house and we passed two copies between ourselves and her two brothers, and sometimes Harold would read out loud by the woodstove, all night until the last page. When the sixth book came out I read the first chapter in a bookstore in Belgrade.
I'm about to start chapter ten. Nowhere near half way yet. I'm avoiding the internet and I haven't even read the comments on my last blog entry, because I don't want to accidentally come across any spoilers. I love suspense and I love surprises and this one has been building for seven years or so. You don't get much more build up than that.
deathly hallows and other friday night fun
Friendly and red-headed Celia’s customer Danny Concannon invited me to the Harry Potter party at Powell’s tonight. Back in the winter he asked me out to dinner and I accepted, but the night before this dinner Disaster and I had a talk about Really Giving Things A Shot – a talk followed by approximately no change in our relationship whatsoever, but I didn’t know that at the time – so I cancelled last minute and felt kind of shitty about it. It takes balls to ask a girl out, and a big part of the reason it takes balls is because of the unlikely but highly unpleasant chance that the girl might pull out the day before because of a different guy. I prefer not to be that girl.
Therefore last week when Danny said I’m going on Friday, clear your calendar, I’ll call you, I was psyched. I like Harry Potter and I’d like to know Danny Concannon.
Except he didn’t call.
So when Friday afternoon rolled around I was sitting alone in the Fresh Pot, sipping my Americano and looking out the big window at the kids lining up for the party at Powell’s on Hawthorne. These kids were so awesome I was doing more staring and smiling than sipping. They were geeky high school kids mostly, but so cool in their geekiness, wearing wigs and scarves and Harry Potter gear, being geeks together. From what I remember of high school, part of being a geek was being a misunderstood loner. Hanging out on a Friday night having fun with other misunderstood loners seemed by definition impossible.
I decided to stick around for the party. And right then Joshua called, and I explained my plans to go to the Harry Potter party because it’s the last one and it’s a cultural moment and other bullshit, except really I just like the books and I like celebrations and I like being up in the middle of the night. He said he was in. And he said as long as we were doing it we might as well do it right and go to the main Powell’s downtown.
Not long after that I decided that as long as we were doing it right we might as well do it Right, so I went home and dressed up. (Early Hermione, if that means anything to you.) (Everyone else: yes, I know how bad this sounds.)
It was a good party. It could have used some music but in its place were the conversations of thousands of Portlanders, all ages and many in costume, filling the streets and ignoring their bedtimes to anxiously await the midnight purchase of a book. Joshua and I stuck around the store entrance to watch the first buyers, who ran in past the camera crews and danced around with their hardbacks. Then we joined the rear of the line, nine blocks away.
My receipt reveals that at five past two I had my very own copy. Half an hour later we were eating breakfast at the Roxy. And now here I am at home, and it’s fast approaching five. Seven hundred fifty nine pages to go!
Eavesdropping
a play in one act
Cast:
Girl, a sexy-cute mod style Portlander girl, approximate age 25, the sort you would have an instant thing for, but whom you would assume is out of your league, seated at the table next to mine outside the coffeeshop yesterday
Boy, a sexy-hip emo Portlander boy, not out of her league, the sort about whom, if you were a boy with a thing for Girl, you would wonder How does he do that?, seated across the table from her
Boy2, a third wheel, seated next to Boy
Girl: blah blah blah, something about summer college classes
Boy: blah blah blah, probably something about his band
Girl: blah, blah, maybe she and Boy can register for some of the same fall classes so that they can be together and it won’t be so boring
Boy: something about going to Virginia Beach
Girl: Ha, ha! Right! Virginia Beach!
Boy: What’s funny about that?
Girl: There’s no beach in Virginia.
Boy: (suspense; not sure if this is some joke that hasn’t played out yet)
Girl: (only slightly less sure) I mean, Virginia doesn’t have a beach.
Boy2: What do you mean?
Boy: Yeah, what do you mean? I’m going to Virginia Beach.
Girl: Wait, seriously? Isn’t Virginia… in the middle somewhere?
Boy: Uh, no… it’s on the coast. The east coast.
Girl: (looking skeptical)
Boy: Really.
Girl: (not looking at all embarrassed) Huh!
Boy: (just in case he had become too credible) Yeah. Virginia, has, like, the largest port in the country.
reprise
Operaman is lying on my floor doing chemistry homework, because he recently traded in his opera hat for a med student hat. That is also why he traded in Portland for Corvallis, one hour south. So he moved out of town and started med school, and let me go ahead and answer the two big questions on your mind: (1) No, I don’t think it’s really wise to start dating him, considering it didn’t work out when we gave it a shot in the fall, back when we lived in the same city and one of us wasn’t in med school. And (2) Yes, I will continue to call him Operaman.
But back to number one. Yeah, I don’t know what I’m thinking. I guess I’m thinking that I really enjoy spending time with him, and that when I’m not spending time with him he is often sending me youtube links to Richard Feynman lectures, or postcards on which he has sketched small chickens with pants.
Lately I have needed to remind myself that I’ve never been much interested in the American Experience thing, the one where you Get A Good Job and Marry A Nice Boy and Buy A Big House and Settle Down. I’ve always preferred having more than one job, and I’ve always preferred small houses, and I’ve always preferred moving around. Yet something about finding Portland threw me for a loop. Though I still want to travel a lot and live in other places when I can, this is my home base if ever there was one. That said, I still don’t want the rest of the package. Not a Work Wardrobe, and not a Home Entertainment System, and not Good Dishes. And not a Nice Boyfriend who wants these things, either.
Several years ago a few of us were sitting around some bar in Eugene trying to reduce what we were looking for in a significant other to the smallest number of qualities, and my two were these: Joy and Bravery. There are certainly other things, but if there are just two, these are they. As in: you recognize life is a marvelous unlikely thing, and you have the balls to go live it.
I think I can say pretty fairly that with all the fabulous people I have dated, I’ve never dated a boy who, at the time we were dating, had both of these qualities. I believe that everyone I’ve ever really liked had the capacity for these things, and likely a desire for them. Sometimes a good relationship makes us more of who we want to be. But it never worked out that way, in this case. So I’ve never actually gotten to see if my list works out in practice.
Operaman, however, is both joyous and brave. He sings opera, for God’s sake. And he quit the opera mid career to try something huge and new. You regret the things you don’t do, he said. At least if I fail it will be Adventure with a capital A.
So sure, it’s a bad idea, whatever. I appreciate all of you who are cringing as you read this, who have spent the last three years watching me walk – run, jump really - into one unwise relationship after another. What can I say? It makes for good blogging. And I’ve known for a long time, pretty much always, that the sort of relationship that would make me happy is one that involves a lot of movement, a lot of surprise and challenge and newness and experimentation, with someone who is so much an ally that it feels just the right amount of scary. It’s not going to look like it’s supposed to look. Which is why I keep trying on one wrong-looking thing after another. One of these wrong-looking things is going to shock us all with its rightness, and we’re not going to know which one it is until I try it on, and until then it’s at least an Adventure.
ozone
There was a thunderstorm tonight, a good kind of thunderstorm with rumbles that cause the windows to shudder, and rolling rain. Now the air smells and tastes just right. It broke the heat wave that settled in early this week – the one that made customers at Celia’s yesterday overtly cranky. No one tips well in a heat wave.
We don’t get many summer thunderstorms in the northwest, and I will always miss them, the way I miss snow that sticks in the winter, the way I miss lightening bugs. Nowhere is everywhere, I guess. I still like Portland best.
I remain stuck in bed, more or less. I went to the city job on Monday and to the coffee shop job two days later and both had repercussions. My leg is bruised from the base of my toes to half way up my calf, in various cloud-like patterns of purple and pale blue. It does not like to bend. When I’m upright for too long it gets achy, and it swells.
The real problem though is that I’m going crazy with restlessness. It’s only been a week but I’m used to quite a bit more motion in my days. I’m lying here right now and looking out the window at the wet pavement and smelling the grass and I’d like most of all to get out on my bike, or even just drive around with the windows down. You know. If I had a car.
Instead I’m going to scoop up some of the mint chip ice cream that Deb & Nopporn so awesomely delivered, and I’m going to sit back with Audrey Hepburn. The window is wide open. It’s almost like being outside.
Shortz Stories
I didn’t used to do the Sunday Times crossword. Until recently I had only participated in one Sunday crossword completion, with Joshua in Eugene. It felt like such a fluke that it didn’t occur to me to even try again until Jamey folded open the Magazine to the crossword page one afternoon last fall. After that we finished them a bunch of times, either together on the porch or over coffee, or more often by passing the puzzle back and forth through the week. We indulged each other’s crossword quirks and saved each other the good parts. We were kind to each other, in this.
We were not so kind in other things and one day in the winter when I was sad and upset I took the puzzle to his favorite coffee shop and I did it all by myself. I hadn’t meant to, because I didn’t know I could. I finished a second one a couple months later when he went away for the week with hardly a word.
The third Sunday crossword I have ever finished on my own I finished just now. It was, refreshingly, not done out of spite. Housebound and horizontal as I am, I just couldn’t think of what else to do. And while it happens that, sometimes at least, I can finish a Sunday Times crossword puzzle all by myself, it also happens that it’s not much fun. I guess if I discovered that I could play tennis or sing rounds all on my own, that wouldn’t be so appealing either. It kinda misses all the fun.
Jamey just left on a three week trip, hiking somewhere with no internet and no phone, and probably no tent. I thought I would feel relieved once I knew he was gone, but really nothing much changed. We weren’t calling or texting or emailing each other anymore anyway. The only difference is I feel like I can write about him here, without it being inadvertently hurtful.
It turns out I have surprisingly little to write. We never even dated really, so there’s not much to cry about. I imagine that to him, that is the comfort of never calling anything Anything – that when it’s over, nothing’s really lost. But I prefer to call something Something. And then if it ends you can say, That sure didn’t work, and now we know.
As far as I’m concerned the point of dating is to find out if you like someone. The bizarre loss I feel is this: not the loss of someone I surely liked, but more the loss of the opportunity to find out how much I liked him. Because what I knew, from circumstance, was that I liked cooking with him, and talking about the law with him, and lying around with him in the park. And what I wondered, from conjecture, was whether there was more – the more that distinguishes one person from all the other people with whom one enjoys cooking and talking and lying around. But I don’t get to know, yes or no, and I don't get to feel relieved, or even sad. What was lost? Who knows. We rarely got to see the best of each other. Once in a while with the crossword, maybe.
the stars might lie
On 7.7.7 I was camped at campsite 7. Which was good for seven reasons (at least).Reason the first, that all those sevens are lucky.Reason the second, that campsite 7 had a creek, full of icy cold water good for soaking a sprained ankle.Reason the third, that campsite 7 had a flat spot for a tent surrounded by tall tall trees, which provided shade, thereby allowing the uncommon treat of sleeping late while camping.Reason the fourth, that campsite 7 had a fire pit, in which many delicious marshmallows were roasted, just before being squashed into s’mores and devoured.Reason the fifth, that campsite 7 was a few hundred feet from the parking spot for campsite 7, so I had to be carried to the campsite, and being carried is fun.Reason the sixth, that I assumed, after spraining my ankle last Wednesday, that my weekend hiking plans were shot to hell, and that instead I would be lying about staring out my bedroom window longingly. But when I called Operaman to cancel he said, I’ll figure something out, it doesn’t really fucking matter what we do, and that, right there, is the correct answer. And then he found a place for us to go car camping, and he packed up sleeping bags and a stove and bacon, and also some ridiculous car-camping-only things like pillows and a French press, and he picked me up and drove us to Mt. Hood, to Shellrock Creek Campground, to campsite 7.Reason the seventh, that according to a numerologist quoted on abcnews.com 7.7.7 is “considered a day for freedom, restlessness, gambling and doing things unconventionally.... It's a day when plans are made to be broken." And is there any more reliable source than a numerologist being quoted on a TV news website?
I hate not walking
Ohhhhh how I wish I could conjure up a crossword puzzle, a pint of mint chip ice cream, and a DVD of West Wing by sheer will alone.MMMMrrrrghhh.AAAAAaaaggggrrrrrr.Nope. Fuck.
mobility
When I was twenty one my friend M married a girl I'd met only once, and their honeymoon was a ten day hike. When they returned I was eager to hear the stories but as it turned out they hardly hiked at all, because on the first day she pushed too hard and strained her ankle or her knee or something, and after that they basically sat around the waterside for a week reading books to each other.And I remember my reaction to this, which was basically No Fucking Way. I didn't like the idea of this wussy girl being my hiker friend's wife, and I didn't understand his seeming indifference to their aborted trip. I was an only child, after all - a status that was, just for the record, not my fault - and at twenty one I wanted to do what I wanted when I wanted, jobs and family gatherings and boyfriends and so on be damned. At twenty one I was fairly sure that everyone had a list of things they most wanted to do, as I did, and that any deviation from this list was either selling out or compromising oneself.At thirty I hardly know a person who hasn't made big decisions because of someone else: moving or not moving, skipping a trip, staying in a crappy job, generally avoiding horror movies or heights or dairy. Also at thirty, not so coincidentally, I hardly know a person who hasn't dealt with their own big shit. It's near impossible to go thirty years without illness, injury, unemployment, depression, or loss of someone close. The unavoidable unexpected.And I'm not embarrassed at the list I kept when I was twenty one - there was some pretty cool shit on it that I managed to do. And I still keep a list, to be honest, because there is quite a lot still to be done. But I'm glad to be rid of the cocky integrity I ascribed to it, the do-or-die decisiveness that didn't leave much room for revision. At thirty I know who among my friends says Sure, come stay in the guest room, says, We were going biking but instead we'll be there to help you move, says, I guess Mt Hood is no good with your ankle so how about a drive in movie? And I know who among my friends knows to call me up whenever, knows that I will get there, knows that everything else will wait.It's funny, how what used to feel like compromise now feels like the whole point. I think I like being thirty.
so much for independence
I was working on a post this morning about the awesomeness of the Declaration of Independence and the plan was to come home tonight after the festivities and edit it and put it up, but instead I sprained my ankle in a (rather impressive) play at first base during a sunny afternoon kickball game. (The ball was totally in my hands, for the record, before the collision.) And I have never sprained anything, or broken anything, or much of anything bad with my body really except for a few weeks of runner’s knee and one small run-in with fire ants and anaphylactic shock.It happened really fast, the collision and the ankle twisting in a clearly wrong direction, and then I rolled around on the ground in my owl dress long enough to feel stupid. Luckily Nopporn is a wilderness first responder with a first aid kit in his trunk, and he elevated it and iced it and gave me anti-inflammatories, and eventually wrapped an ace bandage around it. It became rather plump. I guess this is why people get that “Health Insurance” I’ve heard so much about.Now I am back home. The ankle is tender and it’s hard to get comfortable, but really I just need to complain for a few minutes about logistics. I can’t get upstairs, or go anywhere. So I’m trapped here on the first floor of my house. Happily I can hop to the kitchen - though I only have frozen bagels - and to the computer, though I have no DVDs. The only things to read down here are this month’s edition of The Southeast Examiner and my housemate’s Vegetarian Times. And most of all what is making me cranky is that tonight are fireworks, and I love fireworks the most, I have dragged friends to fireworks shows all over the world, I do not ever grow tired of them. They are different and fabulous every time. But I can’t imagine how I’d get to the river, since I can hardly get across the room. And that SUCKS.
So if you are one of the many jaded people who is sitting home avoiding the holiday, you should call me. I'm on the sofa. I'm reading about salsa.
no good reason
The songs I hooked to Frenchy were either power ballads from the 80s, or French. The songs I hooked to Chicagoboy were mostly quirky singer-songwriter numbers. I find it hard to know a person for more than fifteen minutes without hooking on a song, and for the most part this isn’t a problem. For the most part this means that I’ll be riding in an elevator in the middle of a Sunday afternoon and the muzak version of You Don’t Send Me Roses will come on and I will think, Lauren! and I will smile for the whole elevator ride, quietly (or less quietly, if the elevator is empty) singing you don’t send me eggplants anymore, just the way we used to, ten years ago.
A particular person gets a particular song because it’s a song they like, or because it was an inside joke, or because they play the song or mock the song or because the song was on at some key moment, or because the lyrics call that person up for me every time, like it or not. The like it or not thing, as I said, is usually not a problem. Unless I am trying not to think about someone.
This was easy with Frenchy’s songs. While I missed REO Speedwagon during the period when I needed to not think of him, it just wasn’t that hard to avoid. Ditto for French songs. Burgerville doesn’t pipe in Joe Dassin.
Chicagoboy’s songs were too obscure for the radio and too geeky for places of business. I only knew most of them because he put them on a mix cd for me. You know, cause why wouldn’t you send a mix cd to a girl you’re not into? A mix cd with I Believe in a Thing Called Love as the first song. But I digress.
Now, the main song I hooked to Disaster was a conveniently avoidable folk-country track that I encountered when my Austin friend was introducing me to Austin music. Kelly Willis is kickass, and she has a twangy voice to die for, but she doesn’t show up much on the northwest airwaves. So when I needed to move my mind along I put her cd back in the binder and turned up KWJJ.
I suppose that instead of shaking my fist vindictively at the sky, I should take it as a sign of my good taste that this old, unheralded song was just covered by… George Strait. George Strait, country icon, King of Country, nominated for more Country Music Awards than any other artist ever. George Strait. You know who has more gold or platinum albums? Elvis Presley, and the Beatles. That’s the whole list.
Well fabulous.
So now I can’t listen to country radio for more than fifteen minutes without hearing this delightful song, which – for a little extra poetry – is all about being caught off guard by someone who keeps reappearing. Are you laughing, Disaster? I am laughing. Ha, ha, haha! Stop reading my blog.
My small consolation is that these things cycle through pretty fast, even when it’s George Strait. George Strait, who has had fifty-four number one hits on the Billboard charts.
Hey! Guess which song is predicted to be fifty-five.
the first
We are up in the top branches of the tree, Melissa and I - the highest ones that will hold us anyway - and we are reaching out and balancing and filling our hands with cherries, filling bowls and baskets and pockets with cherries, padding out on the burgundy-stained soles of our feet, sun flashing between the big cherry tree leaves, new cherries peeking out every time the wind blows, and later we are rolling down Willamette, spitting cherry seeds out the open windows, soaking in Etta James and Louis Armstrong, and Melissa is telling stories about the boy she has gone to live with in California, the one she hardly knew for two years until an unlikely meeting in a local bar long after he'd moved away, and now they are sea kayaking and kissing in apple orchards and making it up as they go along; and you don't have to convince me about coincidence, you don't have to sell me on serendipity. And I am telling her about my waterfall hike yesterday with Operaman, Operaman who keeps turning up again as often as I say goodbye, eight hours of scrabbling over rocks and a very cold swim in the end, a swim which required no coercion, just me hopping in the water so cold it forced the breath out of my lungs, and by the time it was back he was right there behind me and I am done with auditioning myself, with trying to prove the goodness of my heart as if it needed salesmanship, pulling someone into the pool. He issued the invitation, and he met me by the trailhead, and when I got into the water so did he. And he is not the person I wake up thinking about and he is one foot out the door and I don't care I don't care I do not care.
