Talkin' 'Bout a Resolution

It’s a new year.

The ball has dropped, the dust has settled, the drunkenly fumbled pigs-in-blankets have been scarfed up by opportunistic terriers.

So... what are you going to do?

Notice I didn't ask what you're not going to do. Negative resolutions are terribly monotonous. Yes, yes, yes... you're not going to drink as much, smoke as much, cram quite as many queso-slathered chimichangas down the ol' gullet.

You're definitely not going to take any more sheep tranquilizers, even if the young lady proffering them seems really cool, even if she attends Veterinary Science classes at Vo-Tech on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

These are fine goals, noble goals, goals which will last for, oh, a week or so... maybe two, if Enchilada Enclave gets shut down for health code violations. But they're not what I want to know about.

Sometimes, life's like dodgeball... high-velocity projectiles come hurtling at you from all angles; all you can do is react quickly and remain upright. Other times, though, it's more like tennis. Sure, you've got to whack problems back over the net. But you also have the chance to be proactive. To set your sights, lift your racket and send your aspirations flying... ideally, straight into the crotch of your opponent, who in this particular metaphor represents Forces Conspiring to Quash Your Precious Dreams. Few things are as satisfying as giving one's goals an emphatic smack towards fruition. In 2008, let's do exactly that.

What positive changes do you want to see in your life this year? And - more importantly - how do you plan to enact them?

C'mon. Take control. Hustle.. or, as it's the Year of the Rat, scurry. Cast the XBox controller of complacency from your hands! Free the pulsating phallus of self-determination from your pants! Um... figuratively, that is. Wouldn't want to start the Year of the Rat with the Public Indecency Charge of the Idiot.

I'll get the party started.

---

Proactive Resolution #1 : The Internal Loofah (finish entire 31-serving box of Grape-Nuts and thereby achieve colonic excellence).

Irregularity and ADD go together like vodka and cranberry juice. The bright cheeriness of the latter manages to mask the harsh unpleasantness of the former… to a point. It wasn’t until several people had marveled at my erratic eliminatory habits than I realized that I might Have a Problem.

Other Person: [makes comment regarding a recent excretion]
Jul: “Yeah… um… I don’t… you know… do that so often.”
Other Person: “… so when WAS the last time you went?”
Jul: “I don’t really remember.”
Other Person: “How can you not remember? Was it yesterday? Last week? The Regan administration?”
Jul, Defensively: “Shut up! I went once! It was boring! I decided to do other stuff instead!”

(Note: what, you don’t discuss bowel movements with your loves ones? Perhaps you discuss Sir John Gielgud’s interpretation of Chekhov’s later works? Guess what? JOHN GIELGUD POOPED, TOO! So did Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard and Tom Stoppard. Andy Warhol didn’t poop; he extracted individual-sized boxes of Quisp from a portal in his abdomen. But I digress.)

Enter Grape-Nuts.

They’re cheap. They’re somewhat palatable. They are jam-packed with vitamins and protein and sweet, sweet fiber.

I have eaten my way through six cups of Grape-y goodness thus far. So how has southbound traffic been moving? Well… I’m not sure. More quickly than before, but I can’t help but feel as though SOMETHING bigger should be happening. You know that scene in movies where a bomb has been dropped into a lake but hasn’t exploded? Everyone’s sitting on the edge of their seat, waiting for the rumble, the muffled boom, the thousands of dead fish bobbing to the surface? Yeah. Same here. Regardless, I resolve to make my way to the bottom of the box.

---

Proactive Resolution #2 : ‘Cause I’m as Free as a Bird, Now (A Somewhat Tame Bird, One With a 401(K) and a Pantry Full of Trader Joe’s Foodstuffs. What, I Can’t Be Subversive And Still Eat Smoky Peach Salsa?) - more solo travel.

Sure, joint vacations are lovely. It’s wonderful to have a dining companion, an activity partner, an alternate source of cash should street urchins steal your fanny pack. But I’ll always have a soft spot for solitary trips. For me, they’ve always been suffused with a certain breathless joy. How can you not grin while running through O’Hare with a week’s worth of clothing in your backpack and a ticket to somewhere Brand! New! And! EXCITING! in your sweaty little hand?

I want that smile on my face again before the year is through.

---

Proactive Resolution #3 : We Regret to Inform You That You Suck (growing a pair of [figurative] testes and submitting my work for publication).

I’m afraid of falling. I’m afraid of singing in front of other people. I’m afraid of click beetles (shut up, they can forcibly propel themselves ALL UP IN YOUR GRILL). I’m afraid of Suze Orman, who I am convinced is part raccoon and will one day be arrested for foraging for hot stock tips in a Wall Street dumpster.

But I’m really… really… REALLY afraid of trying to get published.

It’s not the rejection that scares me. It’s the process itself. Sending off something I’d written would require a degree of faith in my talent which I’ve thus far been unable to muster. The idea makes me squirm, moreso than falling into a room full of click beetles while belting out “Ave Maria”.

That’s precisely why I need to do it. Well, that and the whole “lifelong ambition” thing. I never wanted to be a teacher or an astronaut or a godforsaken princess. I was writing my own stories when I was five. When I was fifteen, I was skipping gym class, sitting in the bleachers and attempting channel Alan Ginsberg on the back of my Earth Science notebook.

I write. It’s what I do, and it’s what I’m going to do.

How about YOU?...

Better or Verse - "Big Gulp"

[Ed. Note : primary writing done last winter. I made a good deal of solo late-night convenience store runs, replenishing my caffeine and sugar levels and occasionally shaking my fist at the security cameras and silently imploring, "WHY! IS! THIS! MY! LIFE?!" Every poem I've written since the age of sixteen has included at least a touch of goofiness. For me, the seriousness of the medium well-nigh demands irreverence. If I ever find myself in sequiny black-tie regalia, you'd better BELIEVE I'll be mooning someone. ]

I am become a Paul Westerberg song
Destroyer of self
And not all that easy on anyone else

These emotions go like Bubble Yum
And occasionally beef jerky
(What I mean to say is,
they stay in the mouth
tediously long
before you work through them
or just spit them out)
Mindsets you can purchase at 7-11
Don't tend to be terribly healthy

Of course I turn in,
Turning outwards just turns you
to somebody else
I'd sooner cut to the chase
and disembowel myself
(bleed out in non-foods)
Disgorge a quart all over the floor
(knock some Meox Mix off the shelf)

There comes a time
(being twenty-four-seven, we're ready)
When the primary things
lighting up your eyes
are fluorescent, polyethelyne
and words apparent even to the cashier
as the laziest of lies
Given three minutes,
given an eternity
The burrito and the tender spot
Lukewarm, piss-poor
Nasty, babe, but steady

Cold Snap

How forgetful we are of cold and of hurt.

I can't remember winter. Funny, considering I've experienced over two dozen of them. Yet I'll be damned if I can carry an accurate impression of the season from year to year. Superficial memories abound. Snow, cocoa, wet chilly wool? Those, I keep. Darkness, despair and marrow-deep cold? They begin to fade with the sun of each lengthening day. By the time the first crocus wriggles up, they're gone. Disintegrated and blown away across newly-verdant fields. For the next seven or eight months, the word will evoke naught but eggnog and evergreens. Winter has once again been Sanitized For My Protection.

It's like childbirth. Nature, cruel and clever, knows to slip you an amnesiac. Why else would you do such a thing again? You can never recall why things were so blackly, bleakly challenging. The past is erased, as it your ability to stave off a repeat... to run screaming for your diaphragm or one-way tickets to Ft. Lauderdale.

You forget. You can't dredge up the bottom-dwelling dreck from the hidey-hole of last year. And, as such, can't take a prophylactic leap off a short pier when autumn begins to eke out its last.

If winter's a knife in the side, Daylight Savings Time is the twist. Changes nature sensibly chose to distribute over a month or more are condensed into a single evening. It's a mutation of the nasty, horror-movie kind.

Until that fateful weekend, the season's a slow-moving beast, scaled belly scraping the earth, masticating another a few minutes of sunlight each day. Then the game changes. The clocks roll back, and sixty minutes - sixty of them! All at once! - are devoured. Snap, chomp, gone. That innocuous little lizard turns out to be more akin to Godzilla... rending the fabric of the day between mighty animatronic jaws, knocking the earth off its orbit with a flick of his tail.

The first Monday is hard. Not the hardest - that, you fear, is still to come - but compounded by shock.

I strolled outside, post-work, and it was... dark. "Dark" is a relative term in the city, of course. In the forest, the night is black, proper black, splotched with silver-white puddles of moonlight. Urban nights, for all their thrills, lack such stark beauty. It gets dimmer and muddier. The usual post-workday scramble is suffused with fatigue. People rest their heads against bus windows, eyes closed, utterly spent at 6 PM. They weren't so easily depleted a week ago. Yet again, it wasn't winter.

Exiting the bus and wandering home, my emotions were as dim as my surroundings. "Oh, yeaaah," I thought, "This happened last year, too. For a loooong time. How the hell are we going to get through this without killing ourselves?"

"This winter can't be as bad as last one, can it?" I asked Kateri, grasping for reassurance. "Can it? I mean, if I recall, it was… bad. Really bad.”"

“Yeah, it was bad,” she said, "But things were different then."

Truer words never spoken.

We’d each gotten our first taste of post-marriage life that summer. There’s no finer season to be newly single. The air’s heavy with lust and potential. Clothes, cares and inhibitions are readily shed. Even single parenting seems like a lark… long walks! Ice cream for dinner! Playdates in the park!

We were understandably enraptured with our independence. We had the world at our fingertips, babies on our hips, bite marks on our necks. “Aren’t our new lives awesome?” we’d comment, giggling while we sipped red wine and let our bediapered posse rip up the local café.

Flash forward a few months. It’s cold. It’s dark. And it’s bad. Really bad. Neither of us saw it coming.

“We had each other,” Kateri said, “But we didn’t have what we really needed.”

We didn’t have what we needed... or what we wanted. We didn’t know the difference between the two. And we didn’t know how to obtain either one.

We huddled inside, occasionally ducking out for a gallon of milk or a bad date. While the glacial weather was chapping our hands and faces, our nerves were being abraded by a series of spectacularly unsuitable men. Annoying, aloof, disrespectful, disreputable… they ran the gamut. And yet we couldn’t get enough. The slightest signs of affection were pounced on as though they were deep-fried Twinkies and we were starving… which we were. A few days of silence from our pseudo-paramours was enough to make us hungry, cranky, desperate.

“Heard from Mr. X?”
“Not since last Tuesday. Heard from Mr. Y?”
“Radio silence.”
“Fuck.”
“Fuck.”

From my current vantage point, I have no way of remembering the dismal drudgery of The Winter of Our Discontent. It’s been suppressed, like late-stage contractions or junior high in its entirety. I can imagine, though. Trudging through the snow, juggling diaper bags, groceries and a baby who wasn’t yet walking. Scattering my fire on the wind, blowing sparks towards a series of straw men, hoping one would ignite... and then being perplexed as to why my hands were burnt and my back was freezing.

Climate change be damned... that winter didn’t last forever. Things began to slowly shift with the first thaw. The warmth and light helped, of course. Finding a suitable bedmate seems a bit less dire when the comforters have been put away. Most important, though, was the fact that we’d survived. We hadn’t starved, frozen or slaughtered ourselves with ice scrapers. We’d spent a season alone. We weren’t just alive - we were better for it. The testosterone brigade’s text messages and lame excuses hadn’t sustained us through those bleak days. We’d done it ourselves. We’d kept relatively sane, performed home repairs, entertained the children during blizzards, prepared vast mountains of mac ‘n cheese, learned the measure of our own worth.

Our second summer of liberation brought further drinks, hijinks and late-night chicanery. It also brought, as I marveled, “... something I never saw coming! Well, um, except for in the dirty sense.”

Boyfriends.

We’d spent the summer in scorched-earth dating mode. This go-round, we suffered no fools. When our cell phones rang, we didn’t dive for them... we let them ring. Our bodies were sheathed in wispy, low-cut little numbers, but our hearts were armor-clad. “My date was late tonight,” I told Kateri, “And you know what? I realized I would’ve been legitimately happy if he just didn’t show up.”

We were badasses of love, refusing to concede an inch, guarding our emotions with heavy artillery “until things are absolutely, totally right”.

Imagine how surprised we were when they actually were.

Flowers started appearing on our mantels. Phone calls were not only returned, they were initiated. We were treated with respect, loved with gusto, mind and body.

“I might’ve just had an epiphany,” I whispered into Kateri’s ear, twirling a drink stirrer between my fingers. We were sitting in a booth at our dive bar of choice. The leaves and ambient temperature had recently dropped. Warmth was trickling from the earth, but we were, for the moment, still full of hope. And alcohol.

“... yet again, I might just be drunk.”

“Tell me! Tell me!” she said.

“So I was listening to ‘Pressure Drop’. It’s one of my favorite songs, ever, of all time. Love it! And it suddenly occurred to me that this might... possibly... maybe - fuck, this is scary -… be... the one for me.”

“Really?”

“I mean, I’ve had three Scotch and sodas. But, yeah. I’d be happy with that. Really fucking happy. And not for the wrong reasons. Not this time.”

Not this time. It’s nearly December. Winter’s nasty little fangs are about to clamp down on our asses (which, I might add, are decidedly smaller than last year). I fear the cold and the dark, the cabin fever and isolation. But this year won’t be as bad as last. It can’t. The boyfriends play a part - new love warms the room up more than a flotilla of woodstoves. But it’s mainly us. Desperation is a piss-poor fuel, one we won’t be using again. Our days of scattering embers are over. We built a giant bonfire, with our own hands. We stripped down to our undies and danced around, reveling in our handiwork. We chased away those who might steal our heat.

We’ll be hunkering down against the cold with companions who were drawn to us at our strongest... women who take no shit, take no prisoners. Women who make fire.

This year may be one we actually remember.

NaCroPoTiPe

Okay, so it doesn't trip off the tongue quite as easily as "NaNoWriMo" or "NaBloPoMo". "NaCroPoTiPe" sounds kinda like the Aztec god of crappy holiday candy ("Aw, damn... gummie Quetzalcoatls again!"). However, while it may lack the "prestige" and "other participants" of the aforementioned events, NaCroPoTiPe is a special time. A special time... and a special place.

What do you say... are you ready for National Crotch Poking Time Period?

---

I Have Always Been One of Those Ladies Who Takes a Really Long Time

A really long time. A reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally long time.

I was made aware of this issue fairly early in life.

"Why won't you come yet?!" spat my first boyfriend, scowling and flopping next to me in bed. I was embarrassed, upset and strangely guilty... I felt like he wanted his time back. "I could have been licking a non-defective woman!" was the implication, "Or at the very least engaging in petty vandalism behind the Econo-Mart!"

Thankfully (in my mind), most future conquests were unconcerned with my little "issue". Deeply unconcerned. Cupcake and I once discussed this phenomenon.

Cupcake: "[Then-Partner] has no idea whether it happens or not. I love it when he says, 'Nobody makes you come like I do!'"
Me: "... which is to say, NOT AT ALL?"
Cupcake: "Yeah... I mean, by that rationale, EVERYBODY makes me come like he does! Astronauts! Dogs! The mailbox!"

Over the years, my partners' competency levels varied. However, even with men on the studlier end of the spectrum, locating My Own Private Idaho was infrequent, elusive and usually more trouble than it was worth. I tried to identify patterns - did it occur when I was drunk? Sober? Thinking about licking the film of sexy, sexy evil off of Malcolm McDowell (60's era McDowell, not present-day McDowell, who looks like Sir Anthony Hopkins dove off a tall building and absorbed the entire impact with his face)? There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to my response, however. Sometimes it happened, and both parties were happier for it. Sometimes it didn't, and one party (read: not I) was a bit... frustrated.

The frustration always baffled me. I liked sex- I loved sex! Sex was the proverbial bomb! Sullying a perfectly good bed-tussle with an Orgasm Reconnaissance Mission seemed like interrupting a no-hitter to go kick a field goal. "But... but... but that was FUN!" I'd think, praying that the stars would align, Idaho would be located and we could resume lovin'. "I'm good at THAT! I kind of suck at this! No pun intended!" I loved the attention lavished on my body. I hated the pressure it always carried.

"Women have no idea how much pressure men are under." I've heard this dozens of times. "Each and every time, you can't stop thinking, 'Don't come yet! Don't come yet! FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST, don't come yet!"

However, "need for improved skill" is far different than a "mysterious, intermittent inability to perform skill at all". The former is forgivable; it's assumed that a little bit of work will correct the matter. The latter makes one feel like a damned freak - which is secondary only to "fire ants" on the roster of Things You REALLY Don't Want to Feel Whilst Naked.

---

And I Despise Samuel Beckett, Too...

Despite the associated trials, tribulations and hang-ups, I still experienced the occasional partner-provided Idaho excursion - and plenty of self-administered ones, too. That is... until eight months ago. Something... happened. What, I cannot say. I didn't make any major relationship or lifestyle changes. I didn't go on or off any medications. I didn't experience higher or lower levels of stress than usual. Things were chugging along nicely... when suddenly, my ability to get off ground to a screeching, smoking halt.

"Not even after half an hour," I remarked to one of my sisters, dejected, "Not even after forty-five minutes. Not with various unguents and lotions. Not with porn. Not with really depraved porn. Not even with the five-way detachable shower head."

"Dude," she said, sympathetic, "DUDE."

The aforementioned Waiting For Godot's Climactic Moment scenario was a one-woman play. With a partner? Forget it. I soldiered on, living (and lovin') as per usual. I tried not to let the diminished Southern hemisphere seismic activity bother me. At first, I succeeded. However, there were nights I wound up spitting angry epithets at my own lap. As time went on, they became more and more frequent. And a series of men - ranging in prowess from "half-decent" to "enormous, throbbing tower of awesomeness" - hammered away at the issue, baffled and hurt that their efforts never made a dent.

---

She Blinded Herself With Science

And then I got the idea of proactively addressing the issue. And sharing it with the internet! But I get ahead of myself.

The evidence was sitting on the coffee table, clear as day. Lube... and a copy of Cook's Illustrated.

"You... you... you READ while you're doing it?"

"Um... yeah," I said, "Because, you know, it might take a long time? I'd read my Norton Anthology, but it's kind of heavy and I'm afraid of it falling on my head."

I hadn't really analyzed my muffin-buffin' M.O. before. However, it began to dawn on me that my knowledge of my own body - my triggers, my responses, my thought and behavior patterns - might be a little underdeveloped. Make that more than a little. Some women daydream and fantasize. Me? I lay there, wondering if adding Gruyere to corn chowder would be a good idea. SOMETIMES, a warm and wonderful sensation occurs. A lot of the time, I wind up flinging "Carve the Everloving Shit Out of That Holiday Ham" across the room in frustration.

It's not surprising that my ability to get there stopped... it's a miracle that it occurred in the first place. Realizing that I didn't know a goddamn thing about my lady-area's operations was the hard part. It's time to pull up my bootstraps, pull down my pants and get to work.

The Tools:
One (1) bottle multivitamins (per a friend's suggestion).

One (1) bottle special sex vitamins, featuring BIG, LURID PURPLE LETTERING and a picture of a woman with hair like Farrah Fawcett's after several hours of vigorous yanking.

One (1) book, "How To Come So Hard Your Eyeballs Roll All the Way Back in Your Skull and Your Optic Nerve Knits Itself Into a Sock".

Actually, the book is excellent, narrowly-focused, written by a Ph.D. in Clinical Explosive Orgasmology or some such. It's somewhat heavy on the positive self-worth exercises ("Stroke your inner thigh with a feather while repeating 'I AM FULLY ENTITLED TO ENJOY THIS PLEASURABLE SENSATION!'". However, I'm keeping an open mind; the pile of KY-stained recipes on my bookshelf shows the extent of MY subject-matter proficiency. I'll be reading the book cover-to-cover. I'll be doing the exercises, no matter how asinine. I'll be popping my vitamins. And I'll be taking you, dear reader, along for the ride.

I won't be posting every day (do you know how sticky the keyboard would get?), but fear not, there will be reports from the field. National Crotch Poking Time Period has begun. It oughta be an exciting time. Come, take my hand...

... on second thought, don't. But stay tuned.

Slipping Serotonin Serenade

I'm in the kitchen when I feel it coming on.

It's homebrewed, differing from other drugs only in raw materials... peptide chains and nucleotides instead of bleach and brake fluid.

The most wonderful substances in the world are cooked up in the ol' brain-pan. Runner's high, mother's love... they well up, they swell up, they go splashing synapse to synapse.

And then there's the dark matter. Would it be cynical to say it's more impressive than those sparkling spurts of ecstasy? Oh, but it is, in its way.

Depression is a chemical aberration, the type of nasty little mistake you'd scrape from the bottom of Dr. Leary's shoe. Like so many agents of devastation, it's made from common enough stuff. Breathable hydrogen, hydrogen bomb... these things often boil down to organization and degrees. The lowliest element, properly tweaked and shuffled, winds up leveling Nagasaki. Neurotransmitters can be delightful molecules; they're responsible for keeping us awake, alert, upright and ninety-eight-point-six degrees Fahrenheit. Sometimes, though, there are errors. Too little, too much, improper proportions. When that's the case, their range of influence becomes vastly different. Hunger cues and homeostasis are bush league. Unchecked and unbalanced, serotonin and dopamine not only blot out the sun, they become the sun. They become the eyes squinting to adjust to the freshly-vacant heavens. They become the warm aftershock breeze, gamma particles lazily twirling your skirt, a softly scary sign that things are now very different.

The linoleum's dirty. That stain's been there for six months. There is a Lego wedged behind the trash can.

I can't keep the house clean. I'm lazy. I'm a lousy parent.

The new world isn't colorless so much as desaturated. There are thousands of shades, all of which are variations on a single tone... wrong. It's a charcoal sketch, a silent movie - infinite variety, zero vibrancy.

There is the occasional murmur of rationality. "It's just your brain... your poor, fucked-up brain". "You're not an abomination, you're depressed." More often than not, that voice isn't a hand helping pull you up from the muck. It's a rattling pipe, a creaky floorboard. It's a crackle on the PA system; the "bad acid in the crowd" announcement of paltry comfort to those already shaking by the side of the stage (apologies to Craig Finn).

I've been in love. I've held a newborn baby. I've scrunched my eyes shut and flung myself from tall objects. I can state with some small authority that there's no high as massive, as sustained, as all-encompassing as the low of a really whiz-bang depression. The irrational has a seductive luster that the rational simply can't match. Being in love can be a bit complicated... there's the worrying, the wondering, the reevaluation and recalibration. Knowing - knowing, without a doubt - that everyone you ever love will hurt you? That you'll inevitably be bitch-slapped and broken by the hearts of others, but that the only alternative is a slow dissolve in the acid-bath of your own? That right there is a hit of uncut, high-test crazy, simple and slick and readily swallowed.

I have never and will never achieve anything. It will be a goddamned miracle, in fact, if I manage to budge from the linoleum. Forget Juicy-Juice spills... nothing welds your feet to the floor like a glimpse into the dim-lit back room of your universe. It's completely torn to shit back there. Your thoughts, your body, your relationships, your life... uncomfortable at best, awful on average. And all of it completely wrong.

It snaps more slowly than it begins... but it's always a surprise. When you're walking on a frozen pond in February, it's hard to imagine doggie-paddling across it six months hence.

I am a decent, kind person. I am much-loved. Bad things will happen to me, just as they'll happen to everyone. They are not an indicator of my inherent wretchedness. They just, well... are.

It's a bit shameful to admit how good it feels, coming down. Like that first shore French fry, crackling-hot, eaten from a paper boat with saltwater still trickling down your back.

The pleasure is well-seasoned with wariness, of course. It will happen again. I won't see it coming. There's little I can do to prevent it. It will definitely be unpleasant. It may possibly be horrendous. One second you're licking ketchup from your fingers, the next you're choking and flailing, your head suddenly and unexpectedly submerged.

I'm... well, mentally ill. In addition to piss-poor night vision and nicely-flexible joints, I have clinical depression.

The night vision is annoying. The depression is infuriating. Control of one's own mind is something we tend to take for granted. Plenty of people proclaim (following a puke-soaked evening or two), "I'll never drink that much again." "I'll never dabble in veterinary anesthetics again."

I'll never be able to say never. I can get lots of sleep, exercise my ass off, sample the gel-capped delicacies proffered by Merck and Eli Lily. But the potential for cataclysmic blackness will always be there, nestled among my neurons, playing poker with my childhood memories.

I'm okay now. I'm happy. And when I'm happy, I'm really happy. I'm in perpetual pre-cartwheel. Is it related? Is it worth it? I can't say. I don't know.

I can relax. I can enjoy each French fry. Waiting? Part of me's waiting. But I'll be smiling while I do it.

Triple Play : Incongruous Songs Which Have Made Me Cry

1. "Doin' It" - LL Cool J. Note: My tears were in no way related to the Doin' of It, the fabled act of which has rarely reduced me to tears. Yes, there was one incident involving gallons of rum, unfortunate angles and an alarming inability to urinate for the next eight hours, but that was an exception, damn it.

I was sitting in the DecrepiCivic, gritting my teeth through a midsummer traffic jam. My fuel gauge had dipped from "sort of empty" to "hell yes, I'm empty" to "miss, please hook a Honda up with some Iraqi Black, PLEASE, I just need a TASTE!" In the interests of conserving my last few dregs of fuel, I'd turned off the air conditioner. Car horns and exhaust fumes drifted in through my open windows. The former shredded my nerves like a Microplane, the latter mingled with my sweat and oozed down the back of my neck. Harried and headachey, I'd forsaken the AM traffic report in favor of Top 40. At its best, Top 40 is the Cookie Crisp of the airwaves - delicious, sugary crap.

I was hoping for light entertainment. My FM dial, however, had other plans. For "Throwback Thursday", the local Top 40 station had unearthed "Doin' It", LL's paean to skillful sexin'. While the lyrics made me snicker ("Baby I wanna hit it in the worst way / Schemin' on that ass since the first day"), the rush of memories the song invoked made me choke up. "Doin' It" had thrust its way to the top of the pop charts while I was in junior high. The era - like the song - had been simpler, sillier, brasher than anything which followed. Sex - along with love, life, adventure, and everything else - was a purer concept back in tha proverbial day. Lack of context is a better lubricant than anything the KY corporation can conjure up. It's not "Doin' It (And Crying In the Bathroom Afterwards)", or "Doin' It (With Someone Who Will Never Understand You on a Deeper Level". It's doin' it, and doin' it, and doin' it well. I represent Queens, she was raised out in Brooklyn. It represented time - heavier even than Biggie Smalls - and I was rubbing my eyes with my sleeve, giggling, praying that my fellow motorists' eyes were trained on less-ridiculous spectacles.

2. "When the Levee Breaks" - Led Zeppelin. This ditty is notable for a fantastic Jimmy Page guitar solo, for being name-checked in a thousand hamfisted Hurricane Katrina articles... and for being the first-ever song that made me cry. I was slouched in the back of my parents' rusty Crown Vic, a surly pre-teen with a Walkman permanently welded to her head. My musical tastes were proudly iconoclastic. While my peers were exploring the plagiariffic pleasures of Vanilla Ice, I was rocking out to the 60's greats: Zeppelin, Hendrix and the like. Led Zep IV was a perennial favorite; it's a wonder the damned thing didn't melt from the combined force of my love and my auto-reverse button. I'd listened to "When the Levee Breaks" hundreds of times before, but that afternoon, it was subtly different. The lull before the break ("Don't it make you feel bad / when you're tryin' to find your way home / You don't know which way to go?") was a moment of high-voltage calm; the break itself pure bluesy bombast. The wetness unexpectedly dribbling down my face was a drop in the bucket, a harbinger of the rough weather ahead. There's no AccuWeather for one's teenage years, and thank Jehova for that... I couldn't have anticipated the hormones which would batter my body and mind, the depression which would periodically blot out the sun, the alt-rock snarls and emo sighs. I was also unaware that this was the birth of a tradition. Music would be a constant in my life, and so would my emotional connection to it... I'd sob along to Springsteen, bawl with Bad Religion. Which brings us to...

3. "Infected" - Bad Religion. I should've joined stage crew. I should've been on the newspaper staff. I should've teased my hair, slathered on the glitter gloss and lettered in intramural fellatio.

Anything - ANYTHING - but drama club.

It was a dumping ground for histrionic bitches of both genders, a boot camp for those constitutionally unsuited to army duty. Every fall and spring, they formed a dysfunctional, incestuous family. They held court in cramped classrooms which reeked of ambition and Aqua Net. And lo, the showtunes echoed from the walls... along with the fake tears, shrill laughter and vicious rumors.

The knives may've been props, but the backstabbing was all too real.

I have never been more out of place in my life.

I'm the quintessential introvert. I'm a bit shy, a little slow to warm up in social situations. Calling attention to myself is anathema to my nature. Other people jump in front of TV cameras... I duck behind the nearest immobile object, hoping to remain inconspicuous. My sense of humor prevents me from being a total social pariah - never underestimate the power of a good dick joke! - but "character actor" would be a stretch, let alone "leading lady".

And yet at fifteen, my confused little soul hungered for the stage. I wanted to prance across weathered floorboards, belt out Rogers & Hammerstein lyrics, feel the warmth of the house lights beaming down on my theatrical greatness.

It was not to be. Everyone knew it. My family knew it. My friends knew it. My drama teacher (enamored of Anne Taylor suits, sycophantic seniors and high-pitched psychological meltdowns) damned well knew it. "It's okay... you don't have to sing it again," she informed me after my halting, atonal rendition of "Getting to Know You". It was the closest she'd ever come to kindness... sparing us both 03:26 of misery by cutting my audition short.

I wasn't surprised, exactly, when the list of roles was posted in the auditorium. Our teacher had a coterie of favorites; the leads were a sure thing, the supporting roles relatively certain. I was a chubby, unpopular sophomore, incapable of singing "Happy Birthday" on-key. This put me at the bottom of the drama club hierarchy... which meant that I was an extra. No lines, no love. Back page of the program, baby.

I wasn't surprised. I was enraged.

I stormed out of the building, throat constricting, eyes burning. It was totally fair and completely expected. It was, within the warped little universe of Drama Club, right and just.

So why did it still hurt so MOTHERFUCKING BAD? WHY?! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, WHY?

It was a four-mile walk from my school to my house. I must've kicked every single rock, mushroom and discarded soda bottle along the way.

I still remember what I was wearing (a much-beloved sage thermal and paint-stained jeans). I remember what the weather was like (unseasonably warm; when I wasn't sobbing, I was wishing I'd worn a t-shirt). And I remember exactly what I was listening to.

Bad Religion will always occupy a special spot in my heart... an obnoxious, pissed-off little spot. They've rocked their way through three decades, and have not once deviated from formula... a handful of chords, an abundance of adjectives and a heaping helping of fury ("They've only got one song," explained my sister Junket, "But that song fucking rocks!"). Organized faith? Fuck you! Societal convention? Fuck you! A corrupt power structure's willful blindness regarding the catastrophic effects of climate change? Fuck! You!

Getting a taste of exactly how embarrassing and agonizing a seemingly-petty rejection can feel? FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOOOOOOU!

Stop. Rewind. Play-it-again. Stop. Rewind. Play-it-again.

My batteries were fresh. My "Turbo Bass" button (in reality, a "muddy the shit out of the lower end" switch) was firmly engaged. Music and misery mingled freely in my frontal cortex. Like all great pairings - rhythm and lead, Jagger and Richards, warmish bourbon and unfiltered Camels - each one rendered the other a bit rawer, more intense.

I haven't set foot on a stage in years, and gladly so. "Infected" has been with me for over a decade... from cassette to CD to MP3, from high school to college and beyond, as Bad Religion and I both grew older and wiser (although thankfully no less snotty).

It's almost enough to make one tear up.

"She mouthed the words along to 'Running Up That Hill' / that song got scratched into her soul."
- The Hold Steady, "Hornets! Hornets!"

All Pink Is Not Salmon

[Ed. Note: the title is a rather silly joke, as salmon are known for their - HAR! - spawning. Titles aren't my forte. The "book" I'm allegedly "working on" (est. publication date: February 2037, est. publisher: um... the fuel-cell printer in my hovercar?) draws its title from a Rage Against the Machine song. Zach de la Rocha = WAY worse than piscene humor.]

His hands are small, sticky and perpetually wriggling free from mine.

His ambitions are bigger than his britches. The latter are a petite 2T, the former a grandiose "dismantle entire Western hemisphere (and possibly insert into mouth)".

He's big enough to scale the obstacles, small enough to require abundant kisses when he falls off. The most constant refrain is also the most futile: "J.Q., stay near mommy."

Literally, figuratively... doesn't work for either one. Time and toddlers are both way more stubborn than me.

Time has seemed especially fleeting as of late. Months pass like bites of cotton candy... bursts of sweetness which dissolve almost instantly. He periodically refuses to sit on my lap, spurning my advances with a devilish grin and a squeaky, "No! Go away, mommy!"

One day, "periodically" will become "frequently". One day, "frequently" will become permanent. He will giggle, slide to the floor and never look back. It will happen before I know it. He's already two ("… an' a half!", as he reminds me).

It's thrilling and heartbreaking.

I want to snuggle him to my chest, bury my nose in his hair and never, ever unclench my grip.

I want him to explore the world, the solar system, to discover far-flung galaxies made entirely of molybdenum.

I want a million more Toddler Astronomy Lessons… lying next to a Sagan in dinosaur pajamas, being kicked by tiny warm feet and regaled with tales of how, "It nighttime… the moon comes! When sun comes, it gonna be… daytime! Evybody get up!"

I want his sense of joyous adventure to persist long after he's left the lap.

I want this to happen, even as it's killing me.

What I don't want? Is another baby.

---

For years – even prior to his birth – I'd envisioned J.Q. having siblings. My sisters and I are extremely close; our bond has been a frequent comfort (and occasional lifesaver). The concept of what I wanted for myself didn't even register on my consciousness. It was an equation even my math-challenged brain could comprehend… siblings were good, I wanted good things for my child, ergo, producing a few more chilluns would be desirable.

Then my marriage collapsed, my life changed and the math got a lot more complicated.

---

August 1st, 2006. Independence Day. I tossed a few lawn 'n leaf bags full of clothing into my Civic and hit the highway. Not quite "Easy Rider", but still the wildest trip I've ever taken. Literally overnight, I went from doing the majority of the childcare in a dull, far-flung suburb to sharing half-'n-half custody while living in the heart of a major (if slightly urine-dampened) metropolitan area.

I fell in instantaneous love with the city. It was surly, grimy, difficult and entirely mine. I loved my block. I loved my neighborhood. But I especially loved a tiny stretch of I-676, just north of Center City. It's a magical patch of macadam if ever there were one. You're tooling along, surrounded by nothing but asphalt, contemplating ordering a pizza for dinner… then you make a tight left, and you're suddenly ENVELOPED by Philadelphia. It swells around you on all sides, twinkly and bright and enormous. You are hurtling straight towards the center of a place where anything can happen.

Not to kill a perfectly lovely analogy, but my life didn't always feel like that little stretch of highway. Much of the time, it felt like certain areas of West Philly… circuitous, confusing and terrifying.

However, the feelings of excitement and potential never fully waned. Sometimes – as I fumbled through challenges and gained a modicum of self-confidence – they were massive. They sprawled across the entire skyline.

I wasn't at all sure of my course. But I could feel myself being gently propelled forward… away from an unexamined life which had never really felt like my own, toward something brand-new, uncertain and scary, but definitely, unequivocally mine. Each aspect was carefully considered, wiggled into place, lab-tested again and again. Certain things immediately "clicked"… running, brutal honesty, walking home from work and letting the baby throw things in each and every fountain we encountered.

Other things took time. Relationships, responsibility, managing to wash the dishes before the apartment turned into Fruit Fly Island.

Some things just never seemed right. When I thought about having more children – immediately, at some nebulous future point, ever – my reaction was always complex. I'd imagine holding a tiny newborn against my bare chest. I'd sigh and smile. I'd imagine the late nights, the tears, the milestones, the sacrifice. I'd tense. I'd imagine embarking upon full-time parenting once again. My personal time, drastically reduced. My ability to pursue my own interests, harshly curtailed. My chances to revel in unabashed selfishness? More or less annihilated.

And I'd go out of my mind with terror and claustrophobia.

---

I'm a good mom to J.Q. Rather, I try to be... I'm a bit distrustful of anyone who claims to be a "good parent"; like being a good person, it's a continuous process. The effort must be renewed each day. So I try. I let him know how much he's loved. I give him relatively free reign to explore, experiment and play. I celebrate his quirks. I nudge him towards some semblance of morality. I buy him eminently cool shoes.

Do I love the almighty hell out of my kid? Yes.

Do I love parenting him? Yes, I adore it.

Every single minute? No.

Do I love the idea of parenting in general, outside of my own somewhat-unique situation? No. Absolutely not.

At first, I worried that sharing custody would make me a worse mother... that my parenting acumen was directly tied to the number of hours logged with my kid.

If that sentiment were any further from the truth, it'd have to be included in J.Q.'s Enormous Honking Book of Fairy Tales.

I've been a half-time parent for a little over a year. I am much, much better at this than full-time parenting. I'm happier. J.Q. is happier. I can't imagine going back.

When I'm with J.Q., I'm with J.Q. I'm not distracted by housework, hobbies or other errata - I try my damndest to take care of those on non-custodial days. I'm not teetering on the brink of burnout - I'm never more than a few days removed from a break, complete with adult libations, extra sleep, and eerie silence. My interests and J.Q.'s interests don't often conflict... they each have their time to be fulfilled.

Sound like luxuries? They are. They were bought at the expense of time with my child. While I cherish my personal time, I also miss the hell out of my little boy. I wonder about how he's doing, what acts of cute devilry he's plotting. Sometimes, I feel guilty. Sometimes, deeply so.

Nonetheless, our current arrangement feels right. Not right for everyone, of course... but it works for us. Parenting, Version One never felt this comfortable and copacetic. I was permanently exhausted. My stress level rarely dipped below the "OH HOLY SHIT!!!" range. I had a hard time summoning up energy, enthusiasm or much sentiment beyond nose-to-the-grindstone determinism.

Things would be different today, of course. There would be a different spouse... different living situation... different experiences... different me.

It's the last item which makes the real difference, of course.

The spouse, the house, the atlas of scars to guide my path... they're largely irrelevant. I'm different. Siblings might be in J.Q.'s best interests. However, my interests now get a say. They're a frustrating bunch... inconsistent and often unintelligible. However, one sentiment almost always seems to rise above the din. It's one of my son's favorite's, too: "Noooooo!"

---

Why would I want anything less for myself than I want for my child?

I want to explore, to branch out, to try and do and touch and feel.

I want to retain that little spark. I want to burn down a brushfield with it, race away with a grin on my face and embers in my hair.

I want a gamut of feelings as broad as Lake Baikal and as deep as the Marianas Trench. I want memories of both locales… being a speck of static on a vast field of gray frost, bobbing languidly above something unimaginably deep.

I want these things for J.Q., which is why I want him to grow up. It kills me, it really does... he's three feet tall. He uses an assortment of pronouns. He can solve problems which would stump your average reality-TV participant.

The baby years are over, for both of us. Because I want these things for me... or at least the opportunity to pursue them. Further years of child-rearing would put me further away from my goals and aspirations. Of course I'd love any hypothetical future kids... but that's not even close to sufficient reason to have them. I'd take a bullet for J.Q., but I'm not going to encourage the universe to start taking potshots.

I hope - fervently - that my reluctance to have more children isn't viewed as a reflection of my feelings on J.Q. He's the love of my life. Being his mother has been more profound than the greatest (or the schmaltziest) writer could ever express.

My heart is already tethered to his... wound up tight with Kevlar cord. Is it any wonder that it throbs so furiously when he's scared or upset?

That tie will remain even after his hand slips out of mine. It will still hurt. The ache won't - and couldn't - be soothed by the presence of another, tinier hand.

I want these things for us. Having tasted potential, I'll be better suited to describe it to J.Q. Having been suffused with hope and excitement, I'll be able to give them proper reverence.

I want him to dig his fingers into the damp sand on the beach at Pitcairn Island.

I want him to fall in love.

Hands and hearts.

May ours go wherever they wish.

Double Feature : Co-Inky-Dink / Shiraz With a Shudder

1. The Devil On Miss 'Screw:

Remember back in the day, when George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" netted his ass a lah-lah-lah-lawsuit from The Chiffons?

Remember how the judge issued a deeply cheesy verdict of "subconscious plagiarism"? "While Mr. Starr 's jacking of 'He's So Fine' may have been flagrant enough to put 'Chic'-swiping 7-11 bandits to shame, the court always thought he was the dreamiest Beatle and therefore rules that he did not do so ON PURPOSE"?

Okay. While I know you were all enthralled by this intellectual propert-astic anecdote, it was merely to provide a frame of reference.

Ringo Starr can make mistakes like that. Ringo, who presumably has a whole SWAT team of handlers working around the clock to prevent him from doing so ("Ahem, well, Mr. Starr, while Gevalia's offer of a free 10-cup coffee pot may seem to be a fiscally beneficial one, the board urges you to reconsider").

Which makes it slightly more understandable (although no less hilarious) that I recently managed to get me and my siblings emblazoned with the Underwood Potted Meat Devil:

(A friendly [if utterly horrified, and smacking at forearm while shrieking, "GETITOFFME!"] shout-out to Julie for this startling revelation.)

I whipped up the design on a Post-It one night. We all loved it. It was a moment of pure serendipity. Or so I thought.

Turns out I wasn't craving a powerful expression of sisterly love, but rather a fatty, hog-anus-laden snackie.

[Note: I still love my sister-tat, damn it. Potted meat? Not so much.]

---

2. Dear Jackass Date:

May I call you Jack?

Okay, I'm not sure what sort of mental picture of me you'd conjured up before our initial meeting. You'd seen photos of me (ones with minimal undereye circle Photoshopping, no less!). You'd enjoyed our witty e-mail banter. But okay, fine, so the Jul of your hopes and no-doubt humid dreams was NOT the Jul who came strolling up to you last week at Charming Local Taverna. It's not as though I misrepresented myself in any way, but perhaps you have some heretofore-undocumented neurological condition which may've resulted in your confusion. Would you like Oliver Sacks' number? How about a nice KICK in the sack?

There are ways to express disappointment, my lad. "Wow... thanks, Aunt Earlene! You must've worked REALLY HARD on this Carmen Miranda toilet paper roll-holder!" That? That's classy.

You, my erstwhile friend, are not.

I tried. I joked, I smiled, I made The Dreaded Eye Contact. I asked you questions about yourself, I slipped in subtle compliments and affirmations whenever possible. I was ON, enough to make Miss Manners commit a faux pas in her sensible little panties.

But YOU? You radiated disappointment. You conversed, but much like a celebrity being interviewed by a Muppet... with an eye-roll and a smirk, as if to say, "I'll play along, but JESUS, I can't believe I'm discussing the situation in Darfur with a pimped-out duvet cover."

When the waitress presented menus, you blurted, "No, no... just here for drinks." Ouchie.

Seconds after the check appeared, you flung a few bills on the table (I generally like to pay my own way, but if ever there were a time to say, "Fuck progressiveness", that'd be it), stood up and said, "Well, it was really nice to meet you... bye!"

I took a leisurely walk back to the Bachelorette Pad (it was seventy degrees out... I let nothing ruin a seventy-degree night). After giving it some thought, I fired off the following e-mail:

"Uh... wow. So THAT was awkward. Oh, well. Such things happen. Thanks for the drink. - Jul".

A few minutes later, you replied.

"Yep. They do. Best of luck. - Jack".

Back in the day, this would've resulted in a fury of self-loathing on my part, a torrent of bitter tears on my futon.

Fuck that shit.

So I'm not your physical cup of tea. That's okay. Everyone's got their preferences.

Like me. I'd have preferred to enjoy an hour or so of idle chit-chat, part ways amicably, then receive a "Sorry, just didn't feel anything click" e-mail a few days hence.

You apparently preferred to take the "make date feel monstrously uncomfortable and uncomfortably monstrous" route.

A pox on you. Literally and figuratively.

May you one day squirm as badly. May it last a good deal longer.

May you contract one of the itchier STDs.

May it not have even been that good.

May every man who has ever regarded my body as a source of things OTHER than disappointment - lust and pleasure, comfort and joy - band together and kick your fucking ass.

There are plenty of them. There's only one of you.

Your loss, asshole.

The 'Screw Interview : Call & Response

Oh, I still exist, alright... take THAT, oblivion! As promised, here are my answers to The 'Screw Interview.

1. You can travel back in time and visit yourself at [select all applicable] 10, 16, 22 and 30. What would you tell your various temporally-disjointed selves (any hokey "buy stock in Microsoft" replies will be taken out back and accused of antitrust violations)?

10 : you're not brilliant and misunderstood - you're a painfully awkward little girl who really needs to learn how to relate to her peers rather than dishing up a toxic combo platter of fear and disdain.

16 : see above. Also : You're two years younger than your fellow college freshmen. You have a 4.0 GPA. Don't do something stupid like drop out. Pierce your uvula, date the lead singer of a thrash-klezmer band, become a macrobiotic vegan and subsist on sustainably-harvested plankton... but pretty please, with sugar on top... don't drop out.

22 : see above. Also : on August 1st, at approximately 1:30 AM, remember to conceive your son. You'll be terrified at first, but he'll turn out to be a tremendous joy, a gorgeous, sweet, hilarious, revelatory baby, a live wire in footie pajamas. You might want to consider leaving your husband, too… one need not pour it over Wheaties to tell that THAT particular carton of milk has already begun to turn.

Assuming that my words wouldn’t be capable of altering my past selves’ respective courses of action? “You can (and will) experience (and endure) more than you ever thought possible.”

2. Analogy Tyme: if your drug of choice was an item which could be purchased at Home Depot for under $150, which one would be be, and why?

(Ed. Note: there seemed to be some confusion over this one... I meant to pick your ACTUAL favorite drug, then analogize it to a Home Depot item, i.e. "A rototiller, because the dark, impenetrable ditches they produce are eerily similar to the ones gouged in your conscious mind by good ol' veterinary anesthetics").

Ahem.

A Roto-Zip, complete with 30 attachments ("drilling", "gouging", "impassioned shredding", "diamond-cutting", "piping gel-applying", "marital aid", etc). It's dirt cheap and useful in a myriad of situations. And its sleek, injection-molded carrying case makes the user appear WAY sexier than they otherwise would (okay, okay, that one may be a stretch).

3. You can reanimate and spend several hours (say, sharing some Batter-Dipped Choco-Cheesecake Nibblers at the local crap-on-the-walls chain restaurant) with one of the following individuals - which one would you choose, and why?

- A deceased relative of whom you were moderately (but not overwhelmingly) fond.
- A randomly-selected serial killer of moderate notoriety.

Serial killer all the way!

- My family has something of an obsession with serial killers. I have many fond memories of staying up late and watching true-crime shows with my mom... nothing says "togetherness" like a grainy photo of a drainage ditch and a narrator grimly intoning, "... unfortunately for Officer McCloskey, there were STILL MORE fragments of prostitute remaining to be found!"

- I'd be very curious to see which appetizers a serial killer would order... mega-fries (because they're slathered in ketchup)? Chicken wings (because consuming them entails gnawing flesh away from bone)? Riblets (because their preparation involves both harming an animal AND setting something on fire, two components of the Serial Killin' Trifecta [the third is "bed-wetting", but that doesn't go nearly as well with ranch dressing]).

4. Think of your most esoteric, potentially-humiliating sexual fantasy. Think of another, equally-odd (but completely fabricated) fantasy. Describe them both without identifying which is which.

A. I am sitting on the [bus/train/hovercraft], staring into space and wondering if there is some way to combine the deliciousness of mu shu pork with the convenience of Go-Gurt. Just as I’m thinking “Huh, is the name ‘Mu-Tube’ copyrighted?”, the deeply hot gentleman who has been sitting next to me casually shifts his coat onto my lap, slides his hand beneath it, up my leg and under my sensible little Anne Taylor skirt. I neither smack his hand away nor give any outward indication that something is amiss. After a singularly lurid commute, I get up, straighten my disheveled garments and depart without a word.

B. Due to an unfortunate travel mix-up, my trip to Huitzilopochtli Aztec Resort & Spa does not take place. Instead, I find myself stranded among the members of an isolated tropical village, the pervy proclivities of whom make bonobo monkeys look like Morrissey. I am warmly welcomed. Very warmly. The next few weeks are spent cavorting with villagers, handcrafted representations of the lustier tribal gods, sufficiently underripe plantains, etc. Eventually, the state department arrives and spirits me away via helicopter. A single tear trickles down my face as I watch my randy hosts fade into the distance. My state department liaison gives me a sympathetic look, takes my hand in his and says, “Hey… ever done it in an emergency rescue craft?”

5. What is the typical prison sentence for the most legally-questionable act you've ever committed?

Most likely a year or two... nothing terribly titillating and/or reprehensible. Carried a tiny packet containing Unnamed Controlled Substance in my wallet for a few weeks, during which I crossed state lines and visited federal property (not to mention "redefined freaking stupid"). I spent a number of years living with men, so I could've conceivably been co-implicated in a few pieces of boyfriendish stupidity (discharge of unlicensed firearms on private property, the ownership of certain pieces of highly questionable Adult Material, etc). Probably nothing I couldn't have cried my way out of in front of a sympathetic judge.

6. Think of the worst physical pain you've ever experienced (childbirth, ping-pong ball-sized kidney stones, atomic wedgie). Think of the worst emotional pain (depression, divorce, disaster). Think of the person who is closest to you in the world (child, spouse, sibling). You must decide whether they will suffer a comparable degree of physical OR emotional pain. If you choose the former, you will be required to inflict it yourself. If you choose the latter, it will occur without any involvement on your part. Which do you choose?

Physical... definitely. The worst physical pain I've ever felt lasted for seven hours. When it was over, it was over (I ate a pulled pork sandwich, admired my new baby and nagged the nurse to please remove the godforsaken IV). The worst emotional pain lasted for months. Aspects of it still continue to float around my subconscious... phantom wasps, capable of stinging at any moment, sans motivation or provocation. And if J.Q.’s life is half as interesting as I hope it will be, odds are he’ll endure plenty of emotional anguish along the way.

7. You're granted the power to uncover the truth behind one very, very big secret of the modern age - who shot Kennedy? What the hell is the deal with celebrity Scientologists? You will not be permitted to share this knowledge with anyone, ever - it will be solely to satisfy your own curiosity. What do you choose to learn?

Vis a vis big secrets. a few years ago, a friend and I watched “Lost in Translation”. After it ended, I wanted to curl up into a small sphere of hominid and weep for the rest of my natural life, ideally while ethereal indie rock played in the background. My friend, however, was focused on more important matters. “But what did he SAY to her at the end?” he whined, “I really want to know! It’s not fair to leave us hanging like that!” He was unswayed by my repeated protestations of, “That wasn’t the POINT! And why aren’t you sobbing?” Finally, I came up with the perfect answer… wait for it… wait for it… “He told her what was in the briefcase in ‘Pulp Fiction’.”

If I could uncover one non-MacGuffin secret, though, it would have to be “What is the physiological basis for ESP?” I have no doubt that humans possess sensory capabilities not currently acknowledged or understood by medical science. However, I don’t think these abilities are bestowed upon us by mystical/crunchy-granola forces. I think there is a very real scientific basis for them. Our rods and cones enable us to view the world, our cochleae enable us to rock the hell out… but what allows us to see without seeing?

8. While purchasing some plantains at Tienda Mexicano, you find The Lord. You discover that he is a cruel, arbitrary Lord, as well as one who has read entirely too many "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. He takes you outside, sits you down on the hood of his El Camino, hands you a can of Jugo de Coco and informs you that you will never see any of your current loved ones again. They will continue to live their lives, just magically sans any awareness of your continued existence. By way of compensation, you'll be allowed to determine your own natural lifespan. You may elect to die instantly, live to 120 or any option in between. What do you choose? Why?

Assuming I didn’t lapse into hysterical grief at being forever separated from my child… I’d live to be 120. It wouldn’t be as though my loved ones had died - armed with the knowledge that they were living their lives as per usual, I’d do my damndest to survive and thrive. I’d try to embrace the opportunity to start anew, to begin accumulating new memories, new experiences, new relationships.

9. You are given the opportunity to sample human flesh. Your enjoyment of this unusual entree will not be the result of any amoral acts - the source of your Bruce Burger (Tim Tartare? Francois Filet?) will be an individual who has died of unrelated causes. Your consumption of said flesh will not be as a result of starvation, nor as a condition of some sick wager ("Take a chomp out of Lloyd's thigh and I'll give you season tickets to Six Flags Over Highly Unlikely Transactionville"). Yea or nay?

Yea all the way. It’s not something I actively WANT to ingest… but I have a very, very difficult time turning down the opportunity to try anything new and/or novel. My id could best be described as Andrew W.K. (warning! simulated gore!) crossed with Charles Bukowski crossed with Evel Knievel - all gleeful, drunken daredevilishness. And as far as good bar stories go, “… that time I engaged in cannibalism” beats almost everything else, save perhaps “… that time with the identical-triplet strippers in the stolen Popemobile.”

10. You are given a Memory Dustbuster. It looks like a regular Dustbuster, circa 1989. However, when held against the human skull, it has the ability to suck out specific memories. Like many small appliances, this one has gotten a bit finicky in its old age. It no longer removes single memories... for each one which is removed, an equal-but-opposite second memory is also vacuumed up. You can suck out a particularly awful recollection... however, you'll also lose a happy memory of comparable intensity, and you have no say in which one it happens to be.

Do you use this device? How many times?

Nope... no question on this one. I'm grateful for everything I've had a chance to experience... good to awful, incredibly strange to unexpectedly content.

11. The Enormous Glowing Sphere of Influence Equation: how many of the following events have occurred in your life for which you've felt personally responsible? By this, I mean that the event in question would definitely NOT have occurred were it not for one or more conscious decisions on your part. Do NOT include events which were confined strictly to your professional life - thus, lawyers/doctors/matchmakers/executioners/etc. should use their discretion on this one.

- Marriages (1... a number which may increase at some nebulous future point. You never know when Gerard Depardieu might face deportation and require some wacky hijink-laden assistance to remain in the good ol' US of A!)

- Divorces (1... can I get a "booyah!"?)

- Births/adoptions (1, a number which is very unlikely to increase. I love J.Q. more than life itself, and I love parenting him. "Parenting" and "further children", in concept? Not so much).

- Deaths (0... not even Death of a Salesman (too talky), Death By Chocolate (too gooey) or Death Cab For Cutie ("You Will Be Loved" too likely to make me burst into hysterical, exterior AND interior garment-rending tears. You've never ripped off your panties in abject sorrow? Well, lah dee dah for YOU!]).

- Involuntary commitments (mental institution/rehab/prison) (0... have had the opportunity to do so - took a pass each time. Just doing my part to contribute to entropy).

- Relocations of over 1,500 miles (0... two 800-mile jaunts, plus seven or eight local moves, genus "let us express our incredible dumbness NOT by muttering 'duh, duh' or running while clutching shish-kebab skewers, but by boxing up everything we own and hauling it up and down several flights of stairs in the blistering sun!").

- Ascension to a level of fame/renown/power sufficient to interest/impact more than 10,000 individuals. (1/0). That's "one OR zero", not a divide-by-zero error, the bane of my tech-supportin' existence. Microsoft Excel, while a fine spreadsheet application indeed, has the eerie ability to convince users that logical impossibilities are not only possible, but should've been possible FIVE MINUTES AGO WHEN THIS REPORT WAS DUE DAMN IT. If I never again utter the words, "Okay, so if you divide FIVE apples by ZERO apples, you get what? You can't? Yes, that's right, and neither can Excel!"... it will be too soon.
Ahem... according to my trusty Sitemeter, Thumbscre.ws itself may count... but I'm wondering if the caveat "level of MILD interest, as a result of poop joke-telling prowess" should remove this one from contention).

- Change in income level of +/- 50% (1... my own. I started working at Indentured Servicorp Discount Tech Support when I was seventeen. As it turned out, they would make my life utterly miserable... however, they paid a bit more than the local Gefilte 'n Chips franchise, my OTHER employment option. After getting the job (but before getting a nice dose of soul-crushing), I bounced back home like a methamphetamine-crazed Tigger, yelling, "OH MY GOD, I CAN AFFORD NAME-BRAND RAMEN NOW!" The following eight years brought a marked improvement in my circumstances (and dinner selections).

12. An exercise in writing, randomness and self-reflection (when commenting/posting, only include item "C"):
A. In exactly 25 words, describe the thing you're proudest of.
B. In exactly 25 words, describe the thing you're most ashamed of.
C. Combine the odd-numbered words from A. with the even-numbered words from B.

I’ve is much fine and between but selfishness sense the humor which and on to and well not myself on others right survived of grown.

Full Release

So, uh.... my divorce is final. According to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I am "at liberty to marry again". I am also at liberty to stuff my belly button full of ground sirloin and go taunt a Doberman, but the Commonwealth will forgive me if I take a pass on both super-fun activities.

(I'm being disgustingly facetious here. The other day, I caught myself tearing up to - wait for it - "I'll Be", by Edwin McCain. How humiliating. I don't care if you were [wooed/engaged/married/freaked nasty] to "I'll Be"... it's still crap. It's the auditory equivalent of a CIA special-ops team... it materializes out of nowhere (in this case, immediately after "Freebird"), invades your ducts, forcibly extracts any tears present therein, then applies electrodes to their testicles. Um... wait. Tears don't have testicles. Except perhaps Chuck Norris's.

Point being: once again, Liz Phair is right. I DO want a boyfriend. I DO want all that stupid old shit, like letters and sodas.

Damn, I hope my boobs are nice enough to make up for my gun-shy disposition and stress-induced forehead wrinkle.

[Gives boob exploratory jiggle... hrmn. Not good enough to negate ALL emotional baggage, but good nonetheless. That'll do, tit. That'll do.]

On the left : the kind, compassionate and wonderful Menita has been there for me throughout the past year. I'm glad she was there with me when I received the news that my decree had arrived. And I'm REALLY glad she was holding a camera.

On the right : this is more representative of my mental state as of late. Introverted. Contemplative. Wistful. And kinda... rouge-tinted. Someone needs to bat the ever-present bottle of dye from my hand before I either go bald or start to resemble a bigger-titted Ron Howard.

Look Me In the Eye, Then Tell Me I'm Satisfied

Is it personality? Is it time? Is it the ever-popular endogenous chemicals, forever sullying my synapses like marinara on a white silk blouse?

Is it my friends? Is it my coworkers? Is it everything but me, or just me?

Why am I this unhappy with my achievements?

It has been an eventful year.

I have earned an associate's degree. In the oh-so useful field of Liberal Arts, no less. C'mon, give me a Norton Anthology. I'll interpret the shit out of that bitch.

I have gone down three jeans sizes. While I can now look in the three-way mirror at The Gap and coo, "MMM-HMMMN, girlfriend, you look FINE!", I have lost any vestige of an ass. Baby don't got back. Baby basically perches on her coccyx like a Weeble.

I have learned how to...

• Solder.


• Code my own style sheets.


• Transport four bags of groceries and a squirmy toddler across several city blocks and up several flights of stairs.


• Get divorced sans legal counsel. I've got eight syllables for you: independent source of income. I've also got 81 more: odds are your spouse is in a place of existential confusion as well as somewhat lazy; just draft up all the paperwork yourself and hand it over with a brusque, "This agreement is inherently fair and in no way the legal equivalent of nonconsensual anal intercourse, so fucking sign it already."


• Be naked in front of a man without immediately trying to cover myself with a sheet, a quilt, a cat or a nearby bookcase.


• Run for one mile without staggering to the side of the road and vomiting in a concrete planter.


• Etc., ad infinitum, ergo sum.

And a lot of the time, it feels like nothing.

I'm in the same position at work. I have gone from living in a messy Cape Cod to living in a stark white rental box (and hoping said Cape Cod just spontaneously implodes one day, because it is sure as shit not going to be purchased by any sane, credit-worthy individuals). I haven't been promoted, published, showered with love/Valrhona Le Lacte bars or party to a life-altering epiphany. I haven't been content, more or less ever.

When will it be enough? When will I be able to sit back, relax and say, "Yep... I'm fucking proud of you, self. Go grab another diet soda. You've earned it"?

It's the weight loss conundrum : the prospect of losing 50/75/100 pounds is so daunting, so impossible that it seems hardly worth starting a diet. And yet all weight is lost ounces at a time... day after boring, frustrating, rice cake-laden day.

I'm surrounded on all sides by high achievers. I work in a sector which is damned near synonymous with high achievement (well, and trips to Aspen / undermining all that which is right and decent in the world). Pounds and pounds of achievement, industrial-sized pallets of it. How can I be happy with a few ounces of forward momentum? For each credit I earn, there's an office wall upholstered in Ivy League diplomas. For each flattering pair of smaller-size khakis, there's another which make me feel like a dress-casual sausage. There are awards and accolades, achievements and acclaim. Works of art. Summers spent abroad. Grabbing life by the cojones and giving a hearty squeeze.

I'm trying, I really am. And yet there's that oddly familiar voice in the back of my head, the one hissing, "There is no try, there is only do." And I become angry enough to curse, spit, to do awful things to a certain pointy-eared Muppet guru. Because at this point, I haven't done much. And incessant trying is enough to make anyone feel like a Paul Westerberg antihero... desperate, demoralized, depressed and so, so unsatisfied.

Milk, White, Dark

I : Love Won’t Tear Us Apart. If It Did, It Would Save Me a Lot of Calls to Customer Service.

There are days filled with low-level panic and pervasive despair. I transverse the hours via scurry. I'm an existential Indiana Jones, running across the rotting boards of my old life, praying that I reach terra firma before they crumble out from under me. Getting my cell phone company to split our "family" plan into two separate lines is a Kafkaesque exercise in futility. The prospect of arranging every last vestige of my married life into two discrete piles is overwhelming. While sitting in the wreckage is depressing, simultaneously building and demolishing seems flat-out impossible. The Impending Ex and his girlfriend are buying new furniture. Every time I visit, there’s a new table, new decoration, new celebration of a new life. I go to IKEA and find myself unable to buy so much as a shelf, because something supported by wall anchors implies permanence and such a concept is unthinkable. So I wind up eating Swedish meatballs and staring at couples who've got a lot more faith in themselves and in particle board than I ever remember having. There are days like that.

II : Love is a Tower of Strength in Me

And then there are days like this.

My futon is an ideal landing place for stage falls. It's firm yet yielding, of moderate height and so ugly that its inadvertent destruction would fill me will IKEA-bound glee. When I'm feeling very happy and very dramatic, I'll take a face-first dive onto it. After crashing into the cushions, I press my face against the polyester velveteen and close my eyes. I pretend that I have the very essence of warmth and contentment pinned underneath me, and I can't get up, lest it die, disappear or flutter off into a shady corner. Instead, I let it melt against my skin, light up my bloodstream like fiber-optic cable, assimilate me into the vast cosmic repository of all that which is good.

I'm extraordinarily fortunate. My life is filled with a number of people who are wise, kind and compassionate; people who, to my amazement and delight, actually seem to like me. They feed me. They look out for me. They let me flop on their futons. We tickle each others' kids, share secrets embarrassing and profound. Being with them makes me like who I am. The cynicism and self-protective stance fall away. I am inundated with goodness; in turn, I try to disseminate as much of it as I can. Sans irony, sans defensiveness, I know what I'd like to be. An open door. An available lap. A safe haven of kindness, small gestures and esoteric cooking tips. When things are bad, scary or falling apart in the middle of the night, the first phone number which comes to mind.

On days like this, I am swept up in the arms of a momentarily-benevolent universe.

III : Love Is Bad For the Teeth of the Soul

For a limited time only (from thisverysecond until all that remains are desiccated petals and half-chewed caramels), and burning only a fraction of the karma which has so richly entitled me to do so, I intend to be an insufferable little bitch about it, I reserve the right to refuse any comfort, advice, platonic hugs, positive prognostication or radiant gems of staggering insight from anyone, anywhere, who spends these dim and icy days warmed by anything more personal than a massive gas bill, who hovers above the stretcher in a protective fog of hindsight and iodine fumes and murmurs, “I know how it feels”, who takes their coffee with the plentiful half-and-half of comfort and companionship rather than the self-loathing Sweet ‘n Low of really, truly wanting to be able to fulfill all of one’s own needs, and failing to do so time and again, and there is no quantity of Altoids large enough to eradicate that particular taste, there is no peanut butter-filled heart succulent enough to negate the fact that it is charity candy, and there is most certainly no one whose opinion I’d like unless they, like I, spent the past month sleeping on the couch without being entirely sure why, and finally, after moving the bed into a snug corner on a whim, realized that it was the confinement, that a sleeping area with walls and borders felt better, and wondered why that might be, and then, curled up tightly, a serif comma printed on a queen-sized mattress, realized: oh, yeah. Right.

People Try and Hide the Light Underneath the Covers

For your amusement: the route of Jul's Desperation-Based Impromptu Road Trip '07. This is an inexact recreation; I couldn't come up with a way to accurately map those amusing little "Welcome to New York? I thought I was ALREADY IN NEW YORK!" moments.



Highlights:

- Showering in The Bachelorette Pad is a joyless experience. While standing under its lukewarm, erratic spray, I am often tempted to scrawl "HOW COME YOU SUCK SO BAD?" on the wall with one of J.Q.'s tub crayons.

Super Discount Hotel Chain's shower featured both a Shower Massage and a seemingly-endless supply of super-hot water. When I emerged, trailing clouds of steam hot enough to peel wallpaper, I was one happy stewed prune. Ed. Note: did I ever tell you guys about my Shower Massage song? The one which featured lines like "If you don't respect the Shower Massage / You are a total dope / I'll sneak into your shower / and strangle you with your soap-on-a-rope"? No? Yeah, I guess I see why...).

- Stopping in Promised Land, PA, just because the Springsteen song of the same name kinda rocks. I did manage to restrain myself from taking a detour through Cornish, NJ solely to inform the locals, "Dude, I LOVE your game hens!"

- Hiking in the splendid desolation of Stokes State Forest. No one else for miles... just a forest in the eerie, Blair Witch-y lull before a snowstorm. Did not encounter any bears, either, despite posted signs ("Bears Sighted In Area"... "How To Respond When You Encounter a Bear"... "Scream Like a Sissy or Run Like an Idiot? Weighing Your Options"... "LEAVE THIS AREA IMMEDIATELY OR YOUR ASS WILL BE BITTEN CLEAN OFF").

- Complete editorial control over radio. Hence, an eclectic blend of, well, crap: "True Blue"-era Madonna! C+C Music Factory! "Stuck in the Middle With You"! "Hey Man, Nice Shot" (which always begs the question: which son do you think Mr. and Mrs. Patrick love more - Robert, who played the Liquid Metal Man in "T2", or Richard, former lead singer of Filter?)! Plus one total gem... The Arcade Fire's "Rebellion (Lies)"... absolutely gorgeous. It receives a minor demerit for making me break my eighteen-hour crying-free streak, however.

Lowlights:

- Being informed by the front desk that I "must have misheard" the time given when requesting late check-out; having to go from "naked, surfing internet and picking chocolate chips out of trail mix" to "actively vacating premises" in ten minutes.

- Aborted detour to Otisville, NY... "Huh, state and federal penal institutes? Let's check this out!", I thought. Roughly ten miles later: "Why the hell are these prisoners so far from the rest of the decent, law-abiding citizenry? Oh, yeah. Better turn around."

- Alarming the locals during a pit stop at the McDonald's in Yuppie Snottington, NJ. I was covered in forest grime, squinty-eyed from the glacial wind and vaguely surly due to being stuck behind a creaky Ford for the past hundred miles. I felt very much like the protagonist of "Turn the Page".

Hell, maybe that should be a highlight!

- Vague sense of sadness and ennui returned the second I set foot in the Bachelorette Pad. Well, damn.

Future Highlight:

- Stokes Forest has cabins! And I can apparently live on trail mix indefinitely! I sense that my weekends are about to become Thoreau-iffic.

Greetings From Wilkes-Barre

... it's nondescriptastic! It's also pronounced "Wilkes Berry". Which sounds kinda like the breakfast cereal which assassinated Abraham Lincoln (see also: Aaron Burr-an Flakes, Lee Harvey Oswald or Possibly Castro or Perhaps the Illuminati or Maybe the CIA Crispies).

I am illin' and chillin' in tha W.B.'s municipal crib as a result of the most boring whim ever. On a scale of spontaneity ranging from "Mexican gender reassignment surgery" all the way down to "Mountain Fresh fabric softener instead of tried-and-true Spring Breeze", my sojourn hits bottom with a resounding clunk. But it's okay. I've got trail mix, HBO and free wifi. My hotel room is snuggly warm and not nearly as crappy as Super Discount Hotel Chain's usual offerings (this one time? In South Carolina? The entire carpet was damp and the room smelled suspiciously like a poorly-maintained pet store). The bath products are tiny and organic. The sheets are clean, crisp and unsullied by granola bar crumbs.

I didn't really intend to wind up here. However, yesterday evening, I was feeling rather somber. "Aaaaaagh fuck I can't do this any more nooooo," is how I believe I phrased it. I had just handed J.Q. off to the baby-daddy, along with a full status report (milestones, bad: vomited down mama's cleavage. Milestones, good: has 226-word vocabulary. Coupled with his all-abiding love of his tricycle and disregard for authority, J.Q. is fully qualified to be a Hell's Angel). I was young, free of responsibility and in the creamy center of a major metropolitan area.

I also had no plans save "work on novel" and "attempt to chisel vomit out of household linens". I found the prospect... unappealing.

"Nooooo gaaaaaaawd I am going to die of boringness aaaaaaaagh," as I succinctly put it.

So I packed a change of clothes. I grabbed my hiking boots... I wasn't sure where I was going, but I liked the idea that it might require hiking boots. I stopped at Local Retail Behemoth Not Known For Fucking Labor Laws Up The Ass. A road atlas, some electrical tape for my antenna (between that and the ossified fast food ground into the carpet, the DecrepiCivic has been awarded official "hoopty" status) and some trail mix were procured. I wasn't sure where I was going, but shit, more or less every destination would require trail mix. Well, except for Chocolate Chip, Raisin and Pepita Depot, and GOOD CHRIST, wasn't the point of this excursion to make my life slightly MORE interesting?

I spent many happy hours hurtling down the highway. I drove through snow, hail and the mysterious "wintry mix". I saw mountains and truck stops and tiny little airports. I explored local radio stations and wriggled my seat-bound ass to an utterly incongruous rural techno station. I hit the trail mix like a ravenous squirrel.

So here I am. Wilkes-Barre! Alternate town motto: "I Was Tired and It Was There". A few more hours of Kerouac-ing it up and slathering myself in tiny bath products (which contain sunflower seed oil? Shit, I'm gonna turn INTO trail mix), then I hit the road again. Further north? East, to the Delaware Water Gap (I have no idea what it is, but I intend to let its keepers know that a good motto might be "It's Gap-tacular!")? West, to... I don't know, I think mostly pine trees? Don't know. Don't care. Northeastern PA is my oyster, and I fully intend to crack this bitch open.

Jitterbug

I have had mostly-digested pizza crust vomited down my cleavage.

I have used a goodly quantity of Anglo-Saxon vulgarities during a technical presentation.

I have administered Pedialyte and a Q&A session.

Everything went down surprisingly smoothly. Saltiness is apparently better-tolerated than one would imagine.

I have renewed my FAFSA. I have been informed that my “estimated family contribution” is a quarter of my annual net income.

I have idly contemplated erecting a yurt in my parents’ backyard.

I have contemplated no fewer than sixteen different careers.

I have gotten two paragraphs closer to the most-desired and least-likely of the bunch.

I have wanted to run under cover of darkness. To walk two miles to the diner solely to warm my hands on a coffee cup. To curl up in the back of a movie theater with all the accouterments... bucket of soda, cargo container of popcorn, barely-suppressed memories of passing jujubes back and forth during giggly pre-feature kisses. To get a hot shower – a really hot shower, really, really hot, clouds of steam and all that – and press my back against the cool tile and try not to shiver.

I have performed the psychological equivalent of Tae-Bo in outer space : endless silly contortions, only to remain in exactly the same place.

I have not yet decided whether I’d rather get the things I want or stop wanting them.

I have fed my body on diet Coke and miniature brownies.

I have fed my spirit with wild speculation, morbid fascination and Chromacolor melancholy.

I have a headache.

I have faith tomorrow will be just as busy and a little bit better.

A Fairy Tale of New York

J.Q.'s second Christmas was also the first one he spent apart from me.

On Christmas Eve, our brood gathered in New Jersey. It was a warm, happy evening. J.Q. was inundated with cookies, presents and attention. Within five minutes of being placed in his car seat, he'd passed out... an exhausted, sprinkle-coated cherub.

An hour later, I extracted him from the car, kissed his little forehead, handed him off to his father and drove home alone. It was deeply surreal.

The next day, I celebrated the world's first Solitary Contemplation-mas.

It began with Ground Zero. It ended with an apocalyptic wasteland. In between, there was exhaustion, disorientation, soul-searching, eel-eating and trudging around in rain-soaked wool.

It was a good day.

Solitary Contemplation-mas : A Primer

• You've heard of "Christmas in July"? Solitary Contemplation-mas is like Yom Kippur in December, only with less atoning. No atoning, actually. While there are no traditional Solitary Contemplation-mas greetings (see also : first word of holiday's name), "I ain't atoning for SHIT!" would be entirely apt.



• Solitary Contemplation-mas occurs every December 25th. What's that, you say? "Uh, dude, most people have other plans that day?" Agreed.
  
  "Most" people. If you want to be like "most" people - another namby-pamby emotional weakling who would rather peer into an eggnog latte than the troubled depths of your own soul - well, be my guest.
  
  Okay, okay. Special provision: if you absolutely, positively must postpone Solitary Contemplation-mas, it is permissible to do so, PROVIDED that the new date fosters a similar feeling of loneliness and disconnect from one's fellow man. The day the Free Ice Cream Cone and Fuzzy Kitten-Petting Expo comes to the convention center, for instance.



• The traditional color of Solitary Contemplation-mas is Pantone Cool Gray 8C.



• Solitary Contemplation-mas may take place in one of two venues:
  
  
  1. An extremely rural setting. This is the traditional choice; mamacita Nature has long been a refuge for the reflective, the distraught, the secretly-plotting-to-reupholster-their-Lazy-Boy-in-human-skin (if you are the latter, this is not the holiday for you. May I suggest Psychotic Break-wanzaa?). While full of thought-provoking scenery and blessed isolation, nature has a dark side. It is also crammed to the gills with things that will bite you, claw you, sting you or pin your ass to a rock like a fanny pack-wearing butterfly. And as the entire rest of the hemisphere will be busy with their pine-perfumed orgy of comfort and joy, help may take a loooong time to arrive.
     
     You should not allow being pinned to a rock to curtail your observance of Solitary Contemplation-mas. However, it is permissible to take periodic fifteen-minute breaks from soul searching to either scream for help or fantasize about your inevitable Discovery Channel special ("Holy Shit, How the Fuck Are You Still Alive?!: The [Your Name] Story").
  
  
  
  2. An extremely urban setting. If you fail to understand how one can feel utterly alone while in a crowd, you are ill-suited for Solitary Contemplation-mas; you should stick with the traditional candy cane-fellating rigmarole.
     
     Ahem.
     
     How urban is "extremely"? Do you feel as though you are a tiny grain of sand, swept up in a crushing wave of humanity? No? Try harder, bucko.
     
     Manhattan is nice. Busy. Enormous. Large non-Santa-centric population (oy gevalt!). Abundant Chinese restaurants, which brings us to...



• The traditional Solitary Contemplation-mas meal is Chinese food. And by "Chinese", we mean "Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Laotian... so long as said cuisine has been dumbed down and sugared up for the Western palate". The reasons for this are twofold:
  
  
  1. Chinese restaurants are open on Christmas.
  
  
  
  2. You know that vague sense of dissatisfaction and unease, the one you're supposed to be addressing via solitary contemplation? Yeah, well... Chinese food is kind of like that, only deep-fried and slathered in phlegmy brown goo. It's not inedibly awful, it's not fantastically good... it is a Moo Goo Gai Obstacle to Personal Fulfillment which one must gamely plow through. Hoisin sauce helps.



• The traditional solitary contemplation-mas beverage is plum wine. It is the potable analogue to pseudo-Asian food: it is liquor, yes, but it is also disgusting.
  
  
  Special Plum Wine-Related Sidebar:
  
  Most American school children are familiar with the "disintegrating penny" myth. As legend has it, a penny placed in a glass of Coke will dissolve within days, thus proving... something. The myth is kind of vague on that point. The inadvisability of using a can of soda as a change jar, perhaps? In any event, despite being more noxious than even New Coke, plum wine has no urban legends of its own. I will bravely take it upon myself to rectify this situation.
  
  Possible Plum Wine Urban Legend #1 : Plum wine needs to be served in specially-coated glasses, otherwise it will melt through the glass, through the tablecloth, through your shoe, through a 2" reinforced floor joist and through the skull of one of the poor elderly ladies playing mah-jong in the basement.
  
  Possible Plum Wine Urban Legend #2 : Plum wine will steal your woman. It looks so guileless in its cute little decanter. Do not be deceived. It's merely biding its time. As soon as you go to the bathroom to check if there's any seaweed stuck to your teeth, BAM! Its sticky, delicately-fragranced hands will be ALL OVER HER.
  
  It occurs to me that I should quit while I'm ahead, lest I be found dead with a chopstick protruding from my frontal lobe and an ominous note tucked inside my belly button.
  
  



• The official musical form of Solitary Contemplation-mas is the fugue... or, if you are some sort of freaking sissy, the toccata.



• The official weather of Solitary Contemplation-mas is rain. If rain is unavailable, sleet, hail and "plague of locusts" are also fine. If it is capable of blowing your ass down Fifth Avenue, cursing and shivering (or shrieking, "Aaaaagh! Get 'em off me! Get 'em off me!"), it is an acceptable meteorological condition.



• One concludes Solitary Contemplation-mas by watching a movie.
  
  Popcorn is fluffy and insubstantial and therefore prohibited. Milk Duds are permitted, so long as they are consumed chocolate-first, then caramel (traditional tactile sensation of Solitary Contemplation-mas: stickiness).
  
  Foreign films are preferable; French ones in particular. It is generally possible to tell if a film would be a good Solitary Contemplation-mas selection by the synopsis alone:
  
  "Le Cygne Pleure Milliard-et-Demi des Larmes" (The Swan Cries a Billion and a Half Tears) : a grieving widow's tragic life is turned upside-down by the arrival of a mysterious lodger. However, the unlikely duo's newfound happiness is endangered by a tragic secret from his past. Can two wounded souls find solace from the world's tragedies? Here's a hint: no.
  
  That right there would be an excellent Solitary Contemplation-mas movie. Someone needs to dig up and reanimate Jean-Luc Goddard, pronto.
  
  As far as American films go, "Blade Runner" is a good choice. "Kids" would do nicely (as well as segue nicely into February's "Kick Harmony Korine's Pretentious Little Ass-mas"). The recently-released "Children of Men" was my personal Solitary Contemplation-mas film; it is a rare film indeed which makes one think, "Huh, maybe the annihilation of the human race wouldn't be such a bad thing after all."

I paced around Penn Station, headphones blaring, doing parkour-style acrobatics off the steps.

I called my mother, wished her a merry Christmas, apologized once again for forsaking the bosom of my family for Eeyore-ish isolation.

Newark was cold, damp and oily black when I arrived.

Post-marriage, I try to take care of myself in all of the cute little ways a spouse might. When I hopped in the DecrepiCivic, it had a nicely chilled bottle of diet soda on the seat and a full tank of gas. "Awww... thanks, Jul! You shouldn't have!" I said.

Driving back home, I felt a little like I do after a really good run... sweetly depleted, centered, standing stork atop the oft-shaky tectonic plate which is my life.

Like I said... it was a good day.

Oh I could be
Condemned to Hell for every sin but littering.
I could
Slip on the East River and crash into Queens all skittering.

Everything is going up.
Everything is going as planned, yeah.
Everything moves along.
Everything is fine, fine, fine.

Soul Coughing, "The Idiot Kings"

Magazine Rack

Runner's World:

1. While jogging down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway with J.Q. the other day, we paused to let traffic pass. The Parkway is lined with various pieces of statuary and sculpture, including a number of Calders and a cast of Rodin's "The Thinker" (of which there are twenty. Did you know that? I did not know that. Kind of lends ol' Auguste an unsavory, Thomas Kinkadeian aura, doesn't it?). J.Q. looked up at the statue before us, smiled and said, "Mama!"

It was Joan of Arc.

I'll take that as a compliment.

2. My training, which had been proceeding apace, has been threatened by the reappearance of an old nemesis: shin splints. Before, I was capable of trundling down the road for an entire Rage Against the Machine song without ill effect. Now, however, Zach de la Rocha doesn't even get the chance to whip himself into an apoplectic froth before I screech to a halt and begin hopping around and hissing, "Owie owie owie ow!" Funny, I do not recall an "owie owie owie ow" scene in "Chariots of Fire". Compounding my lame-itude is the fact that at any given moment, the Parkway is populated by approximately 10,000 individuals in far better training than I. I think they have all been sent there by the "Lithe, Athletic Specimen of Physical Perfection" department of central casting solely to make me feel awful. When I go inside for the night, they probably all heave sighs of relief and head over to Little Pete's for chili-cheese fries.

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House Beautiful:

There are precious few things I miss about Suburbiaville. It was a dreary, generic place, inaccessible on foot, an arborvitae-edged ghost town after 9 PM. Truly, it had the power to make one's spirit as cold and stony as the marble slab ice cream parlors which seemed to crop up every twenty feet.

I do, however, miss living in a residence with character.

The Suburbiaville Manse was the first home purchased by The Artist Soon to Be Formerly Known As Mr. Thumbscrews and myself. We had watched thousands on thousands of hours of home-improvement shows while inhabiting a series of nondescript white boxes. As a result, we were somewhat, ah, EAGER to embraces the challenges of home improvement. We more or less signed the paperwork with paintbrushes clenched between our teeth and a crazed, "I've got five gallons of Navajo White in the trunk of my car and I know how to use them!" gleam in our eyes.

While renovating had its downsides (see, also: outdoor excretion, 2005, incongruous nature of), our home quickly became a cozy, Arts & Crafts-centric little nest. Un-spackleable holes were drilled into walls, faux finishes were lovingly applied, quarter-round molding was tacked to every remotely linear surface. We were proud of our abode's unique charms. Reviewing our work, we beamed in satisfaction, even as our hair beamed in ugliness after having been washed in the kitchen sink with Palmolive one too many times.

When I moved out, I packed my books and a few IKEAfied items of furniture and roared off down the highway, pausing only to shoot a hearty, "SO LONG, FUCKERS!" at the vacant-eyed, riding-mower propelled residents of my erstwhile 'burb. Having always wished to live in an urban area, I had no compunctions about letting the Impending Ex continue to occupy the family estate (which is as of yet unsold. Anyone want a charming little Cape in a stupefyingly boring town?). In my haste to flee the scene of the crime, I didn't take any items which would have made the Bachelorette Pad anything less than a Bauhausian exercise in Extreme Starkness.

Recently, though, I've spent time in some lovely non-minimalist homes. It was inevitably disappointing to return to my econo-box, which possessed all the charm of the Luis Munoz Marin International Airport. Truly, the only thing I was missing was a "Menudo on a Stick" vendor. I considered subletting from a more stylish individual ("Please, I'll live in the linen closet! You can slide a Pop Tart under the door every morning! You've got exposed beams... EXPOSED BEAAAAAMS!"). However, I finally resolved to spiff up Chalky White Cube Terrace. Among my recent improvements...

• The bathroom window now has a lovely tie-up curtain. "Well, damn, Jul," you may be saying, "What did you have before?" Answer: um... a towel. Anchored to the window ledge with a bottle of Pantene. I know, I know. I will now commit ritual suicide on a decorative finial. Actually, the towel was a marked improvement from my previous window-covering strategy, which was "do nothing, hope the occasional glimpses of bare assitude will make local ne'er-do-well population grateful enough so that they will not harass me".


• The Futon of Terror has been slipcovered. This blocky blue beastie served as a guest bed in Suburbiaville, and therefore saw little wear 'n tear. Upon relocating to Questionable Safety Boulevard, however, it became a sort of uber-furnishing... a bed, a couch, a dinner table, a play mat, a writing surface, a graham cracker storage facility. Not to mention the setting for many of my post-marriage rumspringa-related, um, leisure activities. It was soon covered in stains of varied and dubious provenance, reduced to a shell of its former Scandinavian glory. Rather than replace it, I obtained a fantastically stretchy brown dealie from Target, spent a half hour vigorously tugging and tucking, and now have... an ugly futon which looks as though I am attempting to send it via U.S. Mail. Which would be a WAY better prank mailing than free samples of embarrassing personal care items, come to think of it. "Honey, did you order a LYKVISK? No? Kids? Well, come on, this thing didn't just order ITSELF!"

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Overpriced Test Preparation Centres of Excellence Presents : America's 100 Top Colleges 2006 (Who By Eerie Coincidence All Happened To Send Our Editors Gift Certificates to Steak 'n Two-Lb. Potato Grille):

What should I do with my life? I'm asking you - yes, YOU - because I'm having trouble coming to any conclusions myself.

At 25, most relatively bright people have obtained a degree and spent several years working in their chosen profession. Either that or they're safely ensconced in the prestige- and debt-heavy world of perpetual post-baccalaureate study.

As for me? I've been in IT for eight years, solely because it's a good way to pay the bills. I haven't done much (if any) ladder-climbing; while I'm quite good at what I do, I haven't obtained sufficient training or experience to advance within the technical arena. This is partially due to circumstance, partially due to ennui, partially because the world of computers isn't as inherently fascinating to me as, say, almost anything else, from monster trucks to medicine to Modernism. Nonetheless, frustrated with my continued peon-hood, reluctant to toss away eight years of experience and unwilling to start anew (read: at $7.50 an hour) in another field, I've been looking into additional training in various technical hoo-doo (yes, that's the official Microsoft term).

I have no student loan debt (stick THAT in your pipe and smoke it, Fannie Mae!). I do, however, have what has become an alarming history of dropping out of community college (first time: seventeen, to move to Georgia to live with psychotic boyfriend. This still makes me cringe. Second time: six months pregnant, working full time and exhausted. I think I can be excused for this one). After my two stints in The Big, State Subsidized House, I'm tantalizingly close to an associate's. I recently enrolled in an institution stupid/generous enough to let me complete all of my remaining degree requirements by CLEP exam. Thus, I have been planning to devote the next few months to disorganized but enthusiastic self-study. If and when my degree is conferred, I intend to have a massive, ethanol-saturated party to celebrate the fact that it took me nine years to complete a two-year program.

I've assembled a portfolio of roughly thirty personal essays (almost all of which are edited, stylized and sanitized versions of Thumbscre.ws pieces... hence my longer-than-typical post interval). I've purchased a Writer's Market subscription. I've even shelled out for an "author's career consultation"; this succeeded in revving me up about getting my work published for, oh, maybe two days; after that, I retreated to my usual quiet terror regarding the entire process.

Despite paying my own bills, taking care of my own business, forging my own way, [insert positive, self-esteem-boosting activity here... stir-frying my own seitan! Applying my own slipcover!], I've still been feeling... unsatisfied. Underachieving. Slacker-esque. Tired of answering the inevitable, "So where did you go to college?", with a curt, "Hard Knocks U, PUNK!" I feel as though I should have accomplished so much more in the professional, educational and creative arenas by now. However, I'm beginning to think confronting all three at once is somewhat self-defeating. Chipping away at career advancement AND a degree AND my own byline in Humorous, Poignant Yet Saucily Vulgar Personal Essay Weekly (Ed. note: wouldn't that be lovely?) makes progress towards each goal agonizingly slow.

Well, then... I'm kicking down the Fourth Wall and asking your advice/assvice/opinion: what do I do? I feel like I'm standing at the Chinese buffet, starving, yet too stunned by the array of choices to actually step forward and grasp the Egg Roll of Achievement.

Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself

I react to stress much like a horror movie villain reacts to being whacked upside the head by the terrified-yet-resourceful cheerleader. We both roar, retreat, rub our tender spots in solitude. Then, just as the residents of Predictable Plot Twist Terrace are heaving big, naive sighs of relief that no more teenagers will be forcibly de-spleened... YAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH! We come busting through the nearest wall with a gore-encrusted scimitar and a smile, ready to dispatch our stressors (be they marital problems or bat-wielding blondes) with extreme prejudice. Vengeance is administered. Gallons upon gallons of red-tinted corn syrup are splattered around the joint. What you don't see - even in the deluxe, unrated director's cut - is what happens After. The curses have been hurled, the possessions divided, the ties that bind painstakingly unraveled. Susie Q. Debate team has been neatly relieved of both Louisville Slugger and spleen. We both stand in a stranger's living room, sweaty and panting, wondering what the hell just happened.

Laughter may be the best medicine, but it is surely an over-the-counter one, dispensed in a cheery yellow carton right next to "Time", "Hindsight" and "Don't Pick at It". For sheer illicit neuron-tickling, nothing beats panic. It's always been my drug of choice. Kitchen fires, transmission troubles and emotional meltdowns are like flame coursing through my veins (not to mention across my stovetop). Beneath the pounding pulse and dampened palms, I'm eerily calm. I can almost feel each polished wooden bead click softly against its neighbor as my mental abacus calculates how to remedy the situation at hand. I have pondered careers as an EMT, a crime scene cleanup specialist and an air traffic controller (the latter when "Pushing Tin" was in heavy rotation on HBO; if John Cusack played a compost farmer, I'd probably spend a few weeks waxing rhapsodic about moldering banana peels). I actually enjoy helping others move; relocating a person's entire life in several short hours (in a truck with screechy brakes, while being char-broiled under the summer sun) is nothing if not a dull, controlled panic. The majority of the time, I crave the solutions, not the cheap thrills which necessitate them.

Whirring computers, blatant infidelity, three feet of snow and more on the way… I’m on it. I’m a fixer. Unfortunately for me – and the rest of the few, the proud, the compulsively fidgety – there is no solution tidy enough so as to be completely invisible. Life’s like grape juice… there will always be traces; ghostly, indelible, utterly infuriating streaks announcing that Yes, This Actually Happened. When operating in a state of jaw-grind, barrel-of-a-.38 terror, everything else tends to melt away. It’s a strangely soothing, almost autistic state… you cannot look at anything but the problem, because there is only the problem. The rest of the universe has been smudged into a deep, fuzzy nothingness. There comes a point, however, when you’ve got to snap out of your reverie, step back and regard your handiwork. Naturally, it is never quite as you imagined.

The time, the unholy quantity of time… that’s what surprised me. I’d spend an hour splayed across the couch, just thinking, so peculiarly free of obligations that I almost expected to float away the second I sat up.

At our darkest, snot-drenched worst, my husband and I spent hours each night sitting in bed, talking, crying, dissecting and debating. Drawing circles and loops and Spirograph patterns around an impossible problem, wondering why bright young things such as ourselves couldn’t just solve the damned thing already. When one or both of us was utterly spent, we’d collapse in the dark, burying damp, puffy faces in rough pillowcases. Occasionally, one of us would snake a tentative hand across the blankets, out of kindness or a distant hope that maybe skin-on-skin might correct what mind-on-mind seemed powerless to address. We’d sleep for five fitful hours, stumble off to work, come home, repeat the entire process. It was exhausting, agonizing and fruitless, but it was something, and clearly, something had to be done. Something always has to be done. Relatives still bring gelatin desserts to terminal cancer patients. Jell-O never cured anything, but it’s a testament, a wobbly neon monolith to the irresistible urge to throw yourself head-first at a bad situation. You’ve got to ride that panic like a big, shimmering, jiggling wave… otherwise, you might get washed away.

I got washed away. I drifted, idiotically poked jellyfish, subsisted on kelp, family and antidepressants. I washed up in Philadelphia. Staggering ashore, I was stunned. I was still alive. I felt glad, self-confident, hopeful for the future. I had a cute little apartment, a precocious little boy, a pack of wonderful, supportive female friends. And yet there was that odd, tender spot inside, like a nagging sprain. And the time – oh, lord, all that damned time.

The couch and I bonded. It began to seem like the ideal partner – supportive, a fine listener and an excellent lay (insert rimshot here). It might have been dumpy and the world’s ugliest shade of industrial blue, but it was a nice, solid surface to cling to while being battered by the big truths. I had spend the past six months acting, reacting, booking therapy appointments, hustling my panicked little ass off. All of which had made it conveniently easy to blur out everything else. Like the fact that I was going to get divorced and be a single mother at twenty-four. Like the radical personality changes this trial by fire had instilled in me. Like the realization that I’d spent the past seven years – important, formative years – with a man who, while generally sweet and supportive, just wasn’t terribly into me. I somehow doubt that the authors of the bestselling “He’s Just Not That Into You” will ever release a sequel entitled “P.S. – And You Still Married Him, You Dipshit!” The topic is just a wee bit too weighty for the pop-psych section of Barnes & Noble.

When the good ol’ adrenal glands have spurted their last, when your heart rate has dipped back down to a steady thrum, when you have re-donned your rain slicker and skulked off into the distance, preparing for the inevitable sequel… there is not despair, exactly. Or at least there doesn’t have to be. Every event has the capacity to make an individual better or worse. I choose to be made better, to let each kick in the ass propel me that much closer to the person I’d like to be. There isn’t a bad feeling, or a good feeling, so much as a scooped-out, empty feeling. Everything extraneous has been removed and tossed down the Insinkerator, and you’ve got no choice but to regard your new life with a kind of shell-shocked bemusement. Guess what, tough gal? Yes, This Actually Happened.

It’s time for a road trip. In the words of the late, luscious Soul Coughing, I’m “running on fumes, I got to get right with this.” Tucked away in the bachelorette pad, it is a slow, strange process. I still pause at least once a day to grin, sniffle and mutter, “Huh, these are MY coffee mugs”, as though they were a dusty ruin of a long-dead culture rather than six bucks’ worth of IKEA-ish porcelain. I need to hang up the scimitar, come down off the ceiling, go crashing through some nature preserves, freshen up my bug bites. This actually happened, and it’s actually still happening. It’s time to fuel up the Civic, open the road atlas and get right with this.