I feel like an alien.

This past February, I call my doctor’s office. “I think I have a gluten allergy.” I say.

A few days later, my doctor sees me. We talk. He doesn’t think I have a gluten allergy. I tell him that my skin has been unusually pimply, but had gotten better, I think, whenever I avoided wheat products.

“Any diarrhea?” He asks, looking up from his laptop screen, his fingers frozen from their otherwise flickering clicking state, suspended above his flat black keyboard. My face warms and I am quiet for a moment. I don’t want to tell lies, but I haven’t really had the trots, squirts or the runs, as they say. Yet I know that, at this crucial juncture, describing my digestive expressions as plain old poop and pee will get me nothing. So I fib.

“Yeah….a little bit, maybe. Yes.”

He types this. Then he types up the blood test form because of my complaint of diarrhea and diarrhea and diarrheadiarrheaanddiarrhea, expelling this private potty word several times as if it is some requirement. Maybe he’s wearing a wire from my insurance company or maybe he’s just waiting for me to cry out, “OK OK! I haven’t reeeeallly had diarrhea.” But I don’t and he sends me off for blood work.

“Don’t avoid wheat products before the blood test or it won’t work.”  He tells me. 

That weekend, the gluten gods rapture me into a heaven of burnt bagels, cheesy calzones, big bowls of honey glazed cereal and French bread sandwiches. After this glorious two-day wheat orgy, I feel physically fine, a little fat with a bloating doughy belly, but no diarrhea. On Monday, I go to the hospital for blood work. 

A few days later, I get a call from my doctor’s office. I have no intolerance to wheat.

It’s something I’m eating that’s causing my skin to do this, I tell my doctor next. Maybe something really small like a spice or something. He sends me to an allergist.

In the allergist’s office, a nurse presses cold rounded needles across my back. After she completes this task, I am instructed not to move for fifteen minutes. I sit in stiffness, my back slowly rounding. After thirty minutes, the doctor knocks, enters, looks at my back, wipes away the wetness and tells me to get dressed as he closes the door behind him. Once dressed, the doctor reenters to tell me that I have no common food allergies. He doesn’t know what’s going on with my skin, but he feels bad for me and gives me a prescription for antibiotics.  I thank him and go on my way, planning to never really take the pill for when I took it for acne as a teenager, it caused my face to sunburn all year round.

A few weeks later, I call the dermatologist’s office where I had made an appointment a few weeks before. My appointment isn’t until August. It is March now. “What if I think I have Rosacea?” I ask the receptionist over the phone. “Could you see me sooner then?”

“No. Sorry. But I can put you on our waiting list...”

“I think I have Rosacea.” I say to my doctor. He looks closely at my face. It doesn’t look like Rosacea to him. Looks like acne. “But this is on my cheeks!” I tell him. “I’ve never had acne on my cheeks. Ever. And this doesn’t really feel like acne. This burns.”

“Haven’t you made an appointment with the dermatologist yet?” he asks.

“It’s in August.”

“Well, this isn’t Rosacea.” He says, but he can prescribe me some acne cream. “Which pharmacy would you like me to send this to?” 

You can send it to the pharmacy known as your ass because that shit isn’t going to help me.

“The CVS on Main Street is good. Thank you.” 

Last week, I call my gynecologist’s office.  “I think I have Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.” I say. The receptionist schedules me for an appointment for Thursday with Amy, the nurse practitioner.

Thursday morning, Amy the nurse practitioner tells me that it doesn’t look like Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. Have I noticed an increase in chest, pubic or facial hair? I show her my naked lap. She shakes her head and I cover myself. She then pulls out a little white card and instructs me to record my periods. Months of marking little Xs. That’s what this little card means. This makes me cry. “So you aren’t going to have me tested?” I ask. This crying of mine embarrasses us both. She leaves the room and brings back a yellow form. She’s going to give me the blood test anyway. I cannot take the test until the third “bleeding” day of my period. I thank the poor nurse, get dressed and walk out of the doctor’s office.

Inside the confines of my car, I finish my sobbing. This is my most preferred place to weep, the driver’s seat. Something about the dramatic clutching of the steering wheel or the several small mirrors or perhaps it’s the immediate privacy in any public parking lot that allures me so.

On Friday, my left eye begins to hurt like a bruise. Sunday morning, I awake with a full blown stye on my bottom left eyelid. Even my cheek is puffy. Sunday afternoon, I leave Brooklyn with my friend Claire and we drive home to Northampton, Massachsuetts, leaving Scott with Claire's fiancé, Jay. Scott departs from JFK Airport the following day for Israel on a free ten-day trip called Birthright. We had driven to Brooklyn Saturday morning to stay with our friends in Clinton Hill.

Extacy pills before a rave of rapists, creepers and undercover cops. After taking the drugs, I lay back down. Still my eye won’t close. I turn on my phone and search for the symptoms of Lyme Disease, for a tick had bit me in April and still I have an unhealed mark on my hip. As I read the common symptoms, I discover that this must be it. I must have Lyme Disease. (Even though my troubles started far before April). As I make my new diagnosis, anxiety begins to rupture from my stomach and heart palpitations swell through the small bone bars of my chest cavity. I’m having heart attack. At 3:30am, I nearly drive myself to the local hospital. Alone, for my first night alone, alone, all by my self in this queen sized bed while Scott sleeps on an air mattress in Brooklyn. The next day he is heading for his homeland with a group of twenty something strangers. I’ve never felt so desperate for companionship. How lucky I am to have him here most of the time to carry me from these bouts of insanity. If I die right now, I’m going to be really angry at myself. I should wake up my roommates, Amy and Mark and tell them that I might be having a heart attack. It’s probably not a heart attack, but what if it is? I don’t want them finding me dead from a drug overdose tomorrow morning. Should I call for an ambulance?

But I don’t go anywhere and I don’t call anyone or knock on anyone’s bedroom door. Instead I toss through twenty minutes of unnerving sleep before my alarm clock honks like a stupid goose at 5am. My left eyelids stick together with a thin layer of yellow-crusted junk. I roll out of bed and stand so that I won’t fall back asleep. My reflection in the bathroom mirror is unrecognizable. I have red sores across my cheeks, patches discolored brown and my left eye looks like a deflated red balloon, piled there atop my eye, beneath my brow.

At work, I call my doctor’s office. “I think I have Lyme Disease.” I tell the receptionist. The doctor can see me at 3:45pm. Despite that I nanny until 5pm, I make the appointment. I send my roommate, Amy, a message. She agrees to help me by watching the boys while I see my doctor. I pick her up before the appointment and while I am inside she sits with the boys in the car, drawing the toddlers sketches of fish and octopuses and making paper airplanes. While I wait in the waiting room, I stand at the window watching the car.

Once inside the doctor’s office, while I wait for the doctor to come in, I send Amy a message. “I’m sorry this is taking so long.” I send to her.

“They’re being good so far.” She says.

“Ok good. I’ll make this up to you.”

“No need. Get better! That’ll make me happy.”

As soon as my doctor walks into the room, I watch myself weep. I apologize and get through my words like a train on an overgrown track. “I feel like I’m falling apart.” I tell him. “My body isn’t healing. My skin isn’t healing like it’s supposed to.” And for the first time he agrees that this doesn’t look like acne. It doesn’t look like Lyme Disease either, but we can do the blood test to be sure. I tell him about the rash on my feet and he inspects my puffy eye. Then I show him this ingrown hair on my bikini line that blew up the night before into a bluish bubble. He tells me he thinks that it was wise to pop it, which surprises me as I remember sopping up the fluid with a handful of tissues. He tells me this all seems very similar to Scott’s abscess from the year before. Where could we have been exposed to such bacteria? Do we shower at a gym? "No. I do yoga." I tell him, but there are no showers there. Honestly, I’m a little angry he doesn’t think it’s Lyme Disease. He puts me on antibiotics and some nose ointment. He says if my eye isn't better or close to better by Thursday he's going to have an eye specialist drain it.

I feel like a fucking alien.

After the appointment, I drive Amy home. Then I drive the boys home.

Then it dawns on me that my yoga mat must be infested with years of bacteria for I never clean that thing. Scott’s cyst last year was on his back and he likes to do sit-ups on the yoga mat. 

I call Scott. He’s in a loud airport shop. He steps out to a terminal to talk. I try not to cry, but his gentle voice opens the damn dam I usually keep guarded by a family of prosperous beavers, letting my dead sea to further flood from my eye and a half with such force I can barely breathe. Perhaps the beavers don’t work during illness. Anyway, I had planned to not tell him anything. I didn’t want him to know that I nearly called him in the middle of the night. That in my sleep deprived drugged up delirium, I actually considered driving back to Brooklyn for a hug. But as soon as I hear him say, “Ah Rachey”, my night and day eject out of me like a messy shit, yes diarrhea. As I wipe away my tears, I tell him how much I love him and he tells me the same and that he misses me already. Eventually I realize that saying good bye without a shaky voice isn’t possible at this time in my life so I say it the best I can, with “really don’t worry about mes” wrapping through my good and byes like hundred year old vines in the wind. 

There I am, in my favorite weeping place, the driver’s seat. Parked in the center of town outside the pharmacy where I plan to purchase my new prescriptions. I haven’t put money in the meter yet. It’s a little before 6pm and I imagine a meter maid coming to write me a ticket and then I imagine killing the old maid right there on the sidewalk beside that line of multi-colored newspaper boxes. But no one comes along and after Scott and I say our final good bye, I put two nickels into the machine.

As I walk back to the car from the pharmacy, my father calls and again my tears begin falling and my voice begins rattling like a falling top. My father is on the case. He tells me. He’s going to help me figure out what’s wrong with me. I believe him because, luckily for me, I still secretly believe that he is Superman.  

I go to the grocery store, the good grocery store, and buy three pieces of almond encrusted tilapia; a bunch of broccoli, a bag of whole wheat pasta and two big bunches of dinosaur kale. I will turn this around. This is the start of my skin recovery.

When I get home, I throw out all of my yoga stuff. It’s like the Velveteen Rabbit story, only I don’t have a bonfire in the woods, just a big green garbage can. Amy grills the fish on tin foil and I make pasta salad and sautéed broccoli. I thank them, my roommates for all their help, for watching Penny while I was in New York and for watching the boys while I was falling apart.

At around 9pm, I take my meds, which is one antibiotic pill, and then I take several alcohol swabs to my face.

“You seem exasperated.” My doctor tells me while I lay on the table and he inspects the black hole on my bikini line.

“It’s been a long year.”

I hold a hot washcloth to my eye for a half an hour or so and go to bed. Then I sleep. Really sleep.

“I think you might have MRSA,” My father tells me. I’m not going to search that. I tell myself. I can’t. And I’m definitely not going to do an image search for it. I’m going to wait and see how this two-week antibiotic trial goes. (This inner dialogue lasts as long as the walk from my kitchen to the computer.) Here I am sitting at the computer. MRSA is what made Michael Jackson lose part of his nose. I’m going to lose part of my nose. Suicide is happening pre-nose crumbling. If I can’t deal with pimples, I certainly can’t live with half a nose. I tell my father that this scares the desire to live out of me. “It isn’t life threatening. Its just uncomfortable. So let’s just wait and see what your dermatologist says.” He says, calming me. 

The next morning, I go to my doctor’s office and speak with the front desk receptionist nurse. “My father thinks I have MRSA.” I tell her. 

A couple hours later, she calls me back after speaking with my doctor. “He’s already treating you as if you had MRSA.”

At my last appointment, in my physically disfigured and mentally altered state of failure to operate my own body, I couldn't quite comprehend what he was explaining to me about this virus. So after a year of fluctuating levels of attractiveness, from days of heinous discoloration and blistery bumps across the tops of my cheeks and above my eyebrows, it is finally solved. The mystery is solved. Not yet cured, but at least understood.

Scott is still away. In an email, I tell him, “I’m going to look like the blushing bride you married when you get home.”

For two weeks I’ve been living without his body in bed with mine, so many days without even speaking with him. He’s sent me a couple emails entitled “international love”. Short emails I’ve read over and over. Every day, I scan the news headlines for any violence in Israel and Scott’s grandparents and parents call me to say hello. It’s just Penny and I in the quiet apartment tonight. Amy and Mark are away. They'll be back tomorrow. I swept the floors tonight and tossed the moldy leftovers from the back of the fridge. I haven’t cried since last Monday. I’m fine by myself. On my own schedule. Eating what I feel like. Going to bed early if I want, late if I feel the impulse. But it’s lonely here without him, and this fills me with both gratitude and sympathy for anyone who's every found herself sick and alone.

Douche Bags

"Gut taken in at a checkpoint. Fuckin' six months without a license. But I gut a good lawya, so..." A redhead with rust freckled arms, says.  


"That happened to me last summah, dude." His friend says. 


"Where was the checkpoint?" Another guy asks. 


"Ovah on Columbus Street in Springfield. Fuckin'...yeah but it's cool, I gut a good lawya." 


There is a pause here as the three nod their heads and look around. I can't tell because I'm trying not to stare, but I think this is an awkward moment. 


"You livin 'round here now?" 


Last year, a fellow coworker at the grocery store refers to his D.U.I. with a carefully crafted nonchalance, calling it a "dooey." 


"A what?" I ask. 


"D.U.I." He says. 


Ahhh...a dooey. Just a fuzzy little dooey for driving drunk. No big deal. Cop was an ass hole probably, right? Fuckin' pig pull you over in your low riding, bass bumping beige Camry while you and three other twenty something tormentors speed around town verbally violating every female you pass because it's funny and because it's "fuuuckin' summah dooood"?  


One morning last week, while on his bicycle, Scott is confronted by a man in a white unmarked van. At the intersection on the edge of our small city center where one lane splits into two, Scott gives the signal to go left and steers his bicycle to the right side of the left lane. This infuriates the man in the white unmarked van behind him who slams on his gas pedal and speeds past Scott, nearly hitting the back tire of his bicycle. Blown away by this unwarranted belligerence, Scott raises his middle finger and shows it to the driver. Seconds later, forced to stop at the traffic light, the stranger begins molesting Scott's patience by calling him a "fucking faggot" repeatedly before eventually stringing together enough words to construct a somewhat coherent sentence, "Oh you're such a tough guy with that finger, how about I take it and shove it up your fucking ass, you fuckin' faggot." Of course, it isn't a particularly smart sentence and the mere mention of shoving Scott's finger up Scott's ass is, of course, a form of man-on-man rape and yet he's the one calling Scott the faggot, but all the same, Scott remains calm.


"What was I supposed to do?" My husband asks. 


"You're supposed to be on the fuckin' sidewalk, ya fuckin' faggot." This man (who probably hasn't ridden a bicycle since he was a boy for only "faggots" ride bicycles) says.  


"We're not supposed to ride on the sidewalk." 


"You fuckin' registered, you fuckin' faggot?" The man shouts as his tires screech forward, leaving behind the echo of his rage to surround Scott where he sits simmering on his bicycle seat, waiting, still, for the light to turn green. Shaking off the last bit of loitering tension, he catches the eye of a young lady who stands on the sidewalk waiting for a walk signal. 


"Nice." She says, raising her eyebrows.


What is this? This culture of men who live in these cloudy bubbles of douche baggery?


Yesterday afternoon, after going out to lunch, Scott and I spot a friend sitting on the stoop of a storefront. "Hey, come over here and listen to this guy." He says, waving toward a skinny kid about our age playing guitar. "He's amazing. I've never seen anyone play like him." He says and so we sit and tap our toes and listen to this young man play Bob Dylan songs and yodel between ballads. After a few songs, two bronzed guys with tight white tee shirts, flowery font leg tattoos and cell phones clipped to their black leather belts pass before the busker in a dramatic slow motion dance of mockery. Unfazed, the busking boy plays on and a young woman drops a dollar into his guitar case. 


When these pompous gentlemen reach their buddies on the other side of the guitar, I watch while they give out elaborately casual handshakes before one of them spews,  


"Yo I had a massage and it was wundaful. I had a massage today and it. was. wundaful." It is as if he is speaking for the sake of speaking. As if he has perfected the delivery of contrived chit chatter. I wonder if he ever says anything at all.


We leave soon after, but before we do I toss two dollar bills into the busking boy's case and smile him a thank you. 


"Yo, you wanna go drinkin?" 


Drinking has become an activity. Like hiking a mountain or going to the movie theater or playing video games. It's a thing to do now. I admit, I do it. I drink to relax and laugh away the worries I have congesting my brain waves, but I don't call it that. I don't tell everyone I'm drinking in order to get drunk in order to justify vomiting cheap beer on some girl who looks slutty enough, drunk enough, to give me a blow job in the dirty bar bathroom (not because I want her to but because it'll be a funny story later and because blow jobs by strange girls in bathrooms are supposed to be something I desire and not something that terrifies me.) 


This is why there is nothing like a good man. A man who is secure enough to buy his son dolls, tea sets and dress up clothes. A man who is grown up enough to cross his legs and wear bow ties, cuff links and matching argyle socks. A man who is comfortable enough to embrace the awkwardness of acquaintances, allowing humor and honesty to collide with eye contact and fumbling handshakes. A man who says things like "I can't wait to see you as a mother." And, "When you smile, my heart opens. Some days I spend hours just trying to make you laugh." A man who admits to a real fear of spiders, crabs, lobsters and dead Asian girls with crooked spines, bluish white faces and long stringy hair. A man who is an individual and not a copy of a music video or advertisement or the copy of the copy of either of these things. A man with a scar on his back, not from a knife fight or gang brawl, but from an infected sack of pus he had surgically removed last Spring. 


Sure I don't really know these dudes I call douche bags (a phrase stemmed from my own horrid slang), but that's because I have no desire to know them. I wish I could tell them that. That their two-dimensional portrayals of the people they think they should be are extremely dull compared to the unique men they are on the inside. 

Nana Poopy!

Two-year-old toe head, Noah holds the back of his yellow toy dump truck at the top of the driveway. He has plans to push it down the hill, crashing the metal and plastic into the bumper of my car or flipping over the ridge between the cement and grass, but the boy accidently lets the truck go and it rolls out of his reach. Blimpy baby legs become a peach-colored blur as the boy goes into a full fledged high speed chase. With the hill's momentum and the help of four wheels, the truck manages to escape the clomping froggy rain boots of the proportionally enormous toddler (juxtaposed against the truck's size) for the entire journey down the hill until the truck suddenly hits the rough terrain of the grass and slows down. When he reaches it, Noah grabs the cab of the toy truck with both dimpled hands and shoves his face into the driver’s side window and scolds, “Nana poopy guy in there!” 

"Nana poopy" is the choice curse of the children I nanny for. It is a phrase taken from a sing songy tease that would be written phonetically as "naaanah poooopeee". The twin two year olds, Noah and Willy, learned it from their six-year-old brother, Johnny. The phrase appeared a few months ago and despite my attempts to ignore it or punish them for it, I could not and still cannot rid them of this cuss. 

“Nana Poopy Rachel!” Noah yells from the confines of his crib after I return him to behind the white wooden bars. Seconds before, when their broken chatter had turned to commotion, I walked into their bedroom to discover that Noah and Willy are no longer in their cribs. Noah is in the closet and Willy is jumping inside Noah's crib. Both boys are laughing when I walk in, but the shrill shocked voice flying from my mouth silences them.


"What are you doiiiing?!" 


The words nearly echo. This makes Willy cry, but Noah just scowls, angry that I have ruined their ruckus time. Once I place both boys in their designated beds, I close their bedroom door. As I do, Noah yells, 


"NANA POOPY RACHEL!" Then there is a slight pause before Willy whispers, 


“Nanna poopy, Rachel.” 


Every muscle in my body tenses with incredible rigidity. My morning’s caffeine has now completely evaporated from my bloodstream and, having been watching these two busy boys since 6:45 in the morning, by 2:30pm, I am utterly exhausted. As I land in the middle of the red cushy couch of the living room, Willy's muffled words reach my ears and I can’t stop myself from wailing,  


“NANA POOPY TO YOU, WILLY! NANA POOOPY TO YOU, NOAH!” The phrase had been itching to leave my vocal chords all day. It doesn't feel as good as I had envisioned. Instead I feel mildly humiliated. I cover my eyes with my hands and crash myself into the pile of pillows beside me.  There is a short moment of quiet before giggles and mattress creaking returns to the warm sound waves that separate us, and then, 


"Rachey mad." 


"I know." 


I feel horrible, but then I hear Noah say, "Willy, Willy look at me."  


Giggles.

"Look at me, Noah!" 


They have already forgotten that Rachey is mad. Slightly relieved, I decide that all I can do now is wait for them to tire themselves out and fall asleep. 

I must have history with nana poopy for it tickles my nerves so furiously. One day, Noah will not stop saying it. He says it to his toys, his brothers, to me, his bicycle, to nearly everything and everyone he comes into contact with.  Before we leave for town that morning, he sits in his car seat, saying it again and again and again and again while I buckle Willy in.  At this point, after two and a half -nana poopy- hours, I have reached the fraying end of my wits. I try to tell him nicely not to say it. When that doesn't work, I explain simply that it is not a nice thing to say. By this time, I have already tried ignoring the nanas and the poopies. I have tried time outs for every mention of nana or poopy, but to no avail, NOTHING WORKS. Hunched halfway into the car, I decide on a new approach, but as soon as I start spewing my explanation to the little boy, I know that what I am saying is far more than he can completely comprehend. I say it anyway. 


“Noah, if you say nana poopy one more time, I am going to tell momma when she gets home from work and she is not going to be happy with you and if everyone gets ice cream after supper tonight, you are not going to get ice cream. So don’t say it, Noah. Don’t say—“ 

“Nana poopy ice cream.” He whines with intuitive rebellion. 


I nearly laugh I am so angry, but instead I growl slightly and the boys repeat my sound as I close the car door. I do a little dance in the driveway to let off steam. After a few heavy breaths and some counting, I climb into the car and drive the three of us to town for some fresh air, playground play and an enormously potent cup of coffee. 

Reaching for the stars and shit...

.

There is a generation here of broken down artists, of barristas and bartenders, babysitters and bachelors of the fine arts and I feel like its fat, flamboyant ringleader. 


The daughter of middle class baby boomers, I have no real fear of homelessness, bread lines or the depletion of Medicare. Instead, I run screaming from confining cardboard cubicles, menial labor, micromanaging managers and long term financial commitments. Like an arrogant protester who's really only on the picket line because he prefers his barbecue grill to the community copy machine, I am still (somewhat secretly) sitting on sidewalks striving for what I want: the life as a full time artist. This is a frightening fact because I am twenty-seven years old and can no longer, really, use my age as an excuse for drifting. Even my mother has begun giving me the "you can't do this forever" look... this stalling, fighting, falling.


It reminds me of an afternoon from when I was a young teenager. I dressed to go running and announced my plans to my parents. "Have fun." They told me. "Be safe!" But this response was not what I had expected nor hoped. They were supposed to tell me I was too small to be thinking of exercise that wasn't backyard play. 


It's scary when we grow up without noticing. 


Last spring, my friend Kelsey told me, "Do it now. Don't wait. It gets harder and harder to conceive as soon as you hit thirty." I imagined a thirtieth birthday party where my uterus falls out, my fallopian tubes retire and move to Florida and my little peach-colored utters start smelling of sour milk. Kelsey was right, I decided that day in the ice cream parlor, it was time I made myself a baby. 


I am very impressionable. 

Usually after visiting with my grandparents, who take pleasure in pontificating such phrases as "What are you waiting for?" and "You kids think you can plan everything!," I'll turn to my husband, Scott and say that it is time. Baby time. He has yet to accommodate such spontaneous suggestions. 


I didn't always accept myself as this self-involved idealist. Sure when I was a kid I believed in the cliches of dreams, rainbow slides and stars, but so did everybody. In the fourth grade, I wrote the words, "When I grow up I want to play basketball for the big leagues." Beside this carefully penned pipe dream, there was my school picture of florescent lasers, a wave of brown bangs and a turtleneck sweater ensemble. Once I got to high school I began seeing the common classroom posters of Michael Jordan, Bugs Bunny, Steve McQueen and Flipper the Dolphin as faded fanciful propaganda from the early 90s. The only one that really inspired me was the poster of the black smoker's lung beside the pink non-smoker's lung. The caption read "IMAGINE" or something and probably still hangs on the inside of the athletic director's door.


Toward the end of high school, I started seriously searching for my future career. Retreating to the computer lab often, I'd take several surveys. I was desperate to find any sort of personal passion that did not involve the arts. I thought about law,  government, psychology, but I couldn't imagine myself spending an entire adulthood pursuing any of these. I felt cursed. Years later, now perpetually stuck inside this realm rightly named "the real world", I still cannot enroll in any class or school to further myself as a professional business lady, nurse or landscaper. I hop jobs like bums board trains and I do not really see myself settling down to work forever anywhere. To be quite honest, I cannot completely comprehend how anyone can. How a young adult can say that he/she hopes to have the same job until retirement. To me, that job security looks more like a tediously tiring train ride in a warm windowless wagon. 

My mother is a principal for an elementary school. The union is meeting, she tells me. They're getting ready for a grievance. Of course they are, I think to myself. How could they possibly go day by day, year by year, working in the same building, sometimes the same classroom and be completely content? They're just looking for someone to blame for their boredom, their personal unhappiness, I tell her, don't take it personally, but she can't help it. When I see her Sunday, she drinks three cups of coffee before switching to white wine in the afternoon. My mother is a mover, but she can also commit when it is the right thing to do and, despite the conceived complaints of her employees, she knows that she is very good for her school. This is when I tell her that Scott is probably taking next year off teaching to see if teaching high school is really as horrible as it seems now. I want my health insurance and his bi-weekly pay checks, I tell her, but I am supporting his decision to choose his sanity over the security his job provides. Besides, despite my few semi-serious attempts to get pregnant, we still do not have children. This grants us a little more time for bad decisions. We think. And while Scott is searching his soul, I will be striving to still myself, linger longer in moments and apartments, towns and jobs. Maybe I'll wake up one day with a serious determination to sell tiny knick knack cat statues from a sidewalk cart or go back to school to be something other than an aging vagabond. 

Perhaps my problem is a lack of fear. Maybe a night dumpster diving; busking with my broken guitar; begging pedestrians for pennies and sleeping on a cot in a church basement is what I need to set up a future with reality in mind. I do sincerely wonder what it must be like to want to do something or be someone attainable.

A guided tour through my somewhat self-deprecating thoughts.

In our teens, my two sisters and I discovered the comforting glory of food. "Anorexia starts tomorrow." We'd grumble, grasping our swollen stomachs after family feasts and $20 brunch buffets. My family doesn't do buffets, I tell people smiling, after their restaurant suggestions. We can't handle the pressure. 

photo by Patrick Cummings

Do I feel the faintest glimmer of hunger? I should get a coffee. Anybody wanna grab a beer? WHO THE F ATE THE REST OF MY COOKIES? Is my stomach hollow enough to justify filling it with hardly chewed food and gulped down drink? I am going to eat only vegetables. No more processed foods EVER. I need to cool it on the dairy. I should fill my grocery cart with only pickles, parsley and celery. No more corn. No sugar. No more wheat! Maybe I should do one of those lemon turmeric cleanses and send several interior inches out my back door. I know what to do: chew my food. Chew and chew until it is complete mush and slithers down my throat like a slug on a slip 'n slide. Or, simply, eat more like a bird and less like a dinosaur. I am the middle child of a mother who rarely made enough for everyone to have seconds. I was always first to the stove with an empty plate (except for frozen stir fry dinner nights where terribly bland teriyaki sauce drenched rubbery vegetables and wrinkly brown beef strips). To this day, I am still always the first to be finished. If I were a little bird, I would pick at my plate, daintily taking in a few crumbs at a time and sometimes, SOMETIMES I would even be that person who pushes her plate away with an expression that reads, I've lost interest in this laborious act of eating. I will sip my drink. I won't open my mouth like a curved bridge over a river, flooding my throat and insides as though I haven't drunk in days. I will sip, sifting the liquid through my teeth and bathing my tongue. I will stop looking at food as my drug. I will start doing real drugs. That will distract me. I won't be thinking about those avocados or bananas softening in the fruit bowl if all my brain power is used to figure out when I can pay my dealer for more drugs. I don't think cocaine addicts eat much. Actually, I'm pretty positive they're usually waif thin. I could be waif thin and sickly! Get a couple duffel bags under my eyes and frequent, unannounced bloody noses. Have my ribs show through my winter coat and watch as my skin stretches over my bones like a sheet on an old springy cot. I know, I know! I'll stop sitting entirely. Stand all the time. Wear one of those step counters and walk several miles every day. I'll lose those ten pounds and when I do, when those ten pounds are gone, I will be completely happy. I will be enormously successful and confident. Life will be grand, perfect even. No, of course that isn't true. It isn't that simple. My life will be perfect when I lose those ten pounds and when my skin clears up and when I can convince the skin below my neck that it is more Italian than Irish and English and should, therefore, turn golden in the sun rather than this blotchy pink.  Yes. When those ten pounds are gone, when my face is blemish free and the rest of my skin is more gold than silver, then, then I will be perfectly happy. No, I suppose that's not completely true. Really it's all that in addition to when I can get this toe nail fungus figured out and when some nerdy lab rat somewhere invents a pill to shrink my feet to an adorable size seven and my sausage fingers to the size they were when I was six. When I am thinner and prettier and when I'm wealthy and can afford a new wardrobe and earrings that don't turn my earlobes green then, then I will be happy. I will be incessantly hungry with a stomach full of diet pills and a strangely stiff airbrushed face full of botulism, but I will perfect and happy, just like those fucking magazines and movie screens.

If I survive to an ancient age, will I, by then, just be wishing for this fleshy figure back, for this moist oily skin again? For this flexibility to paint my own toenails? When I am old and retired to rocking chairs and crochet classes, will I read this and cry out, "Damn you! You were your own kind of beautiful and all you saw were what society classified as flaws."  I remember when I was thirteen, writing very similar sentences in diaries and along the mirrors of my conscious thoughts. "When I have contact lenses, when my skin clears up, when my braces are off, when I have boobs, when my body doesn't resemble a baby giraffe...then I will be beautiful." These days, I eat like a hungry hungry hippo whenever I am anxious, bored, feeling awkward around acquaintances or when I am home alone with corn chips wedged into the back corner of the cupboard, but besides this habit to pack my mouth like the tiny suitcase of a queen, I am extremely healthy. I am alive. I am happy. I am loved. I am my own kind of beautiful.  

Osama

This morning, Monday, May 2, 2011, at around 5:45 a.m., while walking my dog, Penny through the quiet beginning of another week here in Northampton, Massachusetts, I passed a collection of colorful newspaper stands. My eyes caught sight of the headlines like an ignorantly eager fish might bite bait and a hook. "Osama bin Laden Killed by U.S." I read. 


I was a senior in high school when the country was attacked by al Qaida's traveling terrorists. That fall, my class's senior trip to Florida was cancelled, but not without a fight. We had an evening assembly. Passionate parents fought to keep the school trip. "We can't let the terrorist win!" I remember one mother saying in a sudden soliloquy. My mother and I sat in the back of the auditorium, leaning into one another, listening and keeping our comments to ourselves. "This is what they want! They want us to be afraid!" A father declared and a few people clapped in support, nodding their heads and saying things like, "He's right, you know, he's exactly right."  It was an awkward assembly (for no seventeen-year-old wants to be present when his/her parent is anything but silent and invisible). I remember my mother mumbling, "I'm not about to sacrifice my child to make a point." Logan International Airport had not yet regained her trust. That Spring, this same group of proactive parents organized and chaperoned the trip to Florida and I went. By then, my mother and father had decided that a quick trip to Disney World wouldn't, most likely, kill me.  


On September 11, 2001, I sat in the lunch room listening to incomplete and unintelligible stories as they spread around me like haze. Everyone leaned over their uneaten sandwiches. "Twin Towers," I heard. "Flew out of Logan," "New York City," "Pentagon" and "it was terrorists, terrorists hijacked the planes." I was nervous, uninformed. I didn't know where the Twin Towers were and I feared they might be in Boston. My father worked in Boston at the time. I didn't know where his office was in Boston, but I assumed it could be within the walls of one of these burning buildings everyone was whispering about. 


After lunch, in classrooms throughout the school, televisions and computers were turned on and tuned in. In smokey New York City streets, debris fell from the sky like dirty snow. Firefighters ran hoses. Police ran for survivors. Business men and woman ran around in heels and dark suits with faces distorted by horror and muddied by soot. Bodies fell from the sky. We watched bodies fall from the sky and planes crash into the New York City skyline. 


That night, President George W. Bush spoke on national television. "That poor bastard," I remember my mother murmuring when his sullen face appeared on the screen. For the following months, we watched the nightly news, wincing and choking up at the personal stories that began to play. Strangers stood before camera crews showing pictures of lost loved ones and crumpled tissues between their fingers as they rose them to their wet eyes. We watched footage of plastered walls of Missing Person papers in New York City bus stops and downtown subway stations. I remember when they stopped calling the work at Ground Zero, a rescue mission. I watched people in foreign city streets celebrate the attacks of September 11th. Dancing, parading and howling, these people publicly hailed the mass murdering martyrs. America, I learned in that moment, was like the rich, perfect, popular kid who one day got ambushed, defecated on, shoved into a locker and left over night to weep within darkness.  


I must admit that I do believe the murder of Osama bin Laden was extremely justified, however it is a peculiar, guilty joy or satisfaction that stems from the death of this person, even someone as corrupt and blatantly evil as he. Sunday night, after President Barack Obama announced the news, there were celebratory riots and prayer vigils across the country, particularly outside the White House and in New York City.  Across America, many people are smiling and sighing that justice has finally been served, but there are also many Americans shaking their heads and fingers, saying, an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind! and quotes by the renowned American pacifist, Martin Luther King Jr.  I can't say what I believe is right. My husband, Scott is disgusted by the excitement. This morning, while I made my bagged lunch, I compared Osama bin Laden to Adolph Hitler. He can't be alive, I said simply. He just shouldn't be alive. Of course, really, I don't know. Perhaps a formal trial would be interesting and just, but what possible sentence does one deserve for the massacre of thousands of innocent people? I know what my friend, Mark would say without even asking him. As I have written before, here, in an entry titled "Eye for an Eye", Mark would say that Osama bin Laden deserves to get what he did to others. He deserves to be raised high above a cement city street, to the height of the 110th floor of the Twin Towers, and thrown onto a burning ledge. He should be forced to choose between fire and a fall, a death by burning or a death by plummeting into the windy expanse of a fourteen hundred foot drop. 


Lucky for him, the Eighth Amendment of The United States Constitution would prevent such cruel and unusual punishment. However, no matter how he died, he is dead and whether you speculate, criticize or commend the actions of the United States in the raid and killing of this extremely powerful terrorist, all we can really do now is hope that Osama bin Laden does not escape Hell and hide in some hidden compound in Heaven.  

Street Shock

As we approach the small intersection where we will turn right, Scott and I pass a tall skinny white man with a long dark ponytail. From the sidewalk, the sullen stranger looks at me; lifts his right hand and adjusts his long fingers into the shape of a pistol. As we pass him, rolling toward the red light, he pulls the trigger of his middle finger and says, "yeah, ya freak." The yeah stretches between us as if he expects me to agree with him. Ya is plain and painfully general. Freak sticks into the air like a real bullet might. I stare at the man from inside a voiceless shock. I want to yell out my window that he is the freak. That he needs a haircut. That he can go fuck himself. But I can't. I am nauseous, numb and dumb. I look to Scott. He laughs. He probably mistook us for someone else, he says, but the gunman looked right at me for four or five full seconds, I tell him. Later, Scott retells the story to our roommates. "The guy was clearly crazy." He says and I laugh along while sharp shrapnel sinks into my flimsy skin. I am free of physical harm, but this particular brand of verbal violence lingers like a wet scab. 

It reminds me of a day in the year we lived in New York City.  I went to cross a street in midtown. I didn't have the walk signal, but there were no cars coming so I did what I always did and began to cross. When I reached a quarter of the way to the other side of this massive street, I noticed a yellow taxi driving toward me. It'll slow down, I thought to myself, but it didn't and after two more timid steps, I began to retreat, turning and running back to the curb. Once safely on the sidewalk, I watched the cab speed by. There was no time to give the driver my favorite finger gesture, only fleeting eye contact. As he passed by, the driver glared at me, grimaced even. He wanted to strike me dead in the middle of the street, I knew. He wanted hit me and drive away, aiming his wheels to squish my skin and crunch my bones into the hot mid-afternoon city cement. As my body laid flat and bloodied, my guts torn out by black rubber tires and plastic windshield wipers, the driver would successfully flee the scene (for a yellow taxi in New York City is like a blond in Los Angeles: they are everywhere and they all look the same.) Shame on me. Such unessessary judgement against a particularly pretty demographic. But my shallow aggression toward blonds derives entirely from dull, imature insecurities where big boobied blond Barbies stand on the tip toes of my childhood bedrooms anxiously waiting for their next costume change, haircut, or private make-out session with Ken. It is nothing compared to the contageous hatred that festers in the puckered eyes of these grown men. 


Was the driver's day so bad, filled with so many mindless jaywalkers that he just wanted to hit one of them to revenge himself against every person who had ever caused him to tap his break pedal since the day he started driving the New York City's streets for tips? Was he caught inside the enchanting thrill of a death threat? At the time, I couldn't help but think the dark skinned taxi driver wanted to hit me because he saw me as a self-entitled white girl tramping across the street like a glutonous Goldilocks, trespassing and stealing the property of strangers, but that's racist to think and embarrassing to admit. Besides, my locks, as I have previously implied, are not gold. Was the man with the imaginary gun angry because we were driving an old beige Toyota Camry? Was he jealous of how openly we flaunt our fortune?  I knew we never should have gotten those spinning diamond rims, gold leafed license plates or that slammin' sound system. 



Perhaps the problem is that most of us fill our bellies with 20 ounce bottles of carbonated anger and any one little thing can tip them over, causing enormous amounts of emotion to spew out of us in unexpecteded explosions. I think that probably was the case of the cab driver. Yet when it comes to the man on the side of the road, I am still somewhat speechless. I have decided that he is crazy. Yet the real scary thing is that this man might be eligible to purchase a real weapon one day. Actually, he might already own one. The cab driver had a weapon, his yellow taxi. When his bottles tipped and broke, he tried to kill me with his car, or at least that's what it felt like. What if the man with the ponytail is packing a real pistol one day and I pass him again and for some reason my eye contact causes some kind of chemical reaction in his body and he draws a real gun on me and all I can do is stare back at him in a silent shock?