The Deeds Counter, Unbalanced

How do you know if you're a bad person? I'm asking this seriously.

I mean, I don't believe in moral absolutes, because I think they point to lazy thinking and dangerous certainty on the part of the person assigning labels-- judge not lest ye be judged, and all that-- but what if there were something like a Good Deeds and Bad Deeds bar chart floating around above all our heads that kept a running tally of our current totals? And what if your Bad Deeds bar started a winning streak? And further, what if you were a prolific dreamer/sufferer of nightmares and you woke up from a startlingly realistic one to confront the certainty that you have a very good chance of frightening any children you might have?

Part of me wants to think that people who are dangerously ahead in their Bad Deeds category kind of sense the hopelessness of evening the score, and hence don't even worry about it. That would make my current fretting evidence that my situation is reversible, that Good Deeds can come out on top again through a program of conscious action in some areas and restraint in others. I think for many years I thought of myself as significantly ahead in the Good category, even to the point where I let myself off the hook for several things I'd been classing as Bad Deeds. Like getting kicked out of high school, for example, which I have since rendered in so many shades of gray that it falls into nether category and is instead something that I measure on a separate graph altogether, one called Experiences Which Allow Me Greater Empathy for Others.

But lately I've been noticing some definite accretions in the Bad category. I know they're bad because they tend to come up in this curious moral vacuum, where the why/why not question seems equally pointless on either side, and it's only after I go ahead and do them that I realize, "Yes, that was bad." I hate being elliptical, but I also hate being overly confessional because I suspect I describe my own bad deeds with a bias sometimes that's meant to encourage others to exonerate me, so let it suffice to say that alcohol plays a stupidly central role in all of this. My Bad Deeds column, which I imagine (uncreatively) as red against Good Deeds' blue, becomes a flaming pillar sometimes when I drink. I forget peoples' names, I gossip, I perform ridiculous stunts to cope with the fact that I'm bored and uncomfortable and really just want to leave. On one hand, I think using alcohol as a social crutch is pretty common for a lot of people, and that doesn't necessarily mean they're actively doing Bad Deeds. On the other hand, I think I'm often prone to waving that crutch around and smashing things instead of just leaning on it.

The obvious fix here would seem to be to just stop drinking for a while and wait for Good Deeds to catch up and overtake Bad, and I've done this periodically in my past. I guess I just wonder about the outside chance that I'm wrong, and there is such thing as moral absolutism and I happen to be Bad--Period. and all this shades-of-gray, deeds-counter business is the real crutch. And if I'm Bad--Period. then what about the possibility of truly fucking up my children?

I suspect there's a gaping hole, or five, in pretty much all of the logic I just used, and that the past century of Western philosophy has been devoted to clearing it all up and I just stopped taking notes that day in college, but it feels like the past couple of months have been leading up to the question that hit me like a lightning bolt last night at 3:37 in the morning. "What if I'm a bad person? What if I frighten my children?" And it was scary enough to make me burst into tears and wake up my husband and our pets.

Escape Hatch

Tonight I'm going to my last night class for graduate school. This has me more freaked out than I would have imagined. The road from here on out to graduation in May is a long, lonely uphill trek wherein I'm supposed to complete a bunch of independent reading hours, put together my thesis, and then complete some giant how-much-do-you-know-about-the-history-of-your-genre exam, while still somehow dealing with the current realities of my job and trying to figure out some future money-making endeavor. When I think too long on any one part of that last sentence, it makes me sick to my stomach. Without dwelling too long on the point, let's just say I get it now, the wistful deus ex machina logic some women employ when they light on sudden pregnancy as an answer in the face of inevitable uncertainty. Luckily, though, I'm just tasked with the one life to muddle through right now.

ANXIETY-INDUCED CHANGE OF SUBJECT

So it's the beginning of the Really Cold Days, officially, and to mark the occasion I'm wearing my ass-busting boots. They got their name one cold rainy day in Texas, remarkably similar to this Fresno morning, when I went charging through the UT Student Union on a mission for waffle fries and felt the damp slate floor skid from beneath my turning heel and the entire world came shooting up from the perpendicular to the parallel, and my elbow, shoulder, and head hit the floor in rapid succession. The fall was so bad someone else screamed. Days later, assessing the injury list beyond the mild concussion and terribly bruised ego, I found that my sweater had somehow left its own waffle-knit print bruised onto my elbow. I'm still not sure how that's possible, but it was the prettiest bruise I've ever had.

And somehow this leads me to thinking about our upcoming winter trek. Pants and I have established the tradition of abandoning both our families (sorry!) during the Most Wonderful Time of the Year to blunder selfishly off in search of icy adventures in the American West. Last year took us through Arizona and Nevada to Utah and this year we're hitting up the Redwoods and southern Oregon. This year we actually plan to camp for four days in the snow, even though it's well-known by now that cold makes me homicidal. Fortunately, it's also well-known that I have no pride when it comes to staying warm. My dad has this ridiculous suit-thing that his company hooked him up with when it looked like he was going to go work in the Arctic Circle, as in, the no-shit, abandon-all-hope cold, and then when it looked like the deal was off for a while, he sent me this ridiculous suit-thing, and oh how I rejoiced. It's bright blue and has a massive, nubbly-lined hood and a big stripe of reflective tape across the back, and when it's on, I look like a six-foot-tall starfish and walk with the stubby gait of an Ewok. I'm most definitely bringing it to Oregon, and if I have to get it out and put it on, it will be a shaming statement for Pants, who will have to acknowledge to passersby that he actually married this thing, and that yes, underneath all that, it is female.

In other news, I went to a wedding this weekend ended up on the roof of the squadron's short bus, which was remodeled on the inside to have black leather bench seating and a wet bar. It was cold, but the reception was outdoors and the space heaters few and far between. Consequently, the only option for warmth was vigorous activity, and the music wasn't working for me. Hence, bus-climbing. I know how it must have looked, not only to wedding guests but also to the legions of rehabbers whose half-way houses ringed the B&B on all sides, but sometimes you get an idea, and then you get bored listening to two hours of child-rearing conversations, and then the DJ plays "Achey Breaky Heart" more than once, and suddenly you're stacking coolers on top of each other and busting out the escape hatch. Plus, the view was nice.

Dream Walk

Last night I dreamed that I was sunbathing on the deck of an aircraft carrier when it decided to dive beneath the surface like a submarine. Apparently everyone else was prepared for this except me, and I had to swim along frantically trying to find the belly of the boat and knocking on all the porthole windows as I went, trying to get someone to let me in before the propellors chopped me up and I drowned. Someone did eventually let me in, though, so there's that.

Right now I'm reading a book called The Song Lines by Bruce Chatwin. It's about the Aboriginal concept of distance and time and maps, like how you basically sing the world into existence as you go along, following in the footsteps of your ancestors, who aren't even necessarily human. Landscape features are also elements of plot in the song-story, like for instance, this hill was formed when an ancestor forgot how to kill off fly larvae and the land was covered in maggots until he gathered them up and buried them all here. All of the land was formed in the Dream Time, which is kind of like the Judeo-Christian story of creation, and all of the paths still sing the same and are owned by different clans within different tribes, who can lend or borrow their songs at any time, but they can never get rid of them or lose them for good.

There's still a lot I don't understand about how land and movement can be a story, and how this concept totally precludes the idea of territorial boundaries or "owning" a delineated chunk of land, but I find the idea arresting. I like imagining the act of walking as something like writing because the times when I've felt the lowest and most tangled up, it's been coupled with an irresistible urge to walk. Once I ended up walking seven miles through South Austin when I'd just parked at the lake to look around. And this summer I went stomping out of the building pretty regularly on my lunch hour for two weeks to wander up and down the rows of grape vineyards tugging and tugging at some knot in my mind.

I'm finally working a little on my thesis, and it's heartening to discover that there's quite a bit of raw material to play with.

Fashionably Late to Existentialists' Ball

Last week I ended up in a situation that's become all too familiar to me over the years. The setting and particulars are always different, but the basic concept is that I'm somehow duped into a set-up where very expensive things I know nothing about (but should) are laid out for my perusal with the effect that I leave feeling worse than I've felt about myself in ages.

This one was a fashion show at a store frequented by my most perplexingly stylish friends. I say "perplexingly" because I would never in a million years put together the ensembles they do-- separately each individual piece makes me wrinkle my nose and think, Seriously?-- but they end up looking very sophisticated and creative and, well, expensive. Is it irony that they all manage to accomplish this by shopping at the same store? Possibly. Do I still feel very frumpy around them all the time, like every day is laundry day? YES.

So I went to this thing hoping to understand how "fashion" happens, how one manages to assemble a whole look that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts, age-appropriate, and flattering to the individual body, and I left feeling like "fashion" will always be Dutch to me. I am blind to its syntax and grammar, and I wish so much that I worked in a profession like my husband's where I could get away with wearing the same onesie in varying colors every fucking day. This realization took approximately 30 seconds, and the fashion show lasted three hours. Fortunately, there was free wine.

What that meant, though, was when it was time for me to follow my fashion-conscious friend around the store weighing the merits of this fifty dollar hat over that seventy dollar blouse, I had to pitch my voice extra high and say things like, "Oh, cute!" when really I was playing a game in my head that my brother and I used to play in the supermarket called "How would I tear this place up?" The rules of the game state that you must come up with creative and entertaining ways to destroy everything in sight, like "I would take a hockey stick and slash that bin of grapes apart" or "I would lay all the cereal boxes down like tiles on a road and run crunching sprints over them." I spent most of Tuesday night last week imagining hauling a fire hose loaded with bleach into one of Fresno's trendiest women's boutiques.

In unrelated news (or perhaps it's related under the general category of "poor attitude"), I'm pretty sure I've been friend-broken-up-with by the wronged combatant I mentioned in the previous post for a poorly timed crack about how fights are often thinly disguised attempts at establishing "alpha male-dom." In retrospect, you'd think I would have seen that coming, but I'm also the same a-hole who once commented to a friend that her failing relationship was like a mosquito biting a mannequin-- it looked like she should be getting what she needed, but the whole premise was wrong. In defense of these totally insensitive, bone-headed remarks, I can only offer that mosquito girl ended up being a total flake who burned me with a $600 hot check and my alpha male friend... well, who likes a hitter anyway?

Latest disturbing dream: I am the head of some sort of poorly-funded UN operation cleaning up after a massacre on an African beach. There is nowhere to step that isn't compressed human remains, and often I find I'm stepping on faces. My job is to sort human remains, and I'm already well into the task of loading up three separate trucks when the dream begins, but I can no longer remember my criteria-- whole bodies over here? Identifiable remains here? State of decay/probably time of death over here? In the middle of sorting this out, I am called over by the mother of a girl I went to junior high with. She wants me to pose with my arm around her daughter, who is wearing her typical weirdo-Fundamentalist long, denim dress, and tilting her head towards me with a fake smile. The sun is too bright and my hands get all tangled in the girl's waist-length permed hair, and I can't pretend to smile when I'm crying. The mother can't get the light exposure right on her camera and is taking picture after picture and scowling at us, and the girl eventually gets disgusted with me and stomps off.

All-too related: This American Life (I love you, Ira Glass, even if your delivery is marred by the neat smack of your lips) has an episode called "Fear of Sleep" in which people tell stories of why they've come to fear sleep. They range from a dopamine-deficient sleep disorder in which the sufferer does whacky shit like jump out of a window, to a family with a roach infestation so bad that roaches routinely end up in their ears, to this extended riff on how nightmares are essentially revealing of the loneliness of the human condition and how we're all just waiting to die and the fear you feel in a nightmare is the inescapable truth. I usually listen to this podcast while I'm walking a horribly predictable route around the perimeter of the base, so it was more than a little awkward when I burst into tears halfway through. Plus, I found a dead cat laid out in the grass beside the road, all careful and neat like someone was sorry they hit it. Its eyes were open and it took me a long time to figure out it was fully dead and not just dying while I watched, not knowing what to do.

So what do you do in this situation, when you're confronted with the undeniable hopelessness of existence while you walk for the 60th time around the perimeter of a world that feels like it grows smaller and more ridiculous every day? You cue up mindless synth rock on the iPod and run the rest of the way home like you're being chased, which, in a sense, you are. Did I mention I'm turning 31 soon?

Nose Rings, Fights, and Tiny Portable Circus

The fog is settling in today and our dog is unreasonably, cracked-out excited to be home from the Dog Jail (the weekend kennel to which we've become something more than regulars-- maybe more like benefactors, like the Medicis of pet boarding) when she's usually kind of glum about having to hang out with us again. The place we take her has random peacocks wandering around loose and a horse and chickens and a really sleazy looking tailless outdoor cat, so Abby has more than enough to stare at and sniff on her regular jaunts into the "socializing corral," but I think she may have reached her threshold with the whole natural stimulus thing. I imagine her yawning like a bored New York hipster and complaining that she's so over the MOMA.

I, however, am so not over all the wandering around we've been doing. Every trip out of Lemoore, with the exception of my work commute which only really registers in my mind when the traffic is gummed up because someone's plowed off into an orchard again out of fatigue or boredom, is thrilling like a tiny escape. This last weekend we went to a music festival in San Francisco where I got to feel thoroughly old. Fashion has cycled around again to where I recognize outfits I wore and loved as a six-year-old being sported by people who can drink legally. It's unnerving, and most of them are deeply unflattering to adult bodies, but I suspect thirty-somethings were grumping about belly shirts and lowrider jeans when I was wearing them, so we'll call it a draw.

I also made the unpleasant discovery that if you rounded up all the chicks with tiny nose rings like mine, we'd fill a parking lot. A Wal-Mart parking lot. Turns out there are a lot of women to whom the teeniest of trendy rebellions appeals. If I was being really hard on myself, I'd point out that the whole thing hurt less than some zits I've squeezed, and that my brief forays into piercings (I had a tongue ring in college), point to a lack of commitment since they can and have been removed as soon as I get tired of them (or bite down really, hard hard on them and think for brief panicked moment that I've cracked my molar).

But if I'm being easy on myself, I would also point out that for someone with as powerful a needle phobia as I have (it's got a name in the DSM-V! BIITS phobia!), getting pierced every now and then is an important exercise in choice and self control. Both times I've gotten pierced I've managed to avoid fainting (though it was a struggle with the tongue-- have you seen the SIZE of one of those needles? It has a sheared off point, for Christ's sake), and both times I've been obnoxiously diligent about following the after-care routine* and avoiding any kind of infection or complication.

*I'm suspicious of the phrase "after-care." Like I didn't care before? I suppose it's better than "professionally-inflicted wound management."

So 9,000 hipster chicks have the same piercing as me. Fine. So there's also some part of me that likes to imagine jamming an ornately carved bone through my nose for a Navy ball. Also fine, though juvenile. I'm coming to realize that I'm not immune to that most human of urges to believe that we're still young even as evidence to the contrary piles up. Maybe recognizing this will keep me from doing the truly grievous shit, like getting bolt-on boobs and botoxing myself into an expressionless rictus. Or buying a Hummer.

But I do have to admit that there's a deep frustration here too, one I've played over in my head so many times that I bore myself every time I think it but I still can't seem to stop: I want to have kids, and the time window for this is not endless. I could go on all day about how wrong-headed it is to assume that popping out a kid will somehow change how you feel about your life or yourself, or how women have so much more to contribute than just more little humans, and what about having a career and having the time to write great books... but then something else just says "Yeah, but..." and I stall out in the silence that follows.

Meanwhile, nothing's gotten done on my thesis/book zygote. And I'm supposed to come up with something profound and professional to say about Faulkner's early novels, something that I can expand upon for thirty pages when really I'd just like to say, "He's incredibly spotty and I think it had to do with the booze, but holy shit, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury changed my life. The End. P.S. I think only male authors can get away with that kind of megalomania in letters to their editors."

On a not at all related note, I went to a party last week at which there was a fight, though as fights go it was more of a stiff, shuffling hug with a lingering pin-down and no real licks exchanged. What I noticed about the whole thing was how charged the whole atmosphere got, and how no one could avoid engaging with the experience afterward. Everyone had to choose a side and comment and exclaim, and the whole sequence of events was retold ad nauseum. In fact, we're still retelling it this week. It seemed like the one impossible thing to do afterwards was take another slug of beer, shrug, and pick up with the conversation. Maybe this is because we're writers and we feel like we have an obligation to embroider direct experience into something more meaningful, but I suspect it's an animal level phermone thing. I even found myself being disgustingly solicitous of the wronged combatant, who, if we're being honest, probably did as much baiting as the officially crowned Douche Bag Instigator.

So, game plan for the next fight I witness: immediately dart out to refresh my beverage and thus miss the main event, and then return with juggling balls and sparklers and an accordion. Plus more beer and a genuine freak if I can find one. I think a small, portable circus midway would be a convenient thing to have on any number of occasions, and would also make a nice, not-so-subtle statement.

Head Junk Mail: Unsubscribe

Last night I dreamed I was a part-time logger.

I had all these trees that I had to shove into this giant machine that acted kind of like a Salad Shooter*, and it sliced the trunks into thin cross-sections, like a giant stack of pennies, and then coated each cross-section with a film of hot, black tar. The tar itself was kept in a giant vat on top of the machine, and each time the machine rattled away chopping trees, the tar would splash down and get all over the surrounding area (which was a residential street curb, by the by, my logging being only part-time, and thus apparently a thing I did in my own dream world front yard). Also, due perhaps to my status as a part-timer, I lacked a proper helmet or gloves in this dream, and much of the falling tar landed on my face and arms, where it stuck and burned horrifically.

I say all of this as a way of explaining why I woke up last night, shoving at my husband's sleeping embrace and shouting "Ow! It BURNS!"

*My mother-in-law gave me a Salad Shooter for Christmas last year and I was having a high old time making cracks about its pistol-like grip, how it was like a vegetable six-shooter, when the friend I was talking to replied icily that it was her favorite kitchen gadget.

Anyway, as often happens when my dreaming brain is not content that it has had the last word, the dream picked up again after he and I rearranged ourselves into an altered (read: him cowering on the bed's far side) sleeping position, and the Salad Shooter logging truck then popped its parking break and roared off backwards down the street, plowing into a neighbor's parked car and arcing boiling black tar all over the neighbor's house. In the dream, I am responsible for $120 in damages, which is obviously a deflated price, and points to the immaturity of my subconscious. You can't even replace a headlight for that much.

I'm writing about this dream for the thinnest of reasons (I'm avoiding more pressing tasks), but also because thematically, it's nagging at me. It's a thematic departure from most of my anxiety dreams, and it comes at the tail end of a truly awful week in which I dreamed that 1) an anonymous email circulated among our friends with a bulleted list of my character flaws, including the chilling entry, "Rachel needs to learn to keep her fucking mouth shut," 2) my parents suddenly decided they were swingers, and 3) I accidentally acquired about seven more facial piercings that all became intertwined in my sleep.

Honestly, what am I supposed to do with this stuff? Is any therapeutic neurological function being served here, or am I just stuck getting junk emails from an angry subconscious? As I writer, I'd love to be able to say I get any kind of material from this nightly flood of adrenaline and imagery, but mostly I think I'm just a pain in the ass to sleep near.

The punchline is: EXPLOSIONS!

My dad's a superintendent on an oil rig and I imagine part of his job is making sure that any number of people make it through the day without getting crushed or incinerated or otherwise murdered by their own negligence around giant, pulverizing machinery.

He is also apparently a subscriber to a regular email list that sends out periodic alerts about hidden safety threats in daily life, which he then generously forwards to the family. Recent topics included static electricity while pumping gas at the gas station (shock + fumes = EXPLOSION), the hazards of driving while texting (negligence + traffic = wrecks and EXPLOSIONS), and the danger of microwaving a beverage in a certain type of ceramic mug (somehow = EXPLOSION).

I appreciate these. I really do. They show me he's thinking about us and is concerned for our safety. But sometimes the reality that Pants spends his whole day square dancing all over the line between safe and reasonable activities the Edge of Death is too hard to forget, and then to think that I could kill us both just as quickly by reheating my tea in the wrong mug? Jesus.

This week's theme is kitchen grease fires. Note the contrast between the neutral and bemused tone of my dad's note at the top and the grizzled, explosion-weary voice of the fire safety officer:

"Pretty interesting and dramatic video. I think it's worth taking the time to watch and think about the contents. R.S. Don't look for a punchline - there isn't one.

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING BEFORE YOU WATCH THE VIDEO!! This is a dramatic video (30-second, very short) about how to deal with a common kitchen fire ...oil in a frying pan. Read the following Introduction, then watch the show ...It's a real eye-opener!!

At the Fire Fighting Training school they would demonstrate this with a deep fat fryer set on the fire field. An instructor would don a fire suit and using an 8 oz cup at the end of a 10-foot pole toss water onto the grease fire. The results got the attention of the students. The water, being heavier than oil, sinks to the bottom where it instantly becomes superheated. The explosive force of the steam blows the burning oil up and out. On the open field, it became a thirty-foot high fireball that resembled a nuclear blast.

Inside the confines of a kitchen, the fireball hits the ceiling and fills the entire room. Also, do not throw sugar or flour on a grease fire. One cup of either creates the explosive force of two sticks of dynamite.

This is a powerful message----watch the video and don't forget what you see."

Unfortunately, the file format of the attached video doesn't work on my computer, so the threat of nuclear fireballs in my kitchen still looms. But then my brother responded:

"Hey Dad,

Good to hear from you. I hope things on the rig are going well (safe!). I'm looking forward to seeing you and Mom in November and am thinking of things to do once you guys get up here.

Unfortunately, I was unable to watch the video in the email you sent as I was driving in interstate traffic when I received the notification on my phone that I had new mail in my inbox. After taking my eyes off the road for several seconds in order to navigate to my Hotmail account, I took the time (still while driving in interstate traffic) to begin to formulate my response to your message. In between glancing up and down from my phone to the road, the gas gauge caught my eye and I realized I was almost out of gas. I took the next exit and continued responding to your email via my phone while I pumped gas into the tank of my car.

Once that was done, I continued driving back to my house while texting several friends and phoning several more (I put my email to you on hold, hope you don't mind). After I arrived at home, I purchased a number of items online utilizing my debit card, canceled my doctor's appointment to receive my flu shot, booked a trip to Mexico for February (airline tickets purchased online via debit card), and started to cook dinner.

The recipe called for a pan seared chicken breast so I filled a skillet with oil and began to heat it on high. It was at this moment that I realized I didn't have a chicken breast! I left the skillet on high heat and ducked out of the house for a quick trip to the grocery store. After purchasing the chicken breast, I arrived back home, tossed it in the well heated skillet (without rinsing the breast under water first), and cooked a fabulous dinner.

Feeling sated and satisfied, I started to get the sleepies and decided to retire for the evening. It's a little chilly up here, so I turned on my gas space heater and huddled under my synthetic comforter. When I was just on the verge of sleep, my carbon monoxide monitor started to beep. Apparently, the battery was low. I knew there was no way I was getting to sleep with that obnoxious beeping carrying on all night, so I hopped out of bed and removed the monitor's batteries.

I woke up this morning feeling happy, safe, and refreshed. Ahhhhhhhhhh.......

Love you, Dad ;)"

My contribution to the discussion? Unintentionally Hilarious Work Safety Videos.

Well-intentioned safety warnings + sarcasm and smart-assery = EXPLOSION!!