Sometimes I need to be hit between the sun eyes.

There is an episode of Dr. Who (tenth Doctor, David Tennant), where alien-related mayhem is occurring in a school, and the doors are locked, imprisoning the kids. One of the supporting characters, Mickey, sits in a car with K9, the robot dog.

"If only we could find something to smash those glass doors," muses Mickey.

"We are in a car," intones K9.

"Yes, yes, but I need to find something to break down those doors. I wish I had some pipe, or..."

"We are in a car."

"Yes , K9, I know we're in a car. Now-- OH! WE'RE IN A CAR!"

For ages I've been trying to get a garden plot. Been on a waiting list for a plot in the local community garden for over three years. The nun who ran it retired -- a concept that blows my mind, actually -- and I'm not sure the list with my name has been passed on. I've tried container gardening, but the gangway out my back door gets too little sun for producing actual vegetables/fruits, although I do end up with a lush section of vegetable plants whose main crops are leaves and powdery mildew. So every year I pore through my Seeds of Change catalog like an adolescent boy with a greasy copy of Hustler, and collect seeds from random plants I encounter wherever I go. (These go into a jar unmarked, because I like surprises.) I confess I did smuggle seeds from some really delicious grapes purchased at a Hungarian farmer's market from two ancient women. I was sweating through Customs. (Have you ever tried to appear nonchalant to a contraband-sniffing Beagle? Beagles don't give a shit about eye contact or your jokey anecdote about Unicum truly tasting like ass.)

But I have no land. I'm all stocked up with nowhere to sow. I often think about having a garden, a nice spot in a community garden where people go to tend their plants and talk to one another and have a great sense of community.

Last weekend was Earth Day weekend. I'd originally planned to join a local group to clean up some vacant lots on a nearby block. If they hadn't planned to meet at 9am, I might actually have made good on that.

I decided instead to clean up the 6x5 patch of dirt at the end of my road. The corner of my street borders a busy road, one with two rows of traffic each way. Several years ago, two men dug it up and planted some things. Not enough, really, and weeds took over. Each year I see the evidence of random acts of planting kindness: sunflowers come up, ground cover appears, but it's never really been kept up, and it lapses back into weeds and debris. I feel almost physical pain when I see degraded and ruined soil, so one year I spread some of my worm compost in an attempt to amend the sad corner. Thing is, I didn't screen it, and the result were random tomato plants and a huge butternut squash bush that took over and spilled into the street.

This year, nothing. Some of the perennials planted have come up, but for the most part it's crabgrass and weeds.

So it was that I took to the plot, tearing up weeds, planting bulbs and flower seeds and picking up trash. As I said the plot is tiny, but it took a good few hours. People passed and stopped and chatted, and it was a good time. At one point, I saw an older man watching me.

"Do you like flowers?" I asked him.

He smiled. "No good English."

I stood and walked to him. "Flowers," I said, using my fingers to imitate something opening up.

"Yes!" he said. "Very nice."

I showed him the packet of giant sunflowers I'd planted, and indicated the ring around the post where I hoped they'd come up.

"In Arabic, we say 'Sun Eyes'" he said. How you water?"

"With buckets." I pointed to the lake at the end of the street. "I live down there by the water."

"You volunteer?"

"Yes, this is my project," I replied.

"Very nice."

"Where do you live?"

"There (pointing to a nearby street). "I am new."

His bus came and he got on it. We have many Iraqi refugees in the RP. I'm already scheming how to introduce him to an Iraqi friend of a friend.

Some of my neighbors stopped and we chatted for awhile. It's almost impossible to walk down my street without seeing someone you know and talking for at least 15 minutes. As we were talking (me from the ground), passersby stopped and chatted; many thanked me. One woman said, "How nice! I won't let my dog pee here."

"Gosh, thanks," I said. And as I sat in the sun with the traffic going by, and looked at the fresh dirt full of planted flower seeds and bulbs, and exchanged "hello"s with passing neighbors, it hit me.

I am in a freaking car.

Meredith, get away from the email.

As I was having my hair cut last night, I was discussing thermonuclear PMS with my stylist, who gets the worst PMS known to man.

I get bad PMS once in awhile. When I do, it's bad in the way that I know whatever crime I will commit will get me no sympathy in the public arena but I will go to the chair unrepentant because the irritating motherfucker deserved it,probably for disregarding escalator etiquette one time too many.

Perhaps it's being off the meds and making up for lost time, but this time 'round, it's the double whammy of ca-RAYZEE physical AND emotional PMS.

Physical: If I were a celebrity, the magazines would be splashed with photos of my baby bump. I cannot shove enough food into my face fast enough, which is hard considering I really have to go shopping. I wake at 2am starving and unable to sleep without eating something, anything, which last night were two dill pickle spears and two pieces of Wasa bread with mayo.

Chest? Two flotation devices of pain. I have to move slowly lest there be any reverb, because I have turned into a blue-ribbon Guernsey overnight.

But ah, the bitchery. The land-mine/leghold-trap bitchery that springs without warning, lethal and fiery. THAT is the crowing glory of this particular bout.

A man on the packed train was releasing silent-but-deadlies literally next to my seated head. I was forced to inhale ripe, putrid air that had been, just moments before, inside a stranger's colon. That I suffered Stranger Ass Gas without making a public announcement or ripping a hole in his proximate ass cheek is as inexplicable as my INability to not yell at the big-screen TV in the common area at work every single time Mitt Romney's face appears. Every. Single. Time. I am some operant conditioner's wet dream. Just the sight of his smarmy insincere smile that never quite hits his eyes sends me instantly into pure foaming fits.

"HE'S A LYING SACK OF CRAP WHO HAS NOTHING BUT CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN AND PEOPLE WHO AREN'T RICH!!" I'll yell for anyone to hear. You'd think that would make me a pariah, but I now have a group of strangers who nod at me knowingly and say hello.

We know how it's going to go down. The revolution.

(as an aside: just started The Hunger Games, and i like the writing, but you can't convince me a society would let its kids be taken annually  for a fight to the death. Because if such a one were to exist, it deserves to be oppressed.)

Kevin is coming to a play with some others of us tomorrow evening.

"Should we go to dinner beforehand?" he asked me.

And here's where I did something that's brave for me. I trusted someone with my anger, with my ugly deep dark full-on unqualified rage. I took the chance that he was a good enough friend to be able to see the werewolf and remember that on every night but a full moon I'm just a person.

"We can," I replied, "but I'm very, very PMS-y, and if J-- makes one more pedantic comment about how I place my chopsticks is socially unacceptable in China, it might get bad and bloody. And if K-- makes another melodramatic statement about her elderly cat 'almost dying' again, I will suggest that it might help to spend less money on pot and more on proper veterinary care and decent food."

Kevin did not respond. I called him when I got home. He answered the phone.

"Please don't yell at me," he ventured timidly.

I've decided to call my PMS alter ego Meredith as a way of distinguishing her from who I am when I have control and don't want to completely obliterate people for behavior that I normally find only mildly irritating. I may have to drink tomorrow.

Meredith wants me to.

Trifextra Week 12: The Apology, Correctly

For this week's  Trifextra challenge, we were to write a letter of apology in exactly 33 words.  I mistakenly used "333," which kind of kills the point. Naturally, you are disqualified if you don't follow the rules, but that's OK.  The submission deadline has closed, but I did the exercise again, this time correctly,  anyway, for the fun of it. Here it is, just for you.

I’m sorry I didn’t stand on a table and tell your friends I endured their asshole behavior only because I cared about you. And that I didn’t tell you to go to hell. 

Trifextra Week 12: The Apology

For this week's  Trifextra challenge, we have to write a letter of apology in exactly 33 words.  Selecting my apology was hard because by now I have so many things I wish I'd done differently, hurts I recognize now that at the time I was too self-centered to care about. This is one I wish I could make right, but never can. Sometimes things are that way.


(POST_SUBMISSION NOTE: OH CRAP! THIRTY_THREE! I kept thinking '333.' Oh well, that's me disqualified. Still, I'm going to do the exercise anyway, because now it seems even more cool.)


Here's the corrected exercise, just for fun. Good luck, everyone!

To The Two Happy Boys

I could tell myself: I was new, I was young; I’d been left in charge anyway. The shelter was full and I was trying to be practical. Difficult choices are part of life.

All of this was true, but it doesn’t change one bit what you lost. I can’t help but think that if I’d known that “American Bulldog” was an actual breed and not some made-up name designed to hide pit-bull ancestry, I might have contacted that breed’s rescue. It might not have made a difference anyway, but after twenty years, I still wonder what might have happened if I’d made a phone call, one phone call. Would you both have found good homes? I’m sure you would have; you were affectionate and gentle, all six-months-paws and face kisses. Oh, and not housebroken. Right. Easily addressed, but not in a shelter that has little money or staffing, where housebroken dogs come in every day.

I’m sorry I didn’t make that call. I’m sorry I led you instead to the back where you each in turn came up to me trustingly, tail wagging, while a volunteer held off the vein and I administered the injection. I’m sorry your bodies went from happy and energetic to limp and lifeless in a matter of seconds. That I cried during the process doesn’t make it better. I merely had a bad day; you died for the simple crime of existing on a day the shelter was full.

You weren’t alone that year. There were many others also unjustly convicted, many whom I sent on, gently, compassionately, frequently with tears. Those are other apologies I also make, also without self-forgiveness.

I’m sorry that people are stupid and irresponsible. I’m sorry that you and so many others have to suffer for it. It’s twenty years later, and you’d be gone by now anyway, but oh, the warm sun and the fresh grass and the whole wonderful wide world of things you could have loved.

I’m sorry. Every day. 

BS-asana

The world is full of mysteries, conundra, enigmas. I accept that not everything is knowable, and that the unknowable makes life interesting, injects it with wonder.

But there's something I really wish someone could explain to me:

What the fuck is the deal with yoga?!?!?

I took a beginner class over ten years ago. OK, yeah; it felt good. But it was boring. BO-ring.  Now, as I experience more aches and pains, I'm told constantly by yoga devotees that I Must. Do. Yoga.

So I've taken two classes at my gym, classes that are described as being "good for beginners." And when I'm done, yeah, I feel good, my body feels aligned and relaxed and present and all those great things.

But I can live without the things I have to do go get there.

Today I was on the treadmill, happily racing along, Irish Folk Rock from Detroit in my ears, when I noticed it was time for the yoga class. I thought about it, and decided that as much as I was enjoying the run, I needed to do something about my kinked neck. So I just stopped, got off the machine, and headed to the exercise room. I grabbed a gym-supplied mat that smelled of feet and sat my sweaty ass down, trying to ignore the combined stench of strangers' feet and crotch sweat.

I spent the next hour rotating my arms outward, spiraling my thigh muscles, paying attention to my belly button and breastbone. And my breathing. And keeping my shoulders down and my feet aligned with the mat, and my hips tilted and my toes tucked. Aside from the fact that when I try to do these moves it really hits home that I'm a short chick with no torso who feels like a garden gnome; for someone like me who has a hard time shutting her brain down, there are just too many things to concentrate on at once. I like running and biking because I like the rhythm, the ease of focus, the heartbeat. It's meditative for me; simple. Yoga is like trying to perfect several chapters of the Kama Sutra when all I want is a nice straightforward fuck.

The instructor says things like, "And now we'll do a modified Eagle Pose," and I think two things:

One: "What the fuck is an Eagle Pose?!?!?"

Two:  "Eagles mate for life. Oh, that documentary on them was good, except it broke my heart when the female was found dead and the male finally had to abandon the clutch of eggs to go in search of food and a new mate..."

Every pose: Monkey, Bridge, Triangle, brings a similar rush of free association. And frustration.

I have several friends who are really into yoga, and they get defensive and talk about how they can't live without yoga. They get offended in the way that some people do when I say that Glee is a moronic show with clearly fake musical numbers.

And most of the women I know don't do anything physically challenging but yoga, and not in the cover-of-the-magazines-at-Whole-Foods-checkout yoga. They have flabby arms, are overweight, and act as though any kind of cardiac endeavor is beneath them and their chakras. They drive everywhere and spend a lot of time smoking pot or sitting on their couches.  I might have tight flexors, but dammit, I can carry furniture. I have yet to have someone say, "Hey can you come over and help us with a Cobra pose?"

Because then I'll start on Rikki Tikki Tavi....

Friday

I've been trying to write more, which is why I'm up writing when I have to leave for work in 15 minutes, while two kittens perform morning Ninja Anti-Gravity Cirque de Soleil routines up my walls and the rabbits calmly ignore them while chewing on orchard hay.

It's a good life. Did I mention there's also good Indian tea?

I like my place. It's small, cozy, and full of creatures who pay attention to one another. And to me. I like my bed, my green walls, my small kitchen with the tangerine dresser I use as a counter/storage piece. I like the pink couch, the trash-picked furniture, the ancient tiled bathroom.

I will go off to work, where large-screen TVs will play CNN relentlessly (remember when CNN was actually a news channel and not some FOX news wannabe?) and I will marvel that I live in a country where people like Mitt Romney an Rick Santorum are considered viable presidential candidates and cretins like Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin are given airtime. Where women have to fight all over again for ownership of their bodies, and where there is actual discussion about whether an unarmed teenage boy deserved to be shot by an armed nut job who chased him down and cornered him.

You want a modern-day lynching, here it is. Hello, Florida.

I'm slowly coming off meds. My doctor is taking it slowly, more slowly than I'd like (patience was never my strong suit, once I had a goal in mind), and as my brain re-adjusts I feel sharper. Yeah, a little angrier, but that's OK; in this world, people should be angry. But I'm also happy.

And oh yeah. Late for work.

xo

Breast Bandits

Last week C--and I went to J's housewarming in Elgin. We sat on the couch and let people come talk to us, which is what we often do because we're lazy. We're also gregarious enough to pull it off.

Looking around, I spied something on the bookshelf.

"Is that a...boob?"

"Yes," C. explained. "J was in a play where they had Amazons who, you know, supposedly sliced off their boobs to fight better with their swords--"

"Yes, because Lord knows we get all kinds of clumsy with these things in the way."

"Yeah. Anyway, My uncle made that boob for her for the play."

As the evening wound down, we threw away our plates and cups, said our goodbyes, and left with the boob in my purse. Since then we have posted its adventures on Facebook.

I called J. the next day about an unrelated issue.

"GIVE ME BACK MY BOOB!" she wailed.

"I have no idea what you're talking about. You are clearly hung over, still."

Tonight C and I went with K. to a friend's house here in the city. On the way we stopped at a wine store, and I ran in.

"May I help you?" asked the solicitous man behind the counter.

I took out the object.

"What goes well with a bronze boob?"

Pausing just a moment to look at the boob, he asked, "will you be drinking out of it?"

"Oh, no, just drinking with it as a sort of mascot. We want a fitting drink. A tittini? Kidding. Wine is fine."

"Red or white?"

"Red, please."

He thought for about two seconds, reached over to a display, and handed me a bottle.

Temptation zinfandel.

"You, Sir, are an artist."

Thus it was we watched movie, ate pizza, drank Temptation and gave the boob a night out with the girls.

"Too bad we can't send it back in pieces. You know, like cut off the nipple," said C.

"Yeah but without a nipple a boob is useless. I mean, it has no point," I said.

HA HA HA.

Yeah. Wine.