skeleton encounter

A guy wearing a tight skeleton sweatsuit came over to me at the tea shop and introduced himself.

"I just wanted to tell you that you are beautiful and you look just like Rebecca Romijn Stamos," he said. "You are fabulous."

"Uh, thank you," I said.

"I'm gay, so I'm not, like hitting on you," he said. "I just wanted you to know how fabulous you are. You are amazing. You are beautiful."

"Uh, thank you," I said again, and he was off.

Day = made. 

Murphy

I forgot to schedule it earlier this week, so I was supposed to have my weekly Skype Spanish hour with a grandpa in Guatemala at 5 pm today. 

It was a parody of Everything That Can Go Wrong.

I was stuck on a phone call at 5 pm, and I had be almost rude to get off the phone. By the time I got on Skype, the grandpa in Guatemala had called me a couple of times and practically sent out an APB.

When we started talking, I realized that Friday at 5 is perhaps not the best time to work on learning a language. I couldn't think in English, let alone Spanish. Words were not happening in either language. I felt like I could hardly hold my head up from exhaustion.

Everything was dim in Guatemala, and the tutor was fuzzy. It was the electricity, he explained. It was very weak, but the computer's battery was fully charged. 

I have some familiarity with electricity's eccentricities as they pertain to internet access, though, and I suspected exactly what happened: after about 15 minutes, the power cut out and we got cut off. 

Meanwhile, my dad was calling my phone, my coworker was coming in asking for snacks, and the grandpa in Guatemala was trying to call again.

 Needless to say, we rescheduled, leaving me free to comb t@rget, r0ss, and goodwill in two states trying to find pieces for my Halloween costume. At least that didn't require thinking, other than remembering how to get back on the highway back to Gone West.

colors

Pretty much no one who knows me is going to believe what I'm about to tell you, but it's true. It's all true.

My closet is organized by color. Type of clothing, and then color. In rainbow order.

Yeah, I'm... not... quite... sure how it happened either, except that when I moved back to Gone West and was putting all my clothes in the closet, I found myself putting all the shirts together by color and all the dresses together by color, and for some reason I don't quite know, I've kept doing it. 

The good news is that I can tell you definitively exactly how many black shirts is enough that you will be able to look at the clearance shirts at T@rget and decide against another black one: the answer is seven. 

I can also tell you that eight grey shirts is not enough to keep you from thinking about buying more new grey shirts. 

The interesting thing is how completely my wardrobe is dominated by black, grey, blue, and green. There are a few scattered red and pink items, and still fewer purple. I think I have one orange shirt and one yellow dress. My rainbow has a big chunk missing in the middle. I feel like you could guess my skin tone just by the items in my closet. (Very, very few oranges and yellows look good on pale white people. It just can hardly be done.)

It's all very frightening, actually. I've never really thought of myself as the sort of person who would - gasp - organize a closet. Closets are for shoving things into, never to be found again. 

Never fear, though. I'm sure there will come a day when I finally get around to removing all of the items that currently live in the laundry basket and putting them away and I'll be too hurried to put them back with their colors and the natural order of things will be restored. (Ha! Obviously the laundry basket is for storing clean and/or clean-ish clothes that you can re-wear. Everyone knows that. The dirty clothes go in a heap on the floor and then you carry them down to the basement in your arms while the heap drips socks for you to go back and collect and take down on your second trip to the basement.)

Now that you know my opinion of clean-ish clothes, it will not surprise you at all to hear that today some people were discussing the compost bucket and how they can't stand to have it on the counter that is the most disgusting thing ever because the things in it are rotting, ROTTING I tell you, and while I'm not exactly a fan of the very old, stanky container my parents have on their counter, the compost bucket itself, here in my house in Gone West, does not gross me out one bit, as long as it is rinsed out every time you empty it and it hasn't sat for too long with any particular concoction inside it. I could probably eat right while sitting next to it.

(I now have that paint with all the colors of the wind song stuck in my head. And you do, too. You're welcome.)

sweep

Update: after sitting with blue conditioner on it for a while, my hair is significantly less orange. I can now be seen in public. I'm still going to ask them to re-do the top, though. One should not come out of a hair appointment looking like your hair was colored a month ago. 

...

When I was relatively young - 10? 11? 12? 13? Clearly I don't remember - I went along a couple of times when my Uncle E. had a hockey game late at night. If I recall correctly, he would take me and/or my brother along to watch his daughter. After the game, a bunch of people congregated at a restaurant that had huge cinnamon rolls. 

I do remember the cinnamon rolls.

Between that and the cleared-off section of the lake where we would knock a puck around every once in a while when we were back in the US, I have a basic appreciation for hockey even though I haven't been to a game since my ice-obsessed grade school friend and I were both living at home after college and went to a semi-pro game in our hometown. (She was obsessed with both figure-skating and hockey. I always figured that if I had a choice, I would join the sport that involved fighting. It seems that I knew myself, even back then. Also, I can't do figure-skates. They have no support for my wimpy ankles.)

So I went to a hockey game on Friday night, with another displaced Mid-Westerner. I didn't actually know that there was hockey here, but lo! There is hockey here. It was in the same arena where much bigger sports play, and it was really fun.

On the way home, I ran over a couple of smashed beer bottles just up the street from my house. I was paranoid about my own tires, of course, since I have a knack for accidental tire deflation, but I was even more worried about the bicycles that ride down our street on the regular. This street is a bike route.

I dropped my stuff off inside and headed back out, armed with keys, cell phone, headlamp, and broom. By the time I got to the glass, a block and a half away, an older couple had come out, too. The man and I swept the glass of the bottles into my dust pan by the light of my headlamp and emptied the dust pan into a fast food bag that we found on the street. By the time we got done, we'd also swept up a substantial quantity of autumn leaves, but the bicyclists were safe again.

Good deed complete for the evening, I went back and checked my tires. They were fine.

And then I checked them again in the morning, and again this morning. Fine, and again fine.

brass

I went to get my hair colored at the same place I have always gone here in State of Happiness: a training school for an international company. My hair hasn't always ended up perfect there - they are students, after all - but usually it all goes pretty smoothly.

I haven't gotten my hair colored since May of 2011. It's pretty much all grown out to just a little bit of gold on the ends of the strands. (Periodically people would think I was doing ombre on purpose. Nope! Just lazy.) I was ready to go all out and get it all cutely highlighted.

I used to think of myself as not super picky about my hair, but I have learned two three things: 

1. The right side of my hair grows faster than the left, and it needs to be cut shorter than the left at the beginning. It doesn't look longer when you just look at it after cutting them what looks like evenly, but trust me, there is a cowlick or something going on there, and if you hold the two sides next to one another, the right side is longer.
2. I hate it when the framing layers around my face are huge and chunky.
3. I do not want my highlights golden. I do not want the yellow blonde. I want the ashy, almost grey blonde. Otherwise my face looks a funny color.

This was basically my mantra today: I want an ashy blonde. No, really, really ashy. If you have to choose between having variation of color in my hair or making it more ashy, I want it as ashy as possible.

For someone who is graduating next month, the girl who was doing my hair seemed a little clueless. Nice, but clueless. For example, she wanted to do all the foils with bleach, take them out, and then tone every other piece of colored hair to make it more ashy. (The instructor: "That is basically impossible. Once you take the foils out, you will never find the sections again.")

She set out putting foils into my hair. They were kind of weird, though. I've had them march straight back from the front of my hair, and march up the sides of my hair, but she had a triangle in the front and then pie slices up the side. It wasn't until she was finishing the pie slices that I asked if it was a problem that so much of my hair right at the visible top of my head wasn't getting color. 

"Oh, no," she said. "We can't get right to the scalp anyway."

Erm. Not what I was asking. It was more that the edges of the section of hair were right where my part goes, but were about an inch outside of the foil, meaning that the middle of my head wasn't going to get color.

When she took out the foils, I almost cried. My hair was that awful, brassy, bottle blonde that one associates with cheap Clairol dye kits from the local drugstore, where a woman with her hair that color is sitting smoking on the stool at the soda fountain. 

But. I have faith in the products of this international chain, and the toner was yet to come (toner adds a blue tint to your hair to take away the orange), so I remained calm.

I did tell the story about how I turned my brother's hair that brassy bottle blonde in the summer of 2000, right before we went back to Liberia the first time, and while he and I rode around in the open bed of the pickup we were using (we couldn't stand to sit inside - the shocks on that thing were terrible and bouncing around was less nausea-inducing when you were out in the open air), the kids would laugh and point at us. 

"They are laughing because I have orange hair," my brother kept saying.

"They are laughing because we are the only white people around," I said. "Your hair has nothing to do with it."

"No, they are laughing because I have orange hair," he would say.

My hair was toned. It looked substantially better afterward, and I paid and left.

Then I had a breakdown in a clothing store over whether to buy a coat or not (I've been needing one to wear to work that is not a raincoat or a soft shell or a winter coat), and if I did buy a coat whether to buy the longer waterproof trench-like one that was on clearance or the shorter one that basically offered no protection that was also on clearance.

(Spoiler alert: I bought one.)

(Additional spoiler alert: I bought the trench.)

(Further spoiler alert: I did not buy the $400 slightly warmer trench, but I will have my eye on it when it goes on clearance in January.)

(In my defense for even looking at $400 coats, all three of the considered coats are made by a local company that cares about the environment, blah blah blah, stop it, it's the cheap clothes that are destroying the earth and this sustainably made expensive one will last me forever so there.)

Then I realized that my breakdown was because I was too hungry to think, so I put the trench coat on hold because it was the last one of its kind and I went to a tea place nearby and waited an inordinately long amount of time for a sandwich on gluten free bread. (Waiter, after I have been sitting with the menu closed for about 10 minutes, looking at him impatiently. "Oh. Are you ready to order?" Yes, that is what the STARING YOU DOWN WITH MY EYES means, sir. It's not because you are pretty.)

I found my reflection in the tea shop bathroom mirror a little startling. Why was the hair right around my face so... orange?

I went back to the coat store and bought the trench and got into my car and looked at my hair in the rearview mirror in the light of day and I was horrified. It was dreadful. I looked like I'd seriously misread the instructions on the bottle of peroxide. The rest of my hair wasn't so bad, although my roots are already an inch long because of the weird placement of the foils, but those brassy sections near the front were truly terrible.

I called the place and tried to make an appointment to get it fixed (the answering service told me it had already closed), but they wanted $45 for it, so I went home to pee. Then I caught sight of myself in the mirror, gasped in horror, and googled the place. They were not yet closed.

I got in my car and went back. By the time I walked in the door, I had maybe been crying in my car just a little because, I don't know, I was embarrassed to be seen in public with hair like this? 

Okay, that was a little bit of an overreaction.

But my appointment to get it fixed isn't until Tuesday and in the meantime? I'm embarrassed to be seen in public like this.

The women at the school gave me some blue conditioner to use on the front strands, which is supposed to tone it again. I sat here with the conditioner on my hair for fifteen minutes after I went on a shopping spree to try to solace myself for my hair.

It's really bad. And I have no idea how they are going to fix it. I'm just really disappointed, because I was so excited to go out and make my hair cute again, and now I may have to cut it all off and start over.

breaks

I am sitting on my bed with my feet under the covers. My face is washed, my teeth are brushed, and my sinuses are rinsed. 

The week is more than half over, thank goodness.

I decided to take a sabbatical from martial arts this week. I didn't go today, either. Instead, I puttered. I cut up an apple and ate it with Justin's Maple Almond Butter while perusing the B0den catalog of things I cannot afford. I put pomegranate and pineapple in plastic containers to take to work. I set out my lunch for tomorrow. 

I need this. I need a few days of being able to come home and not rush off to somewhere else. 

I'm also taking a sabbatical from f@ceb00k. It will only last a day or two, but I realized that it has become something I check on my phone before I get out of bed (along with my email), and I'm wasting too much of my day on it. I don't have day to waste right now.

I need this. I need a few days of reading a book instead of trying to find more internet to distract me.

And I need at least one night of turning off the light at 9:29 pm, and really sleeping.

because

I skipped my martial arts class tonight for what might be the first time I've ever skipped it just because.

Just because I'm so very tired.

In Universe City, I went straight to fighting class at 5:30 and it was over by 6:30 and I could go home and relax and do stuff and get ready for bed.

Here, I struggle to leave work by six. I get home at 6:30 or 6:45, eat some food, change my clothes, and rush off to fighting class. By the time fighting class is done, it is 9:00, and I have to run whatever errands need to be run, get home, and try to fall asleep by 10:30 or so.

It never works. I can't wind down that fast. And then I don't get enough sleep. And then I start even more tired the next day.

I do not do well on seven hours of sleep, and that's about all I can manage here.

After seven months of this, I'm starting to unravel.

I knew that it would be busier here. I knew that I would work more hours. But I think what I underestimated is how much longer everything else would take. I ride the bus because I can't afford to pay for parking downtown and I want to take care of the environment and the bus is RIGHT THERE, but it means that I can't just leave straight from work and go to fighting. I have to come home first, to get my car, or I have to take the train out to fighting and then not get home until 10 pm.

It was different last time I lived here, because 1. I worked exactly 40 hours a week, 2. I never took work home, mentally or literally, and 3. I didn't try to work out.

I fought with myself, even walking back from the bus tonight. I should go to my class, I told myself. I should. I should.

But instead I gave myself a break. I came home, and I put on some lentils and rice to eat for the rest of the week. I worked on some Spanish homework. I updated my computer. Such little things, but things that I usually don't have time to do in this life I've bought myself.

I'm not sure how long I can do this.

pustulent pus

Warning: this post is about to get medical and possibly gross.

A couple of weeks ago, the skin around my fingernail swelled up and started exuding pus. I squeezed the pus out with a sense of satisfaction, as one does, and went about my life.

Only, the swelling came back today, and I squeezed out even more pus, with an even greater sense of satisfaction, and then I started wondering if recurring pus in your cuticle is a problem. 

So I googled, of course. Apparently when this type of cuticle swelling is bacterial, which it usually is, it tends to be strep or staph and you need a special kind of antibacterial ointment because Neosporin doesn't tend to work. 

Hrummph.

Warm water soaks it is!

stamp

Africa finds me, even here.

I could tell that the guy who sat next to me on the bus was from Africa, and so when he said hello, I took out my headphones.

"DRC or Republic of Congo?" I asked when he mentioned Congo.

"DRC," he said. "The former Zaire."

"Which part?" I asked.

"Lumumbashi," he said, and we both said, at the same time, "In the middle." "In the center, in the south."

"I lived in Rwanda for a couple of years," I told him.

"In Kigali?"

"No, in Kibuye."

"By Goma? In the west?" he asked.

"Yes, on Lake Kivu. Halfway between Goma and Bukavu."

And as so frequently happens, he said, "You are African!"

"Two years can't make me African," I said.

"No, but so few people from here go to Africa that once we give you the stamp, you are African," he said.

I've always wondered about that.

back (forth)

I took a nap this afternoon. It was lovely.

I would say that it was a nap kind of day, but really it was the beautiful sort of day that should have been spent outside and instead I woke up in Universe City, packed up my stuff, said goodbye to my friends who had lent me their basement room, had tea with a former coworker, drove to Gone West, had a Spanish lesson, went to Trader Joe's, came home, took a nap, made lentils and rice to eat all week, and walked to the bookstore, where I picked out a Spanish verb book, Spanish flashcards, and a new journal before realizing that I'd forgotten my wallet at home and the store was closing right then. So it was more of a sneak-a-nap sort of day than a nap sort of day.

My trip to Universe City was primarily for an event on Friday. A good friend and colleague of mine received a very high honor, and there was no way I was going to miss the ceremony. I talked to hordes of former coworkers and opposing counsel types, and more than once people mentioned that my old job has an opening again and do you think...? 

I thought about it, surrounded by all of these familiar, wonderful people.

I thought about it pushing my friends' baby in a jogging stroller up and down the hills in the neighborhood one over and one down from where I used to live, while they cleaned the house for a kids birthday party, while a former opposing counsel stopped and yelled hi as he drove by.

I thought about it getting chai at my sunny old coffee shop, where a former colleague just happened to be getting coffee and we chatted for half an hour.

But then she left, and I sat alone, and I felt again the break my heart took in Universe City, and I knew that I didn't want to couldn't go back to living amongst all those reminders.

Still, later, drinking tea outside in the warm sunshine with the honoree from the day before, the thought crept back.

Reading book after book to little A. while the football game played in the background, bouncing baby J., eating E.'s delicious glazed drumsticks, sharing a fuzzy blanket with I., the thought came again. 

And drinking Two-Buck Chuck with J. and L. in their familiar kitchen, there it was yet again.

But this morning I knew that it was impossible, even as I hugged one more former colleague. I can't go back to the life of wondering whether I'll ever hear from a certain boy again. I can't go back to being three flights away from my family. I can't go back to one of the worst places on the planet for my allergies. I can't. I won't. I am gone. 

There are some places you can only revisit. You can't go back.

Onward.

still lit

Driving home tonight, I noticed that the lights are out to the north of us, and to the east, and to the west. There are two blocks on our street that have power: ours and one other. 

Given that I've been on the wrong end of power outages many a time (see also: 40 minutes of power per day, on average, my last few months in Rwanda), I will take it. 

I'm not even superstitious, but after I told my roommates about the power situation in our neighborhood, I rapped on the wooden frame around a doorway, just in case. 

driving problems

I secretly take a little bit of joy in letting my manual transmission car roll backwards just a tiny bit when people pull up too close behind me on a hill.

Does that make me a bad person? 

Even if you are in a hurry, it is a good idea to be kind to other drivers.

Which is possibly the opposite of what I am doing by letting my car roll back. But I'm not doing it to hit them (I have never hit them), just to remind them that some of us have manual transmission cars, and on especially steep hills, we need a little more space. I think people forget that manual transmission cars still exist. 

WE EXIST, PEOPLE.

...

A couple of times lately I have thought there was something wrong with my headlights. It would be annoying if I had to replace yet another headlight.

I feel like I forgot to turn my headlights on, but I look and look at the road before me and there are two widening Vs of light, so it can't be my car.

Why is it so dark?

It turns out that the power has been going off every time it rains, in different parts of town, which in the Pacific Northwest is a problem. It rains a lot here, you see. 

(Weirdly, Universe City gets 13 inches of rain per year more than Gone West, possibly proving my ancient theory that it rains more often in Gone West but not as hard. Gone West drizzles. Universe City pours. I needed an umbrella much more in Universe City.)

And still, every time it actually rains (v. drizzling), both towns fall apart. This would be like the Mitten falling apart every time it snowed, ONLY WORSE because it rains 9 months out of the year here. The drains fill up. The electricity goes out.

It is unnerving to be at a major intersection in a major city with no traffic signal. In Liberia, where the traffic lights haven't worked in years, everyone seems to just figure it out. Here, people are so dependent on the lights that they stutter forward hesitantly at the intersections so that I want to open my window and say, "Yes, it's your turn. Yes, all three of you who are headed east. All three of you go at once, and then those of us headed north and south will go at the same time, see?"

That said, I almost ran an intersection completely because it was so dark that I didn't even realize I'd already come to it.

most

I went to Universe City a week and a half ago, just for a night, for the birthday party of a friend of mine. I drove down after my Spanish lesson, and because of traffic concerns, I took a route into town that I never took while I lived there. I drove up the hill behind my old house without passing it. I parked at a corner that I rarely saw.

And then I went into the backyard and snuggled a baby for three hours.

I love it when my friends provide me with babies to snuggle. My friends love eating with both hands. It's a perfect party tradeoff.

We went out to a college bar, later, one I'd never been in before (we did not bring the baby), and the birthday person got drunk enough that he spilled a beer on himself and I had to put a plastic garbage bag (that was handily in my trunk - always prepared) down on his seat before I drove him home. 

The thing about staying in a house with three drunk friends is that you will never get to sleep because every time you attempt to walk toward the bathroom with your toothbrush in your hand, one of them will start talking to you and three hours will pass before you finally have to go to bed right now or the world will end. (I get serious about my sleep.)

In the morning, driving through town to meet the baby (and some grownups, I suppose) for brunch, the whole place seemed so small and old. It felt like the past, somehow, even as I was there. 

It's the same. I know it's the same. I drove down the same roads with the same buildings on either side every day for two and a half years. I could drive that route through downtown in my sleep. And yet. Even in only six months, the buildings seemed to have shrunk. The sidewalks seemed dirtier.

I got the same iced chai in my old coffee shop, with the big south-facing windows, but the servers were different, and they didn't know my drink. 

I don't fit there anymore, and that makes me happy, and that makes me sad. I made some great friends in Universe City - you need friends more there than here, where so much is going on all the time - but my life isn't there, anymore. I've escaped, and what I still feel most, leaving, is relief.

thefted

There were two young Middle Eastern men at the table next to me outside Starbucks this afternoon. One of them took out a cigarette and started smoking it, but when the smoke wafted my direction and I leaned back out of the way, he said, "Oh, sorry," and they both got up and moved to a bench a few feet away, at the edge of the street, where the smoke wouldn't blow toward me.

A few minutes later, a homeless white couple came over and sat at that table. 

One of the original occupants of the table came back over and suddenly there was a little commotion.

I looked up, and realized that the first guy had left his frapuccino on the table when they went to the smoking bench, and the homeless guy had started to drink it.

"Sorry, man," the homeless guy said, "I didn't know it was yours. Sorry, bro." He offered it back, partially consumed.

The two young men threw their hands up in despair and left.

I can sort of see both sides: it did look abandoned, but you don't really expect a frapuccino to be stolen from a few feet away.

It occurred to me, too, that I could have watched it for him, considering that he only moved to accommodate my dislike of cigarette smoke.

variously

Today in jiu jitsu, we did this exercise where you grab the sleeve and collar of your partner and jump up so your legs are around their waist. The exercise is really for the standing person to practice taking the weight, so we practiced with people roughly our own size.

Being a tall woman, I ended up working with a man who was a couple of inches taller than me, but reasonably slender. 

I surprised myself: I actually did dare to jump up like that, to trust myself to hang on. 

And then I surprised myself even more: I had no trouble holding the guy up.

And then I surprised myself still more: I could hang on with my legs and lean my head back down to the ground and do situps to work on core strength.

Apparently I am stronger than I think I am. 

See also: the 2.5 minute plank in stand-up fighting is no longer a problem.

It's funny, because those 90 minute stand-up classes are still kicking my tail. I can barely make it through. But I must be getting stronger somewhere in there.

...

It's the time of year when people bring grocery bags full of tomatoes into the office, and I am stocking up for winter. I roasted a big pan of cherry tomatoes yesterday, all different colors, and today I am simmering down tomatoes with butter to freeze in an ice cube tray. (Next time I am going to flash-boil them and take the skins off. They are quite annoying in the sauce.)

The corn is getting big and too starchy, and I bought the wrong kind of beans, so the salad that my niece called "the stinky salad" didn't taste great.

I'm starting to wonder if squash is back in season.

...

I had a conversation today which I switched to Spanish, and the communication was better in Spanish than in English. 

Which is not saying much. 

But it's better than a month ago, when I couldn't find any words at all in Spanish. I think the mere act of thinking about Spanish when I'm with the teacher and while doing the homework has made me think in or about Spanish at other times. I find myself thinking of how to say things in Spanish even when it isn't necessary.

That, and I've had a bunch of situations where I needed Spanish interpreters lately. It's all fresh in my head.

nothing to fear

One of the things that happens when you move around the world is that you meet people who don't fit the framework you were given in your little hometown in your little home church.

One of the things that happens when you move around the world is that those people you were always told about are now the coworker in the office next to yours who tells those funny jokes and the new friend from the cafe down the street.

I grew up in a place and time where we were told that it was okay for a person to have feelings of attraction to the same sex as long as that person didn't sin by actually acting on the feelings.

That always seemed fundamentally unfair to me, even at my most conservative. How could you ask a person to go through their entire life without even the possibility of a romantic relationship? If I couldn't survive without that hope, how could someone else? Was my straightness all that spared me from a life that seemed to require horrific loneliness? Why would anyone think a good God would ask that of people? How could I ask it of people when I knew, had it been me, I couldn't have done it? It just seemed mean.

But because of that teaching, for a long time I didn't know how to act around people who were gay, even as I stopped believing that there was anything wrong with gay relationships.

It wasn't until I was in law school and a good friend told me over a good cup of British tea that she had decided to become an equal opportunity dater and oh by the way that girl she introduced me to in the elevator was her new girlfriend that I realized exactly how one does react when a friend tells you the truth about herself: you react with joy, because she is closer to who she is meant to be. You react with excitement, because she is excited about her new love. You react with gentleness, because she trusted you with who she really is, and that is what friendship means: that we are gentle with the real version of each other. We love the real version of each other even more than the facade we first encountered.

Where I live now, I have friends and coworkers who are gay couples, men and women, married and just starting out, childless and raising kids. I have friends and coworkers who are bisexual and transgender and fluid in their sexuality.

A wedding between two men or between two women makes me cry with the joy of it in a way I never do at a straight wedding, because in a gay wedding I see hope deferred and finally realized, and it is beautiful.

The funny thing is that I realized that the gay men and women, the transgender men and women, the bisexual men and women, they were all around me the whole time. They were around me in my little hometown. They were around me in my home church. They just had to hide, in a world that told them that their full beautiful selves were wrong, and many of them are hiding still: from themselves, from their families, from their churches.

I have long joked that the thing Christians are most afraid of in this country is that their son might be gay or their daughter might get pregnant before she is married.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: there is nothing to be afraid of.

People are beautiful and wonderful and mysterious, and the more they can be their real selves, the more beautiful and wonderful and mysterious they are. When we ask the people we love to be real, when we ask them to be gay or bisexual or queer or transgender just as they really are, when we ask them to trust us enough to let us love who they really are, then the fear disappears, and all we have left is love.

We just have to keep being honest and gentle, with ourselves and with the people we love. There is nothing to fear.

...

I wrote this in honor of a friend, who was brave enough today to share with the world the fact that he is transgender. Friend, you were a beautiful woman, and you are a beautiful man. Love always.

...

http://notalllikethat.org/

tremble

I thought I was in pretty good shape in Universe City. I worked out three times a week, mixed martial arts and such, and I tried to hike or walk or run or something at least one other day.

Um. 

The MMA classes I took in Universe City were a maximum of 45 minutes of hard-core workout. We would then move on to some sort of self-defense scenario.

Now that I am in the advanced MMA class here in Gone West, it is a solid 90 minutes.

I am not in that kind of shape.

Today, at the end, I waved goodbye to the guy I'd been working with and said thank you, and I realized that I wasn't opening my hand all the way. Odd. I looked at it again in the women's changing room, and when I tried to pull my pinkie and ring finger back to be level with the rest of my hand, they started shaking.

I am struggling to type even now. My pinkie and ring finger seem to be out of my control. A little too much of the 16 ounce gloves?

Don't worry, it's not the golf elbow hand. It's the other one. So it's fine, right? Totally fine.

funny bone of the knee

So did you know that if you do a switch-kick at the same time as your sparring partner does a round kick, your knees will slam together and it will feel like you've hit the funny bone of your leg?

Yeah, me neither,  until yesterday.

I hopped around for a minute, and then grabbed a shelf to stay upright.

"It feels like I hit my funny bone, only on my leg," I said. "I can't feel my foot."

"That always makes me feel like I'm going to throw up," the coach said. 

"Yeah, that, too."

But when the feeling died down, I was back in the ring.

I iced it last night, and today the bruise is dripping down under the skin below the extra bulge in my knee. It hurts to bend my knee, but I'm operating under the assumption that this is the kind of wound that benefits from forcing it to move while riding my bike rather than the kind that gets worse with use.

Sometimes I'm tempted not to ice things so that I can have a wicked bruise to show off, until I remember that I need to be able to kick things again by tomorrow night, and I dig out the ice pack (the one I can find; it's amazing how much I cannot find after moving). I would rather fight again immediately than have a grislier wound to display to the world at large.

taste

WARNING: this post mentions gluten and the eating or non-eating thereof. Proceed at your own risk.

...

A friend of mine hosted a Blindfolded Tasting Dinner Saturday night. It was a warm, clear night, and we gathered along a long table in her yard. We each got a blindfold, a pen, a napkin, and a bingo sheet with various ingredient combinations in different boxes.

I love eating outside. I especially love eating outside in a backyard at night in the summer, with a big group of people. It reminds me of holidays in Liberia, or Rwanda, or Honduras.

The rule for the dinner was that you couldn't have any food allergies. There are a lot of things I seldom eat (meat, gluten, shellfish), but I decided to risk it because none of those are eat-and-die  allergies for me. I just don't like them and/or feel better without them.

We began.

For each of the 15 courses, we all put our blindfolds on at the same time and sat with our hands out in front of us. The servers came by and put something into our hands. "I'm giving you a cup," they would say, over and over, moving down the table.

Once we had the cup/plate/bowl, we could touch the contents, smell them, and taste them. When we were finished with our sensory experience, we held the cup/plate/bowl in the air for the server to come and remove it. Then we all waited until everyone's dish had been taken away before removing our blindfolds and checking the box on the bingo card that contained what we thought was in the food.

Some of them were easy to guess (blueberry soup! corn ice cream with blackberries!). Some of them were harder to guess (cucumber and zucchini, maybe?). Some of them were nearly impossible to guess (pickled watermelon rind with ginger). Some of them I would never have touched if I'd known what was in them (pulled beef tongue with cilantro cabbage slaw). 

Actually, that last one was amazingly good. They were all amazingly good.

pannier

We have discussed before - and by we have discussed I mean I have soliloquized* - about how money doesn't buy happiness but sometimes a new thing that you buy can make your life so much easier that you don't know how you ever lived without it.

Case in point: 

My parents bought me my bike for college graduation. (I distinctly remember my mom asking me what I wanted for college graduation, and I said, "A bike," and she literally went, "Awwww," as if it was the cutest thing she'd ever heard. That was before she had grandkids. They have trumped all cutenesses.) 

We went down to the Schwinn store and bought one, and we tricked it out. For some reason, I thought it was sexist to have a women's bike with the lower bar in the middle because I CAN SWING MY LEG OVER THANK YOU (I regret this now in my dress-wearing days), so I got a bike with the higher bar and we put fenders on it and a rack on the back - even then I was thinking that I wanted to live in a city where I could commute to work by bike.

This worked for a while. When I first lived in Gone West, I had a huge purse that I would put under the bungee net on the rack and all was fine, but eventually I wanted a new purse, which was not as large or as structured, and it got more complicated.

My old friend S. gave me a milk crate, the red plastic kind, and I belted that onto the rack with a few bungee cords. With the bungee net over the top, it could handle most of my daily commuting needs - I could even carry a gallon of milk plus other groceries in there. 

The only real downside was that the bike got really top-heavy when the crate was full, and it sat right against the seat, so if I put anything in the crate that stood up tall - a binder, a box of cereal - I couldn't sit back in the seat. Another minor issue was that I couldn't put the bike right up against a lot of bike parking spots, so my locking mechanism didn't work as well. 

It was fine, though. It worked for a long time.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was in the bike store waiting for them to replace the tire that was shredding, I bought a pannier on a whim. One can very easily spend $200 on one pannier, but I bought the $50 kind.

Life = changed. 

I cannot even explain how much easier it is just to throw things into a pannier and ride off, with no worries about whether my purse is zipped completely closed or something small is going to fall through the cracks of the crate. I can just grab it off the bike when I get to work, carry it into my office, and have what I need right there. It isn't in my way when I ride. And best of all, it lowers the center of gravity of my bike and makes it much easier to ride.

Money cannot buy happiness, but the money spent on that pannier has made me much happier for several weeks now.

* I spelled this right on the first try, which... whoa.