Diary of a migraine

4:00 a.m.
Wake up with a blinding pain searing through left temple. Wake up Bing. Tell her to please move to the guest room as I am just going to have to start puking soon. Old hat to Bing. She tries to kiss me, I push her away. "GOD! STOP THAT!" I say. Because I am just nice and sweet natured like that. She goes off to the spare room.


4:14 a.m. The puking begins. This is so sexy. As I am spewing the contents of my stomach into the toilet bowl, I have a brief moment of wishing that I had cleaned said bowl.

6:00 a.m. Wake up to get sick again. God, is there anything left in my stomach? Apparently so.

7:00 a.m. Wake up to puke again. Can barely walk to the bathroom, so dizzy. The pain is pulsing so hard that I am unsteady on my feet. A soft light is coming in from the curtains. I want to get a rifle and shoot it away.

8:00 a.m. Alarm goes off. I groan, remembering that I promised to take my mentally challenged niece out for breakfast this morning. I sit up and try and concentrate on dialing her number. She answers on the first ring. "Aunt Maria, you're early! You aren't supposed to pick me up until nine!" she says, exuberant. I tell her that I am sick and cannot go out to breakfast today. She is sweet, asks me if she can make me some cookies and have her dad give her a ride to my house to give them to me. The thought of cookies almost makes me lose mine. I say no, no. Apologize again. Promise to call her soon for a rain check. Go throw up again.

8:45 a.m. Bing comes in, reminds me that she has a class to teach for youth orchestra this morning. Should she take Liv with her? Liv stands at the doorway, arguing that she is plenty old enough to stay home and that if she needs anything she will call Bing or make me get up. I tell Bing that Liv can stay and remind Liv not to turn on the oven. She scowls at me. "I am ELEVEN!" she reminds me. She comes over to the bed and bounces on it, kisses me and tells me to feel better soon. The second that she is out the door, I am lurching to the bathroom where I puke while Bing holds my hair, averting her face because the sight and smell of me is just that bad. I weakly tell her that I can't believe that I am still throwing up. How can there be anything left in there to puke up? "I don't know, honey," she remarks. She flushes the toilet and hands me a cold washrag to wipe my face. I get back into bed. She leans over to kiss me goodbye and I blurt out, "Don't make the bed move. It makes me feel worse." She changes her mind about kissing me and tells me that she will be back around noon. Maybe I will feel up to watching the Cornhusker game? I snort. Doubt it.

Time passes in a blur until noon, Liv comes in to check on me every half hour until I tell her to please stop it, that I will call her if I need her. But, STAY IN THE HOUSE and DON'T ANSWER THE DOOR! She replies that she is NOT A CHILD, MAMA! I wave her away weakly. Too tired to fight.

Bing comes in around 1 p.m. and asks me if I can eat something, reminds me that my blood sugar is probably dropping and that I haven't taken my rheumatoid arthritis meds. "You are going to start swelling up like a toad if you can't keep those meds down," she reminds me. I ask her how she can love someone as sexy as me. She laughs and goes to fetch my blood sugar meter to see what my blood sugar is. It is 45. Ugh. Need to eat something. She brings me a slice of toast and sits on the bed with me feeding me tiny bites. I struggle with each bite because it wants to come right back up. I finally get it down and then she brings me my meds with a glass of water and I manage to take them. She tells me that I have to keep everything down for at least an hour so that they can get into my system. I glance at the clock. It is 1:09. I tell myself that I can puke at 2:10. Not before. I lay back down and grit my teeth, fighting my stomach's insistence that it CANNOT hold this down.

2:10 p.m. I throw up.

Bing comes in at 2:30 to tell me that the game is starting, do I need anything? I wave her away. Curl up on my side with a pillow over my eyes. Why is the sun so bright today? God, even with the blinds closed it is so bright in here.

The afternoon is a haze of sleeping, waking up sick to my stomach and the pain a steady pulse in my left temple.

5:00 p.m. The light is diffusing. It is softer now. I yank off the covers because I am sweating like a pig and fall asleep. I wake up at 5:30, shivering so violently that my teeth are chattering. I pull the covers back up and just as I am drifting off again, I know that I am going to be sick RIGHT NOW. I leap out of the bed and stagger for the bathroom, barely making it. God. HOW CAN I STILL BE PUKING? What the fuck is there left to throw up?

7:00 p.m. Bing comes in and asks me if I need anything, if the pain is still bad. It is getting better, but it still hurts. She offers to change the sheets because she knows that I hate sleeping in sheets that I've sweat in. I say ok and go to take a shower while she changes the sheets. She puts on the soft white ones that I like. The bamboo ones. I come back to bed, shivering from the shower but at least I am not puking. I get back in bed and she tells me that she will get me up for more toast at 9. I say okay. She leans down and very, very gently kisses my forehead.

9:00 p.m. Bing gets me up and hands me more toast. Liv brings in a very small cup of orange juice in one of her old doll cups. "Here," she tells me, "It will seem like more if you drink out of a baby cup." I smile weakly and thank her. "I think you are getting better, Mama! You smiled at me!" she says. I feel terrible. I am an awful mother, I think. God. My daughter is thanking me for smiling at her. How pathetic is that?

After I eat the toast, I note that I am keeping it down easily, but I am still exhausted. My sides ache from throwing up so hard. My knee is swelling just a little bit. The throbbing in my left temple is less sharp, more like a steady ache instead of a pick axe trying to find my brain.

I ask Bing if the Huskers won. She smiles. They creamed Missouri, she tells me. I do a high five with Liv.

"Get some sleep, Snow White," Bing says and shuts off the light. I sink back on the sheets and am asleep in less than a minute.

2:00 a.m. I wake up and the pain is gone. I am feeling shaky, but the pain is gone. The pain is gone. The pain is gone.

And the Huskers won.

Sides still hurt....

I dragged my reluctant sister to go see David Sedaris last night. And even she had to admit that she fell just a little bit in love with him.

I will ready anything by this man. ANYTHING. I laughed so hard that I had black rivulets of mascara running down my cheeks before the first ten minutes were past.

Read this man. Please. It will help you on your darkest day. And you will do what I am going to do: go to work and suddenly remember something David Sedaris said and burst out laughing on the elevator as you ascend up to the fourth floor of your building. The door will open on the third floor and two people will be standing there. They will be just a little afraid to get on that elevator with the woman who is cackling madly by herself. And then you will say, "I'm sorry but I just went to a David Sedaris reading last night and I am still remembering it."

One of the people, a gay man, will burst out laughing with you. The other woman, a dour looking woman who works on the fifth floor and always complains about how kids dress today, well...she will say, "David Who? Oh, never mind. I probably don't want to know." She will say this because once when she was talking about how Obama was leading our country into Muslim territory, you were silent until right before you got off the elevator and then you couldn't stand it anymore and you turned to her and said, "God, I will pay you to shut the fuck up."

She hasn't liked you since and probably thinks you are a Muslim.

But, the gay man will turn to you and tell you his favorite David Sedaris joke:

"What is the worst thing about blowing Willie Nelson?"

What?

"When he says 'I'm not Willie Nelson.'"

The two of you will crack up even more and the Muslim fearing woman in a very unfortunate plaid dress will stand as far away from the two of you as she can get.

Enjoy.

The me that no one knows

I was at work last week and we were all sitting in our staff lounge eating lunch. Jean was talking about how autumn made her feel so sad. I carefully peeled back my orange and commented that I understood completely. That sometimes when I walked my dog in the evenings the rustling of the leaves under my feet, the faint smokiness in the air, made me feel a little weepy.

The rest of the table fell silent for a moment and then Jean said, "Well, what I meant was that I felt sad because winter is coming soon. And wow...I never think of you being....weepy...Maria. You are so so...I dunno...so stoic. You don't seem like the weepy type to me."

The others quickly concurred, one commented on how she was afraid of me for the first few months after she started working with us, how I seemed so aloof and not unfriendly, but not exactly warm either. Another said that her husband had made the comment that he thought I was sure a nice looking woman but that I was one of those "icy ones." Julie, who probably knows me the best, said sweetly, "Oh, Maria is just a very private person. Once you get to know her, she can be pretty.....rogue."

The talk shifted to another topic. But, I was left sitting there wondering how I can be so unknown in a group that I see every week day.

I don't feel like an unfriendly, cold person. Icy? Private? Well, maybe. I am pretty forthcoming on my blog, but in person, I tend to be quieter, not really much of a sharer. But, I hardly think of myself as aloof or cool.

Quite the opposite. Sometimes, I feel as if I am going to explode with all the inner feelings that go on inside of me. As a child, I learned quickly to squelch this tendency of mine to wear my heart on my sleeve. My Da and I were very close and he was a very emotionally there man, very affectionate and demonstrative. My Mother was the cool one. She was not a hugger, a kisser or one to praise easily. After my Da died, it became clear to me that she did not particularly like any open vetting of emotions. I was very young, though, and such lessons took a while to sink in.

One day when I was sitting in the yard one night, watching fireflies, I started crying. It was just too much, you know? I mean, all that beauty just prancing around in front of me. So I was crying. My Mother came out to see what the matter was. Typical of her, she didn't come too close to me but stood at the edge of the kitchen doorway and called to me to ask what was wrong. I answered (blubbered, really) that the fireflies were just so pretty. My Mother's face showed exasperation.

"Maria," she called, annoyed. "They're just BUGS."

And so they were.

My sisters and I changed over the years to accommodate my Mother. In private, we were close, honest, affectionate and even bawdy (we still are) but to the outside world and especially around our Mother, we were very cool. Closed. Polite.

This tendency has spilled into virtually all of my relationships except the one I have with my daughter. I have no idea how it bypassed her. All I know is that from the moment that she was born, I felt safe in her hands, completely and totally myself. The way I always felt with my Da. Having Liv in my life was like coming home. It still is. Oh, I am her parent, that is true. I don't share everything. I don't share my worries for my own health, my concerns about money or how to get along with my partner. I am not one of THOSE parents. But, still. Liv gets the real me in all other ways. She knows that on some days, hard days, I need to get in bed with her for a while at night and do our story time. She starts a story, gets to a pivotal point and then passes it on to me to carry on. I do so and then hand it back to her and so on. Liv and I have a deeply honest, very warm and true relationship. She tells me when she has a bad day and I drag her outside to look at the night sky on warm summer nights. She gets the real me, the me that I don't really feel comfortable sharing with others.

I share with Bing to a certain extent, but it is not total. Bing is a very different person than I am. She lives her life on a very base level. She is not one to get lost in the prettiness of a certain rose. She doesn't cry at the perfect reading of a perfect poem. I can't go up to her with my book of Walt Whitman's poems and say, "You have to listen to this verse." I can do that with Liv.

I think sometimes that the world is overwhelming. Too much with me, as Wordsworth would have put it. I sit outside some autumn weekend afternoons and watch the sun spilling all over butterscotch through the leaves of my oak tree and I feel such a sense of....something. I can't really name it. Just something bigger than myself. Some days I feel regret for the paths that I didn't take. I often think that I am in the wrong career. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a high school English teacher and I still think I missed my calling. The pragmatic me won over the emotional me. I knew that I would never make much money teaching English, so I didn't go into that field, even though my love of the subject was huge. I always wanted to live in some small New England town and teach in some small high school, travel to the big apple on weekends and holidays to dip my toes into the tinsel. Instead, I haven't strayed far from where I was born in a small Iowa town. I wonder if I made some wrong turns. I suspect that I did but not much to be done about it now. And if I am honest, I know that I wouldn't have Liv if I hadn't stayed. That is enough to make me glad that I did.

I wonder sometimes if I would have been different with another partner but I think not. Bing is very different from me, granted, but in all of my relationships prior to mine with her, I always held back. It is just me. Or as Bing would say, it's just the way you roll, darlin'.

I tend to be a watcher while Bing is more of a doer. There is a line in a song by Counting Crows that says, "and all at once you look across a room to see the way that light attaches to a girl..." I feel as if I spend lots of time noticing things like that while Bing will be the one who just gets out there and dances. The only thing that I have ever seen her really lose herself in is music and even then, she is very capable of never drowning in it. On the other hand, I have been known to jump into a book, a song, a lyric, a person's tone, a color or the way the owl makes this certain "woooo" sound at night and immerse myself to the point of near no return.

One of my old lovers called it "the poet in you." My bff, Harriet says that I have a touch of the blarney, like many with Irish ancestors. My Mother would have called it foolishness or too much imagination.

Bing isn't one to try to change me, but she says that she does worry that my tendency to do this makes it easier for my black dogs of depression to come loping in. I think she often wishes that I were different. It is an odd dichotomy, I know. I can jump into deep waters but when I immerse, I can't really share about it well. I believe that Bing wishes that I were more open with my feelings with her, more demonstrative, less inclined to cry by myself in the bathtub but on the other hand, I think she feels uncomfortable with the way that I sometimes hear a beautiful song and have to go stand outside by myself for a while to digest it.

Once, I came home from work to hear her playing this haunting tune on the piano. I stood and listened to her play and it just overwhelmed me, the whole picture of her. The way that her fingers moved over the keys, the way she smiled softly to herself, just to herself. The tune itself, the way it moved across the room in waves towards me, coloring everything in it's wake to a rosy shade of pink. When it was finished, I was unable to speak, had to go upstairs and take off my work clothes and then sit on my bed and stare out the window for a few moments to collect myself. It never occurred to me to share with her how this felt, it was deeply personal and I couldn't really verbalize it. Well, I probably could have told Liv about it, but how could I explain to Bing that her music and the way her chin tilted and how the furniture seemed to soak up all that fineness, well...that it just made my whole heart feel as if it would burst with happiness?

She would have thought that I was a bit loony, I suspect.

Maybe I am.

All I know is that I feel too much most of the time and yet, to the world, I appear to be sliding, robotic through this world maze. How can that be? And more importantly, I suppose, how did I get to that place and why?

In my eyes, it is often a luxury to be understood. Better to be thought unmoved than to be overly so. Safer? Easier?

It's worth thinking about, I suppose, on a soft October day when the air is teasing my skin and making me think about how all I want to do is go outside and roll in the yard like the dog is doing right now.

No. Best to appear unfazed by it rather than undone by it, yes?

Parking Rules

I skipped work this afternoon to go to a matinee with my sister. I won't bother to tell you the movie because it sucked. The only good part was oogling Christina Hendricks and she died in the first half hour. But, it was a good chance to talk to my sister, Patrice. I also begged her to bake cookies for me for our office party on Friday and after I paid for her popcorn and soda, she agreed.

This is what two sisters talk about in nearly empty movie theaters on a Tuesday afternoon:

1) Lies that television shows perpetuate. As in, why was it that when I watched Hawaii Five-O last night, they had Steve McGarrett (the absolutely gorgeous Alex O'Loughlin) in bed with a woman as they woke up in the morning. He stretched beautifully and then turned over on his side to face her and they indulged in some long good morning kisses.

Now, that kind of shit just insults my intelligence. EVERYONE knows that you don't kiss deeply when you first wake up. You both have really bad morning breath and if you must have morning sex, you brush your teeth first or at least don't kiss deeply. But, then my sister commented that if Alex was in her bed and he wanted to kiss her that badly, well, have at it, mister.

Hmm. Point taken.

2) We talked about how she wants me to talk to her daughter about parking rules. Meaning: when you go parking with a guy, what are some good rules to apply. I told her that this was not in my Auntie Maria job description.

"Well, I can't be the one the talk to her about it," she said. "I'm her MOTHER. I'm not even supposed to know that she is parking in the first place. I just know that she will do it and I think you could talk to her about what is appropriate and what isn't.

So, after we dozed off during watched the movie, we stopped for coffee and shared what we thought of as good parking rules. Well, actually, I told her the story about how when I first went parking with a guy, I didn't know what was okay and what wasn't, so I has asked a friend who had a steady boyfriend to tell me the ground rules. This is what I remember her telling me:

1) Don't let him touch your breasts UNDER your shirt until at least the third parking session.

I remember her telling me to "make him work for the privilege" and having no idea how to do this. And what WORK did he need to do?

"Converse with you and say sweet things about how pretty you are," my friend had coached me. "He needs to know that when the headlights go off, that doesn't necessarily mean that the bra straps get pulled down."

Well, okay.

2) There IS a point of no return. She warned me that yes, it was indeed possible to be so aroused that it was hard to stop. She also warned me that he would hit that point WAY before I did and that it was up to me to be the red stop light in our game of parking lot bingo.

"And don't let him tell you the big lie about blue balls," she cautioned.

BLUE BALLS?

She clarified that some guys will say that they have blue balls and the only way to stop their pain and suffering was to let them have an orgasm. Preferably in one of my orifices.

Check. Blue balls are a lie.

3) Never underestimate the power of the breast. She also instructed me that my breasts were probably my biggest asset and that I needed to use them wisely. DON'T let him touch under the blouse too soon and when you do let him take the bra straps down...well....just remember that your breasts have the power to keep him occupied happily for a long time.

Sort of like babysitting, I thought. There was always that one special toy or game that was a sure fire hit to keep them busy for a long time. In this case, I surmised, well, my breasts were the play toy that could keep a boy busy while I what? Worked out pesky math problems in my head? Planned on what I would wear to mass tomorrow? WHY did I need something to keep him busy? And was there a counter toy of his that I could play with? I mean fair is fair.

My friend was perplexed. She finally admitted that boys did not really have a counterpart to the breast. Unless it was the power of kissing. Yes, she finally decided. Find a boy who could kiss you all night without trying to paw at you and well, he was a keeper.

4) Don't let him guide your hands too much. Because there is only one place that he is really interested in putting your hands. And that would be on his penis.

I wondered what the harm could be? I mean, maybe it was okay to touch OUTSIDE of the pants but not INSIDE until..what? Petting date number 10? 11? 29?

Nope, my friend assured me. Once you hit that slippery slope of penis rubbing, well...the next thing they want is to touch YOU. THERE.

Oh. Well. Now. I remember asking when it was okay to let him touch me. There.

When he had declared his love for you and given you a token of it that you could show off to all the other girls, she told me.

Silly me. And there I was thinking that maybe it would be nice to be touched. There.

She went on to say that once you touched him UNDER the pants and he touched you. THERE. Inside of your panties. Well.

That would be that pesky place she referred to as the point of no return.

Because, she admitted. It really does feel nice to be touched. There. And it is ditto for him to be touched. There.

Long story shortened. My friend got pregnant right before our high school graduation and married her parking partner. They had a baby girl and divorced a few years later when she got sick of staying home and taking care of their daughter while he spent his nights at the bar with his friends.

If she had only obeyed those parking rules....

But, I told my sister, I think that instead of telling my niece what constituted parking rules, we should talk instead about how important it was to not get pregnant before you are ready to be a parent and what exactly a STD is and how you can get one. About how no means no.

She thought it important to stress that sex is for married people.

I asked her what planet she lived on. I live on earth and we have sex all the time when we aren't married. But, yes. I did agree that sex is more um....okay...meaningful...when you are in love.

I had to stop there. Because this is where I always hit the wall and this is where I worry about what I will tell my own daughter about sex.

The thing is, I don't really believe that the best sex is committed sex. I think that sex is a really exciting, joyous thing and that it can be good even if one isn't in love. But, am I willing to tell my DAUGHTER this?

Because I also know that I really wasn't ready for the sheer physicality of sex until I was in college. Sex can be fun, but it can also be deeply personal. Sharing one's body is great but doing so before you are emotionally prepared for it can be devastating. And at sixteen or even seventeen, I wasn't there yet. Now I am willing to admit that I may be behind the times. I am 52. And from the television that I watch and the news that I see, it seems that girls are ready today WAY before I was.

Seeing my twelve year old great niece in hot pants and a tight tee shirt made me look at my own eleven year old child and fervently pray that she didn't go in this direction in one years time. I can't imagine Liv walking around in high heeled strappy sandals and a leather mini skirt but I see girls not much older than her doing it all the time.

When I was eleven, I was still having bike races with boys.

I was not really emotionally ready for sex until I was in my twenties.

So, instead of parking rules maybe we should stress that knowing oneself is important. And that sex is complicated sometimes. It would be great if it was just about sharing a good time. But in today's world, we have to consider STDs.

In the end, my sister and I agreed that neither one of us would have a talk with her daughter about parking rules. But that she would have a long talk with her about what can happen when you have sex before you are ready to take that step.

I still don't know what the hell I will say to Liv. She and I spent the last hour talking about why she likes one sort of telescope more than another. She has never mentioned liking a boy to me. Or a girl for that matter. Because it could happen.

And one day she will come to me and say "Mama, I met this really interesting boy..." and I will have to be ready to have the talk.

God, it would be so much easier just to hand her a list of rules about going parking.

And I suppose the same set could be given for two girls parking or two guys. Well, except for the breast thing with two guys. They get to skip right over that part. And with two girls? Well, yeah. Breasts as play toys? That comes up.

Wow. Way too much to worry about this close to bedtime. So, let's have some fun instead. Did YOU have any parking rules? Any good parking stories?

My best one involves this guy cutting the headlights and plunging us into total darkness. When we went to kiss, we knocked heads and he got a bloody nose. Sexy beast.

Any good parking stories or add ons/comments about parking rules?

Might be kind of fun....

Money can't buy happiness and all that bullshit.

I have probably heard that phrase about a million times.

And not once have I agreed with it.

Oh, okay. To a small extent. I believe that it is more important to have love and good health than to have money. But money helps. A lot. A fucking lot.

I grew up on a working farm. We always had enough. I never had to go hungry or wear clothes from Goodwill. (If I didn't want to...my mother did believe that Goodwill was just a store to get really good bargains and I agree with her sentiment. One of my favorite Mary Quant dresses was purchased for six dollars at Goodwill.)

When I went on to college, things were fine until I came out to my mother. And then she stopped paying for college, for everything. I was disowned. I lost my inheritance and my family until she died when I was in my thirties and then my sisters and I decided that we didn't want to be without each other anymore.

But during that time from when I was 23 until I started my career, I knew what it was like to go hungry. When I finally finished school and was able to get my first paying job at the age of 28, I was hip deep in student loans, owed nearly 30 thousand dollars. I had lived in an apartment that had iffy heat, a hole in the kitchen floor that looked down into the apartment below me, and windows that I could not open because as the landlord told me, "They'll fall right out in the yard, sugar."

I worked in the hospital cafeteria every morning and could eat breakfast there and then I would steal anything usable from the trays that came back: uneaten rolls, unopened cereal boxes, carrot sticks. I also pocketed apples and oranges from the fruit basket whenever I could. That was my lunch and even my dinner if I could swing it. I had always been sort of scrawny. Now I was just scrawnier.

Literally ALL of my clothes were either scrubs or from Goodwill. I owned one pair of jeans. One pair of sneakers. It was not uncommon for me to just wear scrubs all of the time unless I was going out on a date or someplace special. My friends were usually in the medical field too, so we all went everywhere in our scrubs and it was not a big deal.

I worked weekends doing tarot cards in a restaurant. This enabled me to actually get a clientele of fairly wealthy older women and Daddy's little girls who paid me well to read their tarot cards privately. I was never sure if I believed in the cards or not, I just knew that I had a talent for reading them well. At the restaurant where I worked, the owners gave me this Stevie Nicks get up to wear so I didn't have to worry about wearing my scrubs to read cards.

I got by. By the skin of my teeth sometimes. I remember well that I had to give up lots of concerts and movies because I simply could not afford them. This enabled me to bone up on my flirting skills. If I had a date, he or she would usually pay and I admit to occasionally dating someone whom I didn't like that much just because they took me to nice restaurants and movies. I often volunteered to take tickets at the door of college concerts and would then get to see some absolutely terrific college bands for free. For the larger concerts, I was on a waiting list to usher and if a regular usher got sick, they would call me. I got to see Bon Jovi, Counting Crows, Poison and Bruce Springsteen this way. I actually got to meet Jon Bon Jovi, who not only shared his tuna salad sandwich with me, but helped me shove a bottle of wine into my big hippie purse to drink later. And he kissed my cheek. Twice. Not bad for a pauper girl.

Eventually, money became less and less of a problem. I was able to pay off my student loans. I bought my first house. I not only had money in the bank, I even had an IRA. And a savings account. By the time Liv was born, I was doing just fine. Her college fund was started when she was still enroute via womb.

Now, I can't complain. Bing and I both have steady jobs although I make much more than she does and that seems almost unbelievable to me since the truth is that she works much harder than I do, much longer hours. But, she is a teacher. Enough said. She supplements her income by playing as many music gigs as she can. She has a reggae band, a jazz band that she plays with regularly and she occasionally plays with the symphony if their regular percussionist can't do a gig. She does lots of church gigs, weddings and local musicals at the playhouse.

The rest of our money is pooled together in one account. We share. The topic of whether to have our own accounts has been debated more than once. I tend to spend more on clothes than Bing does. I admit to liking my Ferragamo shoes, my Chanel suits and my cashmere. But, since I contribute more, she doesn't have much whimpering room. Aside from clothing, we both are pretty good at penny pinching, although Bing is slightly better at it than I am. If I want to go see David Sedaris (and I did) and the tickets are 60 bucks a pop, I just buy them. I'm not going to quibble. We are talking about David Sedaris here, dudes. He's worth every dime. Our checks have both of our names on them.

Bing jokingly told me once that when she was growing up she thought if she hooked up with a doctor, she would be set for life. That was back then. This is now. The now that we live in is a place where while we can pay our bills and splurge on nice vacations now and then, we aren't sitting pretty. We worry that there won't be enough for Liv to get through college, for us to be able to retire until we are both in our seventies.

But, we can't complain. I can go to Whole Foods and buy my goat milk yogurt and my goat milk soap. Bing can go to a seminar and stay an extra couple of days to hook up with an old friend. If Lee DeWyze ever gives a concert in our city, I am so there. (But...good hell, his new single SUCKS the big one....all I can hope is that his record label made him do it because dudes, this auto tuned guy singing about Sweet Serendipity is NOT him, I swear it. Listen to his other stuff instead: Only Dreaming, Predicament, A Song I Wrote For You or Annabelle.)

My daughter goes to a Montessori school and I pay the big bucks to keep her there.

We aren't starving. But we ARE careful with our money. At the grocery store this week, Bing noticed that ham was on sale, so we are having ham and cheese quiche for dinner tonight, but when I was at Whole Foods buying my special goat milk yogurt today, I picked up some french rolls to have with it which probably made the ham sale not as dear. (I also picked up some blood orange cake for dessert which was not cheap, let me tell you....)

I am smart enough to know that having money is not everything. Having a wife whom I am still madly in love with and a daughter who I adore is much more important than money to buy Ferragamos. And being healthy and well is nothing to sneeze at. But, keep in mind that my health insurance and Bing's health insurance are necessary for that. If we weren't working, we would not have all of my drugs for my rheumatoid arthritis paid for and they are not cheap. I still think that Obama's health plan is our best bet in long term care.

Now that I am getting older, money is taking on more importance to me. When I was in my mid thirties and my mother died, she left me out of her will. I lost an inheritance of nearly 200 thousand dollars. When I was younger, it seemed sad but not devastating. I was working by then and earning a good living. Now, I look back in anger, I truly do. All that money. Wow. I could have put it in Liv's college fund, taken us all on a great vacation and still had lots of pretty pennies left over.

I still have bag lady nightmares. We have some money invested and I watch it with a careful eye. I am not one to take many chances with investments. I am frugal and cautious.

And Bing points out periodically that if an apocalypse occurs, well....money won't matter. I tell her that she watches too many disaster movies but the truth is that we all live with the threat of nuclear disaster sitting right next to us and in the hands of a lunatic, we are all dead. Or just as well.

And if something like that happens, I want to be right next to Bing. She is a survivor, that one. I know that she would find a way to protect Liv and me and she would think nothing of breaking into a pharmacy and getting enough medication to keep us all going for years. She's like the Bruce Willis in our family. She would be the one patrolling the grounds with a rifle to make sure that no one steals our goat. Because she knows how much I like my goat milk soap and yogurt.....

I think that money can buy a helluva lot of happiness, don't you? I mean...REALLY...c'mon, don't you?

But having two successful careers and a savings account isn't the nest egg that it used to be. Bing and I are both professionals in our fields and our house is not yet paid for. And our house is elderly. She is like Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke. She has good bones and she is pretty feisty, but she still needs some work. The sink in the bathroom off our bedroom periodically leaks and no plumber yet has been able to fix it for good. We are getting a new roof soon and just had some window people come out who specialize in old Victorian homes to give an estimate on how much it would cost to replace the windows in Liv's bedroom, our kitchen and our office.

I nearly swallowed my tongue when I saw the cost. Boy Howdy. Home repairs do not come cheap.

But, no. I'm no longer living in an apartment where I get to hear the everyday kitchen conversations (and fights) of the couple who live below me. I do wonder sometimes if they are still together and if he was ever able to fix that problem he had with pre-mature ejaculation. That bugged the hell out of her, I remember. Oh, and her mother. They fought a lot about her.

My daughter keeps growing and soon she will be able to play professional basketball at the rate that she is shooting up. She is not picky about her clothes, yet. She pretty much lives in jeans and sweatshirts and will occasionally agree to a sweater and skirt set for special occasions, but she shows no predilection for designer gear.

Yet.

My friends with teenagers snicker when I say that. They tell me that it is coming. It is coming.

Having a child is expensive. Liv has so much more gear than I ever did. She has her own cell phone and her own computer. She is going through a phase where she wants to be an astronomer, so her birthday and Christmas lists all have pricey telescopes on them.

Even our dog costs more than the ones I had as a child. When I was a kid, we had no indoor dogs. The two dogs that we had, Sunny and Penny, lived in our barn. They ate table scraps and I don't ever remember them going to a vet. Ever. They both hunted in the fields around our home to supplement their table scrap diet and they both lived to a ripe old age.

Our dog, Socks, is in good health. But. I no longer give him baths in the sink like I did when he was young. I take him to the groomer once a month where he is bathed and blown dry and returned to us with a dapper little bandanna around his neck. He promptly removes this within ten minutes of getting home as he finds it embarrassing. He fancies himself as an Indiana Jones dog not a Nathan Lane dog. He is nobody's priss. He has all of his shots and when he got sick with a stomach virus last year, I took him to the vet. The dogs of my youth would have just endured throwing up in the fields for a few days. But, since it was my HOME that was being puked in, I took Socks in to the vet and then spent the next few days feeding him hamburger and rice and shoving little red pills down his throat. The only line that I have drawn with him is that I have not has his teeth cleaned. But if his breath gets any worse, I may give in and just do it.

Money seems to go fast around here, what is it like in your neck of the woods? Do you feel as if your emergency fund is constantly being dipped into as ours is?

Is your life better or worse than your parent's life was? Why?

Has money bought you any measure of happiness?

Do tell.

Jonesin' for the book

I love it when that happens.

Liv was reading a book that I had never heard of before. I checked out the cover, read the jacket insert. Hmm. Not usually my drug of choice. But then I saw that Stephen King gave it a glowing review and I asked Liv to let me read it when she finished.

She did.

And now I am crazy mad for it.

I started it last night, reading on commercials during Glee. And then I realized that the show had come back on and I had missed it because I was so engrossed. I went to bed with it and read until I could no longer keep my eyes open. I woke up this morning and read it while I drank my coffee, reading bits and pieces out loud to Liv who kept assuring me that "it even gets better, Mama!"

And it just does. It keeps getting more and more intriguing. More and more upsetting. More and more exciting.

I dare you to read this and be able to put it down after the first twenty pages:

I double dare you to be able to stop.

That post where Maria goes to a baby shower

I'd been dreading it for weeks. When the baby shower invitation came in the mail, it was addressed to both of us, so I showed it to Bing.

Who snorted.

"God," was her comment, "why must they troll so shamelessly for presents?"

The new parents are my nephew and his wife. Jesse and Celine.

I like them both. They are in their late thirties and took their time finding each other. And then since she is an older woman, it took almost a year for her to get pregnant.

Which is so unfair, in my opinion.

Why the fuck is it that when you are seventeen and have no parenting skills you can get pregnant by just looking at a guy but when you are thirty eight, you have to plan fucking around your cycle and do crazy things like lay in bed with your heels propped up on the headboard just hoping that his sperm finds that elusive old egg and sticks?

Which is what they did. For ten months. And then it finally stuck.

So, now they are having a baby.

And there was this baby shower to contend with.

I hate showers of any kind. Wedding, baby, whatever. They are always fraught with danger. I have to buy a gift, which I don't mind. But, I can't just send said gift because when my sister calls to tell me that I "freaking better attend, sister, because seven people have already sent their regrets," well....I have to go.

So instead of spending my Saturday finishing my Jonathan Tropper book and lazing around the back yard while Bing mowed....I had to get gussied up and go sit in a big room with a bunch of tittering females who all insisted on saying macabre things to the about-to-be new mother like:

"Be prepared for no sleep!"

"For ten years!!!!!" (Loud laughter that is softly tinged with memories of back when yes, we thought that if that baby did not sleep we were going to slit our wrists...)

"And then be prepared to spend the next ten years sitting up and waiting for them to decide to come home two hours after their curfew!"

"I was in labor for 28 hours. I hope yours won't be as terrible. But, ask for that epidural RIGHT AWAY. Don't let them tell you to wait because if you wait too long, you will be like me and not get one at all and then well, you can feel like you are expelling a watermelon."

"You'll take one look at that sweet little face and forget that you just spent the last ten hours in the worst pain of your entire life."

"My advice? Let them cry. They have to learn to comfort themselves! And don't even start the rocking thing unless you want to do it forever."

"A routine is essential. Babies LOVE schedules. Seriously. Put them on one and keep them on it."

"Men will try everything to make you believe that they don't know how to warm formula or change a diaper properly. Don't believe a word of it. But be prepared for them to be total idiots at everything. You just have to lower the bar, don't expect much."

By the end of the party, Celine was looking a little green around the gills, especially when she was confronted with such contraptions as a diaper genie and a processor that will mash up every food that you can think of into a baby mush.

I gave them a book of fairy tales written in French, Celine's native tongue.

The party was given by two of Celine's best friends, one a total earth mother type from Colorado named Greta and the other her pal at her place of work, an extremely tanned and fit woman named Cecilia. Greta was one of those women that you know is really, really special and unique but you sort of want to smash her face in anyway.

She gardens and is not only proficient, she is also completely organic and makes her own baby food. She made the cake for the shower and it was completely organic and actually tasted delicious so I couldn't even grouse that ok, ok, ok...so it was organic already...it tasted like sawdust. It didn't. it was flavored completely with raw organic honey and was so succulent that it melted in one's mouth like the organic butter that was in it.

Greta has a big, hearty earth mama laugh too and you just know that she will never ever dye her frizzy brown mane of hair or wear makeup. She was dressed in a long flowing skirt and sandals that her husband (fittingly...a cobbler) made for her. I wanted to like her, truly I did. But, she was just too blatantly organic for my taste. I tried hard to find her Achilles heel...was she a smoker? a gambler? No. And when she said that she thought pacifiers were "criminal" and that no child under the age of ten should watch television...well...that was my justification for thinking that she was just too organically perfect for my taste.

I liked Cecilia only marginally better. She was reed thin and wore a short sleeved tee shirt that showed off her gym toned pecs. She was also the color of coffee with just a dab of cream...WAY too tanned for a white woman. She was in her mid thirties and already had the crispy looking skin that over tanners get. I started out thinking that I would never, ever be able to like a woman who walked nine miles a day and seemed almost orgasmic about her stair stepper but ended up half liking her when she admitted it made her sick when Celine admitted that their dog slept with Jesse and her under the covers at night.

Because that is just wrong, people. Pets do not need to sleep under the covers with anyone. On top of the covers, yes. Under, no.

I drove to the party with my sister, Patrice who is mother in law of the mommy-to-be. On the way, Patrice warned me about people that she thought I should stay away from and people that she thought I would enjoy. She said that Celine's mother had a French accent that was so thick that you could barely understand her but that she was an Obama lover so that might endear her to me.

"Plus she drank like a fish when we had her over for dinner a few weeks ago and she told me that she thought that our swimming pool was 'ostentatious' so knowing you, Maria...you two will hit it off like gangbusters."

Patrice thought that I might like one of Celine's friends who sported tattoos. She warned me about a few of her die hard Republican friends who were coming: "You'll be itching to snicker at their pantsuits and the gifts that they will probably bring, things like little blankets with Disney characters on them but try to stay away from talking about politics, won't you?"

I promised. Fingers crossed behind my back, of course. Because seriously, I would probably need more than two Appletinis to get me through the shower and once that liquor was in my veins, the mouthy Maria would venture out just a little bit. I do keep my manners on, my Mother trained me well, but if they had the nerve to say one word against Obama, I would find my claws nicely.

When we arrived, we were immediately handed a piece of paper and told to write 2 items of advice for Celine as a new mother. I found my other sister, Jessie, and looked at her items. She had written 1) Spanking is ok and 2) Dirt won't kill anyone. I licked my pencil tip and wrote my own words of advice:

1) It's not the end of the world if you let the baby sleep with you now and then

and

2) Cap'n Crunch is okay for children to eat for breakfast if you are busy or hungover or it's 6:30 a.m. and the coffee isn't ready yet.

Greta collected our lists and tsk tsked when she read mine. I smiled sweetly. She nervously asked me how many children I had and when I said it was just the one, she looked relieved.

Next, we were told to pass around a ball of string and to cut how big a piece of string we thought would fit around Celine.

I hoped that the games would improve. They didn't. We next had to answer a questionnaire with such compelling questions as:

What Sesame Street character is cranky? and What fairy tale character thought the porridge was too cold? and Who did the dish run away with?

I sat next to my niece, Erica. She is 14 and dressed for the shower in Daisy Dukes and a tank top. She told me that she sat next to me precisely because her mother told her not to because I was a "free thinker." I explained that this meant that I was a lesbian, a Democrat and had smoked pot in college. And inhaled. She looked disappointed. I refrained from telling her that if her mother had no problem with her dressing like the girl from Dukes of Hazzard for a baby shower that it was a little cheeky of her to insinuate that I might be not the most suitable person to sit next to at a baby shower.

I came in second on the string contest because I am just a math whiz or something.

I also came in second on guessing how many q-tips were in the baby bottle. I guessed 69 and it was 71.

And I won at the game where you have to unscrabble letters to find words like bassinet, diaper, rattle and blanket because I am just that smart.

My prize? A huge bottle of hand lotion that smelled like dead roses. It will make a nice Secret Santa gift at work. I had an image of this lotion being like ten years old and making the rounds of various re-gifting all around the country.

Then we all watched Celine open her gifts and oohed and aahhhhed. We ate cake and drank bright red Hawaiian punch. And then everyone ganged up and scared the bejesus out of Celine with their childbirth stories and how you must baby proof your house or little Mary or John will end up sticking their fingers into a light socket and frying their brain.

Greta told us that she had brought her "birthing tape" for Celine to see.

"I had both of my children at home," she said. "It was so peaceful. I had Piers in our bathtub and he came swimming out of me like a little Olympian!"

No shit. Imagine our surprise. I was truly glad that Greta hadn't brought her tape to share to with all of us. Because she also confessed that she hadn't shaved her legs in decades and I had this picture in my mind of her big hairy legs straddling the sides of the bathtub as little Piers came slithering out of her like a fat trout.

No thanks.

Greta also brought a case of her homemade apple sauce to hand out to all of us as party favors. They were quaint little glass jars, hermetically sealed and had decals of baby heads on the sides. She had written in bright blue ink: No chemicals to harm precious babes!

I told a funny story about how Liv once ate a tube of my Cherries in the Snow lipstick and was just fine, but had extremely red lips for a few days. Greta visibly shuddered.

I admit here that this was not completely true. She only ate about half of it. But, I felt compelled to upset Greta. It is always more fun to be the cautionary tale than the role model.

Everyone began grabbing their sweaters to leave at last. Celine came over to hug me goodbye and said that she'd see me at the family Thanksgiving dinner. She leaned over to tell me how much she loved the French fairy tales and then whispered, "Thank you so much for not sharing your childbirth story about Liv. I am almost ready to puke from fear as it is."

I patted her and told her that she would be just fine and that I would babysit any time she asked. Greta, who was standing next to us, looked at me in horror, probably having visions of my feeding the new baby a snickers bar while I set him down on the floor with a shedding dog and told him to share the candy.

As we walked out to the parking lot with my sister's friends, one of them commented on a pro Obama bumper sticker that she had seen recently on a car.

"I just sighed," she said. "I mean...that horrid man is going to take our nice clean world to Muslim hell in a handbasket..."

I would have said something but Patrice accidentally on purpose pinched me. Hard.

So, instead I just said that I needed to hurry home to fuck my wife.

Ok. I didn't say that. But, I said it in my head.

Instead, I told the Obama hater that I really, really hoped that all the silly hoopla about building a mosque on the Twin Towers site would stop soon.

"Isn't bigotry just the sign of an uneducated mind?" I asked mildly.

I'm sure I was one of the topics of conversation on the way home.

When I arrived home, Bing was correcting papers and Liv was working on her school paper about millworkers in the 19th century. Oxtail soup was simmering in the crock pot.

It was good to be home to see my unconventional family: my lesbian partner and my out of wedlock child.

I spied something on the ground and leaned down to pick it up. It was a small piece of a cookie. No. I didn't put it in my mouth. I gave it to the dog.

Too bad there wasn't a baby around to feed it to......

Nightmare on Chicago Street

The nightmare is always the same, basically.

I'm out somewhere in public. It is cold and windy. I have my manuscript, a book I've written in some sort of unreliable satchel. It is rainy too most of the time and darkish. Not full on night dark, but evening-ish.

I somehow lose the manuscript. I either drop it or it somehow ends up flying out of a car window. Something like that. In the nightmare last night, I was standing and waiting for a subway in New York or some large city. I could hear the rain pounding above me on a tin roof. I was wearing a scarf around my head, tied under my chin like my mother used to make me wear to school on windy days. The scarf was coming loose and I reached up to tidy it and suddenly there went the manuscript....right into some sort of duck pond.

Right. In the subway. Hey. It's my dream. I'll murk it up if I need to.

At any rate, I realized too late that the manuscript was in the water and I was distraught. God. All the work. I wring my hands.

And then the nightmare becomes truly ghoulish.

Because in my nightmare, I realized that it wasn't a manuscript that fell into the water. It was my baby. Liv. An infant. I run...absolutely terrified out of my fucking mind...back to the water. I was screaming and trying to get to her. I could see a sort of whitish blob under the water, a faint outline of what? A doll? A face? Couldn't make it out, but I knew that it is Liv. I had somehow let her fall into the water.
It is the same every time I have this nightmare. I try to get to her but there is always a handicap. I am tied to a pole and can't get loose. My shoes seem to be filled with lead. I don't have any hands...just these gross bloody stumps.

And then, I saw her plainly. She was laying face up at the bottom of the pond and she was screaming, crying for me. I kept trying to get to her and somehow couldn't.

I felt someone holding me back, telling me that it is too late. She is dead. I realize that the voice is right. Liv is floating face down in the water.

And then I have the oddest thought but I have it in each and every nightmare.

I think to myself: MY GOD! YOU LET HER DIE AGAIN. WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS?

It is as if in my dream I realize that I have had this dream many, many times and the outcome is always the same. I always am incompetent or not paying attention and Liv dies because of my ineptitude. I always think it is a manuscript or a book of important papers or something like that and it ALWAYS turns out to be Liv. And yes, each and every time, she dies.

In my dream, I felt my Da's hands patting me. Telling me that if I will just wake up, he will give me a hug and it will be okay. I turned around to tell him that he can't really help me, he is dead. He seemed pretty cool with this, nodding sadly and disappearing into the duck pond, next to Liv. The two people whom I probably love most in the world, side by side. Dead.

I woke up flailing, muscles aching in my legs from clenching them. My hands balled into fists and me crying. Silently crying. I don't think I cried out. The times that I have had this nightmare with Bing in the bed with me, she has never once woken up so I think I must be silently enduring it.

Bing was not in bed with me at 2 a.m. when I had the latest edition of nightmare on Chicago street. I have been waking up with leg cramps for the last few days and my rheumatoid arthritis has been attacking my knee in the middle of the night. Even if Bing slightly bumps me, it hurts like hell...so she has been sleeping in the guest room until it quiets down.

Eventually, I awakened enough to realize that I was having my old nightmare. I have 3 basic nightmares, with variations.

1) The lost manuscript that turns into Liv dying nightmare.
2) The nightmare where I realize that I have not even graduated from high school and I am going to be outed as a high school drop out at work. I am also being stalked in the workplace by some unseen person who wants to kill me.
3) The common nightmare that most people have: I am naked in a public place. I often dream about celebrities in these dreams. My last dream involved singing a duet with Lee DeWyze and Crystal Bowersox on American Idol and I was naked and they were trying not to laugh at me and not really succeeding since they ended up trying to take my photo on their i phone.

The losing Liv nightmare is hands down the worst. I always wake up shaking and terrified. Always end up feeling like maybe the dreams are right. Maybe I suck at parenting. Maybe she would have been better off with anyone but me.

Last night was no exception. I lay in bed until the need to pee coaxed me up. I didn't want to be alone in my bed but didn't really want the arms of my lover. Instead, I tiptoed quietly into Liv's bedroom and sat down in the rocker beside her bed, just watching her sleep. She woke up as she sometimes does. I moved to the side of her bed, ran my fingers through her hair, leaned down to kiss her cheek.

"It's okay, sugarfoot. Back to sleep," I said.

Liv sleepily asked me if I want to get in with her for awhile, to warm my toes.

"Don't mind if I do," I said and got in with her. She is getting over a ten day cold but her fever has finally gone away for good. She was warm but not hot. I settled in and cuddled her close to me, silently asking for her forgiveness for dreaming that I neglected her.

Liv cuddled up close, my turtle dove.

"Would you like a story?" she asked kindly. She is a tender, watchful child. She knows that sometimes I just need to hold her, smell her, be with her.

No, I told her. No story. Maybe you could hum a song with me?

We hummed to a Beatles song: Strawberry Fields and then segue over into I Want To Hold Your Hand. Halfway through she fell back to sleep and I laid there for several moments, timing my breath to hers, holding her close and warm. And safe.

When she began to snore lightly (nose still stuffed up), I slid out of her bed and went back to my own. The sheets felt as if they belonged to me again, the bed felt warm and cozy and not like a screening room for a nightmare on Chicago street.

I fell back asleep after I made the decision not to analyze the dream too deeply. It wasn't hard to decipher.

There is this woman who never thought she would be anyone's mother who now is someone's mother and she feels like she is out of her comfort zone. So, she dreams about losing something that matters to her..a manuscript and eventually the dream allows her to see what her real fear is: not being a good mother, a good enough mother. The sort of mother who allows her child to drown in a duck pond in the subway system of New York City. And it scares her more than a clown ringing her doorbell at 3 a.m. (Thank you, George Carlin.)

I went to work this morning with my ear buds in and my music turned on loud to Six Inch Nails screaming that

You let me violate you
You let me desecrate you
You let me penetrate you
You let me complicate you...

After a nightmare night, I just can't endure anything soft. I want something gritty and chewy. A song that makes me cringe just a little bit.

My first call at work was from my bff, Harriet. It has stopped freaking me out that she always knows exactly when I need to hear her voice.

"Hey, you," she said, congenially. "I felt my twin pull last night. Are you okay?"

Twin pull. This is a Harriet term. She told me long ago that she felt like we were twin souls. She swears that she can feel it when I am having a bad day.

"Like twin telepathy," she tells me.

It has happened too many times for me to snort when she says that. And vice versa. I will often feel a need to call her and have no idea why but if I do, well, something has usually happened that is troubling her or she is just in need of someone to listen to bitch about why she can't stand to watch her husband trim his nose hair.

I told her that I had the dead baby Liv nightmare. She knows the specifics.

She sighed.

"Oh, Penelope," she said.

She calls me Penelope sometimes. I call her Francine. We have no idea why we do this but just do.

We talked about the past week. I told her how Liv had told me that she didn't want to trick or treat this year, felt that being in sixth grade was too old.

"Well.....there you go," she said, wisely. "Aw, honey. You have to let her grow up," she said this in a not unkind voice but the voice that I have grown to love. She tells it straight and doesn't sugar coat.

"You know what I think you should do?" she said.

"Eat a pack of oreos?" I suggested.

"I think you should tell yourself that you are going to have a hot dream about....let's see...who makes you wet?" she asks.

I stop and think. I am drawing a blank. This IS bad.

I finally say Laura Linney. Carey Mulligan. Johnny Depp. You know, the ones who are attainable.

"Okay. Tonight tell yourself that the next time you are drifting into that nightmare that Carey Mulligan or Johnny Depp or Jon Bon Jovi...whoops...sorry that's MY fantasy...will come stand beside you and make sure that Liv doesn't drown. And then drop Liv off at my house and I will babysit and you two can go off and fuck yourselves silly to that Nine Inch Nails song that I bet you played on the way to work today..."

It is such a luxury to have a best friend who is also your twin and thus can read your mind.

"I love you," I told her.

"I love you back," she said. "Now, I really need to go change a stinky diaper..."

So, now it is time for bed. And I am all ready to go say my mantra.

But here's my question for you.

What do you have recurring nightmares about?

Care to share? Might be kind of illuminating for all of us, yes?

Pimping myself out for cable service

...or how I kept from going berserk.

The weekend was looking pretty good. My sisters are in town, visiting from Iowa. We are going to a local production of Footloose tonight, followed by some heavy drinking, carousing and cattily making fun of spouses behind their backs nachos at Chilis.

It had been a good work week. All of my cases were handled well, paperwork in on time and all t's crossed and i's dotted. Someone had brought powdered doughnuts to work that Friday and I had eaten two and had the white lips to prove it.

I came home, went out for pancakes with Bing and Liv and after Liv retired for the night with her book to her room, Bing and I settled in on the sofa for a couple hours of watching reruns of Six Feet Under on HBO on demand.

Halfway through the show, the television screen froze. We sighed. Waited. Bing finally got up and found the remote and tried shutting it off and on. Still frozen. Except this time there was a little message on the screen telling us to check our cables and call the cable company.

Bing growled under her breath. Tried to get a local channel. It came on fine. So. We had all the channels but just not HBO on demand. She went in to call Cox Cable. Put it on speaker.

Becky soon came on the line and announced perkily that she could help us. We hoped so. Bing relayed the problem. Becky said that the solution was simple. She would re-send the signal through to our cable box and we should be right as rain.

"Wait for the zap!" she said merrily.

We waited for the zap. It came. Now we had a fuzzed out screen. Bing relayed the news to Becky who faltered but didn't fall.

"OK!" she said, brightly. "Now, just give it 10 to 45 minutes to load up! Is there anything else I can do for you tonight?"

Um. Wait up, missy.

I informed Becky that the last time the cable went out we did not have to wait for 45 minutes for anything to "load up." And that we hadn't really lost power, we had simply lost HBO on Demand. Becky's voice took on an edge. She wanted off that line now. She knew that something was amiss and didn't want to listen to two women bitching at her.

Becky repeated her line about waiting 45 minutes and then if things were still not right to call back.

Bing and I looked at each other. Decided that we would give it a go.

45 minutes later: nothing.

We called back. This time, Bart offered to help us. He had us shut everything down and resent the signal. We tried to tell him that we HAD NOT LOST OUR CABLE CHANNELS, ONLY HBO ON DEMAND until Becky "zapped" us.

This was on Becky. It was.

Bitch. Incompetent bitch.

I did not say this, of course. But, I thought it. I even pictured Becky's smirking face in my head. She was 24 and itching for it to be time for her leave when her shift ended at 11 so that she could go over to her boyfriend's house and give him a goodnight bj, maybe joke about how she had fried some people's cable tonight.

Bart was puzzled by our predicament. He said that he needed to send a technician to our home to have a "look see." Bing warily asked him when that would be.

"Well," he said in that recklessly happy way of his, "we can put you down from 8 to noon on Monday."

Bing sputtered. "We WORK, buster. We need a time after five."

He was silent. I could hear him thinking tough beans, bitch.

He said that he could do a Tuesday night from 7-10.

TUESDAY NIGHT!? No television until TUESDAY NIGHT???

I did not want to miss Amazing Race. I did not want to miss Alex's perfect man stubble on Hawaii Five-0

Bing went into a diatribe as only Bing can.

LISTEN, BART. WE PAY BIG BUCKS FOR CABLE EACH MONTH. WAITING FOR FOUR DAYS FOR SERVICE WHEN THE ERROR WAS ON BECKY'S NECK IS RIDICULOUS. WE NEED SOMEONE OUT TOMORROW!

Not gonna happen, Bart told us. His voice was now sliding over from the happy go lucky to the so-what-the-fucky.

It all ended badly with Bing slamming the phone down and us having to wait until Tuesday for television.

I don't even like television all that much.

Well, except for Alex's man stubble. I am pretty attached to that. Like I want to sort of lick the screen when he is on.

I'd like to say that Bing and I looked at each other and calmly shrugged and went to bed to spend some time making hot sweet love instead of bickering about television.

It was not to be.

Because when things go wrong, I suddenly am reminded of everything that bugs me about her.

Like WHY does she have to handle everything incorrectly? Bart was not going to respond to screaming. Why did she have to act like an asshole?

Her eyebrows shot up in the air. Her voice took on that acid edge that it always does when she is irritated with me.

"Well, honey," she drawled. "You are the big psych expert in the house. Maybe you should have handled it with your perfect expertise and wise negotiating skills..."

She went to bed.

I gave her the finger behind her back.

I am pretty sure that she felt it.

So, this morning after she left to go teach a youth orchestra class, I called Cox Cable. I talked to Albert. Albert sounded tired. Albert sounded as if he was Becky's boyfriend and the bj was just not up to her usual tomfoolery. Maybe her tongue action was sluggish. At any rate, he was not really into working today.

I brought my voice down a register and let it slide up and down his ear.

"Albert?"

I said his name with just the right amount of sweet in my mouth. Rolled that b around just enough for him to feel it all the way down to his chest hair.

"Uh. Yeah?"

I smiled. Bait taken.

God, I am good at this. I should really do phone sex for a living.

"I'm wondering if you can help me...."

(Because I am sitting here all alone in my thong bikini and I really, really need your big powerful man skills to help me with my little problem. Here. It's a problem and only you and your strong, handsome skill set can take me on)

"Uh...ok. What do you need, Miss...um. Miss Lastname?"

"Call me, Maria." (throaty laugh) "No one calls me Miss Lastname. It sounds like my mother!" (tinkling giggle)

"Uh, ok. Maria. How can I help you?"

"Well, there is a problem with my cable and I am not scheduled to have it looked at until Tuesday night and well....I would really, really like to have it looked at sooner if there is any way possible. I just love my cable and I can tell by your voice that you have it in your power to help me. Can you help me, Albbbbbbert? Pulease?"

I refrain saying pretty please but will hike it up with my skirt if I have to.

"Uh. Sorry, Maria. It looks like everyone is booked pretty solid today."

I count to seven. Let him feel my pout up close and personal.

Long, silky sigh.

"Ah. Well, I'm pretty sad about this...Are you sure there isn't some way that you can help me? Because, I can tell that you can be pretty....skillful...at finding solutions to tough problems...."

(Like...I really, really, really need your big manly help for my soft feminine needs)

Gloria Steinem is frowning at me. She is pursing her lips and shaking her head. Because she worked so hard all those years and I have gone and sent things back to the dark ages. Shame on my head. Shame on my Victoria's Secret underpants.

Albert is thinking hard. He wants to help this sweet woman with the soft voice. He makes the decision. He feels really good about himself and his voice loses its tentative quality and now has a lumberjack ring to it.

"Ok. Maria. I think that we can squeeze you in this afternoon. Can you promise to be home between noon and three?"

"Oh, yes! Sure. Of course. Albert, you are my hero. Thank you so much! I just knew you would be able to help me. I could tell by your voice....."

We said our warm goodbyes. It's a win-win. Albert gets to feel helpful and strong. He also gets to feel like maybe not getting that superlative blow job was not the end of the world. There is always tonight. And he is the man with the solutions. He can help soft spoken women who have cable needs and only he can bring home the bacon.

I win because I get my cable looked at. And hopefully fixed.

I call Bing to tell her this. She is not impressed.

"You know, Maria," she says, her voice just a little too scolding for my taste, "not everything can be solved by using feminine wiles."

I don't answer. Because she is right, of course. But I am too. I know how to get things attended to. That is a talent. Give me some credit. So, I used the feminine card. Sue me. She just may be able to watch Anderson Cooper tonight. And SNL.

She goes on.

"And is this what you want to teach Liv? That when you get into a tough spot, you prey on men with your womanly flirtations? That this is how we get things done?"

Ok. I'm starting to feel that little prick of guilt now. I don't much care for that. I want to feel like I problem solved not like I sold out my pussy for cable.

So, I'm throwing it out to you. What do you think? C'mon, don't sugar coat it. Am I a sell out? Was I wrong? What do you really think?

(Smiling right at you. Winking.)

Is it working?

Post script: The cable guy came out this afternoon but was unable to find what the problem was. We still do not have cable service and there is a new appt for someone to come out on Monday evening to replace the cable in our attic and see if that helps. I did like the cable guy. I am not kidding when I tell you that he looked like this.
I had this crazy urge to kiss him when he left. He spent over 2 hours trying to locate our problem and I felt like he knew his stuff. Plus, he sat on the living room floor and rubbed Socks' belly while we waited for the signal to try to come back on. How can you not like a guy who does that? So...no television for a while. We'll survive.