Every Day is Marne Gras

On August 5th or 6th I am slated to bring early Chanuka tidings to a nice stranger lady living somewhere with cancer. I’m giving her one thousand and ninety (mls? tiny units of some kind? whatever) little units of my bone marrow because she has leukemia and I do not.

In preparation, I will receive a physical, including a chest x-ray and an EKG and infectious disease screening in order to make sure I am healthy enough to donate and that my anatomical gift is not biologically yucky. She will have high dose chemotherapy and then full body radiation to empty her body of what is presently killing her (which, presently, is just about everything) and she will try her very hardest to not die while my stem cells find their way from Seattle to wherever she is and attempt to graft themselves up in her business.

I got involved with the National Marrow Donor Program the way I imagine many people do: I was killing time in between afternoon appointments. I was walking sloooowly across the Oberlin campus, considering wandering through the mailroom again when I saw a cluster of earnest-looking women standing behind a table covered in brightly-colored schwag, apparently handing out free stuff. I walked over, and behold: I could have a free lollipop if I gave them a cheek swab! Awesome.

I would probably never get a phone call, they told me, but they handed me several packets of information regarding how the whole program works, what would happen if I did get called, and how to update them for the rest of my life with my contact information. I swabbed away, convinced I was swabbing wrong and they would probably just throw my sample out after I left, and thanked them for my nice, new glossy packets (which I read on the way to my next appointment), and that was it.

Fast forward some years. I apparently gave the NMDP my end-of-the-world e-mail address.  It’s the one I never, ever use, but incidentally, the only e-mail address I know I will never delete, an AOL account I’ve had since I was fifteen that I clean out once a month or so. It’s the only knickknack I own.  I hold onto it for nostalgia.  This is the e-mail account I created when I wanted to surf the internet without my high school boyfriend being able to talk to me online; it was my secret e-mail, my first weapon of resistance.

When it happened I didn’t even get a call when it happened (though I tell people about “the call” when I describe the process so far because it sounds so much more dramatic and exciting than “when I got the e-mail”).

I am deleting the same old trash I delete every month from my AOL account: assimilationist crap from the HRC, 10% off of nothing from Babeland, something about my Friendster account (Facebook, you know how this ends), and there on my screen is a terse subject heading: “Bone Marrow Donor Program”.

I love opening spam in the hope that it is not actually spam, so I opened it, rather than sending it to recently deleted AOL hell. I thought it was a reminder that I was still in their database, and would I please verify my contact information. I thought it was the donor program finally telling me that I had swabbed incorrectly and they had to junk my specimen.

Wrong. Our records indicate that you may be a potential match for a patient.

Please contact us right away if you are still interested in becoming a donor.

I thought it was a joke. For the uninitiated: there are over seven million people in the NMDP registry, and there are even more folks registered elsewhere. There are barely a few thousand matches made in the US each year. The pacific northwest/seattly area makes around 40. You have a much better chance of getting into Harvard; it is similarly probable to getting Ed McMahon to come to your house during the superbowl with a big check and balloons.

But say you do get an e-mail, like me. This is what it means: someone out there has an HLA type (that’s science talk for something geneticky) that matches yours enough based on your preliminary sample that you gave them X years ago as you were dawdling to your meeting with your Women’s Studies advisor that they want to test you out further to see exactly how good of a match you are.

If you’re still into the idea of giving it up for a stranger, the next thing you will do is answer a lot of questions about your health over the phone. I experienced the joy of the phone screening while shopping for my New Zealand backpack in the REI. While I was being ignored by the entire sales staff, I sat in the corner next to the clearance daypacks and assured the phone screener that I was pretty sure I did not have mad cow disease.

She did not think I was very funny. It probably would not have worked out well between us. You know, sexually.

If there is nothing especially infectious about you (and, you know, you’re not, gasp, a gay man or African, because if you are, then you’re out, you walking vessel for AIDS, you). you get to go give them more samples. You are in a contest now with some other potential donors to see who is the healthiest and who mostly closely genetically resembles the potential recipient. There might be quite a few people in the running, but there might not be.

I don’t like needles. Puncture wounds make me faint, no matter how small. Every time I have had something pierced (what was it about being nineteen that made me think “I should poke lots of holes in my face”?) and every time I have had to give blood, I have passed out. When I had my labret (chin) pierced, I passed out twice. I refused to share this tidbit, though, with the blood technicians who have taken my samples so far; instead I just told them that I really enjoy elevating my feet and drinking apple juice while undergoing medical procedures. They think I am a riot. I don’t want anyone there to know how physically challenging this whole business is for me.

Anyway, after they take more blood from you, you wait.  You have somewhere around a 10-15% chance of receiving another phone call from the program. This one is actually a phone call, and it is “the” phone call:

“Guess what? You’re the best match for our patient. Would you like to be the donor?”

The woman who called me was elated; clearly the highlight of her day.

I got the call from this happy, happy woman while I was on vacation in Arizona; at that moment I was an hour deep into trying to make our dead campstove come back to life.  I was cursing at a piece of rusty tin in a hostel parking lot when we connected.

“Holy shit”, I offered. “Can I call you back, in like, a week?”. They were not especially thrilled, but after I promised them that I would call them back when I got home, they acquiesced and I got back to playing cub scout.

So fast forward again three weeks; here I am now, rushing through blood tests and consultations and examinations so I can get this bone marrow stuff out of my body and into hers before her cancer kills her.

Her name isn’t Linda (although I guess it could be). They can’t tell me her name– I’m only allowed to know her sex, her age, and her diagnosis. I started calling her Linda, though, because I thought it would be helpful when talking about this whole process to other people to use a name instead of “the recipient” or “the lady I’m donating for”.

Or that was my logic. But now I’ve become attached to Linda, like the way farmers do when they can’t help naming their livestock names like Buttercup and Snowflake instead of just tagging them with serial numbers. Not to make slaughtering metaphors while talking about a stranger lady’s cancer, but you try slaughtering something named Snowflake.

Okay, not a perfect metaphor. Moving on.

But since they won’t give me the idea person to latch on to, I’ve started creating her for myself. I think about this Linda character a lot. I wonder what she’s doing today, how she’s feeling, if she’s scared. I decided she lives in Detroit, and that she’s an old school butch dyke. I think she’s a welder. She drinks bud light while she watches the L word on Sunday nights. When she gets done with this cancer thing, she’s going on an Olivia cruise like she always meant to. She’s a reformed catholic. She wants to be cremated and spread over Lake Michigan because she used to go fishing there with her dad in summertime.

At first it was practical to call her Linda. And then it was cute. And then it was fun, like a game. But now I realize how hard I am trying to turn Linda into 1. the right kind of cancer patient and 2. someone who isn’t me. Everyone wants to donate to someone who is taking all of the right steps to get rid of their cancer, who is thinking the right thoughts, who does important good things in life, who is a good person who really, really, really needs this transplant. And everyone wants to donate to someone who bears no resemblance to them, because frankly, it’s really easy to drown in thinking that you can just easily wind up on the other end of this confidentiality agreement. She could be my mother or my sister. She could heal and then I could get cancer and die.

In six months we’re allowed to make contact (if things went okay and I haven’t been hit by a bus yet), no gifts. And if she’s lucky and she makes it, and she wants to, we’re eventually allowed to meet. I don’t feel especially tied to the idea of finding out what happens after my part is all over, and I don’t know if I’ll ever ask how it went for Linda. She will die without the transplant, but she has about a 40% of surviving the next two or three years with it.

Anyway, Linda, maybe you’re out there right now. And maybe your name isn’t Linda. Maybe its Shirley Jane. I hope you’re doing alright in the last few days before they start bombarding you with chemo. I hope you’re enjoying your morning coffee and blogroll. I don’t have much to say, except I hope that things go well for you and I so hope that you will wake up in a few weeks when this is all over and you will feel a little more sarcastic and a little more New Yorky and a little more farmy because hopefully my sarcastic, New Yorker, farmy bone marrow will be multiplying like crazy all up in you. I don’t pray, but if I did, I would pray for you, but I don’t believe in prayer; I believe in blogs and words and being funny when it counts, so trust that if I could be hanging out with you right now, we would probably be laughing up a storm, watching the fifth season of sex and the city or sitting in a public place somewhere making fun of all the ugly people who walk by us with their ugly babies. I would probably spend the afternoon trying to get you drunk and you would practically piss yourself at my antics, you wouldn’t even realize that they were antics and that I was trying to make you forget about what is going on for you right now. You would probably just think that you had a terrific, funny friend, and you wouldn’t even mind that I was trying to be cheery, because you know that I balance being cheery with knowing damn well what’s about to happen to you. But they won’t let me do that, and that’s probably a good idea, because my friends who know me know that I’m a little crazy in the noodle… so I just wrote this thing for you instead.

(I am 1. leaving my job next week 2. moving out of my apartment at the end of july 3. donating bone marrow via the national bone marrow donor program in the next couple of weeks and 4. moving to new zealand sometime early this fall, all while trying to write more. I have the focus of a four year old right now. It is probably a good thing that exactly twelve people looked at this blog yesterday. By the way, where did you come from, you (undoubtedly) disappointed reader, you?)

while in cupcake royale:

The girl sitting across from me is talking to her boyfriend while she disembowels her cupcake from the top with a fork and her giant tongue. Repeat: I am watching a college-aged blonde girl in terrycloth shorts (with a giant tongue) eat a cupcake: top. first. I am looking for some hint of hipster irony and I am finding nothing.

She is a top first cupcake eater.

I thought we had all evolved beyond this point.

She is now chatting with her boyfriend as if nothing horrible has happened. Excuse me, the top of your cupcake is GONE. Its just you, your boyfriend, and your cupcake bottom.

I need to leave seattle.

in the park, early evening:

I am sitting in the park with my friend. It is one of those fabled Seattle sunny days that people talk about dreamily when they are unhappy and sodden the other eleven months of the year. A typical Seattlite’s relationship with sunshine is a lot like Patty Hearst’s relationship with her captors; just a smidge out of touch with reality.

I am thinking about how summer in Seattle is a lot like summer everywhere else, only here it is much shorter and punctuated by daylong bouts of rain when I remember it is dinnertime and suddenly I want a sandwich (my thoughts have no transition sentences; fuck you eleventh grade english teacher). I want to sit in my favorite, dark sandwich restaurant very far away from the windows and squander my sunset away. I am moving to New Zealand; squandering the Seattle sun is one of my favorite hobbies.

I squint in my friend’s direction like I am bothered by all this vitamin D and ask her, “Can we go get sandwiches now?”

My friend stirs from her pre-dinner sunsoak/nap at the interrogative sentence and mumbles noncommittally, like you do when you’re from the west coast.

I think she is mumbling about being broke, because we are broke. “Can you afford a sandwich?”, I rephrase myself.  We tend to save our money during the week and spend it on random dates with socially unattractive women we lose our spendthrifty senses around.

My friend initially says no and our thoughts drift to reheating pasta or making scrambled eggs and then she has a moment clarity and backtracks: “Oh!”, she says. “I’m selling a Hummel this week! Let’s do it!”

We are immortal and we have good senses of humor.  We laugh all the way to the Honey Hole.

**Honey Hole is the name of the sandwich restaurant.  The one two punch of the sexual nature of the name of the joint AND their FABULOUS veggie BLT is perhaps the very definition of serendipity.

I am going on vacation; I will be back in Seattle on June 30th.

Recently I started to tick off the months it has been since I last saw my parents, much the same the way I used to count each month anniversary with my high school boyfriend.

It has been not quite eight months; I went home for a few days during Chanuka. As each month passes by without a comment from my mother about my weight or one of my siblings offering to get me high, I’ve become a little more defiant, a little more too into playing the role of the kid who has a don’t-even-mention-it-in-front-of-her fucked up relationship with her family.

This is slightly misinformed as my family doesn’t hate me more than they hate anyone else (we’re pretty curmudgeonly and we enjoy complaining), and even though we don’t have a lot in common and can’t stand to be around each other fifteen minutes after I step off the plane (here is a typical conversation that takes place on the car ride home from the airport):

“Are you going to smoke while you talk on your cell phone while you drive?” “Are you ever going to shave your armpits?” etc.

we still have one of those I’m-going-to-hate-my-family-members-as-much-as-I-want but-if-you-say-anything-bad-about-them-I-will-put-a-dead-horse-in-your-bed dealios.

Having a poor relationship with one’s parents inevitably surrounds one with a sexy, sexy cloud of mystery, and I could ponder why that is or discuss why I think this is fucked up, but I am feeling mushy and not very critical at the moment. Plus, I don’t care; I miss my mom. Poor relationship or not, I think about my mom all the time, and most of those thoughts are about the random things that make me think of her rather than how my perceived independence makes me more sexually desirable.

Even though my mother and I are not close, being older and living far away from her sometimes makes me feel like I have broken up with a great love, in the way that I am sometimes overwhelmed with sadness knowing that things will never be the same, or something. It’s a weird analogy. If I run with it anymore, I’m bound to run into incest territory, which was not where I was attempting to go, so you can think about how your great love breakups made you feel and then apply that to my mom.

Sometimes I think about her in past tense, as if she has died. She is healthy and alive, though; we talk on the phone once a week, but it feels like I am constantly grieving. Someone my age with dead parents probably needs to smack me around a little bit.

I have developed mom triggers– things or places or actions that hit me in the stomach by surprise, and I get caught in these sudden onslaughts of loneliness and nostalgia and weakness and confusion.

Every now and then something will remind me of her in a positive way; I will find a new memory or be reminded of something good that makes me feel grounded and whole and safe. This does not happen especially often, though, and these moments do not lend themselves nearly as well to compelling blogs as the existential crisis type moments do.

1. This just started happening to me: my mother’s voice comes out in mine when I sing in my car. I was winding around the freeway on-ramp headed to my office a couple weeks ago when I first heard it. It was during this two week stretch of cold rain (I swear I am moving away from this miserable coast and never coming back) and I only heard it for a second, but it was unmistakably her intonation, her voicing.

I have a terrible singing voice (I had a lead role in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in eighth grade and everyone in my family agreed that while my acting was cute and funny, my solo numbers sounded like a lo-fi version of Yoko Ono imitating a school bus); my mother was a voice major during her one semester stint in college who sang in fancy, elite choirs. We have never sounded anything alike. This is one of many reasons why I am not especially concerned about the prospect that I am possibly becoming my mother, even though we are both middle children and we have the same face and both love to overstuff our friends and say things like “I love to see you eat”.

Recently I learned how to drive and acquired a car and now that car is an extension of myself where I feel safe and happy (champagne honda civic, i wonder what that means?), so now I sing (loudly) all the time, but the mom voice thing is a new development.

It was a folk song that I like a lot, because I can sing a majority of the notes close to on-key. I was belting out some line about the fucked-upedness of the american political system and then there it was, hanging in the air, like casper the friendly ghost or a butterfly. I put my hand over my mouth, and then I got a little weepy, and then I went back to singing. I sang the same song again on the way home from work and felt it again, the same note. After experimenting with almost all of my cds, I’ve found three albums where my singing versions conjure my ma, but it feels a lot like listening to the voicemail greeting of someone who has died. You think it’ll make you feel closer to them, but it doesn’t, and instead the hollow space in you gets a little bit bigger.

2. I don’t eat meat and I don’t make vegan nut loaves, but last week I watched some kids mix ground beef with vegetables with their bare hands the way my mom does when she makes meatloaf, and that made me feel a little lost. I participated in a cooking class with the youth I teach at my job; they made egg rolls.

When I saw the youth in my program working their hands through the meat, I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother, and how when she made meatloaf when I was younger she wouldn’t be able to answer the phone while she stirred, and how I could never get up the guts to ask her to mix the beef with a fork. I think I was worried that she would get E Coli and die by mixing it by hand. When I became a vegetarian, I never thought about how it would affect my mother, but she went through a long period of feeling resentful about me not eating her cooking, especially the foods that she used to show her love through, like meatloaf.

I used to love eating meatloaf as a kid (I think I loved it more because my sister hated it AND it was covered in ketchup), but I hated watching the prep for it. My mother would take her rings off and stick her hands in up to her wrists in the ground beef, eggs, bread crumbs, and god knows what else. I hated the noises it made and I could not figure out how something so disgusting turned into any meal, let alone something as wonderful as meatloaf.

3. I have a watch my mother wore every day for as long as I can remember. A couple of years ago my father bought my mother a fancy pink Burberry watch to replace her old one. She put the old one at the bottom of her jewelry box to make way for her new wrist candy almost immediately.

I was heartbroken. I remember looking at the new pink plaid band around my mother’s wrist with pure sadness and hate for my mother’s love of new, pretty pink things and how it felt like everything sacred in my life was disappearing. I had no words. It was like meeting your new baby sibling; you can’t say you hate it, even if it makes you feel like life as you know it is gone forever (though I guess the changing of the watches was a wee more symbolic).

Last summer we went to an antiques roadshow-type jewelry buying event and my mother attempted to sell the old watch along with a bunch of other random pieces of costume jewelry she had acquired from well-meaning relatives. I spotted the watch in her plastic bag of twinkly crap and threw a small fit about how she could not get rid of the watch (literal translation– me: “you aren’t going to get rid of that, are you?”).

I said “I need a new watch; I’ll take it”, and I put it on. My mother was happy to give it to me; I think she was happy that it meant I would stop hinting at how much I hoped she would buy me a watch before I left for Seattle.

What I meant to say was “This watch reminds me of everything that was good about being a child; I cannot think about this watch without remembering how your skin felt when you hugged me when I was small and feeling sad; this watch is your entire essence rolled up in gold plated tin; when you stopped wearing it my whole world shifted; I am going to wear it every day even though I hate women’s watches and gold colored jewelry because I need to take a part of you with me when I move away”.

4. I will never drink vodka martinis because they are my mother’s drink of choice and even the words ‘vodka’ and ‘martini’ conjure up an image of Mama Marnegras stumbling around the back patio during our annual memorial day barbeque with the music up way too loud, screaming at some neighbor to lighten up and have another shot.

Whereas the fact that my grandmother only drank bourbon makes me feel like I am carrying on a family tradition, even when my friends order martinis (even the slutty chocolate kind that look more like yoohoo than their transparent brethren), I shudder.

I will never get over how much my mother cried when she broke her favorite martini glass. She was washing dishes, and then she couldn’t stop screaming “FUCK!” pause. “FUCK!” She cried even harder when a few weeks later she broke the other glass in the set.

5. I do almost nothing to spite my parents (on purpose, that is; I am in my 20’s; I am not fooling anyone.)

I do indulge when I can 1. afford my favorite ice cream and 2. restrain myself long enough to put said ice cream in a bowl. I douse my ice cream in chocolate syrup, I eat every drop, I don’t share it with anyone, and when I am done, I think of my mother, smile, and lick the entire bowl (with my whole face, in a way that only someone who enjoys cunnilingus can: who else could haphazardly close their eyes, stick their whole face into something wet and sticky, and come out licking their lips, happily satiated?).

When I tried to lick my ice cream bowl as a kid/teenager/college student home for Thanksgiving, my mother would squawk, swoop down, and pry the bowl away from me. She would, with disgust, throw my bowl with perfectly good ice cream residue in a dishwasher full of crusty dinner dishes and dessert would suddenly be over.

The first time I ate ice cream out of a bowl as an adult away from home, I was in a college dining hall. It took about six minutes (the time it took to eat the ice cream in the bowl) to realize that no one cared what I did with my dishware or my tongue (we were too busy exploring our sexual identities and wearing sweatpants in public). I licked the whole bowl. I got ice cream on my nose. My new friends laughed. I have never not licked a bowl with ice cream in it since.

6. My mother has a big personality that goes along with her big voice, and though she passed neither along to me, i did inherit her rabid love for musical theatre. My mother sang snippets of old broadway shows as bedtime lullabies, cheer up songs, rallying cries. I, in turn, sing them to my friends now in the same kinds of moments my mother would sing them to me (this is how my friends usually come to understand the depths of my love for musicals; when I attempt to communicate my feelings through sondheim).

For several years on my birthday I was permitted to skip school and we would go into the city and see a show. I never thought about it then, but I think I was in love with the fact that a big, shaking broadway voice could sing any number of trite, melodramatic lyrics and still convey complex, conflicting emotions; the kind that transcended whatever the actual words were. Broadway voices made me believe that is possible to communicate emotion without surrendering to the confines of our vocabularies, that there are certain voices that could make anyone understand love or pain or whatever. When people make fun of Barbara Streisand around me, I remember watching Funny Girl for the first time on the couch with my mom at age 14, I remember hearing her hit the notes in ‘People’ for the first time, and it feels like they are directly making fun of me and my mother. Our entire relationship is based upon the fact that we are clearly the only people in the world who understand the breadth and depth of what Fanny Brice is experiencing as she is in the alleyway with Nicky.

The Tony awards, which were on last week, featured this incredible performance by Patty LuPone as Mama Rose in the new revival of Gypsy, singing ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’, and I watched alone on my couch here in Seattle, hugging an overstuffed pillow as my housemates milled about, freaking out a little that their housemate they thought they knew was crying over a televised awards show. I wanted so badly to be watching the Tonys with my mom. I don’t even remember if we watched them every year when I was growing up. I don’t think we did. It still felt right, though; missing my mom, conjuring up these memories that may have never happened, wishing I knew for sure she used to be the person I thought she was.

It is three in the afternoon on a Monday, but she is just arriving home from the grocery store that she left for fifteen minutes ago. She took her corduroy purse her mother bought for her (at age seventeen, the last purse anyone ever bought for her) to the store because it is perfect for carrying the amount of groceries one person needs, which is how many people she is usually cooking for.

She struggles to open the front door because it has been humid and hot this week and the lock has swelled and the small part doesn’t fit with the big part quite right anymore and the corduroy bag full of groceries awkwardly restricts her range of motion so her right arm flails uselessly as she slams the left side of her body against the swollen door to force it open.

She leaves the groceries in the bag on the kitchen table and goes to check her e-mail even though all of the groceries are perishables. Butter, cream cheese, sour cream, and mushrooms all sweating and breeding bacteria all over themselves in her bag. Are mushrooms perishables?

She remembers that everything is perishable except honey and styrofoam.

She is on a vacation. She has been on a vacation since 9am this very morning. She is not out on the Olympic peninsula or on the road to California or flying to the other coast to visit her family because she can’t afford to leave, so she is using her empty Monday to bake. She is busily embarking upon a four hour cooking odyssey that will keep her from verbalizing exactly how trapped she feels being too poor to travel, making mushroom turnovers for a dinner party.

The recipe for the turnovers is simple: 1. make a cream cheese based dough with four ingredients: cream cheese, butter, flour, and a little salt. It will roll out like a dream, not like pie crust dough, which would much rather be a ball than a nice flat sheet. She likes how cream cheese dough gives in, how it amicably rolls out. It doesn’t even stick to her jar-for-a-rolling-pin.

2. Make the filling, which is just chopped up and sauteed button mushrooms (why roll up better tasting mushrooms in something as overwhelming as cream cheese pastry, she concludes at the store, putting the criminis back) with some spices and sour cream.

3. The assembly is not very difficult. Roll out the dough and use the lid from the sour cream container to cut circles out of the dough. Put a teaspoon of filling (just a teaspoon, even though it looks like nothing and makes her wonder why the store she used to make these at sold them for the price they did) in the bottom half of the circle. Fold the top half over the filling, press the two halves of the dough together with the fork so it makes a half moon shape. Like big raviolis or circular Hot Pockets. Brush their tops with egg yolks and bake at 350 degrees for twenty minutes. Simple.

Mushroom turnovers are about as dignified as pigs in blankets, but they sure do look pretty.

She chops the mushrooms with a cleaver that is so gigantic and bulky it looks like it should be in a cartoon or she should be decapitating live chickens. She can barely get her fingers all the way around the handle so her chopping is clumsy and haphazard; the button mushroom tops squeak and shoot out from under the cleaver onto the floor, but the cleaver is her favorite knife and the only one she uses. She likes its weight and has used it so many times that all of the other knives feel like toys when she tries to cut with them. Now when she cooks at other people’s houses she uses their cleavers too, if they have them.

She loves mushrooms but hates chopping them, and she is glad no one is around to watch, because she likes to pretend she is a great cook, even though her knife skills give her away immediately. When she did kitchen prep in the cooperative kitchens during college she always hoped no one would be around when she had to chop mushrooms because it took her such a long time to chop them, twice as long as it took her to do any of the other prep tasks. She used to offer to trade chopping mushrooms for dicing onions with the other prep cooks (who were happy to oblige because everyone else hated chopping onions the most). One time a head chef chastized her in front of other cooks for not getting anything else but the mushrooms done in an hour’s time.

She gets all of the mushroom turnover mushrooms chopped and realizes she has forgotten to dice the onions, which are supposed to go in the pan first. It would have made a lot more sense to do them first, and she hates that she has made a mistake. She puts a heavy skillet on the back burner, turns the gas on to medium, throws a stick of butter in the pan and challenges herself to dice the onion before the butter melts.

The melting butter smell reminds her of smelling her mother’s cooking at nine years old, sitting at the kitchen table plodding through her spelling workbook while her mother worked through dinner each night.

She doesn’t quite finish with the onion before the butter melts and burns a little as she cups the pieces into her hands from the cutting board and drops them in. She picks up the bits of onion she dropped on the floor en route, looks around to make sure no one is watching her disregard all her knowledge of health codes and sanitation, and drops them into the pan too.

Before she salts, peppers, and thymes the onions, she turns on her roommate’s I-Pod stereo. She is feeling a little lonely and quiet, cooking alone in the afternoon, even with the sounds of the onions releasing their juices in the butter.

Neko Case starts crooning out of the speakers. She doesn’t believe in owning Mac products, but she enjoys having housemates who do. “Old John the Baptist…”

She is cutting up chunks of butter for the crust as she wails along: “Old John Diviiiine…”

The last time she heard this song was a month ago when she was making breakfast for a friend.  She was whisking eggs for an omelette. When the song came on she belted out the Old John the Baptist part. Her friend belted out the “Old John the Baptist” part too.   This surprised her.  Their friendship was new and she didn’t know her friend liked Neko Case.  They sang together as she moved around the kitchen, making eggs.

She was overflowing the cuisinart with butter and cream cheese when she realized she would always think about whisking eggs and her friend who also liked to pretend to be Neko Case whenever she heard that song again. This was not the sort of conclusion that excited her.

As the dough mixed without her help in the machine, she added the heap of mushrooms to the pan with the onions, spilling a few (again) onto the floor that had not been swept in weeks. As the mushrooms cooked and the dairy products combined with the help of modern technology, she was moved by a wave of productivity so she found the broom to sweep up her and everyone else’s mess. She poked at the corners of the kitchen, swept the stray mushrooms and onions and old bits of dust and food into a pile in the middle of the kitchen floor.

The sun was not shining anymore. Neko Case was in the background. She was quiet. As she searched for a dustpan, she thought to herself ‘Miranda July’ would kill to be filming something like this right now’, and she immediately felt ashamed of the way she associated everything, even the quiet humanity of her life, with representations in pop culture. She finished cooking the filling and mixing the dough, but she did the assembly and the baking without stopping to think again about how beautiful life was even though it was sometimes too quiet, afraid that if she did, she might begin to model her life after a director’s overcompensatingly earnest artistic vision

When she arrived at the dinner party much later that evening, turnovers cooled and perfectly colored and perfectly arranged on a small platter, she assured the rest of the guests that it had taken hardly any time or effort at all.

I know I tend to make unreasonable assumptions about men based on distrust and fear, but Joshua was truly a smarmy, jerkface asshole. Joshua didn’t really give a damn about what I was looking for or where I was going. He didn’t get my jokes; I hate it when people think I’m weird instead of funny. He didn’t really know how anything was supposed to fit. He talked like a used-car salesman. He didn’t believe me when I said things weren’t quite right. When I finally realized my time would be better spent elsewhere, he had already run off with some other girl, as if we had never spoken, leaving me more confused than I was when we’d met, with thirty pounds worth of sandbags uncomfortably and incorrectly tethered to my torso. I guess I shouldn’t have expected as much as I did from someone whose actual job title is ‘backpack salesperson’.

My only current tie to the rest of the world, my AmeriCorps job, ends in roughly a month, so I have been making plans to deal with that cantankerous little subject, the REST OF MY LIFE. Since December I’ve been set on farming my way around the world (to learn how folks grow vegetables and raise sheep). Sort of like backpacking and camping, only without all of the camping.

I had not actually done anything to achieve this goal other than tell lots of people “oh, yeah, I’ll be traveling around the world beginning in November, starting in New Zealand and probably working my way through Eastern Europe and over to the british isles over the course of a year or two” (and then we laugh together like we know where the british isles are). So on a Sunday when I was feeling particularly go-getterish, I decided to take the logical first step, and buy a backpack.

I hate buying new things. I have used the same backpack for nine years; a tan and orange bookbag with a gigantic star of david that I doodled in permanent markers when I was sixteen. I still use the grey felt wallet that I received as a Chanuka present from Lauren Sarakos in the seventh grade, even though all of the lining has ripped out of it and my coins get sticky when I put them in the coin purse spot, though I’m not sure why.

I have having more things. I hate the idea that I might need something that I don’t already have. When I am in a store and I am considering buying something frivolous (like, say, deoderant), I often wind up thinking about Kirsten, the little Swedish girl in the American Girl book series who emigrates to Minnesota with her family and is able to amuse herself with her own handsewn dolls and handwhittled spoons etc. ie, I am generally always overwhelmed by guilt. …It is not especially easy for me to buy things, nor is it especially easy for anyone to sell me something. Hence, I was not expecting my REI shopping adventure to work out in my favor.

The REI flagship store is one of Seattle’s major tourist attractions and during their ‘everything except the thing you want to buy is 20%’ weekends, the store is absolutely crammed full of white people with expensive, plastic glasses in the market for another Thule rack. People actually take trips out to this corner of the west coast in order to pay homage to the great, big gear store.

People here don’t camp or hike or ski more than anyone anywhere else, but folks here are really concerned about being correctly outfitted for their semi-annual walk in the woods. Being concerned makes them feel very good. There is a palpable giddiness surrounding the collective awareness that we in the PNW are enlightened enough to understand the imperative for high-tech camping shit. In the past year I have had two guests visit from the east coast, and both said, when asked what they thought of Seattle “People here are really into their gear…”.

I am not the first person to make fun of this, but it doesn’t seem to be working; the folks donning bike spandex and cycling shoes for their 2-mile jaunt around the lake still seem to think we’re laughing with them.

When I am in an REI store, especially when I am in the big flagship store with the fireplace and indoor climbing wall, it takes a lot for me to not approach strangers to ask them if they know they are being taken because they are buying into this poorly conceived notion that they need highly specialized equipment to correctly enjoy activities like walking or riding a bicycle. Usually I can curb this urge by reminding myself that these people can afford to be taken, and they probably sort of enjoy it, and then I can hop up and down in my head about capitalism instead, which is generally much easier for me to get angry but keep quiet about.

Anyway, I might have bought the $250 bag Joshua tried to pawn off on me had I a real salary or a need for a storage device with loops for my ice ax and hydration pack. As it was, I had a budget of $100 and the only bell/whistle I wanted was a zipper on the bottom of the bag so I could unpack my stuff from both ends (I feel like there’s a great sex joke waiting to come out of that?), and my mental wallet firmly closes whenever a smarmy man is doing the selling.

Joshua was assigned to be my pack specialist. When you get to REI and you want to buy a backpack, you are welcome to do it yourself, but everyone will look at you angrily to let you know that you are doing it wrong. The correct way to buy your backpack is to sign up for a fitting and wait for a pack specialist to come work one on one with you. Your pack specialist will ask you what you are looking for, but the answer is clearly irrelevant as they have run off by the time you open your mouth to say “er, I have no idea?”.

Joshua measured my torso (which involved him bending my neck so he could count the vertebra in my spine; folks, I didn’t let my last girlfriend touch my spine when she tried to give me a massage. this was not what I would call welcome or pleasant touching.). but now I know I have a 15 1/2 inch long torso. One by one, he demonstrated the features of four different packs, which mainly involved zipping and unzipping the different pockets.

The process went something like this: Joshua points at the wall to something flashy and pastel colored and designed for those womanly hips of mine, runs away, and comes back with something that costs a month’s rent without a bottom zipper. His main shtick was to zip and unzip the top part several times, count the number of ice ax loops, say the word ‘load lifters’ a few times, and then attach the bag, which would inevitably not fit (this mere fact would contradict my whole theory about being told we need specific equipment when we actually don’t…conundrum!) to my posterior, I would walk around the store in pain, and then we would move on to something more ill-fitting and expensive.

After four bags and two hours of listening to Joshua talk about his load lifters, I finally tried on one pack that fit my torso. REI says that the pack should feel like a monkey that has jumped on your back if it fits right. I don’t spent much time around monkeys, but I felt stable and there was nothing jabby going on around my back end. I was tired enough that I almost said those magic words every salesperson yearns to hear: ‘I’ll take it”, but then I was quoted a price ($250), promptly squawked like a chicken, realized I was wasting my life away, and left the store to find that the sunshine had turned to rain, and life was not good at all. I walked towards home, backpackless and dejected.

I was hopelessly confused.  Did I need to be custom fitted for a backpack?  What if I bought the wrong one?  What if I just took a duffel bag instead?  Is it possible that I didn’t need a fancy sleeping bag or tent but I did need a fancy bag?  Was I buying into the specialized gear hype that I so enjoy making fun of almost every day in Seattle, even more than people’s awful driving habits?

On my way I stopped in a secondhand sporting goods store that happened to have three used backpacks for sale (this story does not end with me buying a used model and making some aphoristic observation about consumerism or recycling, but this is a nice twist just the same). One model came close to fitting. Nothing special, not worth the price, and a little smaller than what I wanted, but a plain, friendly looking, no frills type bag. No special spot for earbuds or carabiners. …Something a Canadian would buy.

I hadn’t bothered to look inside any of the bags in REI; I just let Joshua fill them with sandbags and lift them onto me, but I looked inside this one bag to make like I knew what I was looking for in a bag, and the enormity of what I had been talking about doing for months finally hit me as I looked around the tiny main compartment.

This, I thought, is where my life goes for the next year. My life goes in the bag; the bag goes on me; we go around the world. “This is where my life goes”, I whispered. Nobody heard; the store was empty. All I could think was that it was a lot smaller than the tiny bedroom closet I already complain about all the fucking time.  The only thing that would accompany on all of my impending travels, the only companion I would have in for the next year or however long I end up being gone, will the canvas sack attached to my back.  I couldn’t help thinking that the way in which I acquired the bag would set the tone for the trip itself.  I didn’t want to purchase the full price fancy yuppie bag, but I didn’t want the too small, stinky, fit for a Newfoundlander bag, either.

For a few hours at home that night I convinced myself I didn’t really want to go around the world with my life in a bag on my back, and then one of my housemates, the seasoned world-traveler, came home and talked me down from my I-am-moving-to-suburbia-forever perch. My housemate, who actually does things like ice climbing and camping in the wilderness for months, who actually has needed to be custom fit for things like backpacks, reminded me that I would be taking buses and trains with my backpack, staying on farms, and sleeping in hostels, not walking the length of Eastern Europe, as I had been wont to imagine in my mind at my computer desk in my office.

She said “You’ll put the bag on, walk to the bus, take the bag off, and put it in the overhead rack. All you need is something with the zippers you want. You’ll pack light. It’ll be great.”

She encouraged me that I did not need to be custom fit for a bag, and that I was right in thinking that people who get custom fit for weekend jaunts in the Olympics are fruitsy-nutsy. She also encouraged me to be twentysomething and reckless and not worry too much about my big, reckless jaunt.  You can’t be reckless if you’re going to get custom fitted for your pack.

Later that night I found the brother model to the backpack that had fit at REI on a clearance closeout website for a price within my meager budget. I didn’t think twice, clicked ‘purchase’, and a week later it arrived.

My backpack is dark green, and it is a size extra small, because that is the height category I have always belonged to. We (the backpack and I) have gone grocery shopping together and returned videos to the movie store together, so we can get to know each other before the big day arrives. It is exactly what I wanted, which was nothing special in particular, just a big bag that isn’t too big to fill with my farm khakis, my photos of my family, and my scrum cap (in the hopes that I will find some good rugby). It isn’t flashy, it has no bells, no whistles, no hydration pouch, and no motherfucking ice ax loops (though it does have some sexy load lifters). It does, however, have a top, bottom, and a front zipper, making a grand total of three access points from which to pack, unpack, and repack my shit while I am godknowswhere this time next year.

taken during that weekend of summer last month

7 May 2006

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARNE!

“So there you have it. My six week adventure in a nutshell. Just as I’m sure you found, there is no good way to sum it up, without getting sappy and such but I’m glad that I have this journal to give to you because maybe it’ll help explain things better than I can myself. And I think out of all the people I know you are the one who will understand what I have written here and you are the one who I want most to understand it. That’s more than I want anything else, just to be understood by you and to share this part of me with you as the only one on shore who might get what it all meant for me. I know its a lot to ask for you to keep me in your heart and your life but nothing would make me happier. So whatever I can do to help you have a happy birthday, you got it. I love you.”

That is the last entry in the journal I received as a gift from my first ex-girlfriend for my birthday two years ago. She wrote it for me while she lived on a sailboat in the middle of the pacific ocean without any outside communication for six weeks. After dating for a year and a half we broke up the day before she got on the boat, but she promised to write anyway, and she delivered on her promise. I was looking for a copy of my birth certificate in my drawer of papers I never look at but occasionally need and can never find at the appropriate moment this week when I found it. It is full of sentiments like that and descriptions of things that were much more exciting than the small town in Ohio I was living in at the time.

***

We met in two places at the same time: Politics 105: American Government, a lecture class during which I watched her fall asleep at her desk instead of paying attention most mornings, and Kinsey 1-5, the (I can’t even write this with a straight face) bisexual student group during my first semester at Oberlin. Alfred Kinsey was a sex researcher who proposed the Kinsey scale, a measure from 0-6 indicating that a few folks were heterosexual in thoughts, deeds, and feelings– zeroes, and a few folks were entirely homosexual– sixes, and most others were in the middle, hence the name Kinsey 1-5. Yes, this is what bored queer kids in Ohio do for fun; invent clubs with no agendas and esoteric names.

The Kinsey 1-5 folks were all relative latebloomers; we were the kids who didn’t figure it out until college, the first generation for whom coming out in college meant you were a latebloomer (who knew?). We were confused and proud and we were very concerned and loud about that and we really, really liked things with rainbows on them and queerly-themed puns. We met on Tuesday nights at 10 in order to devote time to thinking up new gay puns, discuss relevant bisexual issues (1. being confused and proud and maybe not confused 2. clea duvall and angelina jolie) and nurse our first crushes (all on other members of the group) with cookies and sometimes beer.

Eventually the group’s numbers stopped fluctuating and dwindled down to a dozen or so bisexual die-hards and I finally noticed Sarah. Each week she would arrive fifteen minutes late, sweating profusely and preemptively apologizing for her lateness, still wearing her bike helmet. She was 21, a junior, and just coming out. Because of my aforementioned love of comparing my own problems to others to make myself feel better, when I saw her I would often think ‘now here is someone who has even less of a clue than I do’ when she showed up at bi club meetings. This was helpful for me, considering I spent my semester at college cluelessly struggling to find the mailroom, and attempting to do things like join the bowling team.

I stuck with the bi group (and the politics class), and bit by bit Sarah and I became friendly. In our politics tutorial I would make inarticulate points with lots of hand gestures, the rest of the group would ignore me, and Sarah would try to decipher my poorly argued thoughts. In our Kinsey group, Sarah talked about growing ever-closer to coming out to her parents and I shared with the group whatever I could drum up about biphobia or whatever I had decided to feel petulant and angry about that week. We were good for each other, and we were dedicated to being good, intentional friends (whatever that meant). When school let out for the summer we wrote silly handwritten letters back and forth, the friendly kind with doodles and jokes. During that summer I stayed around Oberlin and had my first (first!) lady fling (another day, another blog) and it was Sarah that I gushed to about it over the phone.

By the time fall semester rolled back around, Kinsey 1-5 had been disbanded (everyone had gotten laid and needed to get back to being whole people and doing their homework), but Sarah and I had become a pair. I had two best friends; the other was another girl named Sarah, a trombonist now living in South Africa.  Because I cannot have more than one friend at a time that I have not slept with, it seemed like a very, very good idea at the time to sleep with bike helmet Sarah.

At the end of October on a rainy night when Sarah didn’t want to walk home from my dorm in the rain, I impulsively blurted out what I later realized was the very first pick-up line I had ever uttered: “You’re welcome to stay if you like…” Proper. Enigmatic. Rico. Rico Suave.

She agreed and we spent the first of many nights together in my twin XL dorm bed in the (wait for it) women’s collective. Neither one of us actually slept, but we didn’t screw, either. We didn’t even spoon; we gave each other those I’m closing my eyes like I’m asleep but I’m not half impotent back rubs, daringly grazing each other’s belly buttons (”Am I being super friendly and close to you? Am I working my way down your pants? I don’t know; I’m asleep!”). By the time things got potentially confusing, we couldn’t ignore the truth any longer– it was light out. We were awake. We knew exactly what we were doing.

With the sunrise we finally rolled over to our respective sides of the twin and slept for a few hours. When we finally did get out of bed, there was no mention of our especially touchy sleepover. We both seemed to think we had taken our friendship to that ‘next level’– friends who spooned! We were determined to not feel awkward.

A week later, the exact scenario played out again. It was a little less rainy, a little earlier in the evening, with a little less “Are you sure you don’t mind if I stay over?” We crawled under my blanket, eagerly molding into our ‘friendly’ spoons, and after several hours the same mindless petting (literally; I couldn’t even manage a proper massage) had gotten, well, one might say heavy. One of my hands brushed the underside of one her breasts and we both stopped, like we had just been caught by the secret “you’re about to have sex with your best friend” police. I heard her catch her breath.

I sat upright in bed, reached over, and turned on my bedside lamp.

“What are we DOING?” I half demanded, half asked.

We processed like good little homos for a minute, which ended with me lighting a small red candle, turning off my desk lamp, and taking off her shirt.

“Why do all lesbians in movies always giggle when they’re done doing it?” I asked while giggling myself.

“I don’t know, but it’s bullshit”, said Sarah, laughing. “I am totally not giggling.

The next morning I had a rugby game. She walked me to my carpool at 7am. As we meandered across the center of campus in the early morning fog that we never saw because we tried very hard to never, ever be awake this early, we both swore to each other that we weren’t going to date, that we were just desperate, and no one was going to find out about our recently cashed in benefits. When we reached the street corner where we would part ways for the day, I asked her to please kiss me just one more time. Please make this last a little longer; no one will see, I thought/asked. She bent over the handlebars of the bike between us and we kissed a long ‘this is so not over’ kind of kiss. We pulled away again, and I looked around over both shoulders to see if anyone was watching, late for my carpool, and instead of saying goodbye I said “Please, just one more?”

***

It is 7:30 at night. Because I have the work boundaries of the overeager twenty-something that I sometimes pretend to not be, I am standing in the state of the art, energy-slut of a greenhouse that I am always standing in at this time of night watering tomato seedlings with my cell phone cradled between my right shoulder and ear. I am attempting to simultaneously fit the watering wand down low under the leaves of these gargantuan freak of nature (but organic!) tomato plants and play catchup with my ex when she picks up the phone on the last ring before her voicemail gets it, but she’s busy. It is three hours later in New York, but she is just sitting down to dinner. I say I’ll call back, and I will, eventually. This is week three or four of phone tag.

The water shoots out of the watering wand into the forest of tomatoes and I stick my back phone in my vest pocket so it won’t get wet. I think about disembowling the 1700 tomatoes I am growing in order to participate in normal human activities like eating dinner with other people and call other other people when they’re not eating their dinner.

Sarah and I finally speak for the first time in a month a few days later and we talk about jobs and girls and cities and friends and she sounds happy and I am happy for her and I feel close to my friend.

I used to say she knew me better than anyone else ever knew me, and sometimes I still tell people that, when I’m bragging about my one functional ex relationship (hey there all you crazy exes who read this and don’t call me! don’t you love the internet? don’t worry; you’re next.), even though for the past year we’ve played half-hearted phone tag and when we do talk, we’ve forgotten what we have and haven’t shared with each other.

It doesn’t feel like we ever dated, which is different from feeling friendly or at peace with our relationship. It doesn’t feel like I ever stood in the fog in the early morning begging this woman to just kiss me again. I can’t remember what that felt like, how I must have obsessed about during the entire rugby match. When we talk on the phone, she feels like another old friend from college. There are no whiplash flasbacks to us having sex or impressing each other with unannounced gifts or whatever it is we did for one another during that time. I have my own journal entries and the whole ship log she kept for me, but it’s like reading some other generic strung-out teenager’s rantings, not my own. I can’t even remember what she looks like naked. Maybe the problem is with my long term memory, but really now. Who were we?

I’ve been single for awhile (a valiant effort to curb my serial dating habit), which makes me cynical and bitter and gives me too much time to do things like contemplate my failed relationships, but all evidence points to the fact that Sarah and I shared our lives together for a little while, and we happily gave up our individual sovereignty to include the other in our lives. I’m beginning to think that this is the only reason why people date, because they are not actually whole without someone else messing with their shit or futzing with their underwear drawer. This all screams “unhealthy! bad wrong no stop don’t!” and I spend most of my waking hours developing strategies to stave off codependency and it is probably why I can clearly remember how i t felt to be called ‘barney marne’ in the first grade but I can’t relive any of the time I spent with my first gf.

I am befuddled (yes, befuddled) by the fact that I can’t come up with any other reasons why other people seek out and stay in relationships, because I can’t imagine any other reason working for a very long time (a brief list of the other reasons I have been in other relationships, all of which have been significantly shorter: you’re hot. you make me feel smarter. you need to get laid. i need to get laid. you laugh at my jokes. people think we’d be good together. why not?). The only other reason I can come up with is being scared of being alone and dying alone, but once you get past the whole one day I’m turning into grass thing, all you’re left with is that feeling of wishing someone else was watching out for you. How do people make monogamy work and still feel like an individual in the long term?

It is evenings like this when I feel all of my years old and not a one more.

radish babies

neonatal onions

teeny kale

these were all taken by me in our greenhouse.

please don’t steal, or at least just don’t tell me about it.

Yesterday was my birthday.

Birthdays and I have a pretty terrible track record. When I turned six I had recently entered a phase of being petrified of getting my hair cut. My birthday party, was then, of course, in a hair salon, complete with clown (terrified), face paint (terrified), and aqua net.

Then there was the year I had a sleepover party and encouraged everyone to get a book out of my bookshelf and read to themselves.

Two years ago I celebrated my birthday with a few friends at Cedar Point, an amusement park with an impressive collection of the highest, fastest, most sickening roller coasters in the world. We all got migraines (from our heads banging against the headrests of the coasters the whole day) and second degree sunburns. Everyone stared at us because, well, we were five homos in a theme park. The day improved slightly when we got to stand in line for an hour behind a group of mennonites.

Last year, two days before my birthday I broke up with the girl I had been seeing for a couple of months. Two days before my birthday it felt like the right thing to do and not long after my birthday it again felt like a good decision, but no amount of certainty that your relationship needs to end asap will make drinking alone on your birthday feel any less unspecial and awful. I spent most of that day reading Michelle Tea’s Valencia in a park in Ohio, trying to imagine if my life in Seattle would be anything like this book about queers in San Francisco. Some friends of mine did some pity drinking with me (they sat uncomfortably in front of their chocolate martinis while I gulped down my free birthday drink and then we went home and I went to bed slightly tipsy and sad).

I think the problem is that in the past, I’ve been uncomfortable about wanting attention on my birthday; i’ve always done this smarmy little song and dance about not wanting to celebrate, not wanting any attention or any gifts, when, really, all I want is for Dubya to declare May 7th a national holiday in honor of my having been born. But this past year has been exhausting and not especially sunny: I have not seen my family since Chanukkah, i have not seen most of my friends in upwards of a year, and I put on some weight and can’t seem to figure out how to pay off my loans and still do what I want to do with my life.

So it was kind of mentally effortless to throw my hands up, take two days off of work, and say to my new, seattle friends “let’s celebrate me! let’s spend the whole day talking about how great it is that i’m alive! hooray for me!”

Short of a few hundred hours in therapy, weekly massages, and laundry detergent, this was exactly what I needed.

Early in the morning I got crumpets with a friend at The Crumpet Shop in Pike Place Market. Crumpets, as in, more than one crumpet. Two crumpets! I couldn’t decide between sweet and savory, so I got both… because it was my birthday and I already invested in pants that are slightly bigger than I am in anticipation of me gaining even more weight. Always prepared; it’s the boy scout in me.

Crumpets are like English muffins with class. They are soft. They can be slathered in nutella and honey. They are perfect with tea. They go well with eggs. They can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. They are dirt cheap. I love crumpets. I want to marry crumpets. Madonna’s fake english accent must make her feel closer to them. I get it now.

A couple of weeks ago I won some free passes to Hot House Spa in a staff appreciation raffle, so in the afternoon I went to the spa. I had heard about Hot House shortly after moving to Seattle, but I never checked it out because it sounded a lot like some bad holdover from the days of second wave feminism and lesbian separatism. Plus, it didn’t actually sound that relaxing. It’s not like the facial/mudbath/chemical peel type spa that my parents are so fond of; they have a hot tub, a sauna, and a steam room, with a couple other amenities.

Oh my. I was wrong. Hot House is the happiest place on earth. It is warm, and peaceful, and the water is HOT and the sauna is HOT and the steam room is HOT and you sweat like crazy. I hate being cold and I am cold all the time in Seattle, and it was great to just feel hot and relax. It was also nice to stretch in the relaxation area afterwards; I had a moment where I was doing downward dog in just my underpants, and I was very, very pleased.

After I recovered from the spa (my skin felt great, but my mind felt like mush and I was dizzy like whoa), I put on my one fancy outfit (a pair of black leather shoes from the little boy’s section at Aldo and a dark blue oxford; I’ll admit, my ability to set trends might be on the decline) and attempted to go to Elemental@Gasworks with some other friends. Elemental is a crazy restaurant with five tables where the owners are eccentric and stick wine in your face without telling you what it is and you stay there for many hours and eat weird new american foods and get toasted and feel very good about the up and coming wallingford cuisine. Or something. Anyway, we got shut out; there was a two hour wait for the next seating, so we went up to Carmelita, the hoity toity vegetarian almost identical twin sister of Cafe Flora, which I’d already been to (the highlight of that meal was realizing, while chowing down on the portabello wellingtons, that i was actually eating a very dolled up version of a hot pocket).

Vegetarian restaurants are off-putting to me. You think they’d rather define themselves by what they do serve, rather than by what they don’t. The menu is full of cheesy, pasta-based dishes, which is not really exciting for vegetarian folks after awhile, and the offerings are sort of all over the place as far as what they offer. I don’t get it; vegetables are exciting. They don’t need to be a garnish for cheesy pasta, especially in a vegetarian restaurant.

The food was good, and I was in excellent company, and they threw free sorbet at us when they found out it was my birthday (and they put a candle in my chocolate muk muk so I could blow out a candle on my birthday, very nice). From the murals on the wall down to the manchego on the antipasti platter, it was the absolute picture of lovely. I felt special and loved and happy and unrushed and calm.

We capped off the night by dancing. My friends indulged me in publicly getting my groove on, and I had an excellent time shaking it and getting every last ounce of self-indulgence out of the last hour of my birthday. I was happy. It was good. I am older.