wherein irony is murdered to death. OR IS IT??

Having this new computer is just like when I got a bunch of new pots and pans the Christmas after I got married. They sat in the cabinet for I-don't-know-how-long, intimidating the shit out of me and sneering at my notions of Kraft macaroni and cheese. Those Calphalon pans, they wanted fancier foods.


This computer, it wants fancier words.


Also, I couldn't cook to save my life when I got married. I still had to read the instructions on that box of macaroni and cheese. Every time.


So it's exactly the same.


Also it's past my bedtime and I've been sitting for hours reading Television Without Pity recaps of Dexter - I just finished Season 4 and I am ALL ATWITTER about everything (OMG Lundy! OMG Deb! OMG OMG Rita, no! Wait. Yeah. OMG! Aw, LaGuerta y Batista). 


Also I'm preparing for a trip to Miami. You know, with all the Dexter. Because the show is so rooted in Cuban culture and stuff.


I can say, "Ay, papi," fairly convincingly. That's all the foreign language skill I plan to take. I'm traveling light.


Also I think there is probably not enough sweat in the show, and what's with all the window unit air conditioners? I'm going out on a limb here and saying I think Miami is probably Johnny on the fucking spot when it comes to central air conditioning. I'd wager their HVAC abilities are - um. Whatever HVAC abilities are when they're like, really good.


I say fuck a lot. Okay, maybe not here, but in my head, and in my drafts. I just deleted four fucks. One could argue there's little point in DELETING them if I'm just going to TALK ABOUT them, but fuck that argument. I deleted them from sentences that didn't NEED them. See? I just deleted another one. Because I'm a nice fucking person.


Okay, that was fun. How are you? We should get coffee. Ooh, I wonder what's up with Cuban coffee. Good, right? Probably? I don't know! I'm excited to find out.


I'm excited about getting to run on the beach. I've never run on a beach in my whole life, because back when I lived by a beach I didn't run. Oh, the cruel irony that is my life. Also, my salad forks have to live in the same slot with my dinner forks. Somehow I soldier on.


What else is there to do in Florida? I have major plans. Running on the beach. Reading by the water. Wearing mostly sunscreen. Am I missing anything?


Well, the cats are destroying something in the other room, so.

every sound is a monster

This morning before the race, Eddie turned on the tv and some movie with Adrien Brody was on, the one sort of like Species but somehow ickier, and I kept getting sucked into it while we ran around getting ready to go run the Little Rock half marathon. We ended up watching the end and regretting it. Well, I regret it anyway. It was terrible.


Little Rock is charming, which surprised me for some reason. At mile 7, I laughed at myself because I saw a street sign that said 11th, so I automatically tried to make the scene in front of me look like Tulsa, but my brain quickly corrected that. I thought, "Oh, right, I'm not in Tulsa. This must be OKC." Then I laughed. Tee hee, brains without enough oxygen make jokes on accident.


Maybe I'm still oxygen-deprived, because I can't explain why that was funny.


So tired, I've already been in bed for an hour. Ready to blast off into sleep the second I can stop my head from spinning.


Anyway, I had a lovely time. There were hiccups and hassles and headaches and probably a lot of other H-words, but the race itself went pretty well. I was pleased with my overall performance considering how much I have slacked off recently. I really need a goal to keep me moving forward, so I probably need to pick a marathon to train for. I'm not too thrilled about running OKC, even though I've never run the full marathon there. It was just so awful last year, running the half with my sister. The year before, it was how I met Eddie, so I went last year sort of for sentimental reasons. So I don't know. I need to sit down with a race calendar and make some plans.


It's funny how it's easier to run the miles than it is to sit down and plan the miles.


My feet hurt. It's a good hurt, though. I'm looking forward to yoga tomorrow.


Anyway that movie is still creeping me out.

prom night for blogsie

I fantasized about this, in the shower and on my walk to work, for days. Weeks. I imagined how it would feel, but I had no idea really. And now here I am, sitting at my own table in my own chair with my own computer on my own free time, ready to do it - just blog the shit out of that fucking blog - and I've got nothing. Sorry.

But the keys do feel nice under my fingers. Something will eventually develop.

I just got back from the Canebrake. Some dude I like flew in from England and we had ourselves a mini vacay. Spent 2 days out there. Caught a couple of yoga classes, which were lovely. It's a beautiful space. Go look at their website and be jealous - www.thecanebrake.com - then go out there and see for yourself.

One warning - should you find yourself arriving on a Tuesday night when the restaurant is closed and you haven't had dinner, you may as well save yourself some time and trouble and just go straight to the Wagoner Wal-Mart, where you can pick up some supplies to have yourself a bed picnic. None of the restaurants in town will be open, leaving Wal-Mart and fast food as your only options. Not that I am complaining! Salads and picnicky things can be found in abundance at Wal-Mart, and back in the privacy of your very own room, you and your darling-dearest can feed each other bits of things and kiss and coo to your little heart's content without drawing stares or stinkeyes from anybody. If you're into that sort of thing. Which we're not, me and that dude I like. We never have been.

We watched a documentary on Badwater while eating our picnic - I know how to bring the romance. Nothing says tenderness like watching runners lance their blisters and puke on the side of the road, right? For the record, I could not watch the blister-lancing. I could not even listen to it. Anyway, the documentary is called Running on the Sun and I recommend giving it a watch. I surreptitiously cried four times during our screening. That's four thumbs up.

We managed to get a run in - Eddie took pictures, but I failed to consider copying them for blogging purposes. No pictures were taken of the most important thing that happened - we saw a fox! He was big and fast and maybe a girl. I don't know, we didn't get very close to him/her, just saw him/her take off across a ridge away from us.

Before we saw the fox, we saw many whitetail deer, which is always exciting to me because I grew up with mule deer, an ugly cousin to the whitetail. I'm surprised mule deer don't moo. Whitetails, by comparison, are lovely and delicate and bouncy, flashing their little white tails like sassy little minxes as they vanish into the forest. One stopped at the edge of the ridge, looking down into the riverbed we were following. She looked back at us for a long time while Eddie took pictures of her. She finally decided we were of no consequence and flounced away, waving her bottom at us.

Before we saw the deer, we saw 3 buzzards! Are those turkey vultures? What are buzzards, anyway? Eddie didn't think long about it when I asked, just said he recognized a carrion eater when he saw one. I thought that was well put. I think it applies to people as well as animals. Not that I'm speaking disparagingly about the buzzards. They were lovely in their own way. In a sort of dark and unsettling way, sly eyes checking us for doneness, reminding us that we're bouncing along through the woods with our shoes and our digital watches strapped to bodies made of food for something else should our number come up. Hunched over in a gossipy little trio, they regarded us suspiciously and I wondered what the meal we had disturbed used to be.

After all the animals that came out to be sighted had been duly noted, we finished our run and spent the rest of the day napping and snacking in our room. I totally overslept and missed the evening yoga class.

Can you believe it's March already?

This weekend, Little Rock! Coming soon, Miami!

Oh, I totally ran Post Oak last weekend with my sister and I should probably blog about that before I forget how much fun it was. But right now it's past my bedtime. Remind me to talk about dinner later - the Canebrake does it right. Good night, dear hearts!

you don't know about my life in mexico

A long time ago, crying at the kitchen table, my friend's mother confessed to his sister about her recent suicide attempt. His sister told him and later he told me how his mother had sobbed, "Please don't tell your father." As far as I know, nobody ever did.

I only met her once that I recall. All I really remember is that she was pretty. She seemed happy.

There was a moment somewhere on that porch with our cigarettes, telling our secrets, that the ever-present free-floating panic (anxiety is not a strong enough word for my twenties) lurched across my consciousness and coalesced somehow into an idea - our parents were just as ill-equipped and emotionally immature as we were. Nobody was steering the ship. We were all going down.

It had a revelatory quality to it, but it's the oldest idea ever, right? We're all going to die. OMGWTFBBQ.

A coworker talks about pain, anxiety, medication and children. She says she's the only one in the room who is qualified to make whatever claims I'm not really hearing because I have a podcast playing in my other ear. She's the only one who's ever had a baby, she says, so she's the authority in this room. I laugh and say you don't know.

Pumpkin Holler Hunnerd - an aid station report

Ed texted me from the plane in Atlanta. "Sittin on tarmac, gettin testy." It was 3:25 on Friday afternoon. I did fast math and crossed my fingers. It was already going to be dark by the time we got to Tahlequah.


We had signed up to run an aid station on the Pumpkin Holler Hunnerd, a trail race along the Illinois River where runners would be running either 50k, 100k or 100 miles.


I had left work early to get a jump on trip preparation. I gathered up my supplies and made lists of things I needed to buy. A softball. Beer. Ice. Coffee. Pinto beans. Bacon. Onion. Maybe something for breakfast? A big crock pot. Some sort of speaker system so I could play my ipod and Eddie could share music from his phone.


I hit the liquor store, the grocery store, Target, Tuesday Morning and a convenience store. I ran the crockery through the dishwasher.


The night before, I had baked 3 pans of cornbread, 2 plain and 1 with green chiles. Nerves and fidgetiness made me wonder if that would be enough (and the voice in my head said it was already too much), so I baked 3 more pans, 2 more plain and 1 with green chiles and cheese. I looked at 5 pounds of dried pinto beans.


See, our aid station was called East of Eden. I'm not sure how it came by its name, but I had the movie with James Dean playing in the background all day while I ran around getting ready for the trip. Beans were the only thing I could think of that would even remotely tie in with the story - I mean, I guess I could have decorated the aid station like a birthday party and thrown a bunch of fake money around? Maybe dressed up like a madam? Nothing sounded good, so I stuck with beans.


I wondered if anybody would even eat any beans. Would anybody get it? Would anybody think it was funny? Would runners turn up their noses at humble beans and cornbread?


I fret. It's what I do.


By the time Ed pulled up, sometime after 6, it was about to get dark. As we loaded up the truck, we agreed to avoid the headache of setting up camp in the dark by grabbing a room at a little roadside motel in Tahlequah for the night.

With that decided, we set out to find lights for our aid station, something I had completely spaced earlier. It was 8:30 before we got on the road. We unloaded the truck at our home for the evening, the Cherokee Inn - I chose poorly and ended up sleeping on a pillow that smelled of smoke in a room with no coffeemaker, an actual key lock, and a torn screen on the window. Next time, I'm voting for the Tahlequah Motor Lodge, a happy-looking little pile of kitsch just a little ways down the road. But no matter.

We were way too late to catch the prerace dinner with the runners and crews and organizers, so we went for mexican food at Patron. We chose wisely this time. Cucumber and rosemary margaritas, made tableside, won me over. Eddie bravely ordered something called a molcajete. I stuck with more familiar fare, and we wondered as we dug in why we seemed to be the only people in the restaurant. It was odd.

The alarm went off way too early. I don't remember who said it first, but my first conscious thought was, "We forgot to soak the beans." There was no time for lamentations, though - we loaded up the truck again and drove out to the race.

We drove and drove. Our aid station was a bit remote - 18.8 miles into the course. A slight clearing next to a cattleguard held two pop-up tents standing over a couple of long tables, some trash cans and two 5-gallon Gatorade jugs. A Portajohn sat a slight distance down the road.

We surveyed the scene. No generator.

I fretted. How was I going to cook beans without a crockpot?

Eddie took a more practical stance. How would we have lights and music, especially in the middle of the night, with no electricity? We weren't fretting long - just long enough to realize we had absolutely no cell service. We resolutely began setting up the aid station, and Brian came along shortly with that blessed generator. Our hero.

I had never made beans without soaking them overnight, but I followed the instructions on the package and eventually got a batch going in the crockpot. I could only do one pound at a time with the little cookpot I have, but it was better than nothing. Soon the smell of cooking beans, seasoned with bacon and chopped onion, wafted through our aid station.

I was glad I'd thought to throw some breakfast stuff in the cooler - we were starving! And cold! I made scrambled eggs with bacon and salsa and rolled it up into delicious breakfast burritos.

We set out snacks. M&Ms, plain and peanut. Cheese Nips. Potato chips. Pretzels. Pringles. Chocolate chip cookies. Orange slices. We made "TATUR Specials," which are Oreos smeared with peanut butter and topped with M&Ms. We set out oranges and bananas to be cut. I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Ed mixed up Gatorade - he had a spoon this time!

Ed got the generator going, set up the tent for us to sleep in and/or offer to runners as a place to nap or change or think about life. He found a reasonable place for a fire and got that going.

The flies found us, then the wasps came. Runners started coming through. We cheered and clapped and wrote down times on our handy clipboard. The sun came out, the day warmed up, and we had long stretches of peaceful quiet punctuated by the excitement of a runner coming through ever so often. We saw everyone. The 50k'ers came through our station once. The 100k'ers came through twice, and I think the 100 milers ran 4 loops.

We played catch in the road, getting a few throws in between runners and cars. We clapped and cheered and wrote down times. We strung lights. Ed set up speakers. I put my ipod on shuffle and braced myself. Turns out, exposing one's music can be a bit unnerving!

There was a time, as the day ended and the night wore on, we worried we were going to run out of gas for the generator. We'd be plunged into silent darkness if that happened. Ed got a propane lantern from the truck for an emergency. He had already driven one runner back to the Start/Finish, so he knew how long the drive was likely to take. We tried to calculate how much time we had left on the gas in the generator. Before we could reach a conclusion, Brian showed up with a gas can, saving the day AGAIN.

The night is partly a blur. You get into a rhythm. Stepping out of the lights, the stars were thick and bright. In the distance, a headlamp appeared, shining the same cold white light as the stars. On a country road in Oklahoma in the middle of the night, a headlamp coming at you looks like a star has jumped down and grown legs to run to you. I got chills.

We served beans. We filled water bottles and Camelbaks. We said encouraging words. We listened, but we never could hear the coyotes over the noise of our generator.

Laurie came over to help out, and Ed promptly sent us both to bed - in her case, her truck, and for me, the tent. My sleeping bag never felt so good. Music played, lights swept across the tent, runners crunched by on the road. I drifted off to sleep. Ed had agreed to wake me in a couple of hours, but when I cracked an eyelid, I saw trees outlined against a gray sky. I heard Ed talking, laughing with some runners. He'd let me sleep all night while he handled the aid station all by himself. Laurie and I sat by the fire, a little shamefaced, while he finally got a couple of hours of sleep.

The generator died not long after sunrise.

fertility treatments

This is a post relating to reproductive health, which means I'm going to say the word, "vagina," probably more than once. I haven't written the thing yet, so I can't be sure, but we're going to be discussing some things that happen, you know, down there.


Probably you don't read my blog a lot, and we're probably not really close friends, if you refer to anybody's vagina as down there. Do you tinkle, too? Do you feel that most feminine things should end in "-ie" or maybe just an "i," preferably dotted with a little heart because we're just so precious? Do all of your sentences kind of go up at the end, even if you're not really asking a question? Who are you and why are you reading my blog?


Let's talk about my old gynecologist. No names, because that's not cool, but I went to her for several years before I switched doctors. She was recommended by a coworker when I moved back to Tulsa.


Just in case you're a brand new reader, or maybe it's been a while since I mentioned it, I had a baby when I was 16 and gave him up for adoption. I saw a doctor at a well-regarded clinic (which I will also not be mentioning by name in this blog entry) during my pregnancy, and by coincidence, the OBGYN my coworker recommended was also affiliated with this clinic.


When I first realized where the gynecologist's office was, it gave me pause. When I made an appointment for an exam, the receptionist called me by my maiden name, which threw me. But I shrugged off the weirdness and figured I wouldn't have to do a lot of explaining, since they obviously still had my old chart.


Now, I saw the same doctor every year for a few years without really thinking about it. I wasn't crazy about the bloody birth photos festooning the walls, or the waiting room full of pregnant women paging through magazines devoted to conceiving, birthing and raising offspring - my visits there came but once a year, and a glance at a glossy 8x10 photo of a freshly born infant, complete with bloody umbilical cord, well, that was just part of the gauntlet I was willing to run to ensure that my vagina remained a practice-only zone.


They don't let you refill your birth control prescription if you haven't had your yearly exam, and a pelvic exam means a pap smear - a swab of your cervix - and a doctor's fingers in your vagina. In case you didn't know.


On my last exam with my old doctor, she made small talk while she checked my ovaries. I responded politely, which in a gynecologist's office means you scoot your butt down to the edge of the table and agree that the weather's been nice. School must have been starting, or something, because she said something about her children being reluctant to do their homework, and I saw it coming. Her fingers were still in my vagina, and I remember exhaling, trying not to tense up because she would most likely feel it, so I was trying to stay relaxed as her question came swinging down at me and it was the longest exhale ever like seeing a baseball being pitched in slow motion and I was trying not to be horrified because I didn't have a bat -


"I have the hardest time getting them to do their schoolwork. Does your son do his schoolwork?"


I swallowed and took a breath and looked at the Ann Geddes poster on the ceiling as I said, "I don't know. I gave him up for adoption when he was born." I said it gently. I didn't want her to feel like a jerk.


She said, "Oh my god. I forgot."


I think I laughed. I tried to make it sound like it was no big deal. I probably said it was okay, no worries, and changed the subject back to the weather. Or something. I don't really remember. I actually don't remember much after that. It was a couple of years ago. I know I made it to my car before I burst into tears. I know I held onto the steering wheel and bawled for a few minutes before I started the car. I know I never went back to that doctor.


The next time my birth control prescription needed refilling, I searched my insurance network for a gynecologist who was not an obstetrician as well. I ended up making an appointment at a local fertility center. When I got there to fill out my paperwork, I sat in quiet, peaceful waiting room. On the wall was a picture of a fern. I explained my situation to the doctor. Well, not the horrible last conversation, but why I wanted to be there. She seemed to get it. We'll see when I go back.


Vagina vagina vagina.

draft 7

There are 6 drafts gathering dust, 6 tries to write a blog entry from over the last several months. 6 drafts that went nowhere.


But drafts don't have to go anywhere, really, and digital media doesn't gather any dust, really, and maybe it just wasn't interesting enough to keep writing about. I mean, it's all bitching about my brother, sad shit about my mom, or me trying to explain this running thing. Just to let you know you're not missing anything.


I remember befriending writerly folk once upon a time (there was kind of a group of us, back in the Myspace days, remember those? Did everybody have those? Did you?) and practically salivating over getting to see their drafts. It's like getting to see someone in their underwear. Someone hot. It's intimate and sexy and emotionally very intense.


But really, it's all just the same crap I talk about all the time. Not really all that interesting.


There is something I keep thinking about, though, and I'm not sure how to write it. So I'm not going to try. I'm just going to put it here. Fuck it. This isn't writing. This is just me letting something out of my head.


The man who cleans my office at night smells like soap. I can almost place the soap. It's round and pink and floral scented. It's a scent that most men probably wouldn't choose for themselves, and that makes me wonder if he notices the scent at all. It leads me to believe that he has a wife who chooses the household soap.


We've hardly spoken to each other. I only see him when I work late. He says hello. I say hello. I smile. He smiles. I pull my trash can out from under my desk so he doesn't have to ask me for it, then I go back to work. He thanks me. I thank him back. He wishes me good night and I say something reciprocal.


I don't know his name. It's never come up in our limited conversations. I don't imagine it ever will. I'm not the befriending sort. Even with people I like, I usually am not the friendship initiator. I don't know, call it leftover shyness from an awkward childhood. Call it frigid bitchiness. I'm cool with it, either way.


But the guy who cleans my office at night smells like soap that makes me think he has a wife and probably an abuelita. It's an abuelita kind of scent, really. My grandmother's bathroom always smelled of peppermint, but when I went over to hispanic friends' houses, the ones with abuelitas living with them, their bathrooms smelled like pink floral soap.


Every time I stay late at work I get homesick. I have to remind myself that New Mexico isn't home anymore. I've lived outside of New Mexico longer than I lived there now. More than half of my life has been spent elsewhere.


My grandpa, the one who died first, before I realized he was my favorite, his bathroom smelled like Scope and Vitalis. A plastic bust of Abe Lincoln sat on the windowsill. Abe's head unscrewed and his torso concealed a bottle of aftershave. I don't remember the scent of it, but I thought the whole idea was very clever. There was a closet in the bathroom filled with hanging coveralls. The floor was linoleum.


I think I'm not the only one who writes things down sometimes because losing a memory is a terrifying thing. I can't remember how my mom liked her cheeseburgers at Sonic and I report that from a nearly hysterical emotional place. You'd think my narrator were screaming into a microphone on the edge of a cliff as a hurricane whipped up. Cheeseburgers at Sonic. Mustard or mayonnaise. Probably mustard because I like mustard. I'm pretty sure Mom didn't like mayonnaise on her burgers, but then again she liked Whoppers at Burger King. So I don't know.


The lovely thing about writing things like these is that you, the reader, don't have to see the bursting-into-tears part of the above paragraph. Isn't that silly?


Recently I decided that I might not quit being a CASA after this case is over.


The part of me so terrified of losing a memory is the part of me that believes that to forget is to disrespect, to disregard, to drop. So there's a part of me that would like nothing better than to build statues of my mother and spend every day polishing and tweaking and perfecting those statues.


Fuck, I just realized I missed jewelry class.