Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions (14 page)

One thing I don’t buy into, though, is the theory
that I must not take my writing seriously. I do. I’ve wanted to be
a writer since grade school. I’ve accomplished some things with my
writing, more now than ever. However, I think I take my family
seriously too. What I need to do is find a way to help them
understand the difference between needing me to do things for them
and simply wanting me to do those things.

And, I suppose, a little shot of writing-self-esteem
and a suppression of that conflict-guilt would go a long way toward
finding daily time to write. After all, even Cinderella found time
to make that dress and go to the ball. Granted, she had a bunch of
singing mice to help, but as I look around my office at the guinea
pig enclosure behind me (housing little Murray, who keeps me
company up here), I somehow don’t see him singing and cooking up a
nice dinner for me so I can spend my time writing instead.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to put the
laundry into the dryer and run to the store. We’re out of milk.
Again.

I’m not quite fifty years old and my
body—coincidentally, the only one I own—is rebelling against me.
Some of it is my own fault, but the way my various parts work
together to work against me has been a little daunting in recent
years. I’ve grouped all my annoying ailments into three categories:
blood, sweat and tears.

Blood

At age forty-eight I was diagnosed with Type 2
diabetes. The only good thing I can say about diabetes is that it’s
an excuse to eat every three hours, even if it is stuff like cole
slaw and scrambled eggs all the time. I can hear you now: “Wow,
this is going to be hilarious because diabetes is so damn funny!” I
agree: What’s funnier than Wilford Brimley peddling ways to have
miniature torture devices delivered straight to your door? Gotta
love the Brim-man.

Although I have no empirical evidence to back this
up, I suspect there is a vast pop-culture hierarchy within the
diabetic community that measures a person’s inherent worth by the
brand of his testing meter and the size of his lancing device. I’ve
been a diagnosed diabetic for about five months and I already own
four glucose-testing meters. I’m thinking of starting a collection
the way some people collect Hummel figurines or Star Wars action
figures. Maybe I’ll get a nice oak curio cabinet to display them
all. This disease and all these free meters are bringing out the
gadget-geek in me. If I make it look like any more fun, my husband
will start wantonly wolfing down ice cream sundaes and birthday
cake just so he can get free meters in the mail too. The way free
meters show up at my door, it’s like Christmas every day at our
house—minus the cookies.

So, with the eagerness you’d expect from someone
who’s just learned she gets to poke herself in the finger with a
needle-sharp object half a dozen times a day for the rest of her
life, I began my journey into the wonderful world of deliberately
bleeding like a stuck pig. The first time I used the lancet* to
poke a small hole in my fingertip in order to withdraw my own
lifeblood, I had to change it to its deepest setting to see enough
blood to use on the test strip.
Good grief, do I have skin made
of tree bark or what?

The testing itself isn’t all that bad, but I
constantly fight off the urge to test family members at
indiscriminate moments throughout the day, preferably when they’re
not looking:

“Grace, hold still—and look over there while I just .
. . What? Oh, nothing. Wait, come back!”

“Oh, Jeremy, how terrible that you just cut yourself
with a serrated kitchen knife! That reminds me: Are you using that
blood for anything special? Why? Well, because I want to—No, it’s
not
that
crazy!”

Now nobody will get within twenty-five feet of me
without wearing battle armor or chain mail. And the guinea pig is
looking a little too nervous these days.

SWEAT

I’ve gained weight in my middle age. If the adage is
true that muscle weighs more than fat, this would explain the
scale, though. Except that I can’t make it up the front steps
without a spotter, some semaphore flags, and an oxygen tank.

Calling my life sedentary is like calling water wet.
I work from home in my own office upstairs, and it was once a
kitchen when the house was two apartments. The up side to this
arrangement (besides commuting in my jammies) is that my office has
cupboards for storing office supplies, a countertop for small book
racks and my editor’s desk, a smooth linoleum floor for zipping the
wheeled office chair around, and a sink—which is actually the bad
part too. The sink gave me the brilliant idea to put a small
coffeemaker and a dorm fridge on the countertop so I could make
coffee and store the creamer and cans of diet soda and veggies for
Murray, the guinea pig, in the fridge. Add to the room an ethernet
jack, a cable television outlet, a cheap DVD player, two printers,
two monitors, a phone, an iPod dock, two file cabinets, and an
electric stapler, and I never need to get out of my chair or leave
the room. (Okay, maybe the stapler isn’t all that necessary.) Some
weeks I don’t move a muscle from Monday through Thursday. Give me a
catheter and a sofabed and you won’t see me till next February.

All this physical inactivity (which creates a
heightened sense of self-awareness if I attune my soul to
it—although that could just be the second cup of coffee talking)
has led to an advanced case of middle-aged spread. Once my three
main body measurements were exactly the same, I knew it was time to
get off my derriere. Time to turn that Health Rider back into a
piece of finely crafted exercise equipment.
But,
I thought,
where will I put the clothing that’s been hanging on the
handlebars since 1999? I don’t want to drag all those hangers all
the way downstairs to my bedroom closet. That would tire me out. .
. .

Soon I’ll have to take exercising seriously, if only
to keep from getting winded while walking the twenty-five feet from
the driveway to the front door. Because I’ve heard exercising isn’t
successful without long-term goals.

TEARS

A few years ago I gave up reading anything for more
than twenty minutes because my eyes began to sting just as I was
getting to the good parts. The work I did in front of a computer
screen during the day was killing my sedentary, silent, solitary
social life at night. Until my eye doctor saved the day by
suggesting I might have ocular rosacea and chronic dry eye.

At first this diagnosis made no sense, because my
eyes gush tears with one sip of carbonated soda or with one small
sneeze or sudden movement. She explained that this is precisely
what dry-eye sufferers endure: The eyes emit tears at all the wrong
times (like, in the middle of Will Ferrell movies or in front of
your teenager’s friends at the mall), and they don’t lubricate the
eyeball properly—or something like that. I missed half of what she
said because her office is in the mall and my teenager was meeting
her friends in the Forever 21 store in five minutes and I’d begun
to blink back tears in anticipation.

So now I have over-the-counter-and-through-the-woods
drops for my eyes, antibacterial wipes for my eyelids, antibiotics
measured in fractions of an ounce for forty bucks after the copay,
and recurrent followup appointments (but only on days ending in “y”
during months with an “r”). It’s a lot of work just so I can stare
at the computer screen a little longer without weeping, or just so
I can read another chapter of the latest Outlander novel before
nodding off in the comfy chair at night. I wonder if all that work
counts as exercise.

The logical conclusion of all this annoying bodily
upheaval is that we’re mortal—and, on most days, me more than
anyone else. As I rapidly approach the start of my second century
on the planet, I have this ugly feeling in the pit of my
pathetically ample stomach that it’s not going to get any better
from this point on.

*
Note:
“Lancet” is just not a happy word. It
makes me think of medieval jousting. And frankly, after using one
for the past few months, that initial assessment ain’t too far
off.

List #3: Remember When . . .

•
. . . you could order a
cup of coffee by saying “coffee” without having to play 20
Questions with a barista born thirty years after the demise of the
coffee pot?

•
. . . the only butt
cracks you saw in public belonged to refrigerator repairmen and
weren’t walking the halls of the local high school going to history
class? Or teaching it?

•
. . . family pets had pet
names like Fluffy and Rover and Spot and Whiskers, instead of human
names like Bob and Fred and Chloe?

•
. . . babies had human
names like Bob and Fred and Chloe, instead of names of inanimate or
unknown objects, like Apple and Dweezil and Snake?

•
. . . you could buy big
roomy clothes like bathrobes that were marked “One size fits all”?
I recently bought a bathrobe with this on the label:
“
One size fits most.
” Most? What happened? Did some porky chick buy the robe when
the label read “One size fits all,” and when she discovered she
couldn’t tie the belt, did she sue them for false advertising? Then
again, she has a point. How do they know their robes fit absolutely
everybody? Doesn’t that seem like a bad way to label a piece of
clothing, statistically speaking? If it was a woman’s robe, it’d
have to fit over three billion people for their label to be
accurate.

•
. . . the one television
your family owned got twelve channels . . . on a knob . . .
on
the television . . .
and the “remote control” was you?

I sat under the apple tree,

Just thinking of my love.

He’s tall and blond and dashing too,

Sent down from heav’n above.

I looked up at the deep blue sky

And watched the swallows rise.

The blue gree deeper endlessly

Just like my lover’s eyes.

The golden rays of summer’s sun

Shone on me all the while.

It gave a tingling warmth to all

Just like my lover’s smile.

An apple drops down from the tree;

My head splits it in half.

I hear a chuckle from above,

Just like my lover’s laugh!

My cherished husband, Wayne, is currently tweaking a
home computer server he built from spare parts and stuff he bought
cheap on eBay. This means my living room decor goes from
“country/traditional” to
“computerpartscablesandwireseverywheresowatchwhereyoustep.”

What this meant for me was not only losing my living
room to electronic gadgetry but also a lot of “Can you hear me
now?”-type problem-solving. Trial and error is a wonderful thing,
but once it takes over the living room, no real work gets done.
Books don’t get read in the comfy wing chair. Manuscripts don’t get
edited on the couch. Bad reality television doesn’t get watched
from the recliner. Mass hysteria soon follows.

Instead, freakishly gargantuan CPUs (on wheels, no
less—the big kind that come on office chairs) with cooling fans the
size of New Jersey move noisily around the room, taking with them
enough CAT5 cable for a tech school training class on a bad day.
Each slot that now houses its own huge hard drive (bought on sale
somewhere with rebates and coupons) hums happily and adds its own
din to the whirr and buzz of the fan, and if I need white noise, I
know where to turn.

What I really need, though, is a quiet place to work.
And right now, the living room—with this computer/coffee table and
the massive seventeen-inch CRT monitor tethered to it—is not the
place. White noise is one thing, but once you have to turn up the
television to earsplitting ranges, risking the hearing of all the
neighborhood dogs, well, then, the battle is lost.

Sometimes I’m grateful for the home office I maintain
here . . . upstairs.

My elder daughter and I went on our first fishing
trip this past Saturday. We bought twelve-dollar fishing rods at
Walmart, and the necessary gear, including nightcrawlers. Who knew
you could buy live bait at Walmart? (Well,
you
might have,
but I certainly didn’t. Although, thinking about it later, it made
perfect sense.)

We decided to try Brady’s Run, a few short miles
away, and got there around one p.m. Within about fifteen to twenty
seconds of plunking her line into the water, Grace realized a small
sunfish had decided to hop on for the ride. We threw the little guy
back, but he served to encourage us in our endeavor. Two and a half
hours later we came home with three fish, the largest of which was
about ten inches long.

Grace cleaned them all herself, and then cooked them
in olive oil and garlic along with some lemon juice. Scales and
bones aside (and sadly, they weren’t aside—they were still attached
to the fish), the actual meat itself was marvelous—all twenty-seven
molecules of it.

We learned a few lessons that we’re going to use on
our next camping trip:

1. Scale the fish.
Scale it.
I don’t care how
annoying and dull and difficult it is,
scale it,
stupid.

2. Throw even the semi-little ones back. They’re
really not going to be worth the effort of cleaning them,
especially if you’re not going to
scale them, you
idiot
.