Nosy

Nice Google, trying so hard to provide some ads that relate to my blog content. Apparently related to my allergerific posting last week, the top of my page presently features two links to industrial-caliber sneeze guards. You can even get them with etched glass! Art, that.

Jettisoning the Professional Friend

So, last week I dumped my therapist.

That's probably a loaded phrase, isn't it? But how do you end it--an amicable-but-also-covered-by-the-health-plan relationship like that? You break up with him? You fire him, all Trumpin' it with the little jabby hand-gesture and everything? There isn't a word for it, I don't think.

I have--had?--been "with" the Good Doctor, been "seeing" him, for seven years. Almost to the day, I now realize. When the ExLoveOfMyLife dumped me, seven years ago, I called the number on the refrigerator magnet distributed by the Employee Assistance Program; they entered my global positioning coordinates or somesuch and matched me with the Good Doctor. (The building that held his office also housed a bakery, so I knew that therapeutic comfort of one kind or another would be handily available. Some days, I applied both.)

Seven years. That's longer than the relationship with ELOML that put me on the couch in the first place. It's probably not a stretch to say that it's the longest, most positive relationship I've ever had with...a man. Gender isn't a factor, here...but then again, it is. Isn't; is. Transferrence all over the place. And yes, we talked about that too, over time.

How did I figure this out? The last month or so has been strange. I'm still distracted by my House Joy, feeling generally content and happy. I'm working out; I'm writing this blog; I've lost 6 1/2 pounds. I would go to therapy and find myself groping for things to say, or fretting more about, say, my sister's mental health than my own. We were talking about ice cream. Then, three weeks ago, busy working from home, I completely forgot my appointment--didn't think of it at all until I saw his name on the caller ID, 90 minutes later. Which was a whole new can of worms: he admitted he rarely called the no-shows, but wanted to make sure I was okay. Was concerned. Was worried, maybe.

I've searched myself a lot on this, too--with firm proof that he "worried" about me, am I just fleeing? Is this just responsible Me, fleeing the burden of needing to keep another Grown-Up from worrying, from suffering on my behalf? We talked about that a lot, the next week, but ultimately...I still felt ready. I hadn't missed therapy, whether or not the Good Doctor missed me.

So, we talked about it. I did fret...I hate to be forgotten, after all. I told him a story about revisiting a couple favorite old high-school teachers, when I was a graduate student. English teachers! In whose classes I had cranked out pages of prose, had fancied myself a genius, had laughed and cried and been forced to read Ophelia to my secret crush's Hamlet, the worst indignity ever...anyway. They didn't remember me, couldn't put a name to my face, just four years later. Ouch. The Good Doctor declared that horrible, and said he would be unlikely to forget my name. This moved me deeply...though a bit later it did occur to me that my last name is his first. Heh.

But I was ready. I was grateful, I was happy, and I was ready. He said "goodbye," which I don't remember him saying before. He would not see me next week. And I cried...and did my ears deceive me, or did he sound a little choked up, too? But...I still left.

Absurdly, now, I want to thank him profusely...all "To Sir With Love" about it...or recommend him to others, like a restaurant. How do you thank someone? Where's Lulu when you need her? The thesaurus fails me here, also.

For the record, though, I still possess both crayons and perfume. I'll leave it to you to guess which of those gets more frequent use.

Thank you, Doug.

In your face, gals

Saw a commercial last night for some sorta wrinkle-reducing face cream; the voiceover promised it would help minimize "expression lines." Expression lines! Apparently you're not doomed just for laughing anymore; betraying the least glimmer of all those petty, pesky emotions is a one-way ticket to CrowsFeetVille, you decrepit hag you.

If you believe in fairies, clap your hands!

Grrrrr. Hard day. I woke myself up by sneezing uncontrollably this morning; at first I thought I'd inhaled a stray cat hair in my sleep, or something, but the snuffliness persisted. I popped a Benadryl, the only thing in the house, and headed off to the gym, where I was given cause to wonder, is it possible to fall asleep on a Nautilus machine? Because frankly I was thisclose.

Then to work, where the day was consumed with one of those busywork, cut-n-paste tasks...tedious, but weirdly satisfying at least, when you can quantify the pile of items you've moved to the "Out" heap from the "In." I continued to sneeze and sneeze and sneeze and sneeze, though, in the grip of what I hope is an allergy attack; after six hours and change of trying to blow my face off the front of my skull, I staggered out and caught the earliest possible bus.

But. On the bus, I was unable to stop listening to the conversation of the two women behind me. And believe me when I said I tried. I struggled to doze; I hummed the love theme from "Dr. Zhivago" to myself. But no...I had to pay attention to them, and their first topic, The War. You know, the one in Iraq? (Thank goodness that's over with, huh?) Woman A was insistent that President Bush had "honorable intentions," whatever the hell that means, and that we should stay there and finish up the plan. (Woman B, to her credit, seemed to be taking the "uh, what plan?" tack that was trumpeting in my own head.) Woman A also was very disgusted with those nations now pulling their soldiers out of the region, backing out on their "promises" to help; they were "cowards and quitters!" in her eyes. I wondered whether under her guidance we'd still be sorting out Vietnam. I sneezed. I bit my tongue. Thankfully, they moved on to a new topic: The Gays. Uh oh.

I wasn't going to get all po-litical in this blog. I wasn't! It was going to be all wry observations and pop-culty fun-ness and would you believe the koo-koo things people order at the espresso cart? So if you're here reading for that, scoot on off to TWoP or something for the afternoon, loveys, and I promise you ruminations on hotdish and bingo tomorrow. But at the moment, I have a soapbox to stomp around on.

I'm pro-gay marriage. I have multiple reasons for this; the first is that I see it, at its core, as a church/state issue. Marriage is a legal, civil contract in this country, first and foremost; you don't have to get married in a church, or make religion a part of the ceremony at all, but you do have to get that license in your hand, just like you do to drive or to fish or to dispense cocktails. It's a civil right, and to deny it to a segment of the consenting adult population is discriminatory, period.

I also support it for general cultural (and pop-cultural, I guess) reasons. I don't get the gnashing and wailing over protecting marriage as An Institution. Are you kidding me? Look how the straight folks have botched it up, for crying out loud. (Exhibit A: my poor, young, clueless, ill-suited, now-divorced parents.) How many straight couples are going to court for a Do-Over, or loathing each other through decades of marital acrimony, or throwing their hands in the air and just shacking up, or fame-whoring their way through the latest round of "The Bachelor" on my goddamn television? I hate to break it to you, folks, but The Institution, she is in a world of hurt already. Why not let the homosexuals take a crack at it? There are gay and lesbian couples clamoring to get married; maybe weddings will become a hot new trend. Look at what the Queer Eye fellows have done for belt-wearing. (Thom! Love ya! Need a hag? Call me!)

And I support it for personal reasons. For the record, I'm straight, and single. I just bought a house on my own, and I'm proud of my independence therein, but I long for a boy to play with, and make weekend plans and pancakes and babies with, and possibly get legal with, not necessarily in any order. But friends of mine, people I love dearly, and who love each other dearly...can't get married. They aren't entitled to seize the exact same joys and miseries and legal protections and property rights and social acceptance and big fat Greek wedding and tax status and public declaration of unity that I'm entitled to, someday, just because I happen to be a girl who likes boys. And that's wrong.

It's time, people. It's just plain time.

Back to the ladies on the bus. Woman B, again taking the middle ground, voiced the belief that some folks are just born gay. (Actually, she said that "God made them" that way. I shan't quibble.) Woman A, though, was more dubious; she was "fine" with the gays, as long as they weren't all "in [her] face" about it. Woman B pointed out that she didn't know anyone who ran right up and shouted "I'm gay!" at first meeting. Woman A was still uneasy, though. "I don't mind...I just don't believe in it," she kept saying. Believe in what? Gayness? Gay people? Like ghosts or alien abductions or the Tooth Fairy? (Okay: hee.) I don't believe in blabbing one's sociopolitical opinions so loudly on the bus (yeah, I prefer the subtleties of the INTERNET!)...but dammit, Woman A, you were still there.

So. Recap: allergies, sneezing, gym, work, cranky, yay gay marriage, vote Ron Sims, over and out.

* * * * * *

Got home to find arborists dismantling the giant, limb-tossing, decrepit evergreen in front of the house...which needed to be done, but the chain-sawing and wood-chipping? NOT SO SOOTHING. Grrr.

And how!

Readerboard sign on a church in my neighborhood:

THE LORD IS RISEN
INDEED!

Well, right on. You go, Jesus!

"A *rabbit*?"

Time for a seasonal reading. I've got a few pieces of writing that I turn to over and over at certain times of year (state-fair time has its own entire category), and this is one of them. C. K. Williams, from "Flesh and Blood," copyright 1987 (don't sue me, I replicate out of love). Happy Easter, everybody.

Easter

As though it were the very soul of rational human intercourse which had been violated,
I can't believe you did that, the father chokes out to his little son, kneeling beside him,
tugging at the waistband of the tiny blue jeans, peerng in along the split between the buttocks,
putting down his face at last to sniff, then saying it again, with quiet indignation, outrage,
a power more moral than parental: at issue here are covenants, agreements from the dawn of time.
The child, meanwhile, his eyes a little wider than they might be, is otherwise unblinking;
all the time his father raves, he stares, scholarly, detached, at a package in his hands:
a box of foil-wrapped chocolate eggs, because it's spring, because the god has died, and risen.

Story problem

Is it general knowledge that I am not a math fan? I'm not all Barbie about it, but beyond the ability to balance my checkbook, or determine how much carpet will fit in a room, I've never found much application for the numeric arts in my daily life. I chose a college without a math requirement--that was far from the main reason, but it didn't hurt. Over the past few years, my sister's taken some math courses to fill out her Associate degree credits, and for some reason she'd call me up asking for help. A rocket measuring 54.1 cm leaves a platform 120 cm high and traveling at a rate of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...just...static, in my brain. Don't need those cells anymore, and they're gone daddy gone.

But. Today's P-I featured this article about transferring the Seattle Public Library's collection to its ever-more-awesome new Central Branch building. They calculated the book volume, in linear feet, in exacting detail--months and pages and reams of diagrams and analysis. Now that's some math! I'm somehow charmed, that all these numbers blah blah blah math blah have been brought to bear on...words. Moving great quantities of tangible literary arts around. Cooooool.

This mall has everything!

Whoa. In exhaustive detail, word for word:

The Pepsi Syndrome
"Now, the nuclear fuel here is used to generate energy here, which is sent to your homes to make toast."

The French Chef
"Crap! Oh! Oh, now I've done it--I've cut the dickens out of my finger."

Little Chocolate Donuts
"I logged a lot of miles training for that day."

Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies...glow

I sat up later than I might have, Monday night, watching an episode of American Experience on PBS (thereby cementing both my nerdy and snobby status--NerdSnob! SnobNerd!): a film on the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.

Odd experience, that. I mean, we know that, generally speaking, Things Turned Out All Right. Twenty-five years after the fact, if we could see the gentle glow of the Keystone State from the top of the Space Needle, we'd have caught on. But I was surprised by how much tension the documentary managed to create, Liev Schrieber narrating the blow-by-blow of a really bad week at the ol' plant with measured calm...against a backdrop of bawling evacuation sirens and officials going all Han Solo as they stammered assurances, "Negative, situation normal, everything's fine here...how are you?" President Carter, grimly wading about in his skinny 70s suit and protective yellow booties.

Is it still haunting because we know now how bad it could be? I'm thinking of a link I snagged from Mike: Elena's haunting photo essay of Chernobyl from the back of a motorcycle. "Ghost Town" is a bit of English vernacular that's clearly crossed over to the Russian states, and her blankly terrifying pictures show it: every single day is April 26, 1986, falling slowly, endlessly into poisonous ruin.

I don't know why that, in particular, gets me: the emptiness, the abandonment. How decay marks the infinitesimal passage of time, though the empty world doesn't care whether you live to tell about it or not. In William Langewiesche's series of hotly debated Atlantic articles on the World Trade Center attacks, later collected into his book American Ground, the sequence that continues to stick with me is his regular visits, over a period of weeks, to a conference room in an adjacent bank building, where people had clearly fled their breakfast meeting. He writes about checking on the progress, such as it is, of dust-filmed danishes and the scum of orange juice shrinking away in the glasses. This is the image that continues to cross my mind, beyond what marks the event on television (the planes, planes, planes, always the planes).

Back to Three Mile Island, though. The other--really, only--memory this documentary stirred in me was of what must have been the first "Saturday Night Live" sketch I ever saw. In it, President Carter is touring a nuclear plant when there's a meltdown; exposed to radiation, he grows to tremendous size, Amazing-Colossal-Man-style. Badly bluescreened "huge" through a window, he tells poor teensy Rosalyn that he's leaving her for the plant's similarly affected cleaning lady (who, my brain suggests, was portrayed by Garrett Morris).

I remember finding this hilarious, at the time. What could it have meant to me? I can't imagine my getting any more out of it than "the President is GIANT! that's funny! and that man is wearing a DRESS!" I was nine years old. What the hell was I doing up at that hour, even?

You can find pretty much anything on this here Internet in ten minutes, so I checked: this guy has all the original airdates and episode synopses. Ep 78p, April 7, 1979. Rickie Lee Jones sang "Chuck E's in Love" and, apparently, Belushi extolled the virtues of little chocolate donuts, a fauxmercial I only grew to love in adulthood.

I guess that's the gift of pop culture, what it does: slaps a funny wig on history's terror and misery and boots it out on stage for a laugh. Every night, surely, all over the world in countless television markets, Homer Simpson fishes that glowing ingot of nuke outta his shirt collar and flings it from the car...ahh, that's better! And thank God for it, frankly.

(Incidentally, I searched a little more and found my other seminal SNL skit memory: Ackroyd, again, as Julia Child, cutting "the dickens" out of his finger and bleeding out in the kitchen. Wah ha ha hah! And I reiterate: why the hell was I out of bed? Raised by wolves, you'd think.)

We wouldn't have to eat Kraft Dinner...BUT WE WOULD!

Another random discovery that completely made my day: Ian Golder's consuming devotion to macaroni and cheese dinner.

For the record: always Kraft Dinner; prepared with a wooden spoon (in fact, THE Wooden Spoon, with which Grandma used to chase us around the house, threatening a beating), but eaten with whatever utensil at hand; for dinner, but leftovers may be consumed at any time; more often than I care to admit; directions are for dopes.

Oh--and in adulthood, with plenty of both black and cayenne pepper, but in childhood...cut-up hot dogs. Ambrosia!

(Yes, we probably had some of that, too, with the mini-marshmallows and the nondairy topping.)

Aw. Grammy. I miss her...would gladly take a few whacks with The Wooden Spoon for the chance to tell her so.

Red pen validation

If you're reading this, you probably know I'm an editor--primarily of technical documentation for my JOB job, but also dabbling in things like doctoral theses, updating my mother's resume after 21 years, and "you're funny! Make my personal ad funny!"

Anyway. I'm working with a new writer at the J-O-B: new to me, and new to writing in general. Today she submitted her first-ever draft to me, accompanied by the greatest e-mail I'll likely receive in my career:

"I just checked in my first document for Edit1. Please be really critical so that I don’t start out creating bad habits."

I'm telling you, this reaffirmed my entire accidental, thought-free trajectory into professional nit-picking. As long as we're on the same page from the get-go, we should get along just fiiiine.

Let be be finale of seem

Over a number of years working with my therapist (which in itself feels nicely New Yorker-y--I'm in analysis), we've established that both of us are foodies. We talk about restaurants and compare cheeses; we were gleeful when the Sand Point Metropolitan Market opened; during my house search, we spent more than one session debating the merits of different kitchens. Yesterday, though, it somehow came up that we're both ice cream fiends as well. I can gnaw my way shivering through a cone in 20-degree weather; it was nice to find that someone else shared this particular obsession. I began to tell the story of how a particular strain of Ben and Jerry's fueled my entire Master's thesis, and then they stopped making it--

The Good Doctor (agitated): I know exactly what you're going to say!

Me: You do?

The Good Doctor (vehement): DASTARDLY MASH!

Well, how do you spend your fifty minutes?

Actually, though, that wasn't it. I was a devotee of Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookie Dough; I'd sit there pecking away on my fourth-hand Apple II C, with the cast-iron monitor stand that weighed about 20 pounds, and alternating between ice-cream pints and the occasional bowl of cold cereal. At some point during the most intense two weeks of composition, I went to chuck a dead soldier in the trash, and got a look at probably half a dozen similar empty cartons. I am still not sure whether to be proud of this.

For the public good, however, I submit to you B&J's Flavor Graveyard, where you can submit a Web Form pleading for the dearly departed staple of your own tender recollection. If The Good Doctor is keeping up with the blog, we know where his vote is going.

Mom said no (volume I)

It appears that Topps is trying to revive Wacky Packages for a new generation.

God, just the sight of that "Scrapple" sticker is making me gag. Mmmm, nostalgia. Actually, the Garbage Pail Kids stickers were the ones that drove my mother completely crazy; they were verboten in our household. But putrid parodies reigned supreme; I remember a friend of mine having a similar coloring book of some sort, with full-size labels you could cut out and paste over actual product packages. We got away with "Crust" toothpaste at Grandma and Grandpa's.

Interesting, that Art Spiegelman was one of the original gross-out sticker artists. Then Holly wrote her doctoral thesis on him. And I edited it. Heh. The ciiirrrrrcle of liiiiiiife....

This is not my beautiful house!

Note to Mike: I promised you an update last night, but the Internet connection that was working so beautifully when the cable guy was standing in my living room...is not. Sorry. Furtive at-work blogging...commence!)

I've settled into my new place, for the most part. I'm not completely unpacked--my Native American name is Lives With Boxes--but the physical transition of my belongings and my life from decrepit rental to My First Home is complete. I'm sore from all the toting and hauling; I'm covered in bruises from the waist down, from walking into the corners of boxes and randomly placed furniture...it looks like I've been in a prizefight with a toddler, or a midget. Sunday I actually transferred over the remaining stuff out of the fridge, and I bought some accompanying groceries last night, so now I am prepared to offer guests something more than leftover pizza, a single Coke, and Girl Scout cookies. (Thin Mints, of course--do you take me for a Philistine?)

When I started this whole first-time homebuying process, I tended to see each experience as a significant milestone: My First Meeting with the Agent, My First Open House, My First Horrified Recoil at How Much Hovel You Can Buy For $290,000. When I signed the first page of my loan pre-approval package, my heart was pounding wildly; I thought, "I'm doing it! I'm signing! I'm doing it!" After the first dozen pages, the excitement began to wane. After the subsequent bids on two houses, inspection reports, addendums, actual factual loan applications, and closing on my 1942 2-bedroom Cape Cod, my signature is a senseless scrawl that will probably never recover. At the closing itself, I must have signed or initialed 100 times--the document that says you'll live in the house, the document that references that document, the document confirming receipt of those documents, the document attesting to your awareness that gnawing on your vintage windowsills might cause you dain bramage and it's your own damn fault. I lost sight of those keepsake moments, a little.

But moving in has brought it all back. Saturday night, I performed My First Home Repair when I went to close the stopper in the bathroom sink and the whole drain-lever-mechanism-thingy came off in my hand with a metallic zzzzink. Oookay...so I lay on the floor with my head in the cabinet and proudly figured out what to reattach to what. Yay, me!

At 4:00 a.m. Sunday morning, I awoke to My Second Home Repair, sort of. It was pouring outside, and the newly installed downspout just outside the wall I'd put the head of the bed against...is not entirely perpendicular to Earth. Instead of smoothly trickling down the pipe, rain was falling from some high point in the spout and hitting the interior at an angle of juuuusst...five or...six...degrees.

It was REALLY raining. And the raindrops were REALLY hitting. Bong bong BONGabong bing BONGA bongbongbong bing bong, just above my pillow. It sounded like a drum circle at the Folklife Festival. You could almost smell the Patchouli. To my glamorous 16-year-old college nightshirt, I added sweatpants, my glasses, Converse high-tops and a ski jacket, and slogged blearily outside where, in the blackness, I confirmed that the noise was coming from the pipe. What to do? It was the wee hours on a Sunday. I was in my jammies. My downspout--or my house--were minutely askew. This suggested a need for tools. I trudged back in to bed.

Bong bongbongbong BONG BONGA bong. Tossing, turning, anguish, buyer's remorse...until I remembered the earplugs in the nightstand, from two noisy apartments ago. I squished the little orange foam bullets into my ears, listened to them gradually reexpand and muffle the world down to only my own heartbeat. Silence! Problem solved!

This home ownership thing is gonna be a snap.

What's in your wallet?

It's been a while, I know. I'm in the process of buying my first home--or, I should say, I've purchased a very excellent front doorknob and the bank has graciously agreed to let me live behind it for the next 30 years. So: distracted.

I've spent the last week making random, erratic forrays into packing. This should be relatively simple: I last moved just a couple years ago, and in the intervening 26 months spent assorted free weekends sorting through and streamlining all the crap I'd shoveled desperately into the truck in the preceding move. Did I really need my lecture notes from "Race, Gender, and Identity in Literature" from 1991? There probably won't be another quiz. The mates to stray socks are not waiting at the new house. Waldenbooks pay stubs totalling $119/week can be safely shredded.

I did find myself, last night, going through a bulging, cracking old wallet that I'd stuck in a drawer when I downsized to a just-the-essentials model last year. It's like moving, in a microcosm: Which of these possessions were significant enough to your essential self that you carried them around with you? How do they define, quite literally, your identity? How have you changed? It's an old standby writer's exercise: what's in your character's wallet, and why?

Let's look.

* Driver's license from 1994. I had bangs. I had not previously considered mascara. Hide this one from my future children.
* Reciepts from movie rentals. I think I'm done with "Memento" now.
* Defunct Eddie Bauer charge card. A closer examination of the move-induced Closet Reorg would not suggest that I had let this lapse, what with Mr. Bauer's signature on 82% of everything I own.
* Punch card for Elliott Bay Book Company.
* Punch card for Second Story Bookstore. I'm sensing a trend.
* Two different punch cards for Papyrus, the greeting card store.
* Punch card for Subway.
* Punch card for Taco del Mar.
* Punch card for Lane Bryant undergarments. I sense a more unfortunate trend.
* Staggering amount of loose change that changes the wallet dimensions to more those of a brick.
* Ticket stub from the X-Files movie. Aw. Remember when I wanted to be Scully? Pre-LA, pre-Duchovny leaving, pre-what-the-hell-have-they-done-to-this-show-is-Chris-Carter-on-crack Scully? That was awesome.
* A note from my sister, when she was a small child. I've actually carried this around for maybe 20 years. It's a two-inch stub of notebook paper, outlined and torn from a separate sheet; in green ink, it says, "I like you Kim," and it's signed.


I kept the note, again. It's so her; that's the thing. It's economical: why waste a whole sheet of paper on few words? It has her name on it, too, in case you weren't sure where to focus your attention or reciprocal affection. And it's very particular in its semantics: she likes me. Sure, she loves me; she's my sibling, it's a genetic imperative. But she likes me, too. Or she did, once. I'm not so sure that the adults we've grown into would find enough common ground to be friends, had the established relationship not pre-existed. But the note is evidence of a sort: that we had more than one set of matching dresses, once upon a time...and that we had slapfights over particular rugby shirts and patterned ski sweaters, later. That we have the same wicked cackle and can finish each other's sentences. That I read "Mickey Mouse and the Haunted Mansion" to her so many times I can still quote pages verbatim. That once we fit into the same bathtub. That she'll be 31 next Wednesday, but occasionally I still picture her in a knit Tootsie-Roll pompom hat.

She'll never read this...I haven't tipped the family off to the blog, yet. But happy birthday anyway, sisty.

Oh, and you look like a monkey, and you smell like one too.

And a brick of Equal, please

Today's freakish coffee order: different guy in front of me requested a beverage consisting of SIX shots...of decaf. Whuh? What is that? "Gimme a lot of really strong coffee that's just...not so strong." Shouldn't this drink create some sort of whirling vortex of anti-matter?

Dude, we have this stuff called "water" that you might want to look into.

Once more around the sun

Happy Birthday wishes to two of my favorite people:

First, Holly, who sat next to me in Mr. Zukowski's sixth-grade homeroom and has been a calming influence ever since...even from her current home in Munich. Wish you were here, or I was there. Uh, more the latter!

Then, to Mike, my favorite curmudgeon, who IS here, actually...just down the hall at UberMegaFreeSodaSoft (not its real name). But doubtless wishes he were elsewhere too.

Much love, happiness, and chocolate to the both of you, today!

Origin myth

I've been asked what the story behind "pagooey" is. The short answer is that it's a family nonsense word, one of the phrases or malapropisms that gets handed down for generations, like a code you speak to one another. (Do other people do this? My family has dozens. Some are based in ritual; for example, if you're lost and pull into a stranger's driveway to turn around, at least one of us in the car will call out "Hi! We're here!" for the sake of the unknown residents. Others are simpler, like mispronouncing "debris" as "der-biss," stolen from somebody's sister's college roommate. Really I need a separate glossary site, just for these.)

Anyway. Pagooey. In my mother's elementary school class, as in everyone's elementary school class, was The Kid That Everyone Picked On. You know the kid: the clammy-palmed nosepicker; the girl with thin, stringy, dishwater-blond hair and mismatched socks; the kid who smelled like sour milk, or pee, or fifteen cats, or all the above; the boy with a crust of impetigo on his upper lip; the kid with a shitty lunch, a harboiled egg and an off-brand soda; the kid who accidentally wore Spiderman pajama bottoms to school; the kid picked last. In my class, he was a boy. Billy. I'm going to hell for the stuff I willingly, relievedly inflicted on Billy. In my mother's class, the kid was a girl.

I don't remember the girl's real name, now...something with a P. Peggy? Patricia? At any rate, her classmates had come up with "Pagooey" and the name stuck. It didn't mean anything, or rather it meant that kid, and the taint of ill-fittedness and scorn that clung to her. Pagooey signified a perpetually running nose and hand-me-downs, cooties, paste-eating, the wrong shoes. Pagooey was, as much as anything, the concept of That Kid. "Eeewww, Pagooey!" they'd shriek on the playground, running from her--Pagooey might be catching.

My mother had a birthday, turning probably nine or ten, and made a point of inviting all her female classmates but Pagooey. It was the fifties; you could still do this, exclude one or another little freak without fear of legal reprisals, or having to pick up their therapy tab. The girls had a great time, doing whatever you did at a birthday party in 1956...prancing around in crinolines, eating cake? Something. At the end of the affair, seeing her guests out, my mother found something wedged in the door: a missive from the dreaded Pagooey. A sheet of notebook paper, smudged and smeary, declaring "Happy Birthday," with pictures of horses clumsily cut from magazines and pasted on.

I'll bet the Germans have a word for it, what my mother felt for the first time, holding that note...what I feel, retelling the story she's remembered for nearly 50 years. A guttural word, full of umlauts and spittle, combining disgust for the other with disgust for yourself; multiple syllables that, strung together, mean something like "Awareness of life's pathos and of how you are a cruel little shit and yet not wholly repentant."

But, you know, maybe the English word is "pagooey." It kept coming up, when I was thinking about a name for this blog. It's a funny-sounding word. Maybe its definition has softened, over time, or grown more hopeful. All bloggers are probably a little bit pagooey, myself no exception. I am sneaking onto your porch; I am snootling against your window. I am leaving a note in your mailbox. I am putting the words on the Internet where anyone can find them. I'm telling the story of our inner Pagooeys. Your party looks like fun. Can I come in?

Floor bagels

You know: "everything" bagels, with onion flecks and poppy and sesame seeds and kosher salt and what have you, as if they had been rolled across the bakery linoleum before ending up in your tissue-paper square? A little bit of this, a little bit of that, today.

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Yesterday morning, coffee cart at work: the guy in front of me ordered a beverage with FIVE shots of espresso. FIVE! Would you like a knife and fork with that? The barista, understandably anxious, made him sample it before she'd let him leave; what would she have done if his head had blown off right there? He approved the taste of this concoction...and then asked her to top it off with a swirly pile of chocolate-flavored whipped cream, drizzled with caramel syrup. "That looks like dog poo," his colleague declared frankly.

"I'm waiting for the vein to pop out on your forehead," I said. I'd developed a slight tremor just standing next to the guy. I like my caffeine as much as the next Queen City native, but holy crap, right?

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Apparently Science has documented the intersection of spatial relations and colorful, candy-coated snackery: a new study shows that identical spheroid shapes--namely, M&Ms--can be packed more tightly together than ordinary spheres. Ellipsoids (would those be...peanut M&Ms? or are those so random as to introduce, like, chaos theory?) can be crammed together to reach an even greater maximum density. I thought about this a lot today as I packed a substantial number of Valentine-hued chocolate spheroids into my own maw at the office. Mmmm, volume displacement.

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Hey looky! I added a "Comments"...thingy. Now I can interact with both of my readers! Click the link, love me, I'm needy.

Turned left at Greenland

The media, last weekend, made much of the fact that it was the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' arrival in America, that first epic and epochal appearance on Ed Sullivan.

I was an infant when the band broke up; to me the Beatles have always been history. A vivid history, granted: both my parents were fans. I played my mother's vinyl albums, and knew by heart her tale of their concert at the then Seattle Coliseum--how the lads had to be smuggled out in an ambulance, how after their stay at the Edgewater hotel, the management tore up the carpets and cut up the drapes, sold off in swatches anything a few stray molecules of Beatle might have touched. (As a teen, my mother had a fuzzy pill of "Beatle lint" tacked to the wall for years. It's a long story.) I pored over the picture on Sgt. Pepper, though the only faces I could pick out were Marilyn and Shirley Temple. The year my father got the Compleat Beatles Songbook for Christmas, we puzzled out the guitar tablature and sang ourselves hoarse.

It was Christmas, too, nearly, when Chapman opened fire in the Dakota. I was nine. My mother was in the garage, wrestling a wet Christmas tree into the three-legged stand, when our neighbor Jane called and said in a voice I'd never heard, "John Lennon's been shot!" I knew John, Paul, George, Ringo--I could've told you that sooner than rattled off the Gospels--but I'd never connected the boys on the record jacket to grownups with last names. "You don't know who John Lennon is?" Jane cried at me, and she was crying, shouting in a way that made me feel uniquely stupid and afraid. "Go get your mother," she said.

It was a year or two before I really began to catch on, to understand that I'd missed something. The music was there, sure, and still is and will be...but I was slouching toward thirteen, and I felt like I'd been gypped somehow. There was nothing comparable in my world, nothing to get that excited about...and John was already dead. There wasn't going to be any more of anything "Beatles."

I got a taste, though. In 1982, a print of "A Hard Day's Night" was rereleased, and my mother took me and my best friend from grade school. She'd already seen it sixteen times, and while she was never much for sleepovers, for having to feed an extra kid breakfast in our tiny apartment, she made a strange and rare exception in this case. So we were already giddy, Alyssa and I, going into the theatre. We were staying up late! going to a 9:30 movie! with actual teenagers in the audience! some of them on dates! Did we put a few seats between us and my mom, for dignity's sake? I don't remember.

But the lights went down, and the movie started: first the teaser appended to that release, "I'll Cry Instead," with stills of the band and the cast and the hordes of girls, darting on and off the screen. And then the film itself, the title track, that first unmistakable chord, blang! like the sound your whole central nervous system might make being strummed, like an axe to the head, like pulling the rip cord on Adolescence. The crazed, cartoony chase through the train station: Beatles in phone booths! Beatles behind magazines! And somewhere in the theater audience, a girl, some unknown invisible girl...screamed.

It was like a match to a fuse. She screamed, and then suddenly we all were--shrieking our heads off, bouncing in the mangy spring-shot seats of the Northgate Cinema. We screamed and clutched the armrests, we howled at the punchlines, we committed pages of snarky Brit wit to memory in a single sitting.

There's a little old man in the cupboard.

I now declare this bridge...oooopen!

I'm a mocker.

She looks more like 'im than I do.

I've never forgotten it. It's still one of my top-ten, movie-ecstasy experiences of all time. The clean, crisp, sterile sound of the compact discs, so sharp you can hear Paul breathing; the perfectly restored black-and-white beauty of my special-edition DVD; they can't even touch the stale-popcorn, poorly-heated funk of that now-defunct movie house, the Beatles crackling to life on the dusty screen.

Thanks, Mom.