Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions

by Linda M Au

  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.

  Blood, Sweat and Tears

  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.

  Still More Random Things I Notice

  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 crac
ks 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?

  Gravity (an old poem now dedicated to Wayne)

  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!

  Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts

  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.

  Fishing for Compliments

  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.

  3. If you fish with a second person, don’t stand too close to each other while casting your lines into the water. You only have two eyes, remember? And lips don’t like to have holes in them. At least mine don’t.

  4. Some fish are stupid enough to meander around in the water a foot from shore. Even ten-inch fish. Sometimes. So, be ready to just walk to the edge and drop your line down into the water and yank it back out with a fish attached. It can happen to you.

  5. If you bring a five-gallon plastic bucket to put the fish in, don’t forget to bring a lid. One that stays on. Who knew local fish were also flying fish? If you have no lid, don’t put the bucket too close to the water. You’ve been warned.

  6. If you are using nightcrawlers in dirt, and if you are handling your own fish to take them off the hook, bring wet wipes. Trust me on this one. Especially if you also packed a lunch and haven’t eaten it yet.

  Despite the misadventures of the day, we’re really psyched to go fishing at Laurel Hill Campground in less than two weeks! Trout dinner over an open fire, here we come!

  A Blaze of Glory

  My everlasting beloved works at the local nuclear power plant. (Think Homer Simpson minus the doughnuts. No, wait, keep the doughnuts.) You probably have a local grocery store or a local basketball team. And we have a local nuclear power plant. Doesn’t everybody?

  Tonight at dinner Wayne’s telling me a my-day-at-work story and I’m listening while crunching my salad.

  “So then Blaze says …”

  “Wait, who?”

  “Blaze.”

  “The guy’s nickname is Blaze?”

  “No, that’s his name.”

  I have to think about this for a while. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

  “His first name?”

  “Yup.”

  Crunchety crunch crunch. I don’t ask what his last name is.

  Despite the fact that the story is not going this way, my mind is wandering elsewhere. I am sitting here in awe of parents brave enough to name their baby boy Blaze when they could have named him Justin or Joshua or Sean or something equally conformist. What an attitude this kid must have had during his school years! What cheers he must have heard at graduation when his name was called!

  Then again, do you really want a guy named Blaze working at your local nuke plant?

  Three months later, though, I got the rest of the story (no thanks to Paul Harvey). You know, the part I cared about—that weird name.

  Naturally, while having a conversation (especially one with an engineer and not a fellow writer), no one’s spelling out what they’re saying letter by letter (unless there are small children around and you’re trying to talk about s-e-x).

  Imagine my embarrassment to find out that our nuke plant worker, Blaze, had parents who in actuality named him Blasé.

  So it is a normal name after all, if a bit on the exotic side. But I bet he still got beat up on the playground.

  Even More Random Things I Notice

  List #4: Really Arbitrary Observations

  • Power outages at home are fun—for about fifteen minutes. Then the teenagers figure out that the Internet is down, the cabl
e TV isn’t working, and it’s difficult to read celebrity magazines by candlelight without setting something on fire.

  • All haircuts are great for the first few weeks, but one day the haircut goes nuts and doesn’t remember where any of your hairs should go and cowlicks show up unbidden.

  • Some days I have so little intestinal fortitude that the only staring contest I can win is with the goldfish, and even then it’s a close call because he doesn’t have eyelids.

  • Parents gush with pride over their children’s tiniest accomplishments because they remember when the most difficult thing their kids did was refrain from pooping in their pants, and they’re just grateful the kids have moved beyond doing that sort of thing in public.

  • I have to feel adventurous before I’ll clean the top of the refrigerator. Going up there is akin to exploring the lunar surface. Last time I cleaned up there, I found some moon rocks and a U.S. flag next to the Cheerios box.

  Sunny Side Down

  Have you ever awakened too early—accidentally? You know, you wake up while it’s still half-dark outside, then realize you’re way too awake to go back to sleep, so you get up anyway?

  Yeah, me neither.

  Well, actually, I did that this past week. Twice. Once, I could forgive. But the second time was just downright rude. I could have slept an extra hour or more but my body was saying it needed to visit a bathroom, and then my brain said, “While we’re up, why don’t we just check our e-mail real quick?”

  Then my body said, “This couch is so comfortable. Why don’t we just stay here and put on the news and see if anything big happened overnight?”

  Which, of course, nothing did.

  By now it was eight o’clock, so I said to myself, “Might as well just stay up now. I’ll never get back to sleep at this point.”

  I could have smacked myself for that last thought (well, and the other ones before that too), but I never win when I argue with myself so I let it slide this once and stayed up.