A story of a hawk and a snake

There is a terrifying limbo that occurs and entraps when bad news is received. My mother has this voice she uses on messages when she is delivering News with a capital N, that usually means I will have to climb onto a plane and face down hours of misery because something terrible has happened.  The voice is the smallest voice of doom.

Little did I know when I posted that last post about sleep that I would spend the next several days with little to no sleep thanks to that terrible voice.

The message is usually along the lines of, "I'm going to need you to give me a call back as soon as you get this message." Early into it my stomach has plummeted to my feet, midway I'm in a cold sweat and can barely hold the phone, and by the end I'm fighting off the little dancing lights in my periphery and the ringing in the ears that means I may throw up or pass out. The trembles when I call her back are enough to shake the phone loose from my hands.

This time, though, she didn't answer when I called back. Either time. So I called my dad and was met with a rather chipper hello. The tremors calmed. If he was calm and sounded happy, then things couldn't have happened. Also, it meant he wasn't the one her call was about.

That proved to be false, though, as he explained that he was in hospital because he fainted at dinner the night before. He and I have been known to do that if our blood sugar gets too low, but this appeared not to have been that. The faint followed on an illness and indigestion, some pain. It had all the classic symptoms of a heart attack, minus the heart attack. He was expected to be released in two to three days, no worries, and we joked about the possible valve replacement years down the road:

Me: So you'd have either a pig or a 3D printed heart part?"
Him: I'm hoping for pig if it happens.

The quick release was a false hope. I got another voice of doom call on Friday. Things were bad. EKGs and a catheter revealed severe blockage of a main artery and a valve that was no longer functioning properly.  It meant bypass surgery and valve replacement, which meant open heart surgery. This sent the world tilting a bit. The surgery date, though, was uncertain; I didn't want to make a move until I knew what was going on. I had to tie up some loose ends and take care of some business before I could go. Things aren't real until you're actually there, right? So if I delayed, then it wasn't real. I hoped for Tuesday. I got on a flight on Saturday and raced across the country for a Sunday surgery instead. He could have gone back at any time, and I didn't know if I would see him before the surgery (procedure just doesn't work here; it's innocuous. This was not that).

I caught the flight at 11:59pm Oregon time and landed at 10:20am Oklahoma time. I slept (the only sleep I got) for the duration of the flight from Houston to Oklahoma City. He had not been taken back, and would not, in fact, for several hours. And so we waited in pauses of laughter, somber, silent tears that escaped despite our best efforts, and jokes and stories.  It was a small, rather private affair.  We texted, messaged, talked to the concerned few who knew.

At 4:30 or 5:00pm, they came for him.  At 10:30pm, we were able to see him. He was ventilated, tubed, wired, and beeping, but he was there and responsive, squeezing hands, blinking at us, and even winking at my mother only an hour or so after being stitched up.

The time expands and contracts weirdly in hospitals and times like these. Minutes manage to fly and trudge along simultaneously. There are strange tensions and shredded emotions as we wait for every scrap of news that comes to us through the old land line phone in the Courtyard Marriott-esque waiting room. Our jokes are dark (the body is not frozen during heart surgery nor is it the stuff of unicorns and fancies like that; the doctor is not a magician coming to whisk you away on your adventure with the magical hand wave and phrase, "Come with me"), and we dance and parry against anything that isn't hopeful.

At some point, my sister and I went home to let the dogs out and take care of house things. I can't remember when this happened, though, because it disappears into the miasma that is this species of waiting. When we were driving, we saw a hawk, large and grand, swooping and diving, to come up with a snake in its mouth. We slowed the car and paused overly long at the stop sign to watch, and I realized that it was something my dad had always done--that pause to witness nature's spectacles, brutality and wonder. It struck me enough to put a note in my phone:

A family friend stopped to chat with me while I was sitting in the waiting room yesterday. Our conversation was a two-step as we spoke about the day before (he sat with us the entire day, arriving before I did and going home just before we did).

"You know, you're dad is strong. It was never a question, for me..."
"Me either."
"I mean, I just knew...it would be okay...that he was strong enough."
"Yeah, me too. There was...nothing else it could have been."

And it was the truth.

photo courtesy of Abby Coyle Photo Artistry

Waking dreams

We have these weeks every now and then that really do us in; we trade off who gets to sleep and we revert back to an early college diet (yesterday was donuts and pizza with beer). This is one of those weeks.

I have seen the sun come up three times this week, and it's only Wednesday. No, Thursday now. I have not seen the sun rise because I am an early riser; quite the opposite, actually. I have watched, as that cold, clammy chill just before dawn creeps over my skin and makes my already strung tight body convulse with the shivers, the dark night fade, turning from shadows and depth to a foggy gray and then into a fully blush. The sun, damn him, wakes up shining. I am usually whimpering by this point, frantically and madly dashing out words and letters and numbers, hoping it's coherent enough to hide how close I'm clipping my deadlines.

I know I have at least one, perhaps two, more days of this. I am fighting down all that threatens to flood into my mind because there is not enough room or time to deal with it at the moment. Anxiety? I'm so sorry, but you'll have to take a number and hang out behind crazy, despair, uncertainty and fully coherent back there.

My Kindle is lonely, my own writing quietly huddling in the corner, lurking and teasing little snippets of guilt here and there. Scott and I keep teasing that we really just need to give up sleep to maximize the time in the day. Think of all that time given to dreaming. While I find my dreams to often be exciting, if quite confusing, I could make do without them in lieu of more time. They are often pretty epic:

And then there was an ambulance, and we got into the ambulance because this plane just tumbled out of the sky, end over end. Somersaulted down the field/runway (it was just a field but then it became a runway) and there was destruction. THINGS WERE JUST FALLING OUT OF THE SKY! So we stole an ambulance, but we only stole the ambulance after these giant blue beams of light came shining down from the sky. AND THEN PEOPLE WERE OBLITERATED. THEY JUST DIED. The ambulance we stole because it was better than a Hummer; it was a beast, and it could go anywhere, plus it had medical supplies. We had to drive around collecting people, and some were going to meet us at the safe house....[a lot more happened here but it gets confusing and really hard to explain--you try justifying why do you what you do in dreams]

Eventually there were some dinosaur-like creatures (aliens?) hunting us, and the safe house was compromised.  Everything was in tones of brown and sepia inside the safe house. 

The trouble with these dreams, though, is they leave me exhausted. I'm never sure if I would have been better off just staying up and watching the sun rise and then falling into that deep, dark sleep of the utterly exhausted for just two hours or going on to bed and wrestling with whatever my brain decides to throw at me for a full eight hours. For the moment, I suppose it doesn't really matter; eight hours of sleep this week (and possibly next week, too) is only a dream.

Wisdom from the desert

Deadlines. These terribly important, frustrating things: numbers in a box, highlighted, circled furiously so it looks like a tumbleweed or a vortex sucking away at the peace of mind, crossed out, moved, ignored, stressed over. They run our lives.

I tend to work better when someone else imposes a deadline on me. I struggle with setting them and sticking with them. I tell Scott a date, and then he keeps asking about this date and my progress towards it. I drag my feet; I make up excuses. I do everything but what I am supposed to do to have something by that deadline. I feel guilty and then a bit incompetent that I can't even stick to a simple date.  I am not an efficient worker; I realize this. Each time I try to fix that personality flaw, I find other, more interesting things to do.

Part of the difficulty is that the reward is often abstract. When others set a date for me, it means monetary compensation or penalty should I miss that date. My brain understands that. Finish this, submit time, get paid. Or don't submit, we'll take money or work from you. But when I set my own deadlines, it may only mean that I get to feel proud that I accomplished something. Yay. There is no guarantee that it means anything, really. I tend to see things much more in tangible reciprocity (as I am fully aware I am writing in abstractions). There is another flaw exposed.

That all being said, I've set a deadline of August for a project I have been working on for a while now (since that really slow spring 2013 quarter from hell). If I finish early, hurrah! I can move on to the next phase. There are so many phases of this it's exhausting, and I can only focus on one phase at a time. The next phases, though, I'm hoping to knock out by December. I want this in the bag by 2015.

Big picture stuff is scary. I imagine a scene that goes something like this: I finally make it up a mountain, believing I am close to my destination, only to peek over the ridge and see a vast, Sahara (or Dune) like desert spreading out from mountain to horizon, and I know that I have to cross that, too, and deal with all its threats and dangers. I can't just stick my head in the sand, and I have to fight off that urge or the urge to sit down and simply give up: "No, no, you guys; it's okay. You go on without me. I'll...catch up...eh, forget it."  Although, bonus, were this a Dune desert, I'll embrace the wrangle those sandworms, a la Fremen style, and come into my own. (...apologies for that momentary geek-out...)

It is one foot in front of the other, small steps one day, rest another day, running leaps that cover long stretches the next. Scott has to remind me that at least I keep moving, even if it, like the way I run, is inefficient and awkward, I am moving forward. Progress is progress, I suppose.

Sunshine fun and treasures

Spring has finally arrived in all its verdant, flush glory to the PacNW. Craving color and needing to get out, we waited until late Friday afternoon to go to the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival in Woodburn, OR.

This is another image heavy post, but we couldn't resist the colors. We were there for that "magic hour" in the evening that bathes everything in that retina searing ethereal glow that dances through the synapses and makes the brain crave more. We couldn't open our eyes wide enough to take it all in, and the cameras hardly do it justice.

Mt. Hood, lit up and almost to alpenglow

 (allergies)

The Walrus and the Carpenter

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings."

--Through the Looking Glass

Oysters. These are our newest love affair.

I have eschewed oysters for years for many reasons:

• I tried a fried oyster before and it was terrible. It was fishy and slimy and awful. I'm pretty sure I gagged.
• Oysters look like the flu.
• Sand. (Bonus: Pearls!...?) *generally not eaten by people, I guess
• The work you have to put into them to even get the good stuff.
• Fried oyster take for.ev.er to chew. Like cud. 
• Note: Aphrodisiacs--unbridled love! This was intriguing but not enough to overcome the other points stacked against them.

Recently, we met up with a friend and his girlfriend at the lovely restaurant The Parish. This place...I sent my dad a message and told him "Next time you're in town, we're going here." His response: "Yes, we are!"  The cocktails are amazing and if you fancy something a bit mellower, they had Breakside Pale on tap or Abita(!) in bottles. I don't even remember the name of the drink I had, but it was bubbly and pomegranatey, and it went down waaaayyyy too fast.

The menu is a lovely twist on some classic Cajun and Southern food dishes--crawfish pie, etouffee, muffaletta, catfish. There are also some interesting items that do not appear on the online menu, like rabbit gumbo and frog loegs, and that I was, admittedly, too nervous about them to try:

As a friend asked: If you eat them, do you gain their powers? Like the speed of a rabbit?

 Next time, though, I'm the queen of hearts on this matter. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

What we did learn from this lovely visit was that we do, in fact, love raw oysters on the half shell. Since the friends were fairly new to the oyster thing, we let the very kind and helpful waiter give us a hand on the selection. We went with four different varieties, some farmed, some wild:  Yaquina Bay, Netarts, Olympias, and some kind from Maine, which were referred to as the Corvette of oysters. Each was its own unique take on the shelled delicacy, and delicacies they were.  Briny, slippery, topped with lemon juice and Tabasco, they were perfection. I could have skipped the softshell crab sandwich (also very good) and just eaten more oysters.

We fell so much in love, that when we made our stop for meat last week at the Flying Fish Co., we grabbed some Netarts to take home and shuck ourselves. Scott had that one figured out, luckily; I had no luck getting them open. The ones he took off my hands to open had bits of shell in them. Shucked, set out on ice, topped with lemon juice and Tabasco, and again, they were quite the toothsome morsels.

      "But answer came there none —

And this was scarcely odd, because

      They'd eaten every one."

 

We are converts.

Associated guilt

Let me tell you about my day(s) because I often write about the particular quirks of our life, but it can be difficult for people to really understand. Hell, it's hard for me to understand. I'm going to try to quantify this, but it's really tough since it is a revolving amount; some weeks I am slamming busy and others I am not.

I took in sixteen final research projects last week, totaling 15-20 pages each; with these, I also collected sixteen job portfolios with cover letters, résumés, and work samples with a page total of 4-6 pages.  On the low end, that's 304 pages that have to be graded and reported.

I also have a 36 question exam (due by March 31) to write followed by a 41 question exam due in April. These both require research of source materials and then revisions if necessary once my editor returns them.

Add in three ungraded discussions plus a paper from 80 students (two sections, four classes total) following closely on the heels of these midterms exams and another paper, and catching up on discussions, a long paper, and three short papers for another online writing class of 10 students (this class has continued to drop away throughout the term).  There are also around 50 papers with another school waiting for me to get to and comment on.

On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday last week I taught for at least two hours/day and hold office hours. This week, I launch a new class, grading to wrap up two classes, and begin prepping for a class that begins next week.

I have completed additional copywriting projects in between these as well. I do not know how many ads that actually comes to. A lot.

Sandwiched between all of this is my own writing and frantic typing. Plus this blogpost (which is completely a guilty pleasure).

Ah, I just remembered that I am also in the throes of an online class as a student, too.

Okay,  now you have an idea of that stuff. Here is how a typical day goes today:

Wake up at 10:30 or 11:00 (because I went to bed at 2:00 when I could no longer really work on my project because I was crosseyed and then read for 30 minutes until my eyes forced themselves closed on me) and get that wonderful, life giving coffee machine powered on and heating. As it grumbles to life, I'm stumbling over the computer and pulling up my current project. As I'm working on it, researching and writing, I'm also conducting my office hours for one of my schools. At this point, I have not showered nor dressed for the day.

Project in--1.5 hours on it total--office hours over, and on to the shower. Out, dressed, more coffee, peek in on Asher wherever she may have landed for the night and move her into a bath (I realize this makes no sense to people who don't know her, and for that I apologize, but that bizarre statement is pretty normal for us--we do have a dinosaur after all), talk about Scott's plans for the day, and then head off to my office with my computer to teach for however long. Throw in a break for a bowl of cereal and more coffee and internet surfing, and then another hour teaching. Squeeze in a few words on my own work-in-progress (that 500 words/day and I are still reconciling a balance), read about others navigating living odd lives like this to alleviate some of my anxiety and weird guilt, check some email, avoid other email.

The evening consists of more grading (always more!) and writing. Throw dinner in there somewhere that one of us will handle and both of us will eat, wrestling Asher into eat something which means force feeding her leaves so she eats something other than the sweets (mango and grapes this week), and I will do the tiniest of exercise routines in between different activities (waiting for dinner to cook and brushing my teeth moments) because taking a full hour plus to go to the gym, workout, shower, and come home feels like too much time away. Going to the gym is a decadence that leaves me feeling guilty when I don't go and guilty when I do. So to make up for it and assuage that guilt, I do tiny exercises and drink wine because wine feels healthier than beer.

I will probably have watched a few movie trailers because I really enjoy love watching movie trailers (when Scott is gone sometimes, I just watch the trailers to a lot of things and skip a full length movie altogether). I have also bunnytrailed (new verb, guys!) and read several articles about navigating race, diversity, sexuality, and gender in Hollywood and fiction. My Pinterest board and Scrivener notes dedicated to this are growing quickly. I also read a lot of articles from Salon, apparently.

I'm going to throw in some dishwashing as procrastination, too, because maybe writing this blogpost hasn't been enough.  I would have made some cookies but I forgot to get eggs at the store yesterday when I made a short escape.

Geez, this is why I don't quantify this. I'm a mess, my schedule is a mess, and somehow I still manage to be (kind of somewhat) productive in all of this.  It has taken the time since we moved to Portland to come to grips with the guilt I feel about sleeping in late and keeping such an odd lifestyle. I remind myself that I asked for this, in that tiny comment I made years ago to a friend in grad school with "All I really want to do is get a job that lets me work from home." Yep, the cosmos answered in that jolly way they have of taking our words and spinning them into some wild, barely-there semblance of what we meant (ask me about wishing for a beach some time).

The cake fork goes above

I'm going to let you in a little bit of my brain: I, like most of others who write, I suppose, write to figure things out. It is a way to process what I'm working through or thinking through. Unfortunately, words are often lacking and simply can't quite nail what it is that I'm feeling. And, let's just be honest here, blogging is a way to write and others can see it. We write publicly. I expect others are reading this, although, admittedly, I am always surprised when someone tells me that they are, in fact, reading this or still reading this (thank you).

I'm not always prone to sentimentality (despite what some of these blog posts suggest). I don't really collect tchotchkes, but I do appreciate small aesthetic objects and things that make me laugh. We do collect rocks and books, though. I'm not particularly fond of hugging, but I will hug; I grew up in an affectionate family, Scott gives hugs freely, and a number of our friends are huggers. I am, as I explained to Joey years ago, a converted hugger, or a hugger by default.  I don't like the smell of other people on me, whether it be perfume, cologne, or body odor; it is this scent-based reaction more than the physicality of touch.  I don't like inhaling people I don't know. The just-met-you hug is misery (stop doing this, people). There are also certain colognes that are still being worn (I'm looking at you anything CK brand, and I'm not smiling) that assault my physical senses and my memories (it is the smell of bad, angsty dates that usually occurred in some awful chain restaurant and too close cars). And getting back to the point I was making at the beginning of this paragraph, I do realize, however, as you have noticed if you have read any of this blog, that I have perhaps an unhealthy need for introspection that may lead to misdirected and misguided nostalgia, which isn't a lot of our nostalgia misdirected and misguided?

I was sitting this evening (just joking--this post has been sitting in my drafts and worked over for weeks now), working on a project and reading, and I found myself mulling over strange paths in life--specifically the "what led me to this point," Sliding Doors, fork in the road path that I took to get here.  Nobody's road is straight; they are winding, twisted, motion-sickness inducing roads. Sometimes people get to the crossroads and sell their souls to the devil, and I completely understand this compulsion or need now. I sometimes wish there had been signposts for these moments in my life: "Road closed: Terrible weather ahead" like this sign (a favorite and too appropriate at times):

 

What are those tire marks doing?!

 I can think of a few times (specifically two, possibly three) when I actually stood at the crossroads and realized that one way would lead to a certain way and the other a different way. And in the silly way I had (may/probably still have) of facing down the scary things in life, I ran away, and took the path that confounded those around me. "But I thought this was what you wanted/worked so hard for," they would say. And I would wail in reply, "Me toooo!" all the while stubbornly plowing down that path I never intended to take. I've turned out okay even though I've blundered around directionless at times. I have worked hard to get where I am without a map or good sense of navigation and direction. I still look back and wonder and then look forward and wonder, too.

Anyway, all of this to say that there are strange things afoot, and I'm a bit frightened and hoping I'm making the right moves.  2014, I have decided, is the year I do things and meet some pretty hefty goals. Last March was a mess, I was a mess, and I let things just tumble into a panicky, vast darkness within me, but last March also shifted a direction in my life, if a bit smaller than those crossroads moments. I can't tell that it saved me from more student debt, from years of tears and a happy misery, and set me on a new path, but I'd like to think that some good came out of it. Last spring I was barely keeping my head above water, but 2014? This year I'm swimming the effing ocean, punching sharks as they come my way*.


*Just kidding. No animals have been or will be harmed in the making of this new year.