Things that are in dispute:

1. Does Little Portly have enough chemical coating to eliminate the POW fleas that I keep pulling off of her every day?

2. Did I, in fact, pose for the picture in which I am seen at the Newport Aquarium gift shop wearing a hat shaped like an enormous bat and a dippy, open-mouthed expression on my face, or was it taken in a candid camera sort of way?

3. Did I "flee the room in tears" at work after telling Hapgood that I don't "need his crap" in response to his acidic comments including, but not limited to, a criticism of my proclivity for following procedure when faced with a software problem?

4. Did Eddy appear to be having his genitals twisted by our yoga instructor this morning during a demonstration of 'partner supported down dog,' or was it just me?

5. Do men avoid going to the doctor on purpose, or do they really 'just keep forgetting' to make the appointment?

Whenever I go in to see a doctor about my asthmatic lungs, they have a standard list of questions they ask:

Q: Do you smoke?

A: Are you kidding? Just walking into a bar where other people are smoking is like my own personal Fear Factor. I have to carry an inhaler with me everywhere I go. If there isn't one within reach, I panic. This is not for show. If my lungs are irritated by the slightest thing, my bronchial tubes swell up like pufferfish.

Q: I see. Do you have any allergies?

A: Shouldn't you have that information? I mean, you're looking at my record right there in front of you.

Q: It just says 'amoxicillin' here. I was thinking more along the lines of seasonal allergies.

A: See, that's the thing. I feel crappy when the pollen count is high and you can SEE the stuff floating around in the air, but the guy I saw in the emergency room last night said that it wasn't necessary to do any specific allergy tests because, well, I'm not sure why.

Q: So, just the average pollen and dust stuff that affects everyone?

A: If I had to commit to an answer here, I guess I'd say yes, but obviously it's more than 'average' since most people with 'average' allergies don't have to make 3am urgent care visits.

And we do this thing where they ask me questions that they should already know the answers to, as this happens once or twice a year, and I become this bitchy patient that I don't even recognize because no one will just GIVE ME THE STUPID CORTIZONE SHOT ALREADY SO I CAN BREATHE!

More on this later.

Chris didn't sleep last night.

This morning waiting for the bus, he and I looked like zombies. Not cool half-rotten zombies, but recently dead, waiting to kill our first victim and eat their brains type of zombie. Instead we got coffee at Stumptown and waited for the 4 on Division.

"This one time when I dropped acid...I was living with my dad and stepmom in the mountains at the time, anyway: we went camping. When I came back the next day, Ingrid handed me a package of socks and I broke down sobbing."

I laughed and nearly snorted up half of my latte.

"Why did you cry over the socks?"

"I don't know. It was one of those post-LSD moments where everything is ripe with complex double meanings. Like, 'Here, you asshole, you can't take care of yourself so I bought you some socks,' type of thing. You know?"

We boarded the bus and sat down near the back. There was no unpleasant smell that usually accompanies the 14 or the 15. We had chosen wisely.

When Chris blinked, took a sip from his coffee, turned his head, it was all slow motion. He would make a great zombie. All he needed was the drooling and maybe a little moaning.

We are relatively flea free. Portly told me just this morning. I asked, she responded. The only talking cat in the world today. Sure, she sounds suspiciously like me on helium, but based on her body language, I'm fairly certain I'm interpreting correctly.

Flea free.

The greatest phrase in the English language.

After Portly's second flea dip and subsequent re-medicating to the gills to kill the little plauge-and-tapeworm-carrying fuckers that are eating her alive, she disappeared into the shadowy recesses of the closet to lick herself dry.

"I hope she's not able to lick the spot with the goopy insecticide."

"She's probably fine."

I went back to reading a horrible novel about a woman's sado-masochistic love affair with a bald-headed asshole who wants to "help" her by recreating the scene in which her sister was brutally murdered. It was all so predictable; his knowledge of the event that he couldn't possibly know, the huge red arrows all pointing to him as the killer, blah blah, ad nauseum. And yet I couldn't stop myself from reading. Would she continue to let him blacken her eyes and ruin her career as an up-and-coming artist? Or would she come to terms with her sister's death and quit drinking herself into a stupor at 7am and ditch the cocksucker and make up with her family? I had to know.

But I was hearing a noise that was out of place. It sounded like someone digging a hole in the sand. I put my book down and listened. It was indeed someone digging in the sand. Portly in her sandbox in the closet. Nothing to be concerned about there. Except that the reason the noise piqued my curiosity was because it had been occurring off and on for a good five minutes. I listened for another minute and then the scratching ended and I thought "Sounded like she was spraying sand all over the hallway. I guess I'll be sweeping that up later."

Then Portly bounded up onto the couch and stuck her face in my book.

"Ugh! Get off! You were just in your bathroom!"

She leapt onto the coffee table and shook her back paws.

Then I noticed it: A large turdlet dangling, like a dingle ball from a bad sombrero. It was the size of a Whopper, with similar coloring.

"Oh Jesus! Chris, the cat has a dingleberry! Get in here and help me get it! Grab her, before she sits down, quick!"

And thus, Operation Extricate Turdlet was executed.

Fleas!

Little Portly has fleas.

My sister and I peeled up all the blankets, towels, couch covers, pillows, sleeping bags, dirty clothes, and other assorted fabrics and piled them on the floor. When we removed the chenille throw from portal's favorite chair by the window, my sister recoiled and made a sound like a startled Holstein.

"What? What is it? Oh wow, there certainly is a lot of blanket fluff on this chair," I said, moving in for a closer look.

"Um, that's not fluff. Notice how it's all wriggling."

That's right. On my beloved chaise lounge there was a solid covering of flea poop and larvae, all waiting for the cat to hop back up on the chair so the buffet could begin.

"Gack! Rackin' frack! Ugh!" Really, mere words cannot convey my disgust. But know that it was(and is) absolute.

I tape rolled the chair. I sprayed the chair with harsh chemicals. I vacuumed the chair. Kristi started the bathwater and loaded up with the flea dip and a pile of rags. I started what would end up being over ten loads of laundry. We dipped Portly. She was not pleased.

"Hold her down, she's making a break for it!" Kristi commanded, a seasoned veteran of flea proceedings.

"She's too slippery, and she just scratched me. Look out, she's going to bite down on your arm!"

"I have to get under her armpits, scrub hard. Use more of that soap. Here, gimme. Pick off those fleas that ran for cover on her face." Like a drill sergeant Kristi let me know what was expected of me. Portly let out pathetic mewling noises and stared up at me with such an intense sense of betrayal that I felt like tearing up.

We rinsed her off and dried her as much as she would let us, and then locked her in the garage, which was okay with her, as she didn't want to be within grabbing distance. I rotated laundry. I vacuumed. I sprayed the furniture. I tape rolled every surface. I flea fogged the house. I did more laundry. Chris vacuumed the house a second time.

"This sucks."

"Totally."

After Portly was dry, we flea combed her every hour, pulling off several bugs in each sitting. We kept a jar of soapy water for the comb, with a roll of paper towels and the lint tape roller on the table. We applied a tube of Advantage to the back of her neck. I was maniacal about the combing, taping every surface that she sat on, checking for flea poop, keeping her locked out of the bedroom.

"Have you combed the cat lately?" I asked Chris, as he made himself some ramen.

"No."

"Why not?" I said, defensive about my procedures.

"I just don't think it will do any good."

"Well I think it's better than doing nothing," my hackles were raised, I was going to fight this infestation into extinction if it killed me.

"Maybe so. Here, give her to me."

So Chris combed her while I took a flashlight to the couch and scanned for more forensic evidence, like some sort of rookie cop, wanting to prove myself.

But the fleas don't care.

Die, fleas, die!

"Hey Chris."

"Yeah?"

"The sink is still leaking."

"..."

I was flipped upside down under the kitchen sink in our newly purchased house, shining a tiny Mag-lite on the plastic piping. A small but persistent flow of water dripped from the elbow joint onto the warped cupboard floor.

The sellers had signed off on a legal document that stated the plumbing in the kitchen no longer leaked, but clearly, just because the law said that it was so, didn't make it so.

It's the week before we move in, and we are both a bit anxious about the change. We also want to make sure that everything works. Which it doesn't. Does it ever?

My sister and I went to Home Depot the next day and passed an aisle with a sign: Sink Repair. I ducked down it, thinking, well, maybe someone would be able to give me an idea about what to do.

A man who was almost completely spherical, wearing Home Depot's signature orange apron sidled up to us. He looked like a piece of tropical fruit. I was holding a kitchen sink basket kit in my hands.

"Hey! I was wondering if you could tell me if these things are easy to replace?"

"Oh, yeah. Just pop out the old one and put the new one in with like, a pinky's worth of plumber's putty around the underside." He demonstrated by holding up a pinky the size of a sausage link.

"Do we need any special tools?" Kristi asked, ever thinking logistically, god-bless her heart.

The man who could have been an orange shrugged a little and pointed to a wall of wrenches.

"You might need something to loosen the old one."

"Well," I began. "The old one isn't really 'old,' it's just not put in there right. Or maybe there's a piece missing. That's why we thought it would be easier to replace it."

"Oh, then yeah, you'll probably be fine."

He handed us a mini-tub of putty and sent us on our way.

When we got back to the house, the sink sneered at us in an anthropomorphic appliance way that to me, signified war.

I dropped a pile of fresh rags under the sink and stuffed myself back in the little opening.

"How do you pop this thing out?" I asked, digging at it with a screwdriver.

"Give me that, moron." Kristi took my place and unscrewed the biggest ring with our hefty new pipe wrench. I grabbed it from her and swung it around, slapped it into my palm.

"Colonel Mustard, in the dining room, with the pipe wrench." I muttered, and thought about how I had never held such a substantial piece of metal before with the capacity to do such damage. Holy crap that thing was heavy.

"Hey! He didn't even use any putty in here! And he left a cardboard ring on top of the rubber seal!" I found that all out the hard way as little soaking globs of caulked cardboard came dripping down my sleeves. I felt pretty tough. I knew what I was talking about here.

We replaced the main drain basket and reconnected the pipes. We turned on the water. No leaks. I checked with the flashlight, waiting for the tell tale beading to occur on the rim of the attachment. After a few minutes, I declared it officially cured.

"The other sink drain is probably the same deal, you know. We should take that one apart too." Kristi wiped her hands on a towel and grimaced at the smaller sink.

We took it apart and restructured it, then squished it into place. I hadn't used as much putty as I thought I might have over done it the first time, so when we turned on the faucet, water slipped in the gap and ran down the pipe.

"Houston, we have a problem."

"Good night!" I said. "I can't do this! I don't know what I'm doing. We don't know what we're doing. This sucks."

"It's okay, you know. We'll just take it apart again and start over. We're following the instructions on the box, and the orange guy told us the same thing. Here." She thrust the putty container into my hands. "Just use more of this."

Once more, we disassembled the drain and built it from scratch. This time I used a sausage link sized snake of putty, just like the orange's finger.

We turned on the faucet and watched the water for several minutes. I flopped down on the floor and shined the light into the darkness.

"Well?" Kristi asked.

"I think we have achieved our projected orbital trajectory!" I exclaimed, and we did a little victory dance in the pile of wet rags.

"Okay, let's not get too excited, we still have to shelf paper the cupboards."

"Ungh!"

Thanks, Kristi, for helping my first plumbing repair experience not totally suck.

The periodicals room is like a goddamned meat locker. This happens every year. Weather outside starts to become not so drab and depressing, and the air conditioning stomps the inside temp to like, 60. I can see outside into the offices across the street, and beams of sunlight are striking this lady wearing only unnatural fibers, and it's got to feel pretty good to be her right now, being baked in her Banlon shell by the May sun.

The only good thing about the temperature in here right now is this: the cooler it is, the less people smell. When it gets nice and toasty in here on a rainy winter day, this room is packed to capacity with an array of people and their many, many different ideas about what personal hygiene means to them. It's the same thing when you enter a slaughterhouse in the summer. You can actually see the smell. That's why you should only buy your sausage from a reputable dealer who does all the nasty stuff in a cool room.

The other day while Chris and I were slowly navigating through a crowded neighborhood in northwest, we drove past a pigeon fluttering all over itself in the gutter, wing at a painful angle, eyes bugged out.

"Oh!" I said and brought a horrified hand to my mouth. "What do we do?" I looked to Chris for an answer. I turned the corner and swung into a parking space.

"We can't really do anything."

"We have to do something."

"Like what? We could take it home and nurse it back to health. Keep Little Portly from killing it."

"No, I mean, we have to do something."

"What, like snap it's neck?"

I looked around in the car for anything I could use as a weapon. I had an empty Dr. Pepper can, a pile of napkins, a few cracked CD cases, and a fingernail clipper shaped like a ladybug.

"Christ, I didn't mean it. Are you going to get out of the car and kill it?"

Here's the thing: if I would have had my snow shovel in my car, we wouldn't even have had that conversation.

"You don't think I could kill an animal that was suffering?"

"No, I don't think you have it in you." He paused, then smacked his forehead. "Oh right. I forgot, you're a farm girl. Saw lots of animals mutilated and weird stuff."

Not really, but whatever. I just know that I would want some help reaching death if I had been that mangled bird in the gutter. I wouldn't have smacked it with a shovel to be cruel, and I wouldn't have enjoyed it. But I would have done it if it would have stopped the pain.

We drove away without doing anything at all. I thought about the pigeon as I tried to sleep that night. I imagined it poked at by kids with sticks, kicked by jerks, frightened at it's inability to leave the ground. Am I as bad as the kid with the stick? The asshole who dumps a beer over it's head?

I need to get a new snow shovel.

Little Portly, cat extraoridnaire, got kicked out of our bedroom early last night. She had been inserting her little furry body in the spaces between the blinds and then dangling there, causing all manner of disruption, leaping on our faces.

Chris tossed her out, shut the door, and gave her not a second thought.

This morning while on my way to the bathroom, I noticed that the crappy kitchen linoleum looked even more crappy than usual. I looked closer. There were black spots all over the place, smears on the bottom of our bedroom door, and a bottle of India ink rolling around on the floor.

Portly had somehow managed to unscrew the cap enough so that when she batted it around, it left ink trails behind her. Of course she must have tracked through it. How could she not?

Our apartment is being shown tomorrow to prospective new tenants, and last night before the inking, I told Chris it wouldn't take more than an hour or so to clean things and straighten up a little.

Ha!

Little Portly.

More about the blind hanging fiasco:
On Sunday after work Chris and I schlepped the unopened blinds back to Cost Plus and then raced out to Jantzen Beach to check out some curtains that weren't expensive or dumb. But of course, you can't have both.

While I was freaking out with my pencil and list of windows to cover and adding up sums in my head that might as well have been millions of dollars, Chris did some social research and listened to a woman abuse a sales clerk in the same aisle.

"I drove all day to get here and now you don't have the curtains I need. Can I just take this display model? I drove hours and hours to get here."

I personally wondered why she didn't call first, if she knew what she needed, and clearly, she did.

"Well," the clerk shifted uncomfortably and tried to remain diplomatic. "No, but we can special order whatever you need and have it shipped right to your house."

"That's not the right answer," said the woman who had allegedly driven all day to come to a Portland suburb to buy curtains.

I didn't hear any of this escalating because I was too busy whirling in my own vortex of drama, reeling from the fact that I apparently didn't pay any attention in 5th grade math. I couldn't get the feet to come out in the correct number of inches. Why hadn't I written down the inches as well? They were right on the measuring tape next to each other. Why did I have to make everything so hard?

At ten minutes to close, we grabbed an armful of what we hoped weren't stupid tab panels and some of the cheaper rods and checked out.

"I can cut these in half and sort of pin the extra fabric together to make it work until we get new ones," I chattered happily to myself.

Chris just sighed.

Patriot Act investigation into Chris has been resolved.

A few weeks ago while dealing with the gathering of the dozens of documents to purchase our house, I asked Chris why his address on his ID didn't match our address, or the address of any of his apartments for the last eight years.

"Why should I update it? It's never been important to me before. I hate paperwork."

"Because when you keep your paperwork in order, then you don't ever have to go back and do it over with extra paperwork that happens when you don't keep it together," was my confusing reply.

But we signed all the papers on our house loan and chilled the champagne.

Then our mortgage broker called.

"Angela. We have a slight problem."

Chris' address matched an apartment he had lived in back in 1998. From then on, there was no paper trail leading them to where he is now. Which is with me, while I freak out.

He had to write a letter explaining why he had let his info lapse and provide a list of addresses and dates to satisfy an investigation that falls under the law of the Patriot Act. See, the lender didn't want to fund terrorism. Luckily, the letter sufficed.

"Shit, if I were a criminal of that caliber, I'd have all my paperwork in order all the time. Otherwise, they'd catch me, just like they caught you," I pontificated as we walked towards the bookstore.

"It's totally stupid. I'm just sloppy. I didn't know it would be a big deal. And you told me last week that it would be. Huh." Chris said.

I don't like to be right. At least not when I want to be wrong. Who am I kidding? I love to be right. But not when being right means trouble.

In other news, when we went to hang the blinds that we bought for the whole house, we discovered that they are pretty much see-through. Which defeats the purpose of having blinds in the first place.

Ahhh!

Covert operation:
Chris took the futon apart and dragged it piece by lame piece into the living room. The pee-stained hay-filled mattress he roped together with packing tape, turning it into a lumpy worm.

I called my sister and told her to wear black and come over after dark. She said she had plans, but that she'd stop over when she was done.

Not knowing what to do with ourselves, we cleaned. I sprayed Oxy-Clean around the base of the toilet while the cat played 'jungle cat attacks the village' with my wrists. Why is the toilet such a magnet for pubic hair? Don't answer that. Maybe the question I really mean to ask is where is all this pubic hair coming from? No, I don't really want to know that either. But Jesus, it's almost like we have an invisible chemo patient living with us whose crotch hair is coming out in clumps.

(I just spoke to my friend Matt and he brought up the fact that when men dry off their legs, often times leg hair, which resembles our sexy friends, will cascade down on the floor. Mystery solved.)

(In case you're wondering why I'm not assigning any blame to myself here, it's because I keep my lower level in check.)

Anyway, Chris was busy airing out his room after staging a Raid party on it that morning. There was a colony of ants, complete with LARVAE, swarming under his briefcase computer, and action had to be taken. Not being able to handle infestations of any kind, I was glad that he didn't share any of this with me until after the battle had been won.

Kristi called me at 10:30 to let me know that it wasn't going to happen.

We did a quick re-con in the kitchen.

It was decided that we would go ahead with our plan, minus a wingman.

We loaded the futon parts into my station wagon and cruised around, scouting out the available open dumpsters. The one we had planned on was overlooked by someone's kitchen, and the parking lot lights were pretty bright. The second one was tiny and was flanked by people standing on their back porch. We drove around in circles.

Chris suggested we just drop the thing in a dark parking lot. But we couldn't bring ourselves to do it. It's one thing to break the law by putting our garbage where it doesn't belong, as long as it's where somebody's garbage should go, but to just dump a crappy piece of furniture in a random location? I'll admit it. I'm a pussy. We're both pussies.

Angry that our moldy problem wouldn't go away, I re-parked the car while Chris ripped the stupid thing out of the trunk. We stashed the mattress in the basement and stacked the frame up on the curb for someone to take. We hope. If no one takes it, we'll have to load it up again and figure something else out.

Anybody want a crappy, dismantled, pee-stained futon and frame? It's not our pee. I swear.

My father had a hernia operation in the early 80's, when I was still running around in a pink Garfield night shirt and my little sister had goose down for hair.

He got to spend a week or so at home afterwards, waiting for the bleeding around his stitches to stop and the general pain in his abdominal region to abate. On the weekend, he and my sister and I would sit in the living room in our pajamas (well, he didn't have any pajamas, and wore this blue, fuzzy robe of my mother's that was comically small for him, and dropped from his sizeable girth like a short curtain, giving him a particularly Muppety appearance, which made me want to hug him a lot, which he tried to suppress because of the pain) and watch James Bond movies on the video disc player and eat bacon and toast. During a nasty little scene in "The Man With The Golden Gun" where James' main lady friend gets shot at a Sumo wrestling tournament, dad abruptly sat up, said, "Holy motherfucking shit!" and then yelled for my mother. He had been resting his glass on his belly, as always, and he had punched through the incision like it was a page from a perforated notebook.

Blood soaked through my mother's Grover-like robe. My sister started crying. I, being a screamer, screamed. My mother arrived and helped my father to the bathroom, where many layers of gauze were applied and the doctor was called, who basically told them to stop the bleeding and to come in on Monday to see what could be done.

I was still screaming.

"Jesus Christ! Keep it down in there! It's just a little goddamned blood!" and then quieter, to my mother, "You'd think she was being ax murdered in there or something. For the love of God..." And then my mother's quiet mumbling, and then nothing.

I stopped screaming and focused all my attention on the dwarf butler on Scaramanga's private island. His voice was funny, and it made me and my sister laugh. She came over and put her head on my shoulder, and the two of us sat there until the credits rolled, and then we sang along with Lulu and collapsed into a smelly little goat pile.

My father emerged from the trailer's bathroom wrapped in a sheet, toga style, and put on "The Spy Who Loved Me."

I was with a guy for a long time who never went near his ass crack with a bar of soap. I know, I know, this sort of thing would be a deal breaker if it was readily apparent. But he also went to great lengths to keep me away from his backside in general. When I realized what was going on, it was too late. I confronted him in the bathroom.

"You seem to be neglecting your poop chute. I just watched you suds up everything except, you know, your butt. What's up with that?" I had been brushing my teeth and noting his procedure with mounting disgust.

"It gets clean! The soapy water runs down there. That's all it takes."

"I hate to break it to you, but that's not 'all it takes.' You need to make contact. Here, I'll hand you a washcloth."

"Get out of here."

And it was never spoken of again, although I was very aware, from then on, that I probably just wanted to avoid his butt and his dirty laundry forever.

Chris and I do our best impromptu communicating through issues in the middle of the night. His insomnia will often send his mind reeling in an ever-growing spiral outward from his original prickly thought. When he can no longer pretend that he will get to sleep if he just tries a little harder to relax, he'll turn to me and say:

"Angela."

Sometimes he will shake me a little. Mostly there is just the solid sound of my name in a normal conversational tone.

"What? What is it?" I usually am jarred from a deep sleep, pulled snorting and worried into consciousness. I generally panic, fear the worst. And who doesn't, at 3:30am?

"I was just thinking..."

From here we will have deep, meaningful, if somewhat groggy conversations about everything, from trouble with friends and exes, to the meaning of pets and how we feel about each other. Recently, the conversations in the dark of night have centered around our purchasing of a house in deep southeast Portland, and how and what we will be sacrificing to make this investment. This is a real griller, because it is a big deal, this joint purchase well above the dollar/committment level of the French press we bought together. And so it is discussed.

The other day, while I was napping in the afternoon and Chris was watching cartoons, I heard the tell-tale siren call.

"Angela."

I snorked and lifted my face from the drool puddle it had been resting in.

"Wha-huh? What's wrong?"

"I was just thinking that I am glad you're alive."

These rocky starts at conversation are not always emergency grade explosives. Sometimes they are just good, warm, and fuzzy.

Our father to my sister via phone:
"It's amazing! You can get anything down here. Do you like...giraffes? Because there's this store called Pier One where you can get any damn giraffe thing you want. Yeah, they import this shit from all over the world. You can walk around in there for hours and never see the same damn thing twice. Do you like books? Cause they have this place called 'Borders Books' and I tell ya, I've never seen so many goddamn books in my life. They've got a book for everything. They have these sale books, they're only like, two dollars. Yeah, I bought some art books from that sale table and I just ripped out some pictures and hung 'em up on my walls. You put 'em in a frame and you can't even tell."

I just thought you should know how Dad is adjusting in his third year of "big city livin'."

A little thought for Chris on this morning after a night of little sleep:
"He who angers you, conquers you."

And with that, I must say(in a hypocritical manner) that waiting for our loan broker to call is a particularly exotic torture. I'm trying hard to chill and just let the water roll downhill, but like an idiot, here I am struggling against the current, attempting to climb the Mount Everest of Patience while wearing only a tablecloth knotted under my chin.

!

Argh!

Financing for the house is becoming painful to wait for! I'm not flipping out though. Okay, I'm flipping out. I can hardly type. Oh, the waiting!

I have virtually no patience for this as I need to use it on ridiculous conversations such as this:

"Hi, I'm 369."
"Pardon?"
"Oh! I mean, computer 369. I have some prints to pick up."
"Oh, certainly, it will be just a moment."

(Patron wiggles and mini-paces back and forth in front of my desk. Giggles like a little girl, although he is about 250 pounds and looks something like Barry White.)

"It will probably be a few minutes as it appears that you have a number of pages."
"Oh that's okay. I'm just addicted to flesh, you know, there's just something about it. I don't know what it is."
I smile and nod, as if I know what the hell in the hootenany he's talking about. And although I try hard not to notice what patrons are printing, it's impossible to not see the all caps http://BIGGEST_BLACK_DICK_IN_THE_WORLD_!" come up on the printer release screen. This among other, more imaginative titles.

He continues to jiggle and twitch, and I pretend to straighten the returned reference books.

"I've just got to look, you know?"
"Sure, uh huh."

I love the library.

koala

koala
Originally uploaded by schmangela.

Things from this week:
-Little Portly the cat ripped a one inch hole in my sister's left ear with her claws as she was climbing on her shoulders and batting at her pony tail.
-House buying anxiety roller coaster as we go through the motions; race to put in the offer before anyone else, hold our breath while the seller's flaky agent takes her time to present said offer, freak out about the acceptance, worry about the inspection, which goes off with only minor repairs needed (no dead bodies in the crawlspace like we imagined), and finally, in the home stretch, we get to play the exciting game "Will Our Loan Fall Through (At the Last Minute, Baby)".
-Having spent every last cent we have, and a few extra, actually, Chris purchases his first crappy 99 cent beer and toasts the upcoming financial drought upon our house.
-My allergies take a turn for the better, until I acknowledge that fact out loud to a friend, and then they come back in one big happy fiesta group: itchy eyes, chronic fatigue, death rattle cough(!), sinus pressure, and mucus, oh the mucus!
-A guy flips out at the pharmacy counter where I am patiently waiting to get my steroid inhaler, flabbergasting the attendant and making everybody stop, yet no one does anything. Basically, all I caught of the interaction was the flipper yelling at the flippee: "Just give me the goddamn bag! It's like you don't trust me!"
-Our realtor confides that she could never be on "Fear Factor."
-Library patrons continue to print out an enormous amount of color pornography!

OCD Central:

Every night I put my lunch out on the table in the same arrangement: banana curved outward to the right, orange and apple nestled next to it, tea bag on top of the orange, granola bar underlining everything.

Often I sat bolt upright in the middle of the night, breathing hard and wide awake from a recurring nightmare in which the bathroom linen closet did not have at least four, preferably six rolls of toilet paper neatly arranged beside the carefully rolled towels.

Getting myself out of the house in the morning was a path fraught with obstacles, from getting exactly 13 plaits in my long braid to "just checking" to make sure that the lights were off in every room. I went like this: I'd turn off a light, get a few steps away, and then a scary, insistent version of my voice would pipe up, asking me if I was really sure that the light was off. How did I know? So I'd go back and run my finger over the switch, in the down position, room dark, and then leave the room again. I'd get down the hall, or maybe even make it to the kitchen, and look back, sure that I could see the light on, and have to trudge back to check again.

I'd put my wallet in my backpack, push it securely into the bottom, zip it up, and the whispering question would waft through my brain. "Hey, there Angela. Are you sure you put your wallet in your bag? Maybe you should just have a look see." I'd look, and there it was, just like I thought. I'd rezip, head out to the car, then have to just make sure one more time, foot on the bumper, keys dangling from my mouth.

In spite of all this checking and rechecking, I still managed to do the things I feared the most. I locked my keys in the car with the car running. I left my wallet on the table at the restaurant. I didn't write down to whom I lent my favorite sweater. I lost things all the time. Fate intervened to bring disaster. Our toaster oven spontaneously combusted and had to be thrown out the back door, still flaming, into the rainy parking lot. Our dog pulled my used tampons out of the garbage and spread them in an artful display all over the front lawn. And still I worried, had to have things done my way.

If my husband left any dishes from his hastily consumed breakfast, they had to be rinsed and stacked in neat piles; plates to the right, silverware to the front, glasses on the left, faucet turned slightly toward them before I could try to leave the kitchen, running my finger over the light switch as I did so.

I'd scrub the tub that I just watched my husband clean, wipe down the counter right behind him, even though he'd done an admirable job.

"I just cleaned that."
"I know, I'm just...finishing up." A cheery shrug and a helpless smile.

He'd walk in on me scrubbing the grout between the tiles in the bathroom with an old toothbrush, sweat pouring into my eyes, hair stringy across my face in the sweltering summer heat.

"I can help you with that." He'd poke his head in and dangle an open beer above a section I just finished.

"No, I'm good," I'd say, hoping like hell he'd back the fuck up before he dropped the bottle, because if that happened, we'd have problems.

"You're good alright. Good and crazy."

And in this way, without formal discussion, I nudged him out of the household chores altogether, although to his credit, he never stopped trying to help me.

I might have been a nutjob in just my personal life, but no, it had to spill over into my professional life as well. As the manager of a trendy coffee shop, I would often be unable to delegate cleaning jobs to the rest of the staff, and if it was a slow night, I could often be found on my hands and knees scrubbing the coffee stains off the floor or scraping boogers off the underside of tables. Everything had to be sparkling and put away properly before I could leave for the night. My boss loved me.

It was physically impossible for me to walk down the sidewalk without counting the number of steps to a square. If my gas tank was less than half full, it would consume my thoughts until I dropped everything and got it filled up. Drinking a martini was a complex affair; five sips, one olive, five sips, one olive. If I ran out of olives before the end of the drink, the whole night would be shot.

I took Prozac for my obsessive-compulsive behavior for almost three weeks before I woke up one day and walked to the bathroom without running my finger over the hall light switch to make sure it was off. After I put toothpaste on my toothbrush without hearing even a whisper of my internal voice's painstaking aesthetic qualifications, I caught my own eye in the mirror and smiled. Tonight, I'd let my husband wash the dishes.

Chris spoke first:
"I just had to get out of that Bermuda Triangle of idiocy."

The single mom with two toddlers told everyone in our train car the story of her unfair life. Her children fussed and force-cried for the first half of the night. By the time she had them both properly spanked and sniffling, "Get away from me, you're a bad mommy!" the overweight gentleman across the aisle was able to fall asleep and promptly start snoring like a javelina. After a few hours of negotiating a limited version of rest, one of the kids woke up after snoring guy emitted a particularly loud snorkeling sound. She whined a mysterious phrase over and over, "I want my bat seat," or an equivalent. Her exasperated mother matched her volume in explaining(everytime the little girl finished her sentence) that she couldn't give her the "bat seat" because she had lost it and that she was "going to be" responsible for waking up "everybody on the damn train" and did she really want to be that rude?

What kind of adult tries to reason with a four-year-old in the manipulative way usually reserved for adult-on-adult guilt trips? I mean, it is not going to work to tell a toddler that other people are going to hate her if she doesn't stop making noise, or that she will not receive any of the Easter presents promised to her if she doesn't stop poking her sister.

After the "bat seat" fire had been tamped down to a few stray whimpers, snoring guy fell right off the end of the sleeping pier and started in with his bubbly-sounding snorts. I ground my teeth together and fought, I am not kidding, to keep control of my left leg, which wanted to shoot out and kick the guy in the lumbar region.

Chris got up and stormed to the observation car with his Game Boy, where, presumably, it was quiet.

I stayed clenched in my little ball of fury until I realized that, zoo noises or not, I wasn't going to fall asleep any time soon.

I wrapped my scarf around my face and spread out over both seats.

I love the train.

Further into the night during a snoring volume spike, I went to the bathroom and walked in on an older lady in a state of undress. Wearing only a deep purple bra and some sort of control-top garment, she didn't even notice that I had flung open the door and went on digging around in her suitcase.

Even later, Chris came back to our seats and tried to snuggle up to me, but every position on the seat's incline meant one of us got smooshed and some limb went numb.

Just before sunrise, he crawled under our seats and stretched out on the floor.

"Is that good down there?" I swung my face over the edge of the foot rest and eyeballed him. My scarf was twisted around my head like a lepers bandages.

"It's luxurious!" He pulled his hat over his face and went to sleep.

Soon after, as the sunlight burst into the car like the Kool-Aid mascot in commercials of old, snoring guy shut down his log-sawing operation and almost immediately started making calls on his cell phone to a number of people to tell them that some airline had lost his luggage. It couldn't have been more that 6am.

Single mom woke up and started complaining to snoring man(after he was through telling his missing luggage story about five times) about how behind schedule we were(about two hours), why we didn't stop for a goddamned cigarette break, and how they were "never taking the train again in life,"(?) and how much of a refund they were going to demand. This was punctuated by proclamations of how poorly they slept, how unfair and unacceptable it was that they were going to be late meeting her new boyfriend, and returns to her previous story about why she left the father of her two children.

Even with my scarf pulled over my face, the light got through, the conversation permeated.

"My kids hate the train. I couldn't fly out of Portland on Thursday or we would have done that. My boyfriend insisted that I come home for Easter or we wouldn't be here. On the way up to Portland, the bathroom broke in our train car and we were running two hours behind then too! I have to go live with my parents because I'm having a house built. My husband and I got so stressed about how long it was taking that I left him around last Halloween." She was up and pacing, talking snoring guy's ear off. Then she called her boyfriend and her grandmother and told them the whole story we had just heard.

Oh: by now it was 6:30am.

I started to think about how the only reason I was having a bad time was because of her and her mucus-y offspring. The screaming, the spanking, the loud complaining. Oh my god!

Chris called in the delay to his parents, who were awaiting our arrival in San Francisco. I went to brush my teeth. We gathered our things and sneaked away to the lounge car, noting, on our passage through five other passenger cars, how serene they were. People were still slumbering all around us. My head throbbed.

Chris bought some horrible coffee that only resembled it's label in that it was hot and in a styrofoam cup.

We talked about the Bermuda Triangle of Idiocy in our car.

I replayed the punishment scene from the night before: the older child of single mom wouldn't stop forcing herself to bawl. Huge hitching sobs came from this fairy-sized being. At this point I still had patience. Snoring guy offered to be "surrogate daddy" for a while. Whatever that meant. She told him(and the rest of us) her woes. He told her(and the rest of us) that his own fiance was pregnant, and that he wasn't sure if she really wanted to be with him.

Oh, the drama!

The kid was wailing through all of this. Eventually, I figured, she'd wear herself out. They always do. But her mom cracked first. Warnings were issued and ignored. Tiny four-year-old punches were thrown.

"Alright that's it!" and mom got up and stuffed her two-year old under her arm like a sack of flour, dragged her other screaming child by the wrist down to the lower level, where for a moment we heard nothing.

"Somebody's in big trouble." Chris whispered.

"No kidding."

Then, a solid-sounding WHACK! followed by a thin, reedy wailing as the whackee reacted in exactly the way that got her in trouble in the first place.

"I hate you, Mommy!" she caterwauled and tore back up the stairs, dove past us to hide under her seat.

Late breaking news flash:
People around us confirm we will be even longer delayed due to a medical emergency that is happening in the full view of the observation car. I thought we had been sitting here for a while. Some lady(we hoped it was Single Mom) had an anxiety attack about how late we were and opened one of the exit doors and tried to get off the moving train. An ambulance has been deployed, and a fire engine; train employees are all over the place. Evidently, she wants Amtrak to rent her a car so she can get to where she is going on time. This is not going to happen. They are sedating her and driving her away in the ambulance, which is good, because if she got back on this train, an angry mob would surely kill her.

Some little kids down the car from us are playing "No means yes and yes means no."

Chris seems to feel vindicated having predicted that Single Mom's head would explode at some point during the trip, and if the medical emergency lady is one and the same, he would be right.

Things I have seen from the train:
-a sign on a shed door reading: "Keep locked or stay the fuck out"
-a crusty, hardened glove
-a stallion taking a pee (his stream was as thick as a towing chain!)
-a really really bad wig
-hundreds of abandoned appliances
-frat boys
-ditches of sludge
-Chris asleep on the floor under my seat

Things I have heard today on the train:
-shrill screaming
-more shrill screaming
-a child singing a song phonetically resembling "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" but sounding more like "Twittle Twittle Butter Bar."
-repeated threats of spanking
-I say again: shrill screaming of a pitch and sustainability only utterable by a human under 3 years old. Jesus, but that girl puts her lungs into it. And with a Nuk in there, too!

Taking a stand:
I take stands all over the place. What is it with me? I mean, there isn't just one incident that bubbles to the surface of my memory when I think that phrase. In my life, I pretty much get what I think that I want. This is totally different than getting what I actually want.

When I was in college, I wanted the dishes to be washed every night and the kitchen put away. Nothing strewn about, underwear wise, in the bathroom or hallway. No wet towels balled up on the bathroom floor. My lunch for the next day uneaten. My CDs all in their appropriate cases. I let my live-in boyfriend know as much, and soon after, he moved out. I got my way, but not what I wanted.

I wanted to leave my floundering marriage, which, to be fair, wasn't pleasing my husband either. But by instigating that change, I lost my house and my dog, my own private studio, my garden, and an easy life subsidized by marrying into wealth. I got the station wagon and an apartment besieged by roaches. And oh! The paperwork! Holy crap, if people knew how much paperwork there was involved in divorce, maybe they'd give couples therapy a last ditch effort. Plus, there's nothing like sitting across the table at the courthouse from someone whom you've told you don't want to be married to anymore, that your life together cannot go on, and having them stare you down over your strategically placed cup of Starbucks coffee. Be careful what you wish for; blah, blah, blah.

Of course, I also got Chris out of the deal, who is silly and wonderful and who baby talks to the cat just like I do, so it's not bad. But when you're in the shit it all seems that way.

I haven't ever been able to take a stand with my mother. Doesn't everybody feel that way about one of their parents? I was wondering aloud the other day about a time in the future when I would be able to take grown-up vacations that don't involve using up all my vacation time going to see my family. My sister's boyfriend said, "As soon as you tell your mom that you aren't going to come and visit her this summer, but are going somewhere for yourself instead." This horrified me, as if he had advised me to hit her on the head and roll her car into the nearest body of water. But he's right. It's time for me to start loosening her arthritic yet tight little grip on all of my time off.

I board the bus with Eddy and Chris. I sit at the far end of the section of three seats by the back door. Eddy sits next to me. Chris wanders into the bowels, swallowed by a section of street punks with ripped jeans and bad-itudes.

There is a guy on the other side of Eddy, pasty, dredlocked, who taps me on the shoulder as I press my fists into my chronically itchy eyes. I look up and behind Eddy.

"What's your name?" he asks.
"What?"
"What's your name?"
I panic and blurt out the real thing: "Angela."
"Oh... I'm going to write a poem about you."
"Okay," I say, because, what else can you say?
"That's why I needed to know your name," and with that, hey guy gets up and bolts out the back door.

Eddy appraises me and says, " I was wondering why he gave me the evil eye when I sat down next to you."

Fantastic!

My corduroy pants are never so loud as they are at work.

I walk around in the closed stacks and a zipping sound whispers from between my legs. My thighs don't ordinarily rub together, I am generally thought of as 'just a little bit of a thing,' but wearing corduroy, everyone can know the joys of thigh friction.

I think about how wearing corduroy would translate into the food service industry, where 'Waiter's Ass' runs rampant for both sexes, and how everyone I've ever known waiting tables, including me, carries either talcum powder or a tube of cortisone in their bags. Don't leave home without it! (FYI- this is when you are cruising around at high speed in a hot, often moist environment, and your butt cheeks rub together in the most unpleasant way. Eventually, after hours of this, a red, raw rash will crop up and cause the worst kind of pain and itch you would wish on your most foul enemy.) I think that polyester is the best fabric for that job, based on my personal experience, because it stretches when you do and if you spill some hollandaise on yourself, you can just wipe it off. So no cords while waiting tables.

I also think about this obnoxious fat kid in sixth grade named Brooks. He was loud. He farted and then shook with laughter, every time. He was a friend to no one. He made fun of everyone for any reason. I can't think of a single person who even pretended to like him.

But he did wear these blue cords, and he was big enough so that his thighs scraped together audibly when he walked. There were rumors flying around that he had run to catch the bus and his pants went up in flames because of the furious rubbing of fabric between his legs. I wanted to believe this was true so much that eventually, I did. Brooks was fond of calling me names. "Chicken Wing, Chicken Little, Turkey Neck." Anything that called to mind a small, scrawny, helpless animal. I loathed him.

Even though the fabric of those cords gave in to the tremendous pressure and blew out two bagel sized holes that could be seen if you bent over and looked just under his butt cheeks, he still wore them. I don't know why.

Sometimes, I wonder what those pants of his smelled like.

Opening my eyes this morning was like peeling gauze off of still-damp red crackle paint. For the first time in years, I looked stoned. I closed them immediately and pressed my fingers deep in the sockets, feeling the relief that only pressure can bring to itchy pain. I rolled my eyes experimentally, feeling my scarred marbles move in painful synchronicity.

I thought: "It would be cool to have a wall-eye that I could control. I would freak people out with it all day."

I released my face and looked at the puffy blue-black that surrounded my crackle-glazed stare. Whoa! I looked like hell. Welcome to hay fever country.

Last night Chris and I made a compress soaked in lavender and I sprawled on the bed, pajamas with the baby chickens on them swaddled around me, washcloth tamped into my eyeholes, listening to an episode of Monk.

It felt good, the compress. As long as it was on my face. The relief ended as soon as I removed it and was hit full force by whatever was in the air; Little Portly's fur and dander, dust, mold, pollen, what-have-you. I am starting to hate air. Every time I breathe or otherwise encounter the stuff, it gives me trouble.

Okay:
A week of steroids for my most recent asthma attack has taught me that in order to feel better, I have to sacrifice my generally well-adjusted attitude for one of a strung-out junkie. I am hot, way irritable, full of noxious-smelling farts, and have a ramped up appetite that allows me to eat almost a whole large pizza by myself and then get upset and territorial if there isn't enough left over for a snack later(like, maybe 6 or 8 pieces). My face and chest have broken out in tiny little whiteheads that would be cute if they were made out of glitter, but they're not.

I am wide awake, all the time, with energy that, if only it could be constructive, would be nice. Instead of repainting the bathroom or editing my novel, I am forced to go to late movies, hijacking my friends to watch Keneau Reeves say my name over and over in between his visits to hell. I am so exhausted with coughing, trying to get on top of the cough, that I pine for a sunny nap in the afternoon, kitty asleep and purring on my legs, but instead I get me, eyes wide and throbbing to the jack-rabbit pounding of my heart, launching the cat off of me when she starts to knead her tiny claws into my thigh.

And yet my head is congested, my cough persists. The thought of having to stand next to a smoker, even outside, where the wind could rip the smoke away from my lack-luster lungs, is enough to make me want to grab the next gutter punk who asks me for a cigarette by the tattered lapels and scream obscenities into his face: "Is THIS what you want? To struggle to take in air and spend your nights wondering if you'll be able to make it to the hospital in time before you starve your brain of too much oxygen?"

How did I ever think to put a cigarette to my mouth?

Also, I have to inform the people I work with about the drugs I take, what to watch for if I go down, what to tell the attending medics.

And why, oh why does my Urgent Care physician always have to be so cute? Meeting me while I look, sound, and smell like hell? Why does he have to put his cold stethoscope on my bare back and frown, saying, "Well, yes, actually, that DOES sound pretty bad in there? Are you a smoker?" I roll my eyes and say "Christ, no."

He looks like he still may not believe me. Is it the purple hair, the heavy metal style dragon tattooed on my back?

And my pharmaceutical sentence is only lightweight. I am only on these corticosteroids for a week. I wouldn't take them for longer. You can puff up like a blowfish if you let them linger in your system, bowing to the almost fanatical need to eat constantly, always feeling faint from hunger, yet never really 'hungry.'

I hate this breathing thing, it's getting me down.

Sorry about all the sniffling, guys, I'm not actually on coke, it just sounds that way.

Chris and I have been playing 'Name That Kitty' for a day now, and, while the random words that pop out of our mouths are sometimes uproariously funny(i.e.-Assmaster and Poopmachine are two that take me right back to being six), it has been slow going when it comes to the real candidates.

We thought about 'Oolong' as sort of a tribute to that guy who had a web page devoted to his rabbit, Oolong. He used to put small toys and muffins and stuff on Oolong's head and then post the pictures. Sadly, Oolong died last year. But the website's still up: http://www.h6.dion.ne.jp/~yuebing/ (not sure of this link but if you do a google search for "oolong rabbit pancake" you should be able to find the site. It's in Japanese only, but the pictures have English captions if you roll your mouse over them)

(Okay, I just viewed it and it's his new rabbit's page, but he still has lots of Oolong pictures up.)

Then I suggested 'Pancake,' but Chris said someone else we knew had a hamster with that name.

More bathroom humor ensued.

This morning, as the kitty was launching numerous assaults against an innocent catnip mouse, Chris blurted out, "How about 'Little Portly?!"

To which I exclaimed: "Okay!"

Little Portly is a character from "The Wind In The Willows," specifically, a little otter with a paunch who tends to wander away from home while he plays and then takes naps and wakes up lost. Ratty and Mole spend about a chapter looking for him. (Don't worry, he gets found and is delivered home to Papa Otter safe and sound.)

We just reread the book and Little Portly was, by far, the best name of a charater in the story. Maybe in any book ever.

Yay for Little Portly!

So there's this cat that Chris and I might take on as a freeloader. Her name right now is "Blisters" but I find that repulsive and have countered to rename it.

"How about "Keebler?" I ask and munch on my soggy ham sandwich. "Like the Keebler Elves?"

"What's wrong with "Blisters?"

"It's gross. It makes me wonder if she's got any open, oozing sores. Or maybe a short temper."

Chris takes tiny bites of his banana, thinking, moving mechanically, like a robot. I watch his teeth come down through the meat of the fruit, watching the marks his mouth makes on it. The banana dissolves into moosh. Like a mouthful of pus, sucked out of a 'blister.' I am reinvested in the renaming. I can't call an animal something that makes me think like this, especially when I'm eating.

"Actually," I say, pulling sprouts off of my sweater, "I really like just the sound of "Eebler." It could be something that rhymes."

Chris stares at me for a second and then says, "How 'bout "Enabler?" He looks triumphant, and it's clear from the look on my face that we have a winner.

Whose Pants?

Chris recently discovered that if he washes and dries a pair of his pants that should be dry cleaned only (say, a pair of wool Banana Republic pants that he bought at a thrift store for about $3 and that I have always liked a lot, and have maybe even eyeballed with a good deal of thrift store score envy, on more than one occasion), and the pants shrink, they end up being the exact right size for me. Not that I would wish shrinking wool pants on anybody.

So now I am the proud, if a bit sheepish, owner of a pair of BR pants. They fit great!

I was worried that the butt of these pants would make my butt look more like a typical guy butt, and that is not something that I want, as lots of guys sort of have no butt at all, but more like a weird concavity that should maybe be checked out by a doctor or something. But as I asked around, everyone agreed that my butt does not automatically turn into guy butt just because I'm wearing guy pants. Thank god.

Change of subject:
Tomorrow morning BEFORE work, I've got my yoga class, and although I love it, the last one I went to we were told to use these straps to sort of rope ourselves into position. I couldn't figure it out.

I am not ashamed that it takes me a minute to remember which end of the cable goes to what part of the battery when jumping a car. I am, however, embarrassed that I couldn't figure out how to secure this belt-like thing around my back and have it not immediately unravel.

The instructor was very patient with us, but only got to help the three worst of us unravelers before we had to move on to a different pose, one that didn't involve any props. By that time, I resembled one of those tree-shaped air fresheners that you hang from your rear-view mirror. I didn't smell like one though, which was maybe too bad, because I was quite sweaty.

One last thing: I got asked out on a date by a patron wearing a train engineer's hat. I don't think he was an actual train engineer. I flashed him my divorce ring and told him I was married. He seemed to take it well.

It was almost like my subconscious had grabbed ahold of the virus that was going around the library and kept it in check, waiting for the right moment to begin incubation. I started feeling crappy on Wednesday night, just a slight catch in my throat, a dull ache in my limbs. By the time Chris and Eddy and I had reached the bus stop though, I could tell I was going down for real.

I was supposed to have Jury Duty the next morning, and I couldn't figure out how to call in sick for that so I go up and went to the court house, even though I could barely keep my clothes on. I was hot, my skin was doing that prickly thing that sea urchins do when anything touches them. My spines felt poked at. I was a tide pool creature at the mercy of the people with sticks, with probing fingers.

I waited in line with everyone else, thinking I'd fall over. My fever spiked and I sweated through my clothes. I could have collected the moisture in my shirt in a glass if I had tried to wring it out.

"Fever!" I croaked out when a nice young man named Brian asked me how he could help me. He may have thought I was a junkie, I guess it doesn't matter. He sent me right home, which was all I wanted, with the stipulation that I come back and try again next month.

I climbed in bed and slept for two and a half days.

That's not true; I got up early the next day to reschedule a dentist appointment for the third time. I had been hoping to feel well enough to at least take that off my calendar, but alas, my body made the choice for me: an unmoving mouth-breathing lump in bed instead of numb-faced, drooling, and receiving a lecture on why I should floss more.

Fuckity fuck.

So now both the jury duty and the fillings are back in the hopper, waiting for me to stress out about all over again.

Chris stayed in with me on Friday, even though I think I only woke up a few times to pee. He camped in the bedroom with his new $65 laptop playing video games and trying to entice me into a state of awareness with Frogger and jeopardy. Needless to say, I didn't really play with him, which made me feel bad, but not bad enough to wake up.

I was so sure that I wasn't going to get sick this year. I've been taking all those fancy inhaled steroids for my asthma management and so I figured my lungs were like iron. I was wrong, although, I have to say, that with this cold, there has been a marked lack of congestion. Hmm...

Yesterday I finally started to feel better. I know this because I started to realize how goaty the sheets were getting. I wobbled down to the washer and threw them all in. Then I did the dishes. Ah, being better= domestic chores! Heaven!

It turns out that Jason(see previous post for run down on police action at my house) actually suffered some fractures in his face the other night. There is talk of him or his family suing the Portland police over their brutality and not taking responsibility for hurting him. I understand that he asked to be taken to the hospital on the way to detox, but that he wasn't taken there until the next morning, where they discovered the fractures. He had been cleared by an EMT before he was put in the car, which makes me think that he might have done some of the damage himself.

Prevailing opinions at my house are that the police are solely responsible for his injuries, but as one of the only sober people at the scene, I have a different interpretation:

I didn't see everything go down, BUT;
Two grown men who should have known better got shitfaced.
One woman forgot to give those men a key to the place they were staying.
Chris and I didn't answer the door on the first doorbell ring and were untrusting of the strangers standing on our porch in the middle of the night.
One of the drunk men refused to comply with a police officer's requests.
The other drunk man called the officer a fascist.
The drunk man who was 'taken down' by the cop and handcuffed was put in the patrol car where he then slammed his head against the window repeatedly.

It kind of sounds like no one wants to take responsibility for their actions here.

My opinion is that we are all a little at fault. If they wouldn't have been so hammered...if Sonya would have woken up...if we would have answered the door right away and let them in...if Jason would have just done as he was asked...if he wouldn't have hit his head against the car...

I think that the police need to be liable for the mistakes that they make, but I'm not so sure that they could have done anything different. I mean, every situation they deal with is one where they have to go into it believing that the people involved might kill them or others. Shit, I'd be more likely to take extreme measures myself if that were the case...

3:30am. The doorbell rings. I wake up, but decide to ignore it. It's probably just the same shitheads that stole my sick plant off the front porch.

It rings again. Then again. I wake Chris up, then ask him what we should do. I mean, answering the doorbell at 3:30 in the morning is never going to yield good news. He decides to answer it.

We open the front door out into the hallway we share with the girls that live upstairs. It's one of their friends, a college age boy who compulsively wears a red baseball hat. Chris walks down the hall and opens the door.

He finds out that the guy is drunk and he is staying with our upstairs neighbor and that he and his companion got locked out. We don't know if she locked them out on purpose or if it was just an accident. I am hanging back in the hallway in my pajamas, away from the strange people.

"I'm terribly sorry to disturb you at such a late hour, but I'm a friend of Sonya's and my friend and I just went to the bar down the street after Sonya passed out and she must have locked the door and we're staying with her and she won't wake up to let us in." Red Hat gushes the run-on sentences of a socially well *ahem* lubricated man, but is freakily polite about it. "Thank you so much for being so understanding, and we apologize again for waking you at this hour."

We don't know if we should let them in because there is no way of knowing if these guys even know our upstairs neighbors or if she wants them there. We need to ask Sonya what she wants us to do. Chris runs up the stairs and opens the front door to Sonya's apartment, which is unlocked. He calls her name. No answer. He ventures in as far as her closed bedroom door and calls her name again. Still no answer. He comes back down.

I have decided that my need to know exactly what is happening on my front porch overrides the fact that I am clad in flannel pajamas with baby chickens all over them. I grab my robe and jump into the fray.

The first thing I notice as I enter the hallway is the flashing disco lights of a police car in front of our house. Not a good sign.

A policeman has pulled over and handcuffed Red Hat's companion for mooning his patrol car. The kid sloppily insists he was merely trying to hail a cab. I will later wonder how he thinks he was going to flag down a taxi on a street with no traffic in a town with no cabs. But that is later. This is now:

Red Hat is upset that the policeman tackled his friend to the ground, bruising his face and making him bleed on our front steps. The cop is defending himself by explaining that since he wouldn't take his hands out of his pockets and he was "dancing drunkenly in the middle of the road" and "wouldn't comply with my orders" that he had to assume he was carrying a weapon of some kind. Red Hat is trying to calm down the mooner, whose name I find out is actually Jason, by holding him down on the front steps, blood dripping onto the sidewalk.

A fire truck/ambulance vehicle pulls up. A woman gets out and examines Jason. The cop is calling his sergeant for back-up. The EMT lady clears Jason of any possible concussion.

I wonder out loud to Chris if Sonya has choked on her own vomit upstairs, as Red Hat keeps telling us how much she was throwing up earlier. That plus the fact that she hasn't woken up even with all the noise makes me think she might be dead. We both return to her bedroom, where I knock on the door and call her name. She doesn't answer. It flashes through my mind that this might be a very long, gruesome night. I tiptoe over to her bed, why I'm not sure, I mean, I WANT her to wake up, right. Still, I'm in a strange person's bedroom in the middle of the night and I feel ginger about touching anything or stepping to heavily. I touch her head and she moans. She is incredibly fucked up, but still alive. I ask her if she knows her friends have been locked out. She wakes up a little and tells me to let them back in. She is distressed. I smooth down her unruly curls and tell her to just lay back down. She asks if they are okay. I hesitate and then shrug, saying "I think so."

I do not want her to wake up and "try to help." We shut her bedroom door and promise to let her friends back in her apartment. We do not mention the police, the handcuffs, or the swollen bloodied face.

We return to the front porch where Jason is repeatedly attempting to stand up and confront the cop about his handcuffs. He asks to have them removed. Or at least loosened. This request is denied and Red Hat pulls him down into a sitting position again. Jason and the cop are still discussing whether or not he deserves to be in handcuffs. Red Hat agrees with his friend that they should be removed and is growing visibly upset at his friend's appearance.

The cop refuses to discuss taking the handcuffs off and tells Jason to get used to it(paraphrasing like crazy here, as I could only hear bits and pieces, sorry).

Red Hat tears up the stairs on his way to Sonya's apartment, calling the cop a fascist on the way. I suck in air through my clenched teeth and think that this is not the way to endear yourself to a law enforcement official.

Back-up arrives. There is talk to taking Jason to detox, as he is clearly unable to handle himself, and is even possibly a danger to himself and others. The evidence they have to prove this is the fact that he tried to "hail a cab" by flashing his ass in the middle of the street in the middle of the night. Oh, and that he refused to comply with the officer's request that he remove his hands from his pockets and get down on the ground. Things aren't looking so good for Jason.

Red Hat vehemently opposes Jason's immanent departure for detox, and requests to be taken with to keep an eye on him. The sergeant laughs and says that he does NOT want to do that. Detox is not fun, and the only way he can go with is if he agrees to be locked up there as well.

I think the police are being more than generous with their plan, as they could have just saved themselves a lot of trouble and arrested both of them for being drunk and disorderly.

I mention to the policemen that Sonya has in fact given them the okay to just come back in her apartment and crash. One of them asks me if I am in fact taking responsibility for the two drunk people. I wave my arms and say no. He asks me if I am sober. This grates at me. I am standing on my porch with two strangers causing a scene in the middle of the night. I am in my pajamas, have bed head, and have clearly just been interrupted during a critical stage in my sleep cycle. I am the only one here besides the officers who is sober. But I let it go, as this is clearly an uncool situation and someone needs to take control. I say no, that I have to work in the morning and that I don't even know these people.

The officers confer and decide that Jason really needs to be taken away to sleep it off somewhere where he won't get up and wander off or freak out. They load him into the back of the patrol car. Red Hat flips out. He does not want Jason to go, and asks for the address, which is given to him with the promise that as soon as Jason has sobered up, he will be allowed to call Red Hat for a ride.

"How long are we talking about here?" Red Hat asks.

"You'll probably make it to church."

"We're not going to church, I don't believe in God-" Red Hat is getting upset at the assumption that he is a God-fearing type and the cop laughs a little and tells him that he was just trying to give him a time frame.

Jason making loud noises by himself in the patrol car like he is banging his head against the patrol car window, hard.

The policemen decide to wrap things up and leave Chris and I to reason with a drunk man, with his own brand of circular logic.

After two more whole recaps of how Red Hat thinks things went down, which makes increasingly less and less sense, Chris announces that it is late, and that we are going to bed.

Red Hat apologizes again and thanks us for being so understanding.

We lock the door and go back to bed.

Chris plays his gameboy and I lay awake, eyes on the ceiling, wondering if I'll sleep

Last weekend when Portland had that huge ice storm, Chris got a call telling him that he still had to go to work. I was worried(like a mother hen) that he would slip on the front stairs or on the way to the bus stop, so I decided to venture out on the front porch and see just what we were dealing with. I grabbed my cell phone to cancel my appointments for the day, and opened the door. Everything was covered with a solid layer of wavy ice, sort of beautiful, like a big glazed donut. (The machines that cover donuts and candy bars with the final layer of glaze/chocolate are called 'enrobers,' if I'm not mistaken, and that's so cool.)

I put my slippered hoof down on the top stair and slipped, then bounced down all eight stairs to the sidewalk. Luckily, I was able to break my fall with my cell phone, and so I only sustained enormous bruises on two major portions of my back instead of three. My arm got dinged up too, but my phone only got a small scratch.

When I tried to stand up, I realized I was soaking wet. This was because it was, you know, raining, but I was convinced that it was blood. I kicked off my slippers and used my socks as impromptu wooly cleats, dragging what I thought to be my blood-covered carcass back up the mountain.

I threw myself on the couch in the living room and tried to get my breathing under control. I called out to Chris, who had been getting ready to take a bath. I could hear the water still running and I hoped he hadn't gotten in yet. No answer. I called again, louder this time. Nothing. So I shouted. Then I screamed. That got him. He came out of the bathroom holding his towel, brow furrowed.

"Angela, what is it? What's wrong?" he came over and inspected my crumpled form.

"I fell...down the front steps. Am I covered in my own blood?" I started shaking, the kidney punches the cement had laid into me were starting to really ache.

"What? Blood? No, you're just wet. Come on, let's put you back in bed."

He helped me into the bed room and tucked me in. Kissed my forehead and said, "It's weird, because ten minutes ago, your sister called and told me to tell you to be really careful to not fall down the stairs."

"Why didn't you tell me that?"

"I figured you wouldn't fall down the stairs."

Nice.

Last night after a weird bath(long story, too personal), I heaved myself out of the barely lukewarm water and racked myself on the faucet. I don't normally sit on that end of the tub, and wasn't at all ready for the feeling of being stabbed in the small of my back by what felt like a hollow needle the size of a, well, a bathtub faucet. I checked it out in the mirror, as best I could without my glasses, and it hadn't even broken the skin, which wasn't consistent with the way it felt. After five minutes, I looked at it again, and to my horror, it had swelled up and looked like a sugar cookie had been implanted under my skin.

I went to put on my pajama pants and realized that the scrape was dead center in the physiological lane my waist bands usually drive in. (What a horrible metaphor. I have a headache and girl trouble, can you tell? Fuck.)

Chris put a bandage on it, but that lasted all of 10 minutes, as it just pulled on the fine little hairs around it.

Then I got glassy-eyed as my femininity made itself rudely known by kicking me in the groin.

I went to bed mad that uterine cramps had once again surprised me, deer in headlights style. I mean, I should know what to expect, I've been doing this menstruation thing for quite a while now, but it never fails to blow my fucking mind.

As I drifted to sleep I mentally went through my closet to figure out what clothes I could wear that would accommodate my swollen reproductive organs and the sugar cookie-esque bruise on my back. I decided that I should go pantsless. Then I fell asleep to the sound of Chris playing his Game Boy...

For my birthday yesterday, Chris gave me an armful of purple presents, including a stuffed unicorn. Then we went out for sushi at the place downtown with the train. I stuffed myself with multiple orders of tempura tai(a jazzed up fishstick teetering atop a nub of sticky rice smothered in hot sauce) and creamy scallops. I ordered real crab sushi too, which I normally don't do because it's so expensive. But, this is the last year of my 20's, and if I want real crab with my seaweed, I'll have real crab.

I always buy the 25 cent mints at the counter there when we leave. They're nothing special, but I like how the clear plexiglass mint cage has a pink sign taped to it that says: 25 cents! NOT Free!

I told Chris I was going to name my birthday unicorn 'Sushicorn' in honor of the delightful dinner we had. He thought that was a pretty good name for a stuffed animal.

We're having a reading on Thursday night at our house to give everyone who wrote books for National Novel Writing Month a chance to publicly showcase their efforts. We have about 5 or six people lined up to read, including ourselves. Nervous in that I'm not sure who is going to show up, and will we have enough chairs. Not nervous about reading. That last workshop I took sort of took the wind out of the fear of public speaking.

Now then, I have taken to wearing these fingerless gloves everywhere, because I'm always cold and black fingerless gloves are just rock star cool, no matter what anyone says.

My mom calls those mini-bananas that are all the rage in organic grocery stores right now "banditos." I'm not sure why. She says that's just the first word that pops into her head when she sees them.

Last night I fell asleep on the couch clutching a half-eaten bag of Doritos and the remote for the DVD player. I had been watching the Simpson's third season and when I got to the end of the fourth one I just sort of slumped over and started drooling on Tube Pillow(a pillow shaped like a tube, FYI.).

I had my dog Jake on Saturday for a few hours. We played in the mud, lunged for a guy holding a cup of coffee, and got caught in the rain. We went back to my house and drank a huge bowl of water, curled up on the couch and napped like littermates, and then did some laundry.

Jake loves carrying around dirty socks and underwear in his mouth, and I figured, what the hell, they're all going in the wash anyway, so I let him carry a few pungent items to the basement. It's important to make your pets feel involved.

December 28th: The Final Judgement

Didn't really get up to much. We took a scenic drive on I-84 to scope out activities for mom's summer visit. Drove up to some building on a cliff that I can't recall the name of, and it was so windy, we couldn't even get out of the car. I attempted it, but had to abort the mission as my hat flew off my head, my glasses rattled on my face, and my nostrils flapped shut like a camel.

Kristi, Jackson, mom, and I went to Green Papaya for happy hour, where the service is pretty slow, but the blond bartender is cute and you can order all the cream cheese wantons you can eat for two hours. I'm not sure if the crunchy fried wrap is a vehicle for the cream cheese or the other way around, but it really doesn't matter. We each had an order and I pigged up almost half of them. Luckily, the mom and Kristi were distracted by the steak rolls and Jackson wasn't very hungry so no one slapped my hand away or anything.

The bartender only charged us for our food for some reason, I'd like to think it's because he thought we were all cute, but it was probably just an honest mistake. So we left him a $20 tip.

It was almost 6pm, time for Chris to get off work, and the library's only two blocks from the restaurant, so I walked up there by myself to wait for him. I sat on the windowsill near the back door and watched my coworkers flee the building like it was on fire.

A group of three guys in their 20's, either drunk or stupid or both, rounded the corner and headed my way. I turned slightly in the other direction so I wouldn't have to watch them as they punched each other and had a conversation that consisted only of the words "Fuck you. No, fuck you!"

They walked past me and I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when the littlest one, shaved head and huge cholo style cross swinging from his fat neck, whirled around and clumped over to me. He got six inches from my face and said, "You're so not out of my league. I could totally date you." I was so stunned that I didn't do or say anything, just stared at him for about 8 seconds(a really long time to have a stranger close enough to lick) until he smirked and said, "It's so true," and then ran to catch up with his buddies, who hadn't even noticed that he had peeled off from the group. The 'fuck you's' started up again and dopplered out of my hearing range.

Still, no Chris. I went into the back area, not feeling as safe outside anymore, and checked the schedule. He had gone home early after a training. Curses!

What else?

Not much. Mom and I read for a while and Chris, Jackson, and Kristi played a cutthroat game of
Monopoly in the kitchen.

Kristi generously agreed to pick mom up for the 6am airport run the next morning. We said our sleepy good-byes, no tears thank god, and it was over.

The most stress-free, easiest, agreeable visit my mother has ever had. I know it's not what you were looking for, coming from me and my familial nutjobs, and so I make this promise now: Next year, we'll get her drunk.

December 27th:
was a day dedicated to shopping. Not stuff for the weak of heart or stomach. Jackson went with us for about an hour until mom got stuck in a sweater store at the mall and then he sort of wandered off to drink coffee and read. Good move on his part because the three of us went nuts.

We went from the mall downtown to northwest, where the parking is scarce and the girls all wear those super low-rise jeans. Intimidating. I wished I had worn the fancy new underwear that Kristi had given me. I feel like I'm in a superhero costume in those things, that's how cool they are. But I had decided to save them for a 'special occasion,' whatever that means. It turned out to mean today, I'm wearing them right now. I could rip off my clothes and clothespin a fleece throw blanket thingy around my neck and become my alter ego "Vitamin A."

I was the only person who bought nothing. I just couldn't get into it. Oh, well. Less crap for me, cluttering up my space.

We had chicken salad sandwiches at the Daily Cafe in the Pearl, and made plans for that evening.

After I drove the ladies and their loot home, we got bundled up and jumped back in the car to go to the Festival of Lights at the Grotto. A huge Catholic outdoor sanctuary, it is actually one of my favorite places. It's always peaceful and no one hassles you. I light a few candles and sit and just breathe. Very meditative.

But the F.O.L. is a huge deal. They decorated the whole place with buttloads of lights depicting the story of the baby Jesus, hauled in dinner theater actors to portray people of that time, there was a spanish folk singer in the actual church, Feliz Navidad and all that crap, and best of all, a petting zoo stocked with baby goats, sheep, ponies, and chickens. I could have spent all night in there. I loved the goats. Yay! Yay for mini animals that butt up against your leg for food!

Mom spent almost an hour in the two gift stores, looking for 'the perfect angel' for her collection and ended up buying one that was made in Eden Prarie, MN, about an hour from her house. I started obsessively separating the saint medallions that had been mixed together in their bins, until Kristi stopped me. Just being in there with all that stuff made my stomach hurt.

When we got home, Jackson and Chris made pizza and we all played gin, my mom picking up the game as we went and sort of adapting it to her liking.

"Well, it just doesn't make sense to discard another card if I just played something."

"Mom, that's a good thing. You WANT to get rid of your cards. You should want to play as much as you can when it's your turn."

"I'm just saying, it doesn't make any sense."

Mom. Sigh.

December 26:
Kristi and I dropped mom off at Dosha the next morning at 9:30 to get her massage. We walked around Hawthorne, did some browsing at Fred Meyer for products that decrease eye puffiness. Lots of bottles of creams and gels that made startling promises with great before and after photos, but we were dubious and so just decided to get more sleep and drink more water.

I tried to return some underwear, but that store wasn't open yet.

Kristi had a massive stomach spasm and we ducked into Powell's bookstore to "deal with it."

After an hour of window shopping we went back to the spa and picked up mom, who came down the stairs to meet us like she had been beaten with a sock filled with oranges.

"Mom, are you okay?"

"Oh, yeah, it was great." She hobbled over to us, her hair wet, her swim suit balled up in a ziplock bag sticking out of her purse. "Now I know why I needed to bring my swimsuit. The whole room was soaking after the hydrotherapy."

"What exactly is hydrotherapy?" Kristi asked.

"They had this huge hose attached to the ceiling and a girl wearing a rubber apron came in and pummeled me with the spray for 15 minutes. Anyway, I think I can achieve a similar effect withe the garden hose hooked up to the kitchen sink. I'm going to have my boyfriend try it this summer. I'll just lay on one of those plastic lawn chairs."

Frightening.

I finally got to exchange my underwear and we all had a quick bite to eat at my house.

Oh, man, I totally forgot to tell you about the chicken Kiev.

We made it from scratch for Christmas Day Dinner. Kristi's boyfriend, Jackson, is a vegetarian, so he brought himself over some asparagus thing, but the four of us pounded out chicken breasts with my all purpose utility hammer until it was wafer thin. If you haven't pounded out raw meat between layers of plastic wrap, by God, you should. The sensation of hammering something's muscle is really primal, and I feel like it was better than therapy. I didn't even get all weepy. Progress made in leaps and bounds.

But then we made little raw chicken burritos with filling of sticks of butter and lots of parsely. A little milk, a little flour, a little frypan and then the oven. Ta-da! Delicious chicken twinkies, made from scratch right here in my own kitchen.

We watched Young Frankenstein while we ate. Merry Christmas!

I digress.

We went to the play 'Narnia' at the children's theater. I brought along a koala finger puppet and danced it around until my mother wrestled it from me and put it in her purse.

The snow queen actress was the best part of the play. She was fantastic. Mom gave me back my finger puppet and we went to pick up Chris for dinner.

Kristi wanted to go to the Farm, a tiny restaurant on Burnside, and so we went. We drank and ate and ate and drank. We even ordered desert.

After a whole day of rushing from one activity to the next, we were all ready to go to bed by like, 9:30.

Aside:

Kristi called our dad last night and we all talked for a while. He asked if I liked my job and I told him that working at the library wasn't going to make me rich, but I enjoyed the work.

"That's important, see, that you like what you do. You like books and so you work at a library. I like to dig holes in the ground and put dead people in them, so I dig graves. You have to do something that you like."

For some reason, I thought you needed to know that about my father.

December 25th:
Mom was still snoring away on the futon in the living room until 9:30 or so, thank god.

I tiptoed into the kitchen and had a couple of the several hundred full-sized peanut butter cups we made the day before. I forgot to mention it in my last entry. The three of us ladies formed a sort of chocolate bark-peanut butter dough ball assembly line and cranked out a fridge full of candy in less than two hours. One of my greatest accomplishments to date, for sure.

Anyway, we pulled ourselves together by noon and headed over to a friend's house for brunch, where they served a menu straight off of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy"-little poached egg muffins floating on sauteed porchini mushrooms in a cupcake liner made out of prosciutto, that sort of thing. Scrumptious. We brought over a box of our peanut butter cups. I didn't eat much as I had already ruined my appetite with candy, but I'm an adult and if I want to spend Christmas the way most 6-10 year olds spend the day after Halloween, it's my perogative.

Then we went back to our house for a rousing hour of opening presents. Since everyone gave everyone else exact lists with product numbers and sizes, there weren't any surprises, and the whole thing seemed sort of hollow. The exception to that being that I gave Chris a DVD burner and managed to keep it secret for two whole months. I told him I was getting him a new office chair. He was quite pleased. And he said he'll give me his old CD burner, and so we were both happy, materialistically speaking. Mom gave me a stapler, Kristi gave me some fun underwear that I'd never be able to justify buying myself. Kristi and I gave mom a massage scheduled for the next day. Wine was consumed. Chet Baker was played. Grocery bags used as wrapping paper were folded and recycled. The whole thing was really very civilized.

The five of us went to see The Life Aquatic in the late afternoon. Theater packed. People cranky. Chris had a mild anxiety attack. He doesn't like crowds. Movie was great. Best line was "We're not good husbands, are we? But I have an excuse. I'm part gay."

After the movie, more chocolate bark products were eaten, and we all passed out by 10.

Oh, happy day!

December 24th, Part 2:
After fondue, we all took naps. My mom sat upright on the couch with her mystery novel propped up in her lap, but she wasn't fooling anyone. Her mouth kept falling open and little snorkling noises would come out of her throat.

I curled up in my standard armadillo position and tucked my head under an afghan, hoping we would all fall deeply asleep and miss going out to the 11 o'clock church service downtown.

But mom was determined to go.

So at quarter to, Kristi, mom and I piled into the car and headed over to the church, where we wandered around, looking for a door. The building itself was huge and imposing, gray stones all looking very gothic, and there were only two small wooden doors, as far as we could see, bearing black metal hinges like the door to a steakhouse. We spotted a handicap ramp and figured, well, we're all a little handicapped, and rattled on the door until someone from the choir came out of the dressing room to see what all the rucus was about.

We should have gone through the steakhouse door.

Once we got settled in towards the back, mom nestled between us, I staged a raid on the donation envelopes, which were labeled "PEW OFFERING." I mean, come on.

The lessons were given by a woman with a walleye, very cute, one eye rolling dramatically to the right while the other looked straight ahead.

The minister gave a sermon on how baby Jesus was really born in the heart of the innkeeper's house, as that's where people in those times kept their animals.

A large man in front kept shouting out answers to the mininster's rhetorical questions.

A smaller man in the row ahead of us got a nasty case of the hiccups. The walleyed woman eventually came and sat down next to him.

The choir sang a bunch of songs and rang large bells.

I was so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open.

My sister nudged me and asked if I was going to take communion. I told her that I hadn't been to confession and that I'd probably burst into flames, my standard excuse for not partaking in the freaky cannibalistic ceremony that is transubstantiation. She whispered back that we were at a LUTHERAN church and that I didn't need to go to confession first. Oh, right.

We took communion. We dipped our wafers into a mug of wine held by a ten year old girl. My sister went for the grape juice, which is a popular alternative in this age of recovering alcoholics. She started to dip her wafer and the guy holding the glass said, "This is grape juice, but it's still the blood of Christ, shed for you."

"What?" she said, tilting her head to hear above the organ and the warbling of the congregation singing.

"Grape juice, not wine. But still the blood of Christ, shed for you," he repeated, leaning in.

"I'm sorry, I can't hear you," she stepped over and got within six inches of his face.

"It's GRAPE JUICE!" the man finally raised his voice and shattered the illusion.

She dipped her wafer and stared at him, then turned and walked away.

I was having my own difficulties. The woman in front of me was wrestling with the ten year old, trying to grab the goblet from her to take a drink, a much more traditional way of doing things, although not nearly as sanitary. The kid was holding her own, attempting to stop it, but the minister intervened and let her take a drink, then wiped the edge of the glass and continued as if nothing had happened. I was paralyzed. I'm sort of an obsessive-compulsive freak, and along with that particular disorder comes a great fear of other people's mucus. If I dunked my wafer in there, it would be like kissing her, and who knew where she had been. We're all children of God, my ass! After a slight hesitation, I felt my mother push me with a hand to the small of the back. I dipped into the contaminated wine and put the wafer in my mouth and rubbed my tongue against the roof of my mouth with vigor, in an attempt to psychologically crush the germs that might have been in my few drops of the blood of Christ, shed for me.

When we got back to the pew, mom slid in first, leaving the two of us to sit next to each other. Bad move. Inappropriate laughter ensued, starting with giggles at the chorus to "Most highly favored lady, AMEN!" The hiccup guy couldn't get it under control. Neither could we. The whole pew vibrated with our shaking laugher. The choir walked through the aisles and the guy in front of us high fived one of the tenors. We lost it. People around us glared.

Mom ignored us.

Everyone said an "Our Father" outloud. The last half has been rewritten and revised so many times that no one knows what it originally was. Everyone diverged and said it the way they learned it. It sounded awful, everyone talking at once but with no unification. Kristi hee-hawed. Mom smacked her in the arm.

Mercifully, it ended. We left by the front door on the way out and shook the minister's hand. I caught a glimpse of hiccup man and the walleye woman. I started laughing all over again.

"You are going straight to hell," Kristi giggled in my ear.

"So are you, most highly favored lady," I snorted back.