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.