Pardon me while I vent.

If you are the host(ess) you have certain responsibilities. These responsibilities include, but are not limited to: who, what, when, and where. If I am your guest, I really don't want to have to be in charge of making these decisions. I mean, I don't mind having input, but ultimately the work should be yours.

In specific terms, this mean that if I am coming to your house for dinner, and I've already told you our dietary restrictions, then I don't want to choose the meal from a list of ten. You are not a restaurant. Even if I hate it, I will eat it and tell you it's good.

And when I am the hostess, I will tell you when dinner will be served, what will be served, and where it will be. I'll handle the decision-making, because it's my event, and therefore my responsibility.

So please, pick a damn entree. I'd do it for you.

Studies in Gratitude

My friend the Kitchen Bitsch (or is it the Kitschenbitsch?) is vowing to post every day between now and the end of eternity January 1 about things she is grateful for.

I will try to join her, although let's face it -- I'm a slacker. Mostly I'm a slacker because this is some Deep Shit over here at The Door In the Page, and sometimes I just can't get into it.

Also, I'll be away from a computer (and also away from a Starbucks) for the next three days, during which time I will be holding on to my temper with both hands and praying that someone will walk in and say "Hey, I've got a venti nonfat Pumpkin Spice Latte with three extra shots and no whipped cream, and I don't even DRINK these. Anybody want it?"

It should go without saying that I would knock over my frail, nearly blind father-in-law to get to that lukewarm prize. Which I would be sooooooo grateful for. But at this point, it is only hypothetical. Do we count hypotheticals?

As you've no doubt figured out by now, I'm spending the holiday in the sixth circle of hell with my in-laws. One day, blogosphere, you and I will get into a contest over whose in-laws are worse, and I will win. I've only been taken down by a man whose mother-in-law went to prison for manslaughter. She killed her husband.

But I digress yet again. A thousand apologies. And now, in the spirit of the holiday, and recognizing that I would not survive this trip with my sanity and my relationships with my in-laws intact (and I only really care about maintaining one of those, but still) I give you five reasons I am grateful for the ways my husband tries to make these trips tolerable for me:

1. He checks the bed we sleep in for spiders for me. This is very important, because I am really afraid of spiders. Once, I went to bed before he did and there was a spider as big as my thumb under my pillow. I freaked out and sat on the floor and cried. And watched to make sure it wasn't coming for me. When Travis came in to bed, he killed it (and also its spouse) and removed all the covers to make sure they were all gone.

2. Speaking of bed, he encourages and enables me to bring my own bedding. I have a notoriously hard time sleeping anywhere but my bed. If I'm headed out to be a houseguest somewhere, I normally have to bring sleeping pills. Even if it's a hotel. The bedding in the guest room at my in-laws is a horrible synthetic that is supposed to look like silk but feels just gross and is hot as all hell. Travis and I sneak sheets and blankets and pillows in (we tell them I pack a lot) and remake the bed each night to sleep in it.

3. He takes me out for coffee every morning, under the guise that we need to check our email/call my mom to wish her a happy whatever-the-holiday-is/whoopsies I forgot my toothbrush so we're going to town to pick one up. And I get to go to the shell station, where the coffee is really good, and get a monster cup of java and some twizzlers, and the bathroom is gloriously clean and smells of pine-sol.

And speaking of food,
4. He manages to find a way that we can bring our own food. I know it seems weird to those who know me because I eat a lot, but I'm really picky. If it's gross, I won't eat it. After two visits in which I subsisted solely on driend fruit, granola bars, and pringles that I snuck, he hit on this idea and now we are a self-sustaining unit when we travel. (I'm drawing the line at a tent in the yard.) Every time we go we load up a cooler, and eat salads and sandwiches and homemade soup and fruit. They eat pork chops and the cheap version of velveeta. This time, I'm bringing Thanksgiving dinner, which we are looking forward to eating, and I suspect we'll all end up eating the same meal for once, instead of the awkward mealtimes that usually ensue. (Lest y'all try to report me to the Southern Council on Womanhood, I bring a gracious plenty of whatever it is I'm packing in the cooler -- enough for the entire family plus a few more. For reasons I don't understand, they opt for their own food. Whatever.)

5. He tries to keep me entertained. Here's what my in-laws do: 8 am breakfast. 8:30, TV. 11am, lunch. 11:30, tv. 4pm, dinner. 4:30pm, tv. 7:30pm, snack of dinner-like proportions. 8pm, tv.* Now, I'm not saying that I don't like to eat and watch tv as much as the next guy, but they prefer three kinds of programming, in order: Nancy Grace and her ilk, Game Show reruns, Country Music videos. Travis normally tries to find a way to get me out to go see a park or something around the time I get so restless I can't stand it.
*If my sister-in-law is there, we have to play a game of some sort that she has made up the rules to, and then have awkward conversations.

And that, my friends, is five reasons I am grateful for my husband. In the spirit of bird-killing that goes alongside Thanksgiving, I have successfully killed two birds with one stone -- I have made a list of five things about my husband for which I am grateful, and I have complained about my in-laws.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all!

Journey by Journey

Subtitle: "Don't Stop Believin.'"

Man, I love Glee. I love the music and the silliness and everything.

Most of all, I love how passionate these characters are. How much they believe in the power of what they do. The power of singing, the idea that many voices together can change the world. It makes me feel sad and kind of lost to watch their beautiful, brilliant faith.

I stopped believing in the power of a voice.

Once upon a time, I was accepted to a PhD program. I'm not saying which one (although if you know me, you probably know which one) -- let's just say it's big and mighty and impressive.

And then, I won a scholarship to cover a year's tuition.

And I didn't go.

Going to this school would have meant an insane amount of loans, as they didn't accept my master's degree and could offer no funding other than the scholarship. So I was going to go for six - seven years. And then graduate and go find a job.

Let's talk about my pal Jess for a minute. Jess lives in the same town as me. Jess holds a doctorate. Jess has been unable to find work in her discipline for almost as long as I have lived in this frozen wasteland. Additionally, nobody else wants to hire her -- not to clean houses, not to answer phones, not to work a cash register.

So I probably wouldn't graduate and find a job. No, I would be unemployed and sitting on $250,000 (oh yeah, that's my calculation) worth of student debt. And I would be unemployable just about everywhere else. That was one of my rationalizations.

Rationalization #2: My dad is dying. My mom's a little off her rocker. My grandma's a feisty 85-year old lady, but she can't live forever. They all live in the Southeast, and I want to be able to spend time with them while I can.

So, I rationalized. It was until I was talking with a friend fully 2 years after I resigned from school that I finally admitted that I hadn't gone. I hadn't been able to tell my mentors, because I felt so badly about it. And my friend, who is a wise and good friend, told me that it wasn't the right fit. Which it wasn't, and which I'm coming to terms with.

This blog post, however, is not about th path not taken.

This is about disillusionment and self-worth.

When I was at university, I had Work. No, that's not a typo. I know it's pretentious, but it's how I saw it in my mind's eye. I believed in my Work -- single-mindedly, purposefully. While attempting to continue my Work at this Big Midwest University (BMU, henceforth) I was continually shut down. Classes that would continue the Work were not allowed. Classes that had nothing to do with it were encouraged (and, mind you, I love learning for learning's sake, but not for a quarter of a million dollars and not when I have ALREADY STUDIED THE PELOPONNESIAN WARS. In the original Latin, natch.)

I know this really supports my pal's claim that this program wasn't right for me -- and it's not -- but the denial of my work (I can't keep doing the capital W -- I'm starting to hate myself) was really disheartening. And so, when I didn't go to BMU, I was already feeling poorly -- because what I wanted and needed to do was being marginalized by the machine.

I didn't go get my doctorate, and I couldn't admit it to the women who so encouraged me. I wouldn't have been able to understand it myself -- you got in, why didn't you go? I couldn't really pull myself out of this spiral. I begged anyone and everyone I trusted to make the decision for me. In the end, I had to say no myself and deal with the consequences, far-reaching as they are.

I thought I had healed by the time I was working again. And teaching again. And then I realized last week how bad it all was.

I was watching This Week With Christiane Amanpour, and her panel was discussing the mosque in NYC. While watching it, I discerned that each side is so caught up in anger and righteousness that they now fight only to win. Not to do the right thing, or to educate others, but to be the victor in this fight.

And I didn't care.

I didn't realize how incredible it was that I didn't care -- this would ordinarily, be a key piece in my work -- but lately I've been reconsidering a doctoral program again.

It was immediately distasteful, yet compelling. So much of my own self-image was of myself as a scholar, and I wanted to take up those reins again. But also, I didn't -- because I don't know if I'll survive that kind of heartbreak again. People may hurt you -- everybody acknowledges that. But to damage yourself, even for the right reasons, is a hurt one really cannot prepare for.

I had finally admitted to my mentors that I didn't go to BMU. One of them gently told me to get back on the educational horse. I think she's right, but first I have to recover what it was that I killed two years ago, when I stopped reading literature in my subject, or any literature of protest or self-actualization. I haven't seen a film on my subject in over two years. I don't even listen to my language cds for brush-up. Why?

Because I stopped believing in the power of words to change the world. And that, my friends, is what I could not forgive myself for. But lately, I'm beginning to believe again. And that is precious and hopeful.

Oh, and mosque-debaters? Stop fighting to win and fight for what's right.

Food Is Love

I became a vegetarian this year. Mostly out of rejection for a fast-food culture and a desire to heal my husband's Crohn's disease and my own migraine headaches via the stuff we eat, and also because I am disgusted with Americans' relationships to food. Unfortunately, this has put a deep chink in the relationship I have with my parents.

My mother thinks that in some sense I am rejecting her. I get it. To my mother, food is love.

When I told my mother I was a vegetarian, she became anxious, and immediately began suggesting meat for me to eat.

“Venison is low in fat.”

“Mom, I’m not doing this to lose weight. I’m doing this to be healthier, and because I
don’t want to eat things that suffered for me to eat them.”

“What about chicken? Chicken isn’t meat!” Sometimes my mother doesn’t pay attention in her panic.

“No chicken, mom. I took two cans of chicken over to the food pantry today.”
“But you’ll still eat fish, right?”

“I’ll make it simple. If it can be categorized as ‘dead,’ or if it had to be killed in order for me to eat it, then no – I won’t be eating it anymore. This includes things like fish, meat, poultry, and shellfish. So no shrimp.”

Silence.

My mom doesn’t realize that her panic has less to do with my physical health and more to do with our emotional bond. Jonathan Safran Foer points out that eating is as much of the fabric of culture as anything else – but I’m pretty certain it goes farther than that.

In my family, the only thing that will pull us together is a holiday meal, and sometimes that isn’t even enough. My grandmother’s children fight like pitbulls on PCP, and mostly it is my sister and I who now plan holiday meals and send invitations and attempt to make a cease-fire. I am the preparer of the turkey – although I should now say that I was. My sister and I shoulder(ed) the burden for every holiday meal that was served at my grandmother’s house. My mom may be thinking that I won’t be preparing these feasts anymore – but I simply won’t be preparing the turkey. Let’s face it, it was all I could do to prepare the damn bird anyway – I nearly threw up in the cavity every time I had to stick my arm inside it. Nothing grosses me out more than a giant turkey carcass with its white birdy flesh. I never actually ate much of the stupid turkey, anyway – I was too tired and too disgusted by the time the whole ordeal was over. I had to wait a day or two before I could stand to look at the meat.
Enough on the carcass, back to the family – showing up at the meal means that you accept the love. Because food means love. Provisions are given for those who live far away, but for those within driving distance, it is a denial of emotional bounds, a severing of ties, a denial of love.

I think the idea of food as love in this family originated with my German great-grandmother. She came from pre-Nazi Germany, and while not a Jew, I am certain still suffered from poverty. I’m not trying to minimize, but simply to point out that Germany before the rise of the Third Reich was a bad place for everyone. To leave that kind of extreme situation and come to the bounty of America must have been overwhelming. I get the sense that she spent a long time trying to compensate for the hunger she suffered.

My mother says that she served frosted cinnamon rolls. With butter. In point of fact, she served everything that could be buttered with butter, and some things (like the frosted cinnamon rolls) that you wouldn’t really serve with butter. Butter lived on her table. One of my uncles butters the bread he uses to make tuna salad sandwiches. My mother butters turkey sandwiches she then puts mayonnaise on.

Why all the butter?

It’s a long answer. Let’s put the butter aside for a moment, and talk about emotional eating.

If you think you’re not an emotional eater, I bet you are. If you have a favorite food or foods, or if I can get you to hop in the car with me right now by promising to take you to your favorite restaurant no matter where it is in the contiguous 48 and pay the bill no matter how high it goes, there is, somewhere in you, an emotional tie to food. Chocoholic? Emotional. Coffee addict? Emotional/physical. Ever been “on a diet?” Oh, boy. Denying or restricting in any way is emotional right there.

Now my mom’s family – emotional eaters. They deny it. Two uncles who are obese (one dead, complications from diabetes) one anorexic, one obese mother (heading into morbidity). I’m sure that this seems like a complicated landscape – but we have skipped the generation that will put this picture in focus. The missing fork, as it were.

The lost generation here is my grandparents. My grandmother hates to cook. She doesn’t much care about food, though she does have her preferences, which are mostly convenience foods and Cheetos. She is suspicious of those who do like to cook. I suspect this is a class difference for her – having been raised as a very wealthy young lady and educated, cooking was not something she did but something that was done for her. When she, as a rebellious teenager, eloped with my working-class grandfather, (he of the German mother with the affinity for butter) she found herself attached to a man who expected her to get in the kitchen and make something. Every day. Three times a day. And did not applaud her efforts as superhuman, but instead considered them mundane. This is not a judgment against my grandfather, but rather a statement of fact. I get the sense that his philosophy was that he worked, so he thought she should, as well.

It should go without saying that my sister and I consider(ed) my grandmother a horrible cook. Food was frequently served cold at her house, either oversalted or bland. On one notable occasion, I mistook homemade mashed potatoes for powdered instant potatoes and therefore gagged on the lump I found, which in fact was a large lump of unmashed boiled potato, and not a large lump of congealed flakes, as I originally thought. Since food = love, you can probably understand from this metaphor that my grandmother was not a demonstrably affectionate woman. As her children were looking for affection and warmth, they of course went to the maternal arms of their grandmother, who fed them emotionally and physically. Often at the same time.

Now, I’m not faulting my grandmother here – I would have resented my kitchen as well; much the same way that I resented my cell phone when I had a boss who rang it incessantly. In point of fact, she often jokes that she only has a kitchen “because it comes with the house.”

To this day, my grandmother’s children are food-reward trained. They feel justified in giving themselves ice cream for good deeds, behavior – even a good workout. They’ve passed it on to their children, who use a particularly strenuous workout as an excuse to go out for pizza. But with this comes a particular self-loathing, along with a certain cognitive dissonance and blindness – all of which comes down to one simple equation: If food is love, this love will kill you.

Thou shalt not google.

I was originally planning to write a list of "Ten Commandments For When You Are A Broken Typewriter," but they all boiled down to the above: THOU SHALT NOT GOOGLE. Google can only hurt you in these instances. And as the daughter of a hypochondriac and a medical-procedure addict, I've always tried to keep self-diagnosis to a minimum. I like to roll in to a doctor's office, list off my symptoms, and let them tell me what it is.*

Unfortunately, my situation of the last few months has made me opt to throw my normal rules, for the most part, out the window. Googling will only do two things:

1. It will keep hope alive.
2. It will terrify you even more.

What is below is an abbreviated stream-of-consciousness googlefest.

1. I googled my symptoms via WebMD (and this was suggested by my enabler husband. I was pregnant! Hope lives! Then, negative blood test results come in. Hope dies.

2. I googled PCOS. Symptoms list: Cystic ovaries, obesity, marked hairiness. Now, I defy anyone to find a woman who doesn't think she's fatter than she should be and also hairier than she should be, but this is not helpful. I pictured myself in three years as a cross between a Wookie and Jabba the Hut. I am too vain for this, and begin researching electrolysis and lipo. Also, since these are really areas along a spectrum, isn't it possible I'm already hairy and growing stout? I mean, if I was hairy I wouldn't tell anyone about it. Except my husband, from whom I have extracted a promise to have someone come in and tweeze me every week if I'm ever incapacitated.

3. I googled thyroid problems. I'll never be the lucky bitch with a thyroid problem who continually loses weight,** I'll only be the fat one with ADD and tingly hands. Fortunately, I won't be hairy.

4. Cannot look at the dark side of the coin anymore. Begin googling "pregnancy" and "negative blood tests." Find a chat room in which somebody has posted that they had negative blood tests and now have a kid. Hope has a faint pulse.

5. Discover other nasty things to read about on google, like "miscarriage" and "ectopic pregnancy." Alternate between sad and scared. I mean, Christina Yang from Grey's Anatomy almost DIED from an ectopic pregnancy.

6. Repeat 1-5. A couple of times. And by "couple of times" I mean "couple hundred times."

7. Discover am definitely not pregnant. Fall into funk. Wonder if I'll be lovable once I only speak in honks and have a chick in a bikini chained to me. Although why I'd want to look at some skinny bitch is beyond me.

8. Receive email from friend who points out that you only get fat and hairy if you are already fat and hairy, leading me to think that it's less a symptom and more a cause. Consider writing letter to WebMD and every other medical site protesting. Realize it's not only futile, but that I really only did it to myself.

*Hilarious side story: Once, in the throes of agony due to sinus infection over the hoildays, I went to the emergency room. I told the doctor that I was feeling pain and pressure in my upper jaw and that it was pain similar to the last time I had a sinus infection. He looked at me and asked, "What do you want me to do?" I want you to make the pain stop and the infection go away, Buddy. What, you thought I came here to tell you that and now I'm ready to leave?

**I'm not minimizing thyroid problems here, folks. I'm only relating my complete and total shallow reactions that are totally looks-based. Because that's how I roll.

Not The Mama/The Electric Kool-Aid Baby Test

Sometimes, when we are not brave, we have to borrow a little courage. I usually try to borrow it from my friends, but sometimes I borrow it from complete strangers. In this case, I'm borrowing from the cojones of The Sassy Curmudgeon, whose blog I have stalked read voraciously for the past few months.

She hit a chord when she posted about truth in blogging, which engaged me in an internal debate about how much I wanted to share (I'm mostly anonymous except for the people who know me personally, and since I actually don't resemble a cupcake you wouldn't know me on the street; I started this blog to write, and I am not writing because it's all too much to put OUT THERE; what if someone figures out who I am? Well, let's face it, I probably wouldn't say it at a dinner party, but if you and I had been having coffee for a couple of hours I would have totally told you because everything falls out of my mouth; I hate whiny blogs, but I did make a vow to tell the Truth recently . . . .)

And today she told the truth about not being a mama. And I'm not a mama either. And I feel as though I can be brave because this woman who writes a blog I like and admire could tell the truth. Because what I didn't perhaps get to in the last post was that the truth is messy and unpleasant.

I haven't seen my good friend Aunt Flo in over 85 days. And no, I'm not pregnant. I will tell you that the pregnancy machine that makes home tests et al is an evil machine which likes to continually tell you that the test is probably wrong, and you may be pregnant. But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself here -- you see, I've been a little bit pregnant from June until last Friday, and I've been freaking out for most of that. My sister and I decided that this was a giant worldwide conspiracy involving EPT, and my doctor’s office.

Evolution of the Conspiracy:
January-ish – Pull the goalie. Try to monitor cycles to figure out when to do what.
June 26 – go visit my in-laws
June 30 – four weeks since last cycle. Home from in-law visit, go to bar to unwind from trip. Drink myself into oblivion, aided by husband’s BRILLIANT idea that I should give myself a margarita for every day I spent at the in-laws, as a reward.
July 1 – Hangover.
July 2 – Realize that my cycle should be coming in the next week. Immediately become moody.
July 3 (or thereabouts) – go tie another one on to get to my “one margarita per day spent with in-laws” requirement, because while it was only six days I am a freaking lightweight.
July 4 – Hangover. All I want to eat is chocolate-covered pretzels. So I make them and devour them in front of the TV. Husband tries not to be disgusted by my behavior.
July 10, or thereabouts – Extreme fatigue. My days go a little something like this: Get up, dress in workout wear, plan to run and then clean and apply for jobs. Sit on couch to watch Regis and Kelly. Take a nap. Watch CSI. Nap some more. Move to bedroom. Nap again. Now it’s 4:00 and I take a shower and put on pajamas. This continues until late July.
July 16 – Get a little worried. Buy a stick, pee on it, and celebrate its negativity with a half a bottle of wine.
July 20 – I can no longer button my pants. This is weird, because they are only tight around my middle. Buy fat pants, which are waaay loose in the leg and butt but I can button without feeling like I’m being sawed in half. Also, now have to pee every twenty minutes and am having periods of dizziness. Begin googling “pregnancy” and “negative home pregnancy test.”
July 23 – Get a little worried. Buy a stick, pee on it, and celebrate its negativity with a half a bottle of wine.
July 25 – Repeat
July 25 – Freak out. Call doctor. Schedule blood test. Also negative. Celebrate with wine.
July 29 – Travel to VA to help with sister’s move. She suspects something’s up and tries to out me by asking me to go get margaritas. I go ahead and tell her what’s going on, and she tells me about the time that all the home pregnancy tests she took were negative too. In related news, my niece is now five. I freak the fuck out.
August 7 – I buy another stick and pee on it. Negative. But I no longer trust the damn things. Am still battling afternoon fatigue. No pants fit. Look markedly pregnant in form-fitting clothing, and am scrambling to find things that help me hide it, because while it’s cool when you are pregnant to tell people who figure it out, it’s uncool to have to explain the whole thing to people, who then get confused and treat you like that crazy woman with an hysterical pregnancy from Glee.
August 13 – Return home, call nurse practitioner. Beat myself up for the margaritas, wine, and painkillers.
August 16 – Fat pants no longer fit. Am of two minds – if I’m pregnant, FABULOUS! Time for new clothes! If I’m not, I am a disgusting fat pig.
August 18 – See nurse practitioner. She asks for date of LMP and then we have the following conversation:

NP: So you’re thinking pregnancy?
Me: No. I’ve had several negative home tests, and a negative blood, so I doubt it.
However, my sister also had several negative home tests although the blood came back positive, and my niece is now five.
NP: Well, let’s get you another blood test today, and I’m going to wheel in the ultrasound machine to look at your baby!
Me: Great!
NP: This could also be a thyroid problem or PCOS, but I doubt it because this is the first occurrence of symptoms. I’m thinking pregnancy. Now, I’m not an ultrasound tech, so if we don’t see a fetus it doesn’t mean there’s not one. I want you to continue as pregnant until we have an answer for you.

Okay, I’ve just stopped drinking the Kool-Aid. And now my NP is drinking it, and apparently I still should be, based on her enthusiasm. So I go with it. I’m a little bit pregnant.

As you’ve probably guessed, after twenty minutes of having a probe pressed uncomfortably on my abdomen while I stared at the ceiling tiles and tried not to pee, nothing was seen. NP continues to be upbeat and positive about “my pregnancy.” I go purchase a Bella band so I can wear my pants and begin nesting.

August 19: Blood test that day was negative. Am disgusting fat pig who is retaining water.
August 20: Begin googling “PCOS” (ACK! Will become fat and hairy!) and “low HCG levels, pregnancy symptoms” (these results can be really horrible – ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, etc.) and “thyroid problems.” Cry in shower. Feel like less of a woman. Apologize to dead or mythical baby.
August 23: Trans-vaginal ultrasound. It is as much fun as it sounds. My husband looked like he was really trying to sink into the floor. I knew as soon as my uterus flashed on the screen that I really wasn’t pregnant. Have blood taken to check for thyroid problems. Receive call from NP to tell me that I am not pregnant, I have no thyroid problems, and both ovaries have cysts. (ACK! Will become fat and hairy!) NP prescribes hormones to jump-start things, and refers me to an infertility specialist. Now I am a fat hairy woman who cannot have babies.
August 24: Start hormones. Hate them already. Am headachy and moody, but am less swollen – successfully buttoned and zipped fat pants and wore them for most of the day without cursing the day they were created.

Which brings us to today. I’m awaiting a call from my infertility specialist, and wondering how much of this I want to do. I mean, I want to be a mom, but I don’t know how much in the way of interventions I feel comfortable with. And where do I draw the line?

So yet again I've told you the Truth. It was, as I acknowledged in my last post, exceptionally brutal. All bad jokes are my attempt to deflect, and should not be taken as proof of a bad sense of humor.

And for the Baby, when it comes -- know that this experience let me know how much I want you. Till then.

Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth/Liars prosper*

The truth: we say we want it, but we hate it when it's there. The truth hurts, you know. People who are brutally honest are also, well, brutal. Honesty is supposed to be the best policy. But no one wants to be friends with a liar. So what makes a good friend? A policy of appeasement or a friend who can and does tell you the truth?

Look, I've been on both sides of both sides of this -- I've been mad when someone told me a truth I wasn't ready to hear. I've also been grateful to those who told me the truth. I’ve been the truth-teller, and also the appeaser. But let’s face it, both are dangerous positions to take. Europe’s policy of appeasement really didn’t work with Hitler; and being honest didn’t work so well for Galileo and Darwin and, depending on your world view, Jesus.

Maybe we should rewrite the platitudes about truth above.

I've been both a bringer of Truth and a teller of the lies people want to hear, too. But lately, I grow tired of being wishy-washy, which is what it all boils down to when you take my amazing capacity to be a human band-aid and mix it in with my tendency to be a people-pleaser and my ability to read individuals and situations fast and quickly. My childhood was rough, but at least I learned to be a human gauge.

But events of the past week have taught me that my policy of being pleasing and trying to be what a person needs at the moment that they need it is exhausting and stressful for me, and really not the best way to keep relationships going. It’s also probably not me being a good friend, since sycophants are rarely respected people of integrity.

This all came to a head last night, when I was talking to my friend, whom I'll call Jane. She's been having some problems with her baby-daddy, whom I'll call Dick. Dick Head.

Dick's been a real jerk for a while, but lately has threatened to (a) abdicate all parental rights, (b) sue for sole custody, and (c) kill himself.

I thought about it, and then I decided to tell her the truth, as I saw it: (a) this man is unstable and quite possibly has a personality disorder, (b) he's not good for her or the baby, and (c) she is enabling his behavior by allowing him to emotionally batter and manipulate her.

For the most part, she deflected and tried to excuse his behavior. When she ran out of excuses, she yelled at me for not understanding, because I'm "rich.**"

During the course of our conversation, Jane expressed anger and resentment at Dick, at me, and at her other friends, who give her conflicting advice (like she should marry him.) I feel for my friend. But I wonder if I'm good for her, or she for me. I feel like I'm often there to listen, or to rescue, or both -- and I'm growing uncomfortable in that role.

So, back to friendships in general. What makes a good friend? I started a list, but it ends up reading like a list of things that make a good marriage, which in the end makes a ton of sense. Except that most good marriages start with some discussions about these things, and then you take a vow to love and honor (respect) and cherish (appreciate) each other, so it’s formal. Maybe we ought to have friendship ceremonies.

To Be a Friend, You Must First Be One***
1. Good friends respect each other, intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
2. Good friends, for the most part, offer support for each other in crisis or hard times.
3. Good friends make it possible to enjoy time with them.
4. Good friends tell you the truth, whether it is that you have spinach in your teeth or are wearing the wrong color lipstick or have managed to entangle you in a relationship with a toxic human being.
5. Good friends accept the counsel of the friends they have chosen, and if they disagree, can calmly discuss the situation, because they understand that the advice comes from a place of great love.
6. Good friends understand that emotional crises may dictate that number 5 be temporarily suspended due to extreme duress.

Honesty seems to be the most important underlying concept here.

It’s also the hardest. It’s easy to love someone, but hard to be honest about the relationship, especially to yourself. But as marriages take hard work, so do friendships. Because in order for me to have a friend, I have to be one, right? So I’ve got to be the sort of pal I would want – a person with integrity and wisdom who will tell the truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. Truth that hurts more deeply than a manipulative and evil-intentioned lie. Brutal enough to make you bleed. Honesty, after all, is the best policy, although it is also the hardest and more painful.

So, folks, be prepared. I’m going to have to tell you the truth from here on out.

And, Jane? Dick is bad for you. Very, very bad. Take Spot and run.

*These are quotes from the frontispiece of a Stephen King novel. I can't remember who originally wrote them, nor can I remember what King novel. I may remember to look it up later. I may forget. Either way, I am trying to give credit where it's due.
**Gentle readers, I can assure you that I am not rich. I am a woman who graduated with a degree in English who is married to a man with a degree in English. You do the math.

***My mom embroidered this on a pillow for me when I was a kid. I’ve always tried to be the friend I wanted to have.

Lonely nerd seeks same.

I'm having a hard time making friends in Wisconsin. Now, I'm not necessarily the most gregarious person, but I'm nice and fun and a good listener and a weirdly obnoxious know-it-all who can tell you which direction your ceiling fans should go, and why the "white only between Memorial Day and Labor Day" rule came about. Also, I will tell you if you have spinach in your teeth, and as my friend Kim once said, "She's the kind of girl you want to go out and party with. She'll be fun while you're out and she can still put it together to get you back to your place safe."

Here's my problem: Midwesterners are friendly. They will talk to you as long as you want to talk. I like friendly people and I think it's cool that the folks in the Midwest, largely, are friendly. But I come from the South, where people are polite. They will only be friendly to you when they want to be friends.

So while I've been learning the language and am becoming proficient (eh?) I'm still learning the unspoken language. I guess it's why I now find myself in a mysterious limbo between "insider" and "outsider."

Except that I'm not colonizing the Midwest. I'm just trying to find some like-minded chicks.

In which I change the way I blog.

Folks, if you love it, you love it, but the truth is that I’m going to change the focus of this blog. I started it as an experiment to see if I liked travel writing. While I like it, I’m not a fan of so severely limiting what I write; so while I’ll post my ruminations on being a Midwestern Magnolia, I’m going to have to open this up to more than it is. Mostly, this is happening because stuff I want to write about is bigger than this blog’s boundaries – and since I made those boundaries, I’m re-drawing them.

This blog has now been rezoned.

I love my civil rights.

I particularly love that I can be tried in a court where the language used is one I know. I'm glad that I can't be convicted because a majority of judges "knows in his heart" that I am guilty.

Let's all be glad of these things. And let's publicize Sakineh Ashtiani's terrible sentence. Apparently, the only hope she has left is for the world to stand and say "no."

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/07/01/iran.stoning/index.html

The Reticent Blogger Returns!

I have been the worst slacker recently. The. Worst. All's I can say is, well, sometimes things just get busy. And it's easy to let your blog fall by the wayside. Apologies, etc.

That said, it is now time to tell you about my hands-down favorite place in Wisconsin -- Door County.

If I had been to Door earlier in my sojourn here, I might have held off on wanting to leave so badly for another six months to a year. For a vacation destination, it's surprisingly uncommercial. Most of the hotels/inns/b&bs/
restaurants/shops/things to do were locally owned independent businesses, which is so awesome.

There was so much to do. There are used bookshops, which I love and cannot resist. There's shopping which is not your usual tourist-trap shopping (you know, 15 stores which all stock the same shot glasses and t-shirts and hats -- there was some of that merch, but it wasn't all there was.) There was totally awesome food (which, notably, had a lot of healthy and vegetarian options, which really isn't easy to do where we live -- if you don't want Indian food or pasta, you're eating at home.)

This is my Chubby Bunny Sundae.
While not healthy, it is vegetarian. And adorable.
They made use of local ingredients -- lots of cherries and apples and delicious whole grains. Sidenote: I am in love with a new food our innkeeper called "fruit soup." Right now typing about it it's all I want for breakfast. He served it with homemade granola and I am not kidding when I say that if it's not served in heaven I may not go.
Everything was about the area without what you normally see -- emblazoning the name on stuff you can find everywhere. So much of what we looked at and ate had a lot of personality, was a little (or a lot) quirky, and was homemade.

Like my homemade Door County candy bar that I wolfed down like a starving orphan while watching Chelsea Lately in our room while my husband slept off the 6-mile bike ride.

Oh, yeah -- there's an awesome state park on the lake, which we rode through. And the next day, drove through, because it's pretty big and much of it's uphill and we wanted to see more water and less trees.

Bob Ross painted this photo.
At a scenic overlook, my husband and I watched a couple get engaged. I may have forgotten to tell you in this stream-of-conscious early morning rambling that we were celebrating our anniversary this weekend. So it was both beautiful and humbling to see love continue to grow in the world -- and to be reminded of that first excitement of engagement.

Yes, it is that serene. And pretty.

Biker Chick

I know. I stink. I abandoned the blog. In my defense, it's been abnormally pretty here -- sunny during the day, warm-ish. Temps hover around 70 for a high, which locals call "summer" and "hot." It's not hot until it's over 85 for me, so while the rest of the world runs around in tank tops and shorts, I'm the one in the long-sleeved t-shirt, capris, and sweater.

That said, I've been enjoying my time outdoors. T and I bought bikes, and I now enjoy biking on the trail near our house (which has rabbits! and turtles! and jumping fish! oh my!) and in the cemetery off the trail. The cemetery is quiet and serene and a good place for thinking. The trail goes places and makes me feel like a badass bicyclist. Go me.

Now, the cemetery is interesting for a few reasons. It's home to folks with names such as "Lust," and "Anger," and "Faust," leading me to call it "The Seven Deadly Sins" cemetery, which I find hilarious because it's a Roman Catholic cemetery.

It also contains a very unusual headstone:

Do you see what I see, or do I just have a dirty mind?

Spring giveth, Spring taketh away

This is uncool.

It is also much melted from this morning, when it covered everything and was about 2 inches or so.

That's right. Snow in April.

And I might add, we had been enjoying wonderful temperatures and sunshine, unseasonable for this time of year. So now we are balanced.

On another note, we are still recovering from what my dad calls "The Crud." I'm 11 days into it and slowly mending.

My husband is 4 days into it and is already almost well. I am jealous, even though I am Patient A. Or X, depending on how you like to label the Infectors.

The Great Mysteries of Wisconsin

Yes, well, I'm sorry to keep teasing you three, but the truth is that I have succumbed to the ick. It was all I could do today to go eat pizza with T and then go dig through the Jansport factory store's t-shirts to locate the Kentucky Wildcats shirt I am currently wearing during the KY/WV game. I'm putting the wicked cool field trips off again.

But as we were driving up the highway, I saw the Big Yellow Mystery Trashcans on the side of the highway, and I asked my husband for what probably is the 97th time: "Hey, what's in those Big Yellow Mystery Trashcans?"

He doesn't know. He's never known, and yet he always tells me it's a great question.

I would have taken a picture, but at 65 miles per hour I can't really get it out of my bag fast enough.

But I see them a lot of places -- a bunch (10-12) of BYMT under an overpass, or near an exit sign. Black tops, yellow bodies. I have no idea what's in there.

It seems like everywhere I live, there are Great Mysteries. Normally they're nothing on the level of Nancy Drew -- for instance, when I lived in New York the Great Mysteries were: (1) where does our boss, Joanne, go everyday for 1.5-2 hours? and (2) Where is Mr. P, Joanne's boss, from? (Mr. P., by the way, was very cool. He wore seersucker suits and was frightfully tan and had the coolest accent, which none of us could place. Turns out he was from Argentina.) On my last day there, (I remember it like it was yesterday) someone asked Joanne if she was headed out that day, and she said, "No, I don't think I'm going to work out today." It was like the lights burned brighter. I looked across my desk at my pal George, who was looking at me across his desk, and at the same time we both mouthed, "SHE GOES TO WORK OUT!"

So I have identified the great mysteries of Wisconsin, as determined by T. and I on the way home:

1. What's in the BYMT? What are they FOR?
2. What is a supper club? They're everywhere.
3. Where does the snow go? (This is not a question a four-year-old would ask. In our first apartment, they would plow the parking lot, put all the snow in a dump truck, and drive it away. I would like to know where it goes. Nobody can tell me.)

Leon's And The Fame Monster

Ah, the best-laid plans of mice and men, or in this case women, have gone awry. I’ve planned two field trips over the past week to give me something new to write about, and neither panned out – during the first, it rained. During the second, the place was closed. Repeats planned.

Until I have new stuff, I will continue with the old.

Until then, I give you the best place for frozen custard I’ve ever encountered. So good, that the devil George Bush drove completely out of his way to eat this custard once when he was in Wisconsin.

They also know exactly what they want from their employees:

Curds and Weigh

Today we were going to talk about sausages, but I got a little sidetracked. I was tagged on Facebook by a friend of mine with one of those quiz doodads, which reminds me, I need to post that later today. This internet outage has really done a number on my internet-social life. Anyway, one of the questions had to do with my favorite fast-food restaurant. Since I stopped eating dead things, that pretty much put the kibosh on fast food with the exception of one. We eat there because I can’t give up on frozen custard (more on frozen custard later) and crinkle fries that are rarely icky and cold. Since it seems to be a Midwestern mecca, I felt this was a good place to mention it – Culver’s. (Culver's if you're watching, I have three followers. You may now send me a check for tens of pennies for all the business I've thrown your way.)

Culver’s has some pretty awesome fast-food. It’s hard to call it “fast” since you order it, they give you a number, they cook it, and then they bring it to you (one of their big advertising slogans has to do with the “never under the lights” deal) and I have to admit that it’s pretty good. You can order whatever you want on your sandwich (extra pickles on your chicken sandwich? NBD) and they serve the aforementioned crinkle fries and frozen custard [chocolate, vanilla, and a flavor of the day (Heath bar crunch! Snickers Surprise! Oreo Cookie Explosion!)] with a bunch of toppings. They also serve fried cheese curds.

Now, I separate cheese curds into two varieties: cooked and uncooked. Both of these were described to me by the same coworker, whom I took aside one day and asked, “D__, what are cheese curds?”

I like this woman for many reasons. Chief among them is that she doesn’t care if you ask a question like that. Once, I asked a guy operating as cart in New York what a “knish” was, and he looked at me like I was crazy or stupid or both. And then he answered in one word: “Potato.”

So I ordered one. And I received something that in no way resembled a potato. Until I ate it, and then I understood what he was talking about, and I did not deserve the "crazy-or-stupid" look. It didn't look like "potato."

Pardon the digression. Back to le fromage. So, according to D., cheese curds can be eaten uncooked, but are best “very fresh,” so they squeak against your teeth.

So cool. I love foods that come with activity. Unfortunately, every time I go to the store to purchase them, they look like brains in a bag. I can’t get over the visual. I’m sure they’re delicious, but I can’t get over the brain-cheese.

And fried cheese curds? Well, those are curds that have been battered and deep-fried.

Honey, I’m sold. I’ve been to the North Carolina State Fair, where someone dared me to eat an ostrich burger. They will deep-fry you an Oreo cookie, a Snickers bar, or a Twinkie (or hell, if you want to go into insulin shock, all three) at that fair, and if that’s not fatty enough for you, they will probably put some butter on them. Fried cheese curds, I find, you can get at the Wisconsin State Fair or at Culver’s. I buy mine at Culver’s (I’m not waiting around for the next state fair) and they really are everything she promised.

So I go back to D. and tell her that we are going to be millionaires. If we sold these little bits of fried cheese goodness in the South, I tell her, with some real Wisconsin brats (sausages, not small obnoxious children), we would make a killing.

She looks doubtfully at me.

“D. listen," I say. "The South? Home of onion rings and barbecue? Deep fried everything? The only place the Monte Cristo sandwich is ever ordered, with a side of fries? We’re talking about deep-fried cheese and sausages.

We’re going to be wealthier than Bill Gates.

Of course, we’re going to be responsible for a hell of a lot of heart disease, because of all the weight we’re going to be responsible for.”

I should know. It took a while to lose the curd-weight for my wedding.

First Day of Spring!

No, I didn't forget you.
The internet has been out here in the apartment complex, and so I have been using my computer for what it was really intended: Minesweeper.

I’ve played 133 games, and won 3.

In short, oh internet, how I have missed you.

But back to our Purpose (yes, let me be a little overinflated.) This past week, temperatures rose . . . and it was sunny . . . and beautiful.

This weekend we went outside, to a park by a lake. I don’t mind telling you that it was windy (not anywhere in the vicinity of breezy) and at 53 degrees not exactly warm. But when it has been dreary and snowy for so long, any excuse to get out will do. So we went to a local park, where we saw many joggers, and walkers, and people walking their babies in shorts (!!! Shorts?!?!? Jesus, lady, I'm in a coat and freezing!)

The lake itself is partly thawed, which you can kind of see in the crappy photo I took with my phone. Not that it froze all the way, this year -- T. and I have often wondered why you would ride your snowmobile over the lake (seems dangerous, but it is the thing to do in the winter here, along with killing a deer and digging a hole in the frozen lake and fishing, also dangerous activities, and also undertaken with a case of beer.) I'll give you my analysis of the three activities: I like beer.* Anyways, since snowmobiling over the lake is the thing to do here, quite a few people fell in. Here's my advice to anyone considering a snowmobile trip at dusk after a few cold ones: bad call. In fact, don't snowmobile at all.

But here, the sun has been shining lately, and shining well past six o'clock (in the dead of winter, it goes down around four here) and T. surprised me with some lovely daffodils last week. Now, this state has kicked me in the teeth quite a bit with its winter, which gets its claws in you and doesn't want to let go, but I think it's spring. I've gone ahead and cleaned my winter boots for storage.

*I have never shot a deer. Also, though not for lack of trying in my youth, I have never caught a fish. I now regard both activities as bad business. Turns out you can drink a beer without a gun or a fishing pole. Or a snowmobile.

Learning to speak Wisconsin

The first thing you learn when you move to a new place is that while you may think that most people in the United States all speak the same English, you are dead wrong. I was born and raised in the American south by a northern mother. I was educated, for the most part, in North Carolina, where I learned that people can be suspicious of those not from the south. I adapted by adopting a bit of an accent and learned to say things like "bless your heart." But most of the time I understood what people were saying to me.

That is, until I moved to Wisconsin, where for a while I assumed that some people used a bit of pidgin German.

"Do you want this in a bayg?"
"Excuse me?"
Person holds up a bag.
"Oh, you mean a BAG."

Person looks at me like I'm stupid. I explain I'm from the south. What I don't say is that in the south, some people may add an extra syllable to "pen," but we don't add a "y" to bag so it now rhymes with "vague." Also, we understand that you don't know what we're talking about half the time, but we like to use props. That's why we hold up the pen.

I just read that part back and realized it sounded snarky. I didn't mean for it to sound snarky. Really, once I stopped being confused I found it kind of charming. I used to work in a store, and I pronounced "bag" somewhere in between "bag" and "bague," so as not to confuse people. I thought of it kind of like learning to speak Wisconsin. Once.

That's another bit of Wisconsin lingo. You do something once, even if you're going to do it more that once. "Let's go look at the brown shoes once." I don't know why. It's just kind of . . . musical.

But after walking around for a little while feeling like an outsider, I embraced it. Part of it had to do with the Sausage Guy (and no, it's not dirty, and yes, it's another post) and another part of it had to do with enjoying the little bit of Americana I was really getting to see. I was never going to be a native Wisconsiner (Wisconsonite? Wisco?) but I could always just enjoy being transplanted.

For now.