''Just say the word and tell me that I'm forgiven''

Alright FF, if yesterday's happy song jerked your tears, I can make no guarantees about today's sad song. I promise that one of these meme categories will soon provide me with a funny, upbeat memory, but not today I'm afraid.

Day 4: A song that makes you sad: Never Gonna Let You Go by Sergio Mendes

I remember the day we went to pick up my mom's ''new'' little red Camaro. She had pointed out several times on the street what kind of car she was getting but she always pointed out one that was shiny and new. "See that one right there? That's a Camaro. That's the kind of car mommy's getting. A red one.''

I was surprised at the used car dealership at how chipped the paint was, how the interior smelled like an old ashtray, how the visors hung badly, and how the stuffing was coming out probably through a cigarette burn in the dark upholstery that was stained with unidentifiable liquids. I touched the car while I peered inside the window and quickly withdrew my hand. It was summertime in Mesa, Arizona, the air was thick and dry and almost burned your lungs going in, and you could easily fry an egg on the hood of that car.

Mom was starting over. My dad, far away in Albuquerque, was no longer holding her back and neither were we: me age 7, the Huta kid age 4, and the Chulster age 8.

Mom had a new job working on the assembly line at Motorola. That and the dealing of weed to a few friends and relatives paid the bills and allowed her to spoil us just enough when we visited her. It paid for her new apartment.

That apartment. It was a tiny duplex on a corner near a car wash with a tree that was good for climbing and oleander bushes that filled with bees. Most of the neighbors had covered their windows in tin foil to reflect the sun out. There were no garages on our block, just carports filled with junk and yards with grass that was yellowed and dried and patched with dirt.

You would never guess by looking at the inside of her place that it was just on the border of the projects, that most of the neighbors on our street were on welfare. Inside the apartment was a twenty-something single woman's oasis of independence, a hideaway where she could reinvent herself in a world unhindered.

She had painstakingly decorated the place in her hip, youthful 80s way. Everything about it was a statement of creativity. Restaurant menus she had nicked and hung up carefully on the dining area wall every which way seemed the epitome of funky and fun. Her bedroom was a den of seduction where she had hung Chinese umbrellas upside down over her bed, covering the light and creating an aura. On top of her dresser she had her own swiveling earring rack filled with big cheap earrings, just like the ones in shops that I loved to spin round and round until I was told to stop. She had covered a lamp in a romantic black mesh which was surely meant to kindle something I knew that I didn't know much about. Her negligees hung from the expensive kind of silk padded hangers, not the wire ones that tangled themselves up on the closet floor impossibly at my dad's place in a mess of dirty laundry and shoes. Those negligees probably fit her nicely now with her new boobs. Her designer friends she met in her photography classes came over and as they listened to my mom's Sade album on the record player, in their cracked voices of holding in a drag from a joint held tightly by a roach clip, they would comment on how creative my mom was and how great her apartment was and how happy they were for her. She must have lay in bed alongside my dad and dreamt for months about how she would decorate her own place once she got away from him and his grandmother's hand-me-downs that filled their joyless home.

But back to the little red Camaro. That car, like the apartment, represented a break from the prison of family life or the prison of my dad, from the ugly long brown family car he had humbly accepted when his grandmother passed, since he was worse off than any of his eight siblings. This was supposed to be a happy day for her, a day of confirmation that everything was going better for her now.

We stood around restless while my mom closed the deal: Chulster, with her signature summer sun scowl and her orange popcycle stained lips, the Huta kid covered in a layer of sweat and grime, with her golden baby curls and pouty red lips, and me, with my stringy thin braids going down the sides of a face over-populated by wreckless freckles.

She paid for the car in cash, shook the dealer's hand, and her three little sweaty girls crammed themselves into the tiny hot Camaro that now had her name on the title. The hairs near our ears curled from the heat and our faces flushed and as she reached over the front seat to roll down the passenger side window, she warned us not to touch the metal trim on the windows because it would burn us. She awkwardly put the keys in the ignition, not used to exactly where it was. The engine started up and we were off. Mom could now tick off another item on her to-do list for making a new life.

The hot breeze gushing into the non-air conditioned car was welcomed with relief and she turned on the radio. ''I was as wrong as I could be, to let you get away from me, I'll regret that move, for as long as I'm living..."

''Mom?'' the Huta kid asked. She scooted her tiny body up to the edge of the hot red velour seat. ''Mommy?''

''Shhhh!'' the Chulster turned around from the front seat and hissed angrily. ''Mom's sad.''

''I'm never gonna let you go, I'm gonna hold you in my arms forever, gonna try to make up for the time I hurt you so…''

I could see the back side of my mom's profile and could tell her cheeks were wet. She switched lanes furiously while wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

''Mommy?'', the Huta insisted in a worried small voice. ''Mommy, ARE YOU CRYING, MOMMY?''

''But if there's some feeling left in you, some flicker of love that still shines through, let's talk about, let's talk about second chances…''

''Mommy is this the 'Never Gonna Let You Go' song?'' Huta urgently needed to know while tapping on my mom's shoulder.

''Yeah honey, it is.''

''Does it make you sad, Mommy?''

''Yeah honey, it does''.

''Is that why you're crying, Mommy?''

''Yeah.''

Huta looked around at the three of our tear streaked faces and confirmed, ''Me too. I'm sad too, Mommy.'' She looked down and her bright red lower lip protruded outward and then she proceeded to carefully examine the rest of us for clues on how to be sad from a song. ''Never gonna let you go...'', Huta belted out in her tiny voice, to sing along with the rest of us who were singing it softly under our breaths.

I was heartbroken because even at 7 years old I knew the song was a lie. She was letting go, of him and of us, she was only going to hold us in her arms while we were here visiting from Albuquerque, not forever, like the song said. There was no flicker of love that still shone through and there were no second chances and she didn't have any regrets like the guy singing did, otherwise we would all be together again with Dad. So why was she crying? Because she wished she felt like the guy and girl singing? Did she wish that for our sake she didn't need to face life as a huntress just one last time?

From time to time I'll be at a the mall or in the grocery store and I'll hear this song on the musac and there is no amount of time that can pass between my seven year old self and my adulthood to make me not feel as confused as my sisters and I did that day in my mom's little red Camaro.

StumbleIt

I've got one hand in my pocket and the other one is smashing my neighbor's stereo

So, you guys didn't really believe it was going to be 30 songs in 30 consecutive days, did you? Come on, cut me some slack - I can barely remember how to type a sentence.

Day 2: Your least favorite song


1995 was not a good year for me.

I graduated from high school in spring and was due to start college in the fall. I didn't know why I wanted to go to college. I only knew that it sounded slightly better than working at Dairy Queen and I had heard that this was what successful people did, so I went with it. I had no real aspirations of what to study and minimal interest in anything other than trying to look cool and listen to music that I though affiliated me with cool. The more obscure the band, the more attractive I thought I became to people with this particular brand of cool, but the shit couldn't be too obscure, otherwise I would lose touch with the whole coolness barometer altogether. By the time I graduated from high school I had a good, trained grasp of the fact that anything liked by the masses, with a few exceptions, was automatically suspect, even though I knew very little about what really made music good.

I was heading to a state school. My parents had lacked the cultural capital required to know what went in to exploring a college education for their kids. There were no trips to the nearby PAC-10 schools or out east for interviews or campus visits. I was never encouraged to do things that might look good on a college application. My parents didn't know the first thing about looking into scholarship options. The only time I ever remember my mother talking to me about college was to say that her dream for me was to go off to college and marry an older boy that was about to graduate which would apparently secure me a worry-free future sustained by a college boy salary. Great vote of confidence to get me started at college, eh?

I thumbed through the housing options catalogs and was sold on the idea of 'getting the most out of an authentic college life experience' where I would have an 'important networking opportunity' and would likely establish relationships that would be memorable to me throughout my life.

This was a golden opportunity to try out new versions of myself. I had a clean slate and was heretofore unpigeonholed. I could change my hair, my clothes, my interests, and my taste in music. I could redefine the coolness barometer altogether to fit with the real me. The trouble was, I wasn't comfortable enough with myself to determine what it was I really liked and felt lost without a reference to see how I measured up. I looked around me and was overwhelmed with trying to determine where I belonged.

In high school I had barely been within the margins of the cool crowd. I didn't get asked on dates or to dances a lot, but I got invited to parties and was generally good at tethering myself to people that were well accepted. I was carefully perceptive about what kind of belts were being worn at the time, just how worn my levies should be, and the minimum acceptable number of earring holes required to be part of the crowd. So even though I was a few notches down on the pretty scale compared to the girls I most admired, I fit in with the scenery and didn't draw too much attention to the fact that I had no business being there or anywhere really.

But in the college dorm environment, I couldn't clearly identify the alternatively cool anti-mainstream crowd I had elbowed my way into in high school and I was suddenly surrounded by hundreds of stunningly beautiful, rich women in their prime that were rushing for sororities, whose parents had shipped them off to sunny Arizona from the east coast. I looked around and knew that being on the margins of cool wasn't going to cut the mustard. But I didn't have the confidence to attempt to be accepted at the sorority level. So I duly linked greek life to the claim that it was all just a bunch of bullshit and that I hated it, while I secretly browsed the catalogs of the sorority houses and imagined what it would be like to live in one of them.

I was lonely as fuck at a time when I was unable to appreciate aloneness. I became friends with some of the girls that weren't really into the sorority thing. They were nerdy and smart and knew things like that U of A had a top notch medical school and what your GPA had to be to get into law school. They were all so sure of what they were studying and spent hours at it, while I wandered around bored, with my books barely cracked open. I hung out downstairs on the cement benches where people with obscure t-shirts that seemed integrated and happy and cool smoked cigarettes, but I was too shot down in my loneliness to approach them, only able to muster up occasional eye contact in the hopes that someone would come talk to me. The few fleeting relationships I managed to form made no impressionable impact on me. I don't remember a single person's name of the people I shared months living alongside.

This Alanis Morissette song was popular at the time and the girls in the room in front of mine blasted it multiple times a day with their door wide open for the entire first semester. Every young 18 year woman - nerdy, hippy, alternative type, sorority sister - sang this song from the top of their lungs while clutching their hearts or wrapping their arms around other like-minded women and they all felt like it was written just for them. They were all high but grounded, sane but overwhelmed, lost but hopeful, baby. They knew it was all gonna be fine fine fine. I guess they all had one hand in their pockets and the other giving a high five and I hated them all for their camaraderie and their college life experience that I felt so disconnected with.

Besides, the song is just dumb. Who puts one hand in their pocket while the other one is playing the piano? Please.

I left U of A after one semester.

StumbleIt

Stepdad

I stared blankly at him from across the table and examined his giant orange peel nose, his melanoma-speckled forehead, massive and red - the shore of his baldness which had morphed at some point from athletic-type buzz cut into old man head. Years of golfing weekly with no sunscreen and hair loss can do a number on a good looking man.

As usual, he wore a tie-dye collared sports shirt, one of his shirts -- the ones he'd been dyeing and selling for 20 some years, having started his business in our garage with our own washing machine. Together with his shorts and runners, his whole ensemble perfectly represented both pot-smoking hippie and jock that had molotoved him into one hot conservative Republican mess. He was on his third tequila sunrise (requested in a tumbler lest he be mistaken for a ‘faggot’) and we hadn’t even had our appetizers yet. His green eyes peered through sagged eyelids that appeared to droop down so low they almost folded over themselves and nearly touched his eyeballs while a few still remaining eyelashes pointed almost downward, emphasizing the tired, pigeon feeder Grandpa look about him. His squarish fingers were spread out as he monologued, his thumb naturally in a position of hyperextension.

I suppressed eye-rolling, groaning, or feigning an epileptic fit. We were, after all, in a restaurant for god's sake. I drifted in and out of listening to avoid the worn shoe of confrontation.

"...So anyway, we was the kinda kids that would break anyone's ass that got in our way. I mean it..."

Jesus Christ he’s old, I thought, and at 56 he’s still talking the same shit about growing up in Wisconsin. Maybe he read my mind because he stopped, turned his head ever so slightly, smiled goofily, and sweetly uttered one of the many nicknames he had for me. His cracked tooth that had greeted my giggling face so many times over the last 25 years reminded me of the beautiful man behind the worrisome sun spots, the political diatribes, and the days of old before he was a joy-sucked middle-aged adult whose better days were far behind him and who watched way too damned much Fox News.

".....I dated Margie back then -- she had the biggest tits. But anyway, that's not the point..."

I pretended to be intensely interested in the wine list and buried my head in it, while I breathed in my mother's tangible, thick embarrassment. A familiar parcel of family dinner failure was about to arrive without warning. But she only scoffed and then shoved a vodka tonic into her face.

"...Those fucking people. They don't know how to work. All they know how to do is cash their welfare checks and use their food stamps. And I'm gonna work my ass off and pay for their health insurance? Uh uh..."

Food stamps, I thought, and had a faint recollection of using a food stamp for postage to a letter to Santa Claus. This is the man that rescued my mother from standing in line for blocks of government cheese when I was eight years old. Maybe his politics were more nuanced back then.

"...Fine. I'll shut up. Can I get another tequila sunrise please?"

From my eight year old point of view, he was like a large freckled child – unlike any other adult I had ever met. He was a massive muscular man testifying to the hours he spent boxing, wrestling, running, and in general trying to maintain the youthful body that would eventually escape him. His patience for kid hyperactivity was inexhaustible. He would chase me around the couch until I fell to the floor in utter euphoric exhaustion where I would be doomed to a tickling session until I cried out for my mom gasping for air through my roaring upheavals of laughter. Then, fully clothed, I would get tossed into the pool as I squealed in a mix of terror and delight, but mostly delight. On occasion, he would then pretend to walk casually and step fully clothed into the swimming pool, as if just walking about. La di da, he would hum, for my amusement. He would take out his wallet soaked and ruined and pull out the sopping wet money and pretend to pay for something while I doubled over in pre-adolescent hilarity.

When he wasn’t acting silly for the sole benefit of getting me to snort and snicker and squeal, he was working himself to the bone, reinventing some way to keep the wad of Benjamins he always carried in full supply. He couldn't go back on a rescue attempt. He knew my sisters and I would be needing synchronized swimming lessons and Guess Jeans and trips to Disneyland and trampolines and cars insured for 16 year old garage mishaps.

"...We're losing our house..."

I snapped back from my rescued childhood, replete with everything I had ever wanted and more and stared at the man that now had an IRS freeze on his checking account.

No, no, no, no. You got it all wrong. You are the one with the piles of cash everywhere and the Christmas presents that fill an entire room, see? You're the one that knows about mortgages and investments and the stock exchange and interest rates and how to check the oil in my car and how to file my fucking income tax return, and how to interview for a job at Dairy Queen. You're the one with all the answers who knows how to solve everything. I'm the one that needs a girl scout uniform and flute lessons and braces for my gnarled teeth and someone to pay for my college tuition. I'm the one that needs help paying my rent and that can't afford to get my wisdom teeth pulled. I'm the one that crashed my car and can't afford the $2000 repair job. Remember me? You're the one that went into a trance and punched the fuck out of a punching bag in the garage. But I'm the one that has always needed you punching. You're not defeated. You can't be.

My eyes flashed between his sad eyes and my mother's uneaten plate of pasta and I wrestled myself from the ridiculous grips of self pity and the selfish solitude of realizing that there was no one left to hold my life together if I were to fuck it up. I allowed myself to grasp, however superficially, his disappointment, loss and sense of years wasted - his own personal Waterloo. How much graver and more psychologically destructive is it to, at 56, lose everything you've ever worked for than to, at 33, watch your childhood superhero become merely a man?



I flagged down the waiter and ordered another margarita while I calculated if I had enough money in my checking account to pay for dinner.

StumbleIt

I'm losing my mind a little. Do you know what time I was supposed to be here?

There are a lot of things that I’m realizing about myself now that I’ve moved. Maybe with more light you see things more clearly. One is that I have been needlessly being a bitch during most of my waking hours for the past several years. Okay, it's true that I was utterly, hopelessly claustrophobic in my job and in my house to the point of wanting to headbutt my way out of reality, and now I feel like I’m finally out of prison, but still.

Another realization I've had is that I’ve spent far too many years acting like clocks and watches were for pussies.

So, tickety tock, I bought a new clock.

It’s a beautiful brass and metal German antique clock from the 1950s. It's in the shape of a starburst which makes me feel all hip and in-the-know decoration wise. But best of all, it has the most lusciously subtle whispering tick tock you’ve ever heard and listening to it is like Earl Grey and cashmere and bubble baths and pine-scented candles and chicken enchiladas and sunsets and foot rubs reformulated as the sound waves of a metronome.

When I sit on the sofa I don’t want any bullshit electronic gadgets jacking up my tick tock time. Not like Luisito. Luisito has to have some gadget carcinogenisizing my oxygen every waking second of the day (but I'm turning over the nice leaf so I don't yell, I just drown everything out but the tick tock). But when he's cooped himself up in his office, fabricating homemade 3D glasses or planning his robot project, I sit in almost-silence with only the tick tocking of my new timekeeper to be heard. The sound of finely gauged progress over the sundial is all I need; to hell with nanotechnology and interceptors and shufflers. I don’t even want any music. I only want my tick tock.

Tick tock reminds me of the clock in my grandparents home that used to bewitch me and calmly terrorize me with its swinging pendulum. I would stand before it on an almost-silent-yet-ticking Sunday afternoon when there were no lights on in the house, but the sunlight would pour through the Frank Loyd Wright style skylights above and into the entryway where the clock patriarched over the rest of the furniture and the light would make shadows all over the bluish porcelain statues spangling the neighboring shelves. I imagined unlocking it's chamber and slipping my lanky skinny body inside and coming out the other end where there would be another world beyond it, a melty flowery surreal world, with crystalline streams and pots of gold at the end of rainbows. Maybe one where everyone was a centaur or people served you Turkish Delight from sleds or where you could drink some potion and become really small or really big or you could cross into an enchanted forest and ride through it on the back of a tortoises where you would only survive because you would find a nice cow that you could milk or a giant white dog looking thing would give you a sky-ride to a princess where you could fathom one grain of sand.

But tick tock also reminds me of the clock in my house when I was in high school, a mini grandfather clock because my mom was trying to be fancy when she bought it and thought it would go well with the cherry wood entertainment center that was way too nice for everything else in our house. This clock in particular and I were engaged in a constant game of wits as I pushed the gas pedal to the floor in my Toyota Corolla racing myself home on the freeway from my boyfriend's house in the wee wee hours. That clock usually won and would proceed to ruin my life every time I came in past curfew bracing myself for another encounter with one teary-faced mother who was taking it very hard that I no longer did what she said.

When I was in college, I decided I was done with clocks altogether and I even swore myself off watches. At that point all they did was remind me of how incompetent I was, of my total lack of organization and they impulsed me to feel that frantic panic of running late every time I needed to be anywhere. I used to talk about how timepieces in general represented some kind of human bondage. God was I ever pretentious when I was in college. I wish I could wind the clock back, oh a good twelve years or so and stuff a sock in my mouth and tie myself up and force-listen myself to the tick tocking while erasing my brain of the cliches I'd learned that I didn't know were cliches. That shit would get reprogrammed quick like.

Now? Now my clock feels like home for better or worse and grounds me in something I fully accept as mine. It makes my future gain its will to glow again. But at the same time it makes me panic slightly and feel like I'm running late for something really fucking important that I don't know how I've managed to not show up on time for. I feel like I've been hitting snooze for several years.

I know now why real grown ups have a real ticking clock in their homes and I understand why twenty one year olds that don't have to worry about anything other than if they are going to drink Four Peaks that night or Tom Collins don't. Real grown ups need to be reminded, subconsciously that time is actually moving, even if you act like an a-hole for five years pretending it isn’t.

Tick tock. I already miss my new home, because I know someday I’ll move from it. I know the landlord will want the flat back long before we are ready to leave, or maybe, if things aren't entirely fucked, our family won’t be so small anymore. I wonder how many ticks that clock will breathe in and how many tocks it will breathe out before that happens, if it ever does.

So now I’m on the market for a watch, preferably with subtle tickage.

And you know what else? I want to see an infertility specialist (or is it a fertility specialist?). Because I'm 33 years old and and I fear my clockwork may need repair. Luisito doesn't want to because he thinks we're maybe just wound up too tight causing our hands to spiral backwards frantically, not allowing our mechanics to function properly at all. But I wonder if there isn't some spring that's been dislodged or a wheel that's been rusted, or maybe the wheels' teeth aren't matching up properly due to misuse.

On the other hand, maybe we're a time mechanism that is set to a fucking explosive.

Or maybe I'm a perpetual motion machine that's has suddenly been told that perpetual motion was disproved by physicists.

Help.

StumbleIt

Jumping Bubble

This post is inspired by and written for Gwen.

I grew up in a bubble; a thickly-walled, strong, soapy bubble, like the bubbles made from some kind of industrial run-off, with the swirled rainbows of contamination in them; transparent, but distorting everything outside of them.

Ours was a bubble of religion, enveloping us in a particular brand of millenarian Evangelicalism that my father became involved in upon my parents' divorce. This religion crept into our lives and, almost overnight, filled every crevice of neutrality, every hole of gray, every crack of on-the-fenceness, every fissure of the no-man's-land of morality, leaving no aspect of life outside of its comprehensive judgment. Things that were seemingly benign before like television, music, games and toys were suddenly reinterpreted and their intrinsic evil became prophetically revealed to our family.

When I was eight years old, our television was sold. My father was going to protect us from the evils of the secular world, you see. He read to us at night, when normal families were watching television programs. He read to us about the miracles of missing limbs growing back at worship services, about people who had been blind their whole lives suddenly seeing, about the economically troubled suddenly finding an envelope filled with cash with their name on it.

Religion encased us completely and the only oxygen allowed to fill our lungs, to run through our blood, was scripture. Our giant beautiful, truth-giving, enclosed sphere was a gift to be grateful for. And we floated beyond the world, only needing the word of God and God himself to tell my father what to do.



God told him to marry Pam, a widow with three small children, aged three, six and nine. Pam's husband Jim had died just a few months before from colon cancer. Based on my recollection, my father and Pam barely knew each other and I remember that when I met Pam and her children, their marriage plans were practically already decided. Apparently, God had spoken to them and told Pam that she didn't need to grieve her husband after all. Other members of the congregation confirmed the voice of God telling them that they ought to wed, despite the situation of sorrow and heartbreak that her three young children found themselves in.

So my father married Pam, a woman who just a few months before had refused to bury her dead husband, because she and other spirit-filled members of the church were laying their hands over him, waiting for God to raise him from the dead, because they thought they heard God say that Jim would be healed.

As it turned out, they heard wrong.

For days my step sister and step brothers' father remained unburied in their house. They waited, hopeful that Jesus would heal Daddy Jim and he would get up from where he lay and embrace them again. They believed. They believed so hard. My blood boils when I think of how those little three believed.



As our family grew by four people, our giant glistening ball of truth got even thicker, even harder, seemingly unbreakable as it floated through the empty space of reality. Pam made it so. She thickened our bubble somehow and made it rise far above the rest of the bubbles it had previously bumped into and reflected off of in similarity.

In our high flying globe I could look through to the other side, but what I saw was always twisted like a scary fun house mirror. I saw demon-filled people and lost people and underlying darkness disguised in a sham of false goodness. Occasionally the distortion would subside and I could see people out there that looked good and happy -- but they were not like me, I was told, because they were outside the bubble of faith, true faith. I was warned that if I got too near to them, I would be vulnerable to them pulling me out of our bubble somehow, unless I managed to pull them in. I shouldn't be fooled -- outside of the bubble there were no shades of gray, and there was certainly no light.

But I ached to poke my head through -- just to see. Followers stronger in faith didn't need proof, didn't need to see what was out there to know that the air supply was cut off and the oxygen of Christ would cease to reach the blood flow. But I knew there was something that wasn't right about our household being run like a fascist dictatorship, where I was under the constant control of the thought police. "Honor thy father and thy mother", was the only explanation for why I could not read Christopher Pike horror books for teens but could read other types of horror books that could terrorize me for weeks, months as I lay in bed at night. "It's worldly", was the simple reason why Debbie Gibson was not authorized audio entertainment. But this type of music was encouraged (Go on, listen to the lyrics. If you can control the shivers, like I am incapable of, I commend you).

Normal PG or G rated movies were also off limits because of "hidden messages from Satan" unless they had been previously approved by the rod-bearing parents/police or by other trusted members of the bubble. Even seemingly harmless movies, because they did not contain a Christian message, such as Disney movies, were all under suspicion because they might infect the minds of the children. On the other hand, movies like this were encouraged. When I see that clip my face becomes red with anger and shame. Knowing that they truly believed that they needed to prepare their children for the rapture does not make me any less angry with them for allowing me to see this as a young child.

There was constant discussion among my parents and their closest friends about what was and was really not inside the bubble. Family members, friends, even entire churches that were once considered inside the bubble were suddenly proclaimed to no longer be, due to differences in the interpretation of scripture or due to God having spoken to my father and his wife. As I grew older and more anxious to meet boys, church youth group services and activities were suddenly suspect. Such co-ed activities encouraged by so-called churches of God were actually the devil's playground where the demon of lust had fertile ground to blossom. My father and his wife had hopes that they would eventually find a man for me from within the bubble and we would court each other until everyone agreed we would wed -- at a very young age, of course.

And the bubble drifted and floated and got further and further away from other sorts of bubbles, like my best friend's Methodist bubble, or my grandparents Mormon bubble. Our bubble - the true bubble-- was increasingly less populace as good Christian schools were replaced by homeschooling (which I escaped thanks the protests of my mother who still had a say in my upbringing), and Wednesday night, Friday night and Sunday morning services became replaced by "home fellowship". We were officially weirding out the people that once shared a place in our bubble.

As I got older, and the bubble got higher and higher into space, the oxygen inside the confined space didn't seem to satiate my lungs any longer. I looked through its translucent walls and the images stopped looking so deformed and twisted. As my doubts about what I saw outside grew, I knew my bubble was becoming more permeable. My hand could just slip through to the other side and could feel the light of the world where religion didn't pervade every aspect of life, where demons didn't hover around every possibility.

I began to feel a world where people didn't have fits of crying and laughing on the living room floor during fellowship, a world where tears were not constantly rolling down their faces every time they had a Bible study session with a bunch of other strange bubble people, culminating into a massive mess of hysteria and emotion and tension. It was a place where people didn't scream out, "Praise Jesus. Shun duh duh hun duh maka laka dali shi shi maaaa....praise God, thank you Father. Shallalalalala malaki hunda mana chi ki laki. Blood of Jesus! Blood of Jesus!"

Soon enough I dared to stick my head through the soapy wall and saw all of the other bubbles floating around below.



I hung out on the edge of the bubble for awhile, stepping out completely but leaning up against it still, letting it support me and comfort me and feeling those family members gripping at my limbs with all their force and pulling to keep me inside.

"You stay away from those liberal universities," they hollered from within the bubble. "All they do is instill doubt in the minds of the faithful. Satan will get a grip on your mind there and make you doubt. You stay with us and you won't need to go to college because you'll find a god-fearing man to become your husband and you'll discover the joy of serving your spouse and giving him children."

But it was too late, because my mind already doubted, already wanted to jump and as I turned to take one last look inside the bubble I realized how very very small it was and how very dark.

I landed with a hard and painful thud on the ground just like the law of gravity said I would, from those science textbooks they tried to keep away from me. And I looked up and saw the bubble getting smaller and smaller and weaker and weaker among the millions of other tiny bubbles floating all around, all stemming from what I perceived to be the same effluent waste.

"Twisted World" by Jeff Kubina from Flickr.
"Lightness" by clydye from Flickr.
"Bubble symphony" by bricolage.108 from Flickr.
"Esferas doradas" by * Cati Koe* from Flickr.

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The story of Huta

I just love reading about large combustion plants all day and the current document I'm working on is just making my eyes bulge out of their sockets while I shart in my pants from excitement. The task of changing the word phosphorus to phosphorous twenty bazillion times a day makes me violently playful (hello, can't you freaky academics have your asses peer reviewed into proper adjective formation?). I'm afraid to bring this beautiful piece of literature home, for fear that it will keep me up at night and not let me put it down and get some much needed sleep. The suspense of how Annex VI on monitoring standards might end is just killing me right now. That is some good shit right there.

But there comes a time in the middle of the day when I'm supposed to be reading mind-numbing nonsense and I'm about 200 pages behind schedule and I just say, fuck it, I've got to put the red pen down, turn away from the arousing chapter on fugitive emissions (which actually sounds rather erotic), and look out my window and think of Dublin.

Yes, Dublin.

You see, not all of my internet uselessness amounts to nothing. My fantasy vacation planning actually landed me a flight to Dublin in October for 60 euro bucks. Not bad. Let's not get into why I'm planning a weekend away in October and it's barely July right now, but it might have to do with fugitive emissions and procrastination.

But Dublin, of course, makes me think of my sister, Huta. Welcome to my tangent-story about Huta.

Huta and I always hated each other. Well, not always. There was a time I remember, a short time, maybe a summer when I was 9 and she was 6 when I took her in and loved her and there was room in our little make-believe world for each other where our imaginations melded together in perfect harmonious child play-- our imaginary worlds of playing house and dress up and school. Before that time and after its short duration, we were separated, our sisterhood (or lack thereof) was at the mercy of divorced parents who could not bear to be separated from all of their children at once, so they decided to separate their children from each other because their empty hearts were more important than our togetherness.

We saw each other on odd weekends and spring breaks and such. We never learned how to deal with each other. We probably barely knew each other. When we coincided living together again we were both too old for imaginative play where anything goes and everything is a potential house-play prop and everything is shared and roles are flexible and can be reversed at whim. I was now an irritable pre-teen and she was a spiteful elementary over-achiever who glared at me through squinted hateful blue eyes that looked just like mine.

Huta copied me but hated me all at once. We were forced to share a room and in order to handle her bothersome and forced company, I cleared out my side of the closet and created a sort of mini room for myself in there – a place to escape from her annoying and ironically hate-filled emulations of me. The privacy of my closet room was good for a few hours where I relished in my own tiny little defined space. But when my sister discovered this valuable piece of real estate she had not been previously not privy to, she promptly emptied out her side of the closet and created her own little special room, where she glared at me from the gap in the closet and whistled and hummed and scratched around and fidgeted and annoyed the living fucking hell out of me and my property value plummeted like a mobile home in a hurricane.

The following years can only be described as Huta and me having bouts of ignoring each other intermingled with waged armed conflict where projectile missiles of coat hangers, flip-flops, or any large blunt objects found on the battleground were launched at each other with the full force of our capacities.

We were eventually granted our own rooms by the wise intervening powers that be, trenches of sorts where our ammunition both real and sentimental could be collected, our cannons could be loaded with insults, where shields could be strapped on, especially over our hearts.

Ceasefires were short-lived and peace was a delicate state always teetering on violent upsurge by either side, especially if a word was uttered in the wrong tone, if a blush-brush or a certain feather pillow went missing, if domestic duties were seen to be unfairly assigned, or if the company of the family cat was perceived to be monopolized. There were various territorial zones one normally respected, but even with these honored fortresses, doors were frequently slammed, bedrooms frequently looted, important artifacts often went mysteriously missing and were later found in foreign garrisons. When diplomacy was engaged, such as with a loud bang with a clenched fist on a bedroom door, it was commonly met with a not-so-statesmanlike, "GO AWAY."

When I turned 18, I moved out of the house and moved in with my older sister who had total and complete control over my military capacities and I therefore did not instigate wars because I knew my military would never stand up against hers. And my younger sister Huta disappeared from my life, for the most part in any practical sense, yet again.

Oh, we would see each other when I went home, gave each other a "hey" or an awkward hug if it had been a really really long time. If I stayed longer than a couple of hours, her icy eyes would form into their usual squinty glare and it was always clear that our peace-treaty could be reneged if either of us so much as breathed wrong. Ignoring each other was easiest.

But then at one point we coincided amazingly by choice, in Dublin, spring of 1999 and I hadn't seen family or home in months, and was homesick as ever. We had a beautiful time together, even though she was kind of an idiot and just when we got bikes to go for a bike ride she had to slam on her brakes and fly over the handle bars like that. But I forgave her clumsiness because I had missed her, surprisingly, and we went for beers together for the first time in our lives. We talked about our dreams and our future and our parents and love.

And then in a small hotel room in Dublin we decided that we needed to have one final battle. And we brought out our best soldiers and put them on the front line, we flexed our muscles and showed our greatest technological advances in sisterly-love-destruction. We raised those old medieval fortifications again and pointed our artillery through the holes and I think I got some really good hits in there and threw the best of the best of my mortal grenades. But it was the final blow instigated by the Huta, the one that has always stayed with me that took down the stronghold inside me:

"You've never given a shit about your family."

And in the midst of my homesickness and longing for precisely family, that arrow got me in the gut and sent me down to die in the mud.

And I never fought the Huta again.

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Awkwardly Neighborly

I guess I'm not very neighborly.

Well, that's not entirely true. I want to be neighborly. I like the idea of being neighborly, but it doesn't come naturally for me.

I don't think it's because I'm an asshole. I mean, I don't think I'm an asshole.
I think it's because I'm so nice that I don't want to infringe upon other people's privacy. Okay, truth be told, I don't like people infringing upon mine.

Neighbors, for me, have always been people you sort of look through, with your eyes semi-glazed over. If they are good neighbors, they look at you with the same semi-glazed over look. They don't look at you, directly with accusative curiosity that says, "Holy shit, I totally heard you two going at it last night, you dirty little slut" or "Clean up your kitchen you friggin slobs" (my neighbors can actually see inside my kitchen here. Whatever, shut up, I don't care if you think it's sick that I forgot to put my cheese away, mkay?)

I've never felt compelled to get to know my neighbors or get involved in their lives in any way. The likelihood of the sudden conversion from really nice dude that lives next door into goddamn snoopy asshole has always been too high to warrant the risk involved in interaction.

In my neighborhood growing up, of course, I knew the neighborhood kids (we had a trampoline which made our house a powerful magnet for booger-nosed kids), but I never knew any of the adult's names, not even the next door neighbors or those living directly across the street (after living there for six years). My mom and step dad didn't either. I guess we were sort of quiet folk who kept to ourselves and I learned to be non-neighborly by watching my parents non-neighborliness (okay, total anti-social parents). In fact, on our block, the neighbors would have block parties for the 4th of July and Halloween but the cut-off point was our house and they would fence their little block party off with that plastic tape stuff just before reaching our yard. Fucking assholes. I didn't want to go to your stupid potluck anyway what with all your happy neighborly chatting and mutual babysitting and cup-of-sugar borrowing.

So, you see, it takes great effort on my behalf to be neighborly with my new friendly neighbor due to the trauma of having been rejected for neighborly potlucks.

She's lovely, really she is. She's a good looking and friendly young-ish Norwegian engineer with excellent English and Spanish and she seems like she has a really interesting story to tell. Her only flaw seems to be her proximity to me. And by proximity I mean from my couch, her head is about 8 feet from my head directly in front of me staring at me (or at least it feels like she's staring at me). A car can barely go down the street I live on without scraping itself up and when I open my curtains (which are totally necessary for dancing to Ring of Fire in my underwear and freaking my husband the fuck out as to how the hell he ended up with me), I see her. Right there. Sitting on her terrace. ALL THE DAMN TIME. She is there as I type this. If I need to scratch my butt right now she's gonna see it. Hello. Um. Hi.

It's her right. That terrace is hers. It's not her fault that our houses are positioned in such a way that when she is sitting there sipping her tea she is staring directly into my living room and dammit, are those underwear on my living room floor? How did those get there? Uh, hi.

Up until recently, it was no big deal, just shut the curtains and adios amigos. But Luisito, having the neighborly spirit that he has, often goes out to the balcony to have a smoke and so they have begun chatting and he has begun pestering me to go and be neighborly to the poor new neighbor that doesn't know anyone and doesn't have any friends.

And so I did. And I should be thankful to have such a wonderful neighbor.

But now, my problem is that when I want to prance around in my underwear, or dance to Ring of Fire at will, especially at night, or eat a meal without being scrutinized, I feel I have to first close the shutters, which is always extremely awkward for me because she's always RIGHT THERE. I always feel like I'm accusing her of being nosy just by the act of closing my own fucking shutters. Which means, that I usually leave them open to avoid the awkwardness of it all and cut out the Ring of Fire underwear dancing ritual and in fact, I've started picking crap up and putting the cheese away.

But leaving the shutters open has created further awkwardness. It's like I can feel the weird dilemma between us of the shutting and/or leaving of the curtains and shutters open.

Sometimes I wait until she runs in to go to the bathroom or something and then when she comes back she finds my closed shutters. And I have no idea if she's relieved I shut them or if she thinks I'm a total rude bitch.

Okay, I'm a weird un-neighborly neighbor, and aren't you glad we don't live next door to each other? I guess I might come across as unfriendly. Even though I like you.

It's just that this place makes me claustrophobic.

Maybe I just need to knock it off and be nice to people.

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