For a Good Time, Call*

The words fall from my mouth like tacks. Fuckfacescumbag, I am going to cut off your balls and shove them down your throat until you choke, you little bitch...sometimes it comes out so hard and fast it doesn't even make sense. Dickfuckfartface, and then I feel a little silly, like someone shaken awake from a fugue state not knowing where I am or how I got there, speaking in tongues, so I push the button to disconnect, say one last fuck you to nobody.

They tried to scam my mom. "They" a non-entity of a well-known scam wherein someone calls you saying they know you bought pharmaceuticals online and there's a warrant for your arrest unless you pay a $3,000 fine to U.S. Customs via a wire transfer to the Dominican Republic. Which, dude, I know. But when my mom told them she has cancer and needs pain relief, something to sleep, they said they didn't care, that the DEA was on their way to her house right now. She was scared, and let's face it: I feel guilty. I can't do enough, be there enough, say the right thing in this very wrong situation. How dare they make her feel small? So now I call them.

Another "they" this time...They say that you should envision cancer as a thing, a bundle of all the negative, that with each radiation treatment and chemo it is blasted and shrunk, made impotent, but I have not been able to envision anything until now. This scam. This phone number that I call now, it is the cancer. Cancer with an accent  on the other end of an overseas VoIP phone number. Drug Enforcement Agency, he answers, always the same voice gravelly and garbled, and while I have reported the phone number to the real Department of Justice DEA, I also don't expect they will ever catch him. So I call. Sometimes a few times each day. I don't try to disguise my voice but he is too greedy to notice. Sometimes I threaten him, tell him he has fucked with the wrong family, as if we are some mafia familia and not just a bunch of watered down WASPS. Tell me, I ask, when I kill you, do you want to be listening to Metallica, or maybe some Hank Williams Jr.? Other times I thank him, tell him that I don't know what to do with this anger I have over my mom being so sick, that I am grateful that I can direct my hate, track him down...sometimes I don't know where to go with this and I sputter.... Most of the time, though, he asks for my name and phone number so he can have the DEA agent call me before they "reach my house." Veronica Swish, I say, Gail Brinerd, Jennifer Rosenstonenstein, and I give him the phone number to the city morgue, mortuaries across the country, the San Francisco DEA Office, the FBI's Fraud Unit, and then I hang up, picturing him standing in a hot kitchen somewhere calling.

Of course "they" also say that revenge is a dish best served cold, and there is nothing cold about this. My heart lurches each time I call; I am alive, rattled. I think about that possibly fake Buddha quote, "holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die," but I can't stop. I find myself thinking of other phone numbers I could have him call me back at, things I could say, as if I could change his mind, make him say sorry, make it stop. Because the thing with cancer is that it renders you irrelevant. None of this matters, nothing that came before and nothing that comes after. Cancer is a fake voice on an island halfway across the world via an ip address you cannot trace, and all I can do is set my phone to private and call back.


*Seriously. If anyone needs a good outlet for anger, I'll give you the number.

Wanna See the Ugliest Photo of Me Ever? (You Know You Do.)

You know that moment when you go to take a photo with your phone and your kids are in front of you doing something freakishly adorable, or maybe it's a stupid delicious salad, the image of which you must upload to Facebook immediately as proof that once upon a time a tomato glistened just so...so you click on the little camera icon all quick-like and HolyMotherofSweetJesusFuck! The camera is set on the reverse function and there's your big-pored, double-chinned shiny ass face staring up at you with that line between your brows and your eyes looking down all dumb and caught off-guard, you know? No? Just me? Well then.

Eff the reverse camera mode is all I have to say about that.

For the past 20 years there have been a dozen lost, mythical boxes from my childhood, boxes my mom said she had in storage somewhere. Photo albums and yearbooks, boxes of notes I passed in class, home movies, my prom dress, dried roses and issues of my high school newspaper...my brother and I were convinced it was all gone, the storage unit invoice lost, the contents auctioned off to a very disappointed man with a goatee on Storage Wars. Well slap my ass and call me Judy, as my mom has never said (but I have always thought she should say, seeing as how her name is actually Judy), but apparently the bill remained in good standing and I am now the proud owner of 12 boxes of my past, which is surprisingly like suddenly staring into a camera in reverse. For example, this gem:

HolyMotherofSweetJesusFuck! Note: the haircut that was supposed to resemble a photo of Famke Janssen that I tore out of a magazine and how it accentuates my most-decidedly non-Danish bone structure, the electric blue Space Invaders-meets-Bill Cosby sweater, the or-just-look-like-one Barbizon pose with arms crossed all cool-like, because nothing says nonchalance like standing like that.

It was 1986, the summer before 9th grade on a trip to North Carolina to visit family. My uncle had taken up photography so he took my picture, and the thing of it is, I remember feeling beautiful that day. In front of the camera in that horrible sweater with my bloated awful 13 year old face and puffy hair I remember thinking maybe I was a Danish Supermodel who just so happened to be having a modeling session photographed by her uncle in the basement of a tract home in North Carolina. Surely this happens.

I don't know why I am posting this, the ugliest photo of me ever taken...partly because it's funny, yes. Look how brave I am, posting this picture! I made it to the other side of that round face. But also because maybe there is something beautiful in the fact that I felt pretty then when I was really very not, when there was no reverse function on the camera and how I felt was dictated only by who I was in my head.

It's a 5.8.13 Party!!!!

If, like me, you have a thing for Fibonacci's Sequence, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, French, Joseph Gordon-Levitt speaking French, and poetry, then a.) it's pretty creepy how much we have in common, i.e. we are both pretentious assholes and should totally hang out, and b.) you should watch this video.

Apparently JGL made this short film* inspired by Fibonacci's Sequence, and although I don't quite see the connection other than the spiral of a snail**, I'll take it seeing as how today is Fibonacci's Sequence*** day and I don't know how else to celebrate. 5.8.13. You know? 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13...the sequence wherein each subsequent number is the sum of the two previous numbers. The golden mean, the unfurling of a fern frond, nautilus shells, the flowering of an artichoke, the branching growth of bronchi in the lungs, pinecones and pineapples, the mathematical key to beauty. Don't worry...tomorrow I will be back to posting about farts and cancer, complete with pictures of my kids.


*How do I know this? Because I am friends with JGL†.

**The film is basically JGL reciting a poem by Jacques Prévert titled Chanson des Escargot Qui Vont à L'Enterrement, or The Song of the Snails Who Are Going to a Funeral.

***I just might explode into a pile of dork at 9:34 when it will be 5.8.13.21.34...dare I add :55 seconds?

†i.e. I "liked" him on Facebook, ok?

That.

This is a terrible picture taken at an unflattering angle in horrible light with my mom who is in immense pain--hence the heavy filter--but it's all I've got for now, so. This is how I am brave right now--posting this not kind photo--but that's about it.

There are many awkward-ities™ when your mom has cancer, such as when the doctor asks about her sex life with me right there, or when I mistakenly sit on one of her nephrostomy bags full of urine. But I never expected it to be so awkward when people ask how she is doing.

How's your mom?

People at work, friends, the guy at the corner store...seemingly innocuous, it comes from everywhere, and I know people mean well. Hell, if your mom was sick right now I would ask how she is doing. Actually, how is your mom?

What's awkward is that brief moment when I weigh the situation: the person asking, how they know my mom, where we are, how tired I am. How do I answer? And so it ranges from she's good, fine, you know...my voice trailing off hoping we can change the subject, to facts about the upcoming internal radiation, how medieval it sounds that they are going to surgically drill up to 24 needles into my mom's cervix and then blast them with radioactive material. No matter the degree of detail, inevitably I get a cocked head from the person who asks, eyes that grow just the teensiest bit bigger, lips pressed thin in sympathy, and then we both kind of nod our heads, like yeah. I know. Yeah. It's not a conversation that flows and certainly not one that can be backed away from gracefully.

Which leaves me with this post that I don't know how to end. Do I want people to stop asking me how my mom is doing? No. Really, please don't. This is happening and no matter where you run into me you can bet I am thinking about it. Just understand that sometimes I don't know how to answer, and that sometimes I just want to--

xo,
S

7

Once upon a time you could not eat a whole grape by yourself. Instead I would bite it in half with my front teeth and push slivers of it into your mouth and you laughed. Now we are here where you can eat whole grapes if you want, pluck them off the stem yourself with long, dimple-less fingers and talk to me of racism and what makes airplanes rise.

This is 7. Angled teeth and tiny rubber toys that fall to the bottom of your backpack, pop music, ears pierced, you tell me now not to look when you undress. Are you looking? you ask, and I say no even though I am looking at an optical illusion, my depth perception most certainly off. How did you get so far away? I am looking but I can't see how this happened, your sense of secret and other and me suddenly just there like that. Who are you?

Because suddenly I can see the slippery slope a bit more sharply, how quickly 7 slides into a time when you will answer these questions for yourself. I'm a designer, you might say, or an accountant. My name is Zoey and I am an alcoholic, a teacher, a thief, a mother, a phlebotomist. The truth is, you will be many things to many people, the girl who wears leopard print high tops with a thousand yard stare behind starfish eyes, but I hope you always define yourself knowing that beneath it all lies this constant: you are loved.

7 years ago today they told me I might feel some tugging, some pressure. And then there was the strangest hollow suction as they pulled you from inside of me and you cried. I tell you that on that day your soft baby nails grabbed at my heart trying to hold on, that to this day you carry a piece of me with you. You can roll your eyes, but it's true. How do airplanes fly? Something about lift and force, laws of motion, I looked it up online. More often than not I know things are true without totally understanding them. A piece of my heart is inside of you, and when you are 37 years old I will still watch closely when you eat grapes to make sure you don't choke because I love you, the certainty of that like the ground beneath your feet even as you rise.

Happy birthday sweet girl.
Mommy

6, (5 is missing), 4, 3, 2, (1 is before I had a blog).

Meniscus

 

Too much. You know? I think you know. All of us too full. I see it as I walk around these last few days like an echo of last time and the time before that, how we pay for our coffee gently as we resist the push to overflow. And so we go about our day concave, the surface tension there like that, bound to each other. We tip toe, we rise and we hold on, until eventually, inevitably, we spill.

Prodigy of the Philistines

"Every line means something."

      Jean-Michel Basquiat

Untitled. Chalk and admittedly some smushed food on wall. 2013

One of the best decisions we made when we moved to this house was to paint one of the walls in the kitchen with black chalkboard paint. We all go at it: christmas lists and chore charts, vocabulary, tic tac toe, faces and cats and cartoons of cats with no faces saying ickskoosme! (It's phonetic.)

Every few months I take a photo before erasing the whole thing, and tonight as I was about to wash it away it struck me how much the wall looks like a Basquiat painting. No doubt Zoey's portraits reflect the power struggle of class and gender while Ozzy's kinetic line-work reveals the dichotomy of the inner versus outer experience, yes? Graffiti artists turned Neo-Expressionistic Primitivists, all before the second grade.

To compare: Basquiat's Philistines. Acrylic and chalk on canvas. 1982

Happy (very nearly almost) Friday,

S

An All-Over the Place Post

Once I told some coworkers they just had to watch a video--it was of a baby being born in a car--and they all recoiled in disgust and now maybe I have a bad reputation at work for you-gotta-see-this videos. (Then again, they made me watch footage of basketball player Kevin Ware breaking his leg in half, so I think we're even.)

All this to say wow, this photo. I just. Can't. It's amazing. And yes, a little gross maybe if you're adverse to a little vernix, but whatevs. Still breathing and feeding from the placenta, this baby isn't technically born yet. Holy intact amniotic sac, amiright?

Then again, I'm in a mood. A push pictures of waxy-coated babies in your face mood. I had a dentist appointment today and the dental hygienist must have said a dozen times that I have the teeth of a 20 year old. Which fine, great, anks so mash (because she had my tongue wrapped in gauze and an instrument shoved deep into my molars) except that every time she said it she followed with, if I were to just look at your teeth I would think you were 20! To which I said, ...?

Anks?

Apparently my actual face is a dead giveaway for my age.

Perhaps I should have led this post (and left it) with this. This photo of a book...shelf. 

Next time Bryan goes out of town I am totally going to do this in my hallway. If you don't know why I have to wait for my husband to go out of town it's because I am not "allowed" to hang anything on the walls since the Great Laundry Room Wall Incident of 2004. See also: that's what middle-aged women with young-looking teeth do on wild weekends alone. We get crafty with old books and all broody looking at amniotic sacs that aren't even ours.

Happy Tuesday,
S

Warning: This Is Not Even a Humble Brag But a Flat-Out Booyah of a Check Me Out

My heart is like a handful of Oobleck right now.* Tonight Zoey stuck a bunch of sticky notes together and titled it "Room 9's Go Green List"; she plans on giving it to her teacher tomorrow. The list is so pure and right that I think maybe someone should send this to Kim Jong Un c/o Whatever the Fuck is Going On in North Korea Right Now Because Out of the Mouths of Babes And All...

Let me decipher lest you are not fluent in 1st grade spelling:

1. Please pick up as many pieces of trash, it will help the earth and make the world a better place.
2. Please throw it into the trash or recycling.
3. Please donate to homeless as much as you can.
4. Please show kindness, make new friends.
5. If you are having trouble please show courage or stand up for yourself or tell the yard duty.

And with that my heart dripped through my fingers as I clutched at my chest with toomuch, tootoomuch, sweetjesuschristonacracker,thankyou.

xo,
S

*If you are not familiar with Oobleck, pinky swear you will make some this weekend. You won't be sorry.

Present

I tell myself to listen. To remember. Be present, this is it, be here now, but by accident I think about next week and what we are going to do and I remember how the air used to smell different in the spring when I was little, like rotting plums that had fallen off the tree, and the bees that gathered close to the ground.

I used to try to meditate--I think it was after I saw What's Love Got To Do With It with Angela Bassett as Tina Turner; I liked the intonation of nam-myoho-renge-kyo. And her arms. Picture a leaf floating on the surface of the water, somebody told me, only the leaf skittered and I thought of Skittles, Skipperdee, the turtle who eats raisins in Eloise at The Plaza and--leaf! Think leaf. Just leaf. Only for me ceci n'est pas ever just une leaf, so I gave up on picturing a leaf on the surface of the water.

Today on the bus ride home I was thinking about how the only time I am really truly in the moment is when I am angry. Pissed off and fuck that is when everything disappears. Needless to say this was not a welcome revelation.

I tell myself to think about what I would want if it were me in the hospital and what I would want is for my children to cuddle with me, so I climb beside my mom on the narrow bed and lay my head on her thin chest and marvel at how life really does shrink or expand in proportion to one's courage; I had not cuddled with my mom in years. I tell myself to listen.

Two Eyes Open

Ozzy was being a real butthole the other day so I bought some googly eyes to stick on him to make his butthole-ness more palatable.

That right there is one of those sentences that you type and then step back and think, wow, I never thought I would string those words together--but there it is.

And there we were. At Michael's Crafts which is kind of where buttholes are made what with all the raffia, rhinestones and felt, and I saw the googly eyes and immediately felt better about things. Googly eyes make everything better.

Except when we got home Ozzy refused to let me stick said googly eyes on him. He screamed and squirmed and did the floppy body thing so I had to settle for Zoey who was actually not being a butthole at all but just wanted to watch Annoying Orange. Hey Ozzy! Hey! Hey Ozzy! Don't be such an apple! If you get this reference then I feel sorry for you. I also feel sorry for myself.

Zoey was a real sport about the googly eyes which reminded me of the time she was maybe 2 and ate a small googly eye off of something and I later found it staring up at me from her poop. Take it from me: googly eyes really do make everything better.

Later I downloaded an app to try to put googly eyes on Ozzy but I couldn't quite figure out how to place them or size them so he kept ending up with a googly third eye to ward off evil. That's probably for the best with where we're at developmentally and all.

Later still, after everyone had gone to bed I saw this old video of a dorky tween JGL on Jeopardy! and immediately felt better. It has nothing to do with googly eyes except it also makes me feel silly strange inside.

xo,
S

R.I.P. Google Reader

This is a post about something boring. But it is something boring like paperclips are boring. Boring old paperclips...I can't think of anything more meh. On the other hand, what if someone announced that all paperclips would suddenly be gone come July 1st? How would you feel then? What would you do?

Fuck. I just remembered about staples.

Ok, so maybe paperclips are not a good example. (Because you could also always do that 7th grade thing where you turn down the corner and spit on it a little? Tear a notch and then turn it back to hand in your homework. Someone should probably just take paperclips away. They're almost useless, really.)

No, what I'm talking about is Google Reader. I have been using Google Reader pretty much since I started reading blogs 8 years ago. I have it bookmarked on all my computers; I have the app on my phone. I read it in line, on the bus...this is all sounding very Sam I Am, but it's true--I read it everywhere.

Which is why I almost started to cry when I saw the announcement last week that Google Reader is closing, that on July 1 it will be gone. Gone??! And here I thought everything www lasts forevereverever. I feel betrayed, lost. And yes, a little silly with this boring post about a blog aggregator, but here we are. Staring at a soon-to-be obsolete not-paperclip.

So I must ask: if you read blogs (honestly I have about 200 in my Google Reader), what do you use? What do you recommend? An aggregator that works on a laptop as well as on a phone, has an app, all that yummy stuff. Pretty please: help.

It just hit me. Another sad side-effect of the disappearance of Google Reader is the years of images I have saved to my favorites. I guess this means I will have to start posting them, air out the dank corners of my starred items. Here we go...

Christmas on this, the first day of Spring.
xo,
S

The End of the Rainbow

Supposedly, leprechauns are around 3 feet tall and up to no good. (The leprechaun that came to our house this morning made the toilet water green and left behind a green Whoopee cushion which has been sat on with such gusto over the day that it is already split apart.)

If you catch a leprechaun it is rumored that he will grant you three wishes in exchange for his release.

I caught these wee lil' leprechauns this morning and this is what I wished for: 1.) my mom to be well, 2.) $17 million dollars, 3.) a full night of sleep with nobody kicking me in the face.

But then I remembered that I have to let them go if I want my wishes to come true...so. *Sigh* (Tonight I leaned toward Bryan and very quietly whispered I think the kids are trying to kill me. I was only kind of kidding.)

Pretty sure Zoey is flashing some Gaelic gang sign here. Erin Go Bragh, Yo.

On another note: when did St. Patrick's Day become such a big deal? At Zoey's school they make leprechaun traps and decorate, have little parties and everyone talks about what tricks the leprechaun did in their house. When I was little we maybe pinched someone if they weren't wearing green and got a shamrock shake if we were lucky...seven miles in the snow when candy bars cost a dime, and all that.

Anyway. Off to eat the rest of the green Jell-O.
xo,
S

Whiskers on Kittens

As in actual kitten whiskers. Only they're not on a kitten anymore.

When I was a little kid we saved the whiskers of our cats. Momo, Darryl, Wanda, later there was Lily...if we found a whisker on the floor we picked it up and saved it in a small Indian pot. (Feather not Dot.) I have continued this tradition with Kitty and now Nacho. And added a kiss. That is, I pick up the whisker and kiss it before poking it into the pot, taught Zoey to do the same. It's exciting when we find one. Sometimes--not often--I pull out the bunch of them and feel the pointy ends, so sharp and tipped with black. They're touch receptors, you know. Vibrissae, embedded deep into the muscular and nervous systems of a cat like a radar. I think this is why I like them, but maybe not, I don't know.

A study done at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine found that optimism is the top characteristic found in very resilient people. (Worth noting that altruism is second, followed closely by humor.) People with a positive outlook tend to bounce back from adversity quicker and with less lasting effects than those who dwell on the negative. Not to get all Pollyanna, but this is why I have been wearing these pink neon ballet flats lately and looking forward to the new Hosseini book and this book, too. It's been uncharacteristically warm out and when I walk home from the bus stop after work I can smell the daffodils. Hell, I don't even know if daffodils have a smell, but there is that and vanilla lavender body oil and tonight I found a whisker in the cushions of the couch.

Kiss.
S

Shiny Objects

Today was a bad day, the kind of day that makes me want to build a fort out of blankets to hide in, that makes me want to eat Cadbury Cream Eggs for dinner and overpluck my eyebrows, that makes me want to push my face into the belly of a kitten, listen to Yaz, take big gulping breaths of the smell of crayons and draw a page full of very large eyes. (I did 3 out of 7 of those, but will let the specifics remain a mystery.)

It dawned on me just now that a few months ago Ozzy pulled the "c" key off my laptop, and then the shift key, so that I have to make a conscious effort if I ever want to make an uppercase c. A big c. See? Funny how life is sometimes. I don't have much to say today but I also don't want my last two posts to stand idle as they have been for the last week or so, full of portent. I don't want to make this thing a Thing, to capitalize on everything the way it is. The big C. There. That took a moment.

So instead I eat Honey Smacks and teach Ozzy to kiss me when I say give me some sugar and paint Zoey's toes in the colors of the rainbow and think shiny object, shiny object, shiny object...here are some such distractions from the last week, my capital everythings:

This is his trying-to-get-away-with-something face.

I call this one Driftwood Surfer. Check out the form. A total natural, if only she didn't mind getting water in her eyes.

The t-shirt says it all.

If I were better at math I would graph the curve of her cheek, the slope of her nose, the rise of those lashes to better understand the beauty of divine proportion and why her profile stops me every goddamn time.

xo,
S

Space Oddity

I feel like a 15-piece puzzle lately. You know? Those flat metal toys with the tiles that you slide around to mix up the picture? Only I cannot figure out how to make my picture whole again, how to get back to being right so I am sliding faster and faster, trying to figure out fuck, how am I supposed to do this?

I am hardly the first person with a parent with cancer, and I don't want this to turn into The Adult Child of a Parent with Cancer Blog, though I will cop to this: when I wanted Bryan to bring up the laundry from the basement for me I said pretty please, my mom has cancer. And then the other day I called him while he was driving home to ask if he could please get me a smoothie, I really wanted a smoothie, my mom has cancer and I love you.

Equal parts dark humor and terrible person with a side of absurd.

I get it from my mother.* Ten+ years ago she had a heart attack and had to have an angioplasty. She was all doped up for the surgery when she grabbed my arm to hurriedly tell me that she wanted me to play David Bowie at her funeral, then she sang as they wheeled her away...

This is major Tom to ground control, I'm stepping through the door
And I'm floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today
Here am I sitting in a tin can far above the world
Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do...

There is something so hauntingly lonely about that song. And that is what I can't stand most of all. The fact that my mom is scared and lonely. And that there is nothing I can do.

Nothing but slide the stupid tiles to try to make things make sense again, to make the picture whole. Which brings me to this: did you hear about the photo left on the moon?

In 1972, Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke took his third and final trip to the moon. While there he left behind a portrait of his family. The photo shows him, his wife Dorothy, and two sons Thomas and Charles posing on what looks like a park bench. And for over 40 years now, that photo (and corresponding boot print) has remained in the same exact spot. In a way, Duke not only took his family to the moon, they never left.

I find this oddly reassuring--beautiful, even--though I can't for the life of me figure out why.

xo,
S

*And my father. But this is a post about my mom. So.

No Title

Me: Guess what?

You: What?

Me: My mom has cancer.

You: ...

Me: ...

My brother, my mom and me, circa 1995.

I could go the factual route, which is somehow easier in its clinical-ness, though some may not be comfortable with the TMI-ness of said clinicality. On Tuesday, February 12 my mom called 911 in excruciating pain and went to the ER in acute renal failure. CAT scans showed a large mass on her cervix...turns out it's malignant...diagnosis is stage 3 squamous cell invasive cervical cancer.

Or I could go the hand-flapping, snot-bubble-blowing sobbing route, which is what I have been choking down since this happened. (Don't hug me! I tell people at work, knowing that I am a back pat away from losing it.) When they wheeled my mom away for the first surgery I bent down to tell her that she is magic and my voice caught on the word. My relationship with my mom has not always been easy but she has always been magic in that I live in awe of her, don't always understand her and love her beyond logic. She held my head as I cried about how magical she is, like a stupid fucking kid crying over unicorns, her body suddenly so light and tiny beneath me.

My mom has always said she is a realist; I call her a fatalist. I don't know what will happen. Fuck that. Yes, I do. I know that I will be there for my mom through this, hold her hand as she deals with whatever treatment she decides on, because I am an optimist, and I believe in magic.

For now I just turn to Bryan out of the blue and say guess what? Because I am trying to get used to it, to wade out from beneath the underwater raw numb place that I have been in for the past week. What? he humors me. My mom has cancer.