Trans/plant/portation

Back at the beginning of the year, I posted 5 predictions for 2009. I’ll just note that I was unequivocally correct on numbers 1 and 5. Number 4 is kind of right, in that I think Mrs. Obama has been putting herself out there as a champion for children, especially children of color and in the working class. She’s not sticking to uncontroversial events like book expos on the Mall (much as I appreciated having the chance to get my Sandman #1 signed by Neil Gaiman himself, so thank you, Laura). I still think Jon Stewart might leave the Daily Show, since there are other big gaps in the late night time slots now—can anyone argue that 5 nights of Jay Leno at 10 o’clock aren’t 5 nights too many? As for number 3, well, I think the health care bill in Congress is testimony to the forces against abortion, but I wouldn’t call them quiet, and I wouldn’t say they rise—yet—to the level of vitriol we’ve seen against getting gay married.

What I absolutely failed to understand last January was how ridiculously insane and ludicrous everything would get. It was one thing to blame sub-prime borrowers for the housing market failure. Who doesn’t like to pick on people with bad credit, after all? But really, death panels? “You lie!” shouted in the chamber during the freaking State of the Nation address? The entire Fox News staff schlocking gold as an investment for the masses? Hannity’s time-lapse magic to exaggerate the tea baggers’ crowds at a rally in DC? And hell, the Tea Baggers? I couldn’t dream this crap up!

Or could I? Okay, I’ll take a stab at it. I’ll try and springboard off of some of the more outlandish headlines from 2009. Feel free to chime in with your own flash forwarding stories for next year.

1. Glenn Beck, Tom O’Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh officially begin a new third political party, called the Gold Fox Party getting Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney to agree to run again in 2012. All kinds of donations come in, most in the form of gold, which drives the Federal Election Commission nuts as the price of gold keeps climbing and putting donors over the maximum donation limit. After 6 months, the party collapses when Glenn and Rush are discovered receiving kickbacks and prescription painkillers from a laid-off worker of ACORN.

2. Sarah Palin’s own political career is finally dismantled when the public learns that Trig is the offspring of her and Levi Johnson, Bristol’s now-ex-boyfriend.

3. The US media goes crazy with tons of stories about the new “green economy,” even though the GDP is only up 0.4 percent and there’s only one new factory for producing solar panels that because of NAFTA, has opened in Mexico. The Mexican government is dismayed to find out that all of the physical barriers we’ve erected in the last 5 years aren’t any good at keeping illegal US citizens out of Mexico.

4. An independent study comes out revealing that 72.4 percent of people previously detained at Gitmo know nothing about al Qaeda’s operations from 2001, much less anything that could help counter-terrorism officials now. They have, however, secretly formed a support group with tips on making their prison lives better, including  how to make a lovely bisque from ephemera, though they can’t find any in the middle of Illinois. They turn to Martha Stewart for advice on working with dandelion greens.

5. The CEOs of AIG, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, and Countrywide Mortgage take their latest year salaries, pool them together, and buy an island in the Carribean, setting up a new government with so many tax shelters for the rich that they make a fortune in taking other people’s money at their new banks. They also send out a message to Roman Polanski that he should find a way to get out of Switzerland and come to Moneytopia so that he can direct a film about their story. It wins 8 Golden Globes and 2 Academy Awards and is hailed by critics as an “opus of epochal storytelling, delivered by the master storyteller himself.”

Susanne and I visited our friend in the hospital last week, thinking that she wouldn’t yet be able to talk, as her cancer surgery was in the neighborhood of her neck. I can imagine few people more garrulous than me, which she is, so it must have been difficult for her, relying only on a small white board, looking something like Tim Russert on Election Day in 2000. Only in this case, it’s to ask “When can I get out of here,” and not to suddenly realize the future of the country is “Too close to call.”

My plan was to walk in her room and announce that she could speak up if she didn’t want a visit, give her .2 seconds to chirp, and then say, “Okay, great, so I had a few stories to share with you…”

As it was, she was already sitting up and speaking, to her surgeon. I looked at the older, chubby man with a halo of white hair on his head and the smart Kenneth Cole pinstriped shirt, and realized I knew him from somewhere. But where? Quickly, my brain flicked through Walla Walla experiences like a coke addict with a Fischer-Price Viewmaster. Not the pharmacy. Not my outpatient knee surgery. Not the coffee shop. Not a winery. Not the Bi-Mart. Who was this guy?

They were finishing up their conversation about her prognosis. I stood out in the hall, too focused on placing him than eavesdropping, although the tone they shared indicated that things were better than expected. It occurred to me that I had shared something vaguely intimate with him—which was weird, of course, given the whole married to Susanne thing. I asked her if she remembered him from anywhere, and she shook her head in that way she has when she realizes, again, that I am something of a loon. I would just have to put my sudden fascination aside and think about it later.

He acknowledged us on his way out the door and I gave him one last stare, begging my synapses to at least pretend to give a crap that they were in my brain for my benefit, not theirs. My synapses, absences of material that they are, scoffed at me. Screw those uppity dendrites, they synapted at me. My dendrites, meanwhile, just shrugged as if none of this brain communication was their responsibility.

We sat down and she smiled at us, firecracker that she is. A long red scar ran the width of her neck and I had a memory I’d forgotten previously of when I’d had a very swollen underchin after falling off my bike when I was 7. So apparently something was going on upstairs in my head after all.

She looked at me and said, gravelly voiced, “I’ve been telling everyone about what you said to me 6 weeks ago. You told me I could handle anything.”

Okay, that’s how I remember it. What I had actually said, which our friend recalled as well, was that I’d said, “Mary, you could be a conjoined twin and you would handle it just fine. You could handle anything.”

“I do believe in serendipity,” she said, looking at me intensely. “You said the right words to me at the perfect moment, so thank you.”

Jeez, I was just blathering on, but I was glad she found such meaning in them. I blinked back tears.

Ever the talker, she started launching into various thoughts and opinions, and Susanne and I tried to fill in the space between her words with our own, so she wouldn’t tire herself out. But a couple of days in the CICU, and the old professor wanted to make up for lost time. She wanted to know, it seemed, everything that had happened on the face of the planet in the last 48 hours. To me, things seemed pretty stuck—health care still being bandied about in Washington, Tiger groping for some relief from his PR nightmare—

“Oh, I know! What was he thinking? Can you even believe it?”

“Well,” I said, adding my only “news” about the event to the conversation, “I read that his wife has adjusted the prenup agreement.”

“She’s a smart one,” Mary said, “good for her!”

We devolved into a conversation about reality television and the stars who populate its universe, and Mary mentioned the White House party crashers. Oh good, I thought, I can tell her my stories about their vineyard so she won’t have to talk. I told her my stories, speaking more quickly than I usually do because I was afraid she’d jump in and start chattering. Even Susanne cut me off a couple of times, lest a nanosecond of silence inspire her to start talking.

“I wonder if there isn’t a hierarchy of reality tv personalities,” I mused.

“How do you mean,” asked Mary.

I explained. At the top are the celebrities who have deigned to be the host of some reality show, probably a competition of some kind. You’ve got your reality tv stars, people who at any given moment, are the rage of some show or other. Then you have the reality tv stars of lesser-watched shows, or spin-off shows. Then there are the has beens whose moment has passed recently, and on their heels, the ones who were like, on The Real World eight years ago. Then there are the reality tv figures who weren’t ever really popular, or who were on awful, short-lived shows like The Mole. And now we see there are even the rejects from the reality television world, like the balloon boy parents or the White House party crashers. So it goes something like:

Heidi Klum (Project Runway), Padma (Top Chef)

Jeff Lewis (Flipping Out) Stacy London (What Not to Wear)

Lauri Waring (Real Housewives of Orange County)

Danielle Staub (Real Housewives of New Jersey)

John Gosselin (Jon and Kate Plus Eight)

Diane Ogden (Survivor, season 3)

Valerie Penso (Temptation Island)

Balloon Boy parents

And all of these are still above someone like Brian Bonsall, former child actor who got arrested yet again last week, although I’m not sure I can articulate why.

“I think there’s a study in there somewhere,” Mary said, and we laughed.

All throughout our discussion she kept touching the lower half of her face, presumably to see if it was still attached. It does give one the illusion that one’s head is much, much larger than it is when you can only feel it from the outside and not from within itself. I knew we’d tired her out, so we made our departure, leaving her with a copy of my memoir, since we’d heard she had exhausted her reading material. She nearly yanked it out of my hands, so I’m looking forward to her comments.

I drifted off to sleep that night and realized I’d gone to see that doctor when my hearing was getting bad, about 8 weeks ago. He’d found some ear wax stuck against my eardrum, and had sucked it out with the smallest vacuum tube I’d ever seen.

I’d call that vaguely intimate.

Last year Susanne and I went to observe the local Holiday parade—oh heck, it’s Walla Walla, we don’t need to pretend to be PC. Or rather, calling it a “holiday parade” is really a misnomer, because in fact it’s a Christmas parade. Yes, Christmas. As in, not Kwanzaa, not solstice, not any of the Jewish High Holidays, and certainly, most definitely, how could you even suggest it, anything Arabic. Last year, at least, the floats were about two thirds Christian church groups and denominations, one third the Elks Club and dog rescues. So for those of you doing the math, yes, there were six floats. Okay, there were a few more, but the whole event was over in 10 minutes. And each float was really intense, with lots of waving, small children—the one who got my “Best Waver” award was tween girl who gesticulated somewhere between Queen Elizabeth II and Maddona’s “strike a pose” vogue choreography. Seriously, the girl had it down. This year there were more floats, no MiniCooper brigade, although there were a slew of 60s and 70s-era muscle cars, lots more church groups, and a few fire trucks decked out in white lights, with Santa atop the ladder, which was pretty freaking cool, if you ask me. I was on a ladder truck once. I was 4, with my preschool class, and it was so exciting I nearly peed all over the vehicle. Something about a red, plastic firefighter’s helmet was just too much for me. Maybe that’s why I went into computers.

Anyway, there’s nothing really wrong with church groups per se, just that one gets  a little tired, whilst standing on the sidewalk in the 6pm pitch darkness, fending off folks who are walking with the floats and handing out scripture, lest one’s soul take a detour to that fire and brimstone place at the end of one’s life. That’s presumptive. To my mind, if I am interested in your church, I’ll check it out all on my own. My grandmother moved a lot with her farmer/carpenter husband, and she practically interviewed the pastors of competing churches in each new town to see which one would best reflect her family’s viewpoint. Obviously not a shrinking violet, my grandmother, and I want to applaud her initiative to basically make churches compete against each other. I’d like to see a sack race, actually, with a Ryrie Study Bible at the goal line, maybe.

But really, it’s just a little too exclusionary for me. People should feel excitement to see a town’s parade, not feel alienated by it. I’m sure it’s not their intention; it’s just a reflection of the fact that for 36,000 residents, Walla Walla has a lot of churches. DC certainly had its houses of prayer as well—drive down 16th Street NW into Maryland (which is also the President’s ground escape route, by the way) and you will count more than 25 churches and synagogues, as well as other buildings for less mainstream-in-America faiths, like Baha’i, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In Walla Walla, a small group of Quakers meets in the faculty lounge of a Whitman College building because there aren’t enough of them to warrant building a Friend’s House. There is a synagogue on Alder Street, at which I’ve never seen a person coming or going. Maybe the congregants take secret tunnels in and out of it.

My intention isn’t to gripe about Christians. I was raised Catholic (I can hear the booing and hissing), and it imparted a lot of valuable lessons and beliefs I hold dear to this day. Don’t break your chalk in anger. Always put the period inside the quote marks, always, always, ALWAYS. No talking during announcements. You will never know everything, so don’t even try. Turn the other cheek, always, always, always. The good in life that you do counts, so do some good, you rug rat. Forgive the sinner, hate the sin.

This last life lesson was highlighted my senior year of parochial high school, in religion class. Religion class for seniors was all about how to have “The Catholic Marriage,” which, now that I think of it, was also a bit presumptive, if not at least unintentionally pressuring us to get married right away. We were mostly 17, after all. At any rate, our teacher, Sister Doretta, who I gather had never actually participated in Catholic Marriage, was leading discussion that spring, which must have been tough. I mean, I felt no need to continue the last month of class—I’d already selected my college and was marking big red Xs on my calendar as a personal countdown to getting to leave New Jersey. So it was only with one ear that I heard her talk about one tiny little paragraph at the end of the workbook (don’t even ask what our workbook practices were about) on homosexuality. And then she had my attention, because the official stance didn’t make sense to me.

17-year-old Me: Wait a minute, Sr. Doretta. It’s not being gay, it’s the behavior the Church opposes?

Sr. Doretta: Yes, exactly.

17YOM: Okay, okay. So you can be gay, you just can’t do anything?

Sr. Doretta: Well, right. It’s the sin, not the person.

17YOM: Wait, wait, wait. They could be gay, as long as they’re celibate?

Sr. Doretta: (sounding exasperated) Yes, child.

17YOM: Well, then they might as well be clergy!

Out of the mouths of babes. I wonder what she told the other sisters in the nunnery at supper that night.

Sr. Doretta: So this smart ass in class today figured out that gay people can be clergy.

Sr. Barbara: (finishing a sip of water from a crystalline challis) Oh, dear.

Sr. Cornelius: Let me guess. (chews slowly) The Maroon kid.

Sr. Doretta: You are a wise woman, Sister Cornelius.

Sr. Cornelius: (cutting into her roast lamb) Please. I’ve got that character for homeroom. Always talking during announcements.

If there were a float of nuns at the Walla Walla parade, I’d have to burst into laughter. Maybe I just like my religious figures to come with a jaundiced eye, instead of a 4-color, glossy cardstock notice that I too could be a fervent follower of Christ. Maybe I prefer being a fatass follower instead. Maybe, just maybe, I think my work for the Lord is by making sure I witness to everyone that they should always always always put the period inside the quote marks.

As it is, I’m glad people can be spiritual however they want, as long as they respect my ability to do that as well. As for the Walla Walla Christmas parade, I greatly enjoyed the guy riding his snowmobile on skateboards, and the grandfather who pulled his granddaughter behind his tractor that had so recently been used for field work that it left little bits of wheat behind in the street.

I was a bit concerned for the people who kept dashing across the street, looking for a better view, but I quickly realized they were more than capable of clearing the road before the vehicles traveling 8 miles an hour got anywhere near them. Every so often someone driving a pickup truck would get to the end of a side street, totally befuddled that there was some kind of event going on, and then you could see a light appear over their head as they realized that they had in fact, driven around a detour sign. So that’s what that orange thing was, they’d appear to think, scratching their heads.

The parade this year was much longer, and we were chilled to the bone by the end of it, having only moved enough to keep up with the bystanders who insisted on creeping into the road. These people needed the New York City police barricades, lest they begin attacking the parade floats like joyous zombies. If the parade had gone on much longer the trucks would have only had about 4 feet of street left, the rate we were all crouching in on them.

We walked back home, our legs frozen but still willing to ambulate so that we could reach warmth. Susanne poured a few chocolate martinis and I drew a fire, and I realized I am a fervent follower of Holidays. What a nice distraction from awful weather.

Susanne and I got some pretty bad news last night about a colleague of hers who is ill. She’d been having a sore throat for a few weeks, and went to see her doctor. Out here in Walla Walla there seem to be something like 3.8 doctors for every regular person, so perhaps she could have just passed one on the way to the actual medical center, but they don’t exactly walk around with floating neon signs over their heads proclaiming “Random Health Care Service Here, Cheap.” In fact, thinking about it, that was one of the things that still makes me mad about all that time spent watching Electric Company—I never would get to make orange letters appear over my head as I pronounced words. Such false advertising.

So the doctor sent her to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, who sent her to an oncologist, who scheduled a surgery for next week. I don’t know a heck of a lot about cancer, but I do know that when a relative of mine came down with prostate cancer, the physician said it was okay to wait a few months so he could finish a project. This is not that kind of scenario.

A couple of months ago this lady and I were at a potluck dinner of Susanne’s colleagues, so for the non-faculty such as myself, it’s a little bit of navigating around insider gossip and attempting to bring the conversation away from academics to something more average, without looking like an anti-intellectual Neanderthal. Happily, she and I landed on the topic of Flipping Out, the Bravo reality show about a Califnornia designer with OCD-like perfectionism. He’s nearly impossible to work for, likes his employees to be attractive and subservient, but he has a strong ribbon of compassion that ensures his humanness. It’s also fun to watch the people around him learn how to manage him, and then one realizes that while unorthodox, these are still mutually beneficial relationships with a big dash of absurd just to round out the interpersonal interest.

It’s hard to describe, but this connoisseur of garbage television is Grandmother Incarnate. If you were to take grandmothers everywhere and exaggerate them—warbly voice, prone to high highs and grumbly lows, include the dottiness that comes with no longer giving a shit what anyone thinks of you, and throw in some excessive levels of energy, you’d have her, all in a 4-foot, 10-inch frame. This woman stands on the desks in the front of her classrooms to give lectures. And is not afraid to dance to get her point across.

She was dismayed about Jeff Lewis, who had found out, in the course of this last season, that his best friend of many years had stolen construction/design work from him and denied it, vehemently. So over dinner conversation she remarked to me, her decibel range approximating that of 20 3-year-olds who’ve just had some good measure of processed sugar:

“Oh, I just can’t believe what happened to that poor Jeff Lewis! It’s so sad!” This was pronounced a bit more flaccidly, like this:

“OOOOOOOOh, oi just can’t beLEEEVE what HAAppened to that POOOOOOR Jeffff LOOOOis! It’s SOOOOO SAD!”

We agreed that we needed to catch up later after the reunion show, which is how Bravo ekes out a few more bucks in revenue without actually having a full camera crew, as one interviewer, who seems to have been trained at the Entertainment Tonight School of Broadcasting, talks to everyone who appeared in the previous season. Or at least the ones who were contractually bound to appear.

That conversation tabled, we moved on to other discussion points, and somehow it came up that I’d once been a patient at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia when I was, obviously, a child. Actually, I was 16. It was January, 1987. I was there for a neurological issue (yes, I’ve heard all the jokes), missing my junior year midterms as I spent a week recuperating. On the floor with me were two conjoined twins, later made famous on TLC, attached at the tops of their heads. One was significantly larger than the other, but they were both playing chess against each other, over by the nurses’s station, so being different sizes didn’t seem to intellectually advantage one over the other. Unless, I guess, someone was throwing a lot of games. If I had to spend every waking moment with another person I might do something like that.

Anyway, I’d had an IV for a few days to contend with, and I got sick of dragging it around every time I left the bed. One evening my Dad and I were taking a walk around the floor, shortly after the IV had come out. He asked me how I was doing. We passed the twins.

“At least I’m not attached to anything,” I said, to my own horror as I thought about the context. He patted my shoulder to suggest I wasn’t going to hell for my faux pas. “I wonder if they get along,” he said.

According to TLC, they get along great.

I’m not sure why this story came up during dinner with this older colleague, but my point about it at the time was that you know, everyone has something to contend with, and you just decide you have to handle it and get through it. I could be attached at the head to a smaller me who has to keep dealing with my twin’s annoying Reti opening on a daily basis. Or I could be in a small town, unable to sort through what to make of myself here, absent old friends and sans any kind of substantial income potential. As my niece said when she was 4, one disappointing Christmas, “You get what you get and you love it.” Young and innocent aside, she was explaining why her older sister should not covet the wood puzzle not given to her, so she wasn’t exactly free of ulterior motives. But whatever, it’s still a good line.

When the doctor gave her a diagnosis and course of treatment, she started thinking about our conversation, apparently, and has taken the “you just handle it” as a mantra. It seems that I should write a card for her, tell her something funny, since she appreciates a belly laugh and is such a tiny fireball of humor. I wish I could make cancer funny, but I’m failing. I find a lot of things funny—doctors and hospitals, for sure. Human bodies are funny; how else to explain ear wax and tongue structure? Not uh, not ear wax and tongue structure at the same time, of course. Just in general.

But there’s something about cancer that is just plain harrowing. Cells out of control, cells on a rampage with a maniacal streak toward body domination. Something as tiny as the nail on my little finger can throw any of my organs into shock enough that they stop working, abjectly relinquishing their duties to filter my blood, or let my brain know where my limbs are in space, or decide that it’s not necessary enough for me to smell the food on the plate in front of me. I hate the very idea of cancer—that my own body can decide to self-destruct. So I hate knowing that it’s so unbearably common.

I didn’t feel this way about the diseases I’ve encountered. I’ve made jokes about having all of them; the epilepsy (anyone need a milkshake?), the lazy eye I’ve attempted to repair seven times now, and so on. Perhaps when they happen to me I feel free to find the humorous stuff. When they happen to someone else I just want to go all Braveheart on them, even if Mel is an anti-semitic drunkard. I still want to get my Scottish rage out.

So I am working on something funny, something card-sized, something that she can hang her hat on, that I can pass to her with a warm meal for her after-surgery dining needs. If I’m open to what’s funny, maybe it’ll hit me. But not hit me hard.

I had a bet with Susanne, over no amount of money, that after she neglected to see a dentist for 8 years she’d have at least one or two cavities in her mouth. She disagreed, which is how I suppose I came to the prospect of “betting” her on the issue. I’d been tardy in seeing a dentist for just a couple of years, and lo and behold, I had three cavities to fill. So come on, her mouth must have been worse, right?

Xrays were taken, results analyzed and nope, the good doctor was nary any issues with her enamel. She patted me on the back to show both comfort and a certain degree of smugness, which if our fortunes had been reversed, I would also have communicated nonverbally to her. And so I trudged into the dentist’s office, contrite and humbled.

Teeth for me have a checkerboard history. I wore braces from 5th to 8th grade, and while I’m glad I avoided having them when I was in high school, I’m not sure middle school kids are any better. Train tracks, silver streak, motor mouth, they had a litany of names that I dodged about as well as the red balls in gym class. Thank goodness my income has never been based on dodgeball capability. I was used to the repeated trips to the orthodontist, who had blanketed the walls with smiling, cartoonized teeth so that we’d have something to stare at while he twisted our train tracks to painful levels. I couldn’t even bite into a French fry for the next four hours, it was so excruciating. And still, I would return, driven by my mother who read Women’s World out in the lounge while she allowed a guy who looked like Telly Savalis to perform sadism on her child. At the end of three years of rubber bands shooting off like errant fireworks in the middle of World History, the retainers that came undone and jabbed me in the face while I was sleeping, and the lesson learned the hard way that eating salt water taffy was way off limits, he looked at me, my face in his hands and pronounced that well, I still had a little bit of a cross bite, but nobody would notice.

I sucked it up and thanked him. I THANKED him for making me the target of other people’s orthodontia-ism, because my 13-year-old self was a cowering wuss. My 39-year-old self, well, let’s just say that if he tried to leave me with anything less than utterly perfect dentition, I’d be doing my own “almost perfect” surgery on his Yul Brenner face.

So dentists and I aren’t exactly the best of friends, but the one I found in Walla Walla does a nice job and tries very hard to be as pain-free as possible. When Susanne and I were relocating to Walla Walla, I felt a filling fall out of one of my upper molars. Well, I didn’t feel it fall out so much as I felt it go crunch crunch as I was attempting to chew something. And we still had four days to go before we pulled into town. So my first phone call was to a dentist who had been recommended by one of Susanne’s colleagues. They didn’t seem to understand the urgency of my situation when I called them.

“She’s booked until late October,” said the receptionist, as dryly as the desert air outside.

“But I have a hole in my tooth,” I said. To me, this meant “what else can you do for me? Another dentist in your office? A recommendation for another practice?

To her, however, this meant, “I AM STUPID. PLEASE CONDESCEND TO ME.”

“She’s…booked…until late October. Do you want to make an appointment for then?”

And I thought people in the health care industry wanted to be helpful. Silly me. I made the appointment, even though it was August 22. In the meantime I’d look for another dentist.

Meantime didn’t happen. The next week, lazy about continuing to eat on only one side of my mouth, I broke the tooth in half. Pain soon followed. I held in my hand what had until only very recently been stuck in my head, and saw red. Not my blood, just red anger. I called the receptionist back.

“I need a dentist and I need one now! My tooth just fell out of my head!”

“Why don’t you try Dr. So-and-so?”

Really? Did I move to a higher level of reception service or was I just not saying the right password the last time around? I thought I heard giggling and the exchange of money on her end of the line.

I called the other dentist’s office expecting not much more than nothing. But when they heard of my plight they told me to come right in. Now. I hopped in the car and realized, for the first time of many, that nothing in Walla Walla is more than 5 minutes away from anywhere else in Walla Walla. This apparently is a tradeoff for the fact that Walla Walla itself is extremely far from anything else, except Milton-Freewater, across the Oregon border.

And so my relationship with this dentist began. She gave me a temporary crown, and a week later, a real one to replace the good chunk I’d lost.

Fast forward to this morning, to get two cavities fixed and filled. She stuck some anesthetic in between my teeth and gums, and I was reminded of the woman on Intervention last night who had a problem with fentanyl lollipops. Now that woman had some dental issues, sadly. The taste of this stuff was strange, kind of fruity, kind of like cheap bubble gum.

“Wha is that flava,” I asked, identifying that I sounded like a lush after a bender.

“It’s called Walterberry,” she said, smiling as she put on her magnifying glasses, “it’s the best of the worst flavors they make.”

I wanted to ask why not procure the best of the best flavors they made, but that required too much diction, so I let it go.

Thirty minutes later, I didn’t feel the lower half of my face. But heck, who needs to feel 100 percent of their face 100 percent of the time? I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and now it was after noon. Maybe I could deal with soft food or something to drink. The hygienist, after all, had sucked out a good portion of my saliva, so I was on my way to either a crisp headache or becoming a human-sized prune, neither of which seemed like a good option.

My favorite coffee house beckoned. It was, of course, only 5 minutes away. This turns out not to have been enough time for the numbing medication to wear off, so I wound up wearing most of my tea and only realized I still had food in my mouth by placing my hand in between my cheek and teeth, and moving it to the back of my tongue where I could then swallow it. It was like manual eating, and certainly the aesthetic appeal of this can not be underestimated. I may have just discovered the next diet. Eat all of one’s food with one’s hands deep in one’s own mouth and double check to make sure there aren’t big chunks just sitting on one’s tongue. Do all of this in public. I can see the book title: Redefining Eating.

I was finishing preparations for the big Thanksgiving meal when my cell phone rang, and I saw on the screen that it was one of my closest friends. So of course I answered it.

“Have I got news for you,” she said.

My mind immediately computed all of the possibilities it could find in the 0.02 seconds before I began responding to her statement, which included, in approximate order, the following:

someone was pregnant

someone was pregnant with an alien fetus

I’m behind in watching V episodes

wow, DVR has changed my life

I’m sad Monk is ending

“What’s your news,” I asked innocently.

“Those people who crashed the White House party,” she said, in a hushed tone, “those were the people who own Oasis wine where I got married.” She spat out the last six words so quickly I needed an extra moment to parse them out and find the spaces between them. And then the memory section of my brain filled in everything I needed to recall about the Oasis Vineyard in Virginia. As it happens, there is not much good in those memory stores. A Hummer outfitted with the Oasis logo that camps out at the annual Vintage Virginia wine festival, with “club” members that are condescending toward everyone else. Stories from old coworkers about visiting the vineyard only to be snubbed as “too local” or not wealthy-looking enough to get decent service. When my friend told me she was looking at wedding venues and that those included Oasis, I told her I’d never heard anything good about the place. They took that under advisement but booked there anyway. It sounded so easy—they had caterers on hand, knew several good florists, and would cordon off the premises just for their event. Once the contract was signed, it was a different story. The events manager wouldn’t let them talk to any of the vendors directly, kept changing things that they’d requested, opting, for example, for the most expensive flowers the florist listed, so that my friends had to redo the order at the last minute, and worst, started billing charges to their credit cards without telling them what any of the charges were for. When the third $1,500 charge showed up on their statement, they had the account number changed. The next charge the vineyard tried to put through failed. They had a screaming phone message waiting for them when they got home from work. The whole thing reeked of some kind of badly orchestrated con game, and though the wedding went on as scheduled, they’re still paying off the credit card debt and are left with sour memories infecting what was otherwise a wonderful October afternoon.

So I wasn’t surprised to hear that these people had crashed the White House party. Not surprised in the least. They were probably wearing clothes paid for by fiancees all over the DC Metropolitan area. Without spending much energy on why they’d do such a thing, I’ll write them off as narcissistic or sick. The incident with my friends was only one example of the many people who have sued them over the years for breach of contract and so forth.

What really bothers me about this trespass into the White House is that it happened at all. You can show up without an invitation, without being on the list, and get past the Secret Service? Really? Aren’t they trained for like, spies and crap? How could anyone simply smooth talk their way into the room?

“I hope they get arrested,” said my friend.

“Sheesh, I hope so too,” I said, pulling the turkey out of the oven. “We can’t have people think they can just break security like that.”

“I know! Isn’t that nuts?”

“I guess you’ve never bought anymore of their wine, huh, even though you got a lifetime 20 percent discount for having your wedding there?”

“Guess what,” she said, sounding somewhere between bitter and smiling, “I’m never buying their wine again. Besides, they’re selling the winery, so I don’t think anyone will honor that agreement anyway.”

“Well, Happy Thanksgiving!”

“Happy Thanksgiving to you, Ev,” she said, and I turned back to the bird, which I had named Norbert.

It’s okay not to be wealthy, of course, especially if it means your soul is intact.

New developments from the media say that Michaela and Tariq Salahi, the crashers in question, are now seeking a high-paying interview with whoever winds up top bidder. They misunderstand how broadcast journalism works, then. Reputable media sources don’t pay people to be interviewed. What they really need to do is find a ghostwriter to come up with a book like, “My Crazy Pictures with Famous People,” and then they can get a book deal from some crazy publisher out there, like whoever was going to print OJ’s fakeish confessional, or the folks who printed The Turner Diaries. Of course, they won’t be able to make any money bragging about their trespassing if the Federal Government decides to prosecute them.

So for the sake of all of us who want absolutely no more primetime on the Salahis, or the balloon boy’s parents, or Jon and Kate, or the freaking Duggers, PLEASE, I beg of you, oh Federal Government. Arrest them.

As quietly as you can.

I had a very bad case of senioritis in college. All I could see was my world ending, collapsing around me like a crumbling plaster ceiling (which did, incidently, attempt to cascade on my head a couple of years later, as it turns out). What was I to do? The US was in a recession, and nobody held dual major psych/English graduates in any kind of esteem, especially for entry-level jobs. I wondered what it was all for.

But graduate school glowed in the darkness like a beacon, since it’s the job of beacons to uh, glow, in low or no lighting. I loved writing and talking about literature and writing, after all, and so hey, becoming a professor sounded like a way to keep doing just that, with the added bonus of a three-month vacation.  So off applying I went. For two full summers I read every piece of “literature” listed in the front of my GRE Subject study guide—250 books, poems, essays, and plays. This was on top of my regular reading, and in addition to the thousands of books I’d already consumed up to that point.

The morning of the GRE rolled around, and I was up before dawn, because I had to make the 90-minute trip to Ithaca from Syracuse (New York loves its Greek town names), as I had only been able to get a seat for the test all the way over at Cornell. For those of you keeping score, Cornell’s campus is about three times the size of Syracuse’s, and I knew it like I know how to navigate through Dhaka. Add to this a very up-and-down terrain with few outdoor campus directories, and I wandered around the grounds like a psycho Roomba. I was sweating so much by the time I found the classroom I had a hard time holding on to my two number 2 recommended to bring pencils. I sat down at 7:54, six minutes to get my glasses fog-free before the test began.

So I must really love reading and writing. I approached my studies with love and appreciation that someone cared to spell out a series of words enough to make a story. I had my preferences and interests. I greatly enjoyed some novels, eschewed others, felt the range of emotions that they wanted me to feel as a reader, or that they never intended, “death of the author” what it is.

But let’s get real here. There are a lot of books out there that suck. We read them anyway. Or we pretend to read them. For every person who has read Ulysses, there are 16.4 who didn’t make it past page 30. And while I’m not saying anything qualitative about Ulysses (I actually have read it twice), I think it’s fascinating to see how many literary agents and editors write and blog about the terrible manuscripts that come across their desks. I wonder, “how bad can they be?” I think I may already know the answer, from direct experience, even.

In high school, I was a judge for our literary magazine. I still recall one poem that stood out from all the rest, for the worst reason: because it stunk up the room. It went something like this:

I love you

But you hate me

But

I still love you.

I theorized that they’d been inspired in the girls’ locker room, which was known to hold all sorts of miserable sentiment upon the insides of the actual locker doors. As if opening up some random metal lever could expose someone to the awfulness of a very short relationship’s terminus.

So for me, bad high school poems are the ground floor of poor writing. I don’t have a lot of other experience with terrible prose, although there was one potential hire who included in his cover letter that he was the author of The Emerald Throne, which was, get this, a fantasy novel. One wonders why someone would reference an unpublished novel that smacks of bowel movements when looking for an office job, but the title alone conveyed a kind of unintentional hilarity that I was sure would have me in stitches by page 5.

I understood that I was a literary snob. Even so, I am exhausted from the monotonous chastisement of would-be writers. “Just Because Your Mom Loved It Doesn’t Mean It’s Good,” or some such, is the number one message coming out from the myriad of agents, editors, and publishers who blog about their lives online. Okay, I get it. There are as many bad writers out there as there are screechers filling up the Falcon’s stadium in Atlanta for a chance to be the next American Idol. But given that I’ve heard this message about coming to terms with one’s own literary suckiness for 20-plus years, I’m starting to wonder if relaying the message isn’t working. Anyone egotistical enough to think that because their dog likes the book makes them a prodigy, well, they may not give a fig what Agent X thinks about their rationale. As long as people think writing is a way to make easy money and/or be famous, misoverestimated authors are going to add to the slush piles of publishing houses everywhere (but mostly New York City).

In fact, it seems like there’s a narrow range of egotism that’s acceptable in the publishing world: one must be stubborn enough to keep writing, even in the face of repeated rejection, because any writer worth her or his salt understands that of course, nobody gets their first book published (except ZZ Packer). But you also don’t want to be the crazy person who keeps peddling a bad idea, written into 13 different novels. At some point the insistence turns into delusion, and there’s no blood test to indicate when one has crossed the threshold. The first Harry Potter book, after all, was rejected a dozen times by agents, but Gone with the Wind was rejected 133 times. I can’t imagine how many people told Ms. Mitchell it was a fantastic book. If she’d written it now, would she have self-published it?

Speaking of mixed messages, agent blogs go on and on about the traits of hard-to-work-with writers. They make sense, generally. I mean, I wouldn’t want to work with someone who missed deadlines, who screamed about any criticism received, who was a petty thinker, or unreliable sort. But we’ve screened out most of the sensible people, haven’t we, by making the writing the number one criterion for entry into the club, with the high bar filtering through people with a large sense of themselves. How many team players are left in that scenario?

Anyway, I’m writing. I’ve written stories since my Mom put a steel Royal typewriter into the freezing front room of the house, and I would type—well, bang, actually—out stories wrapped in four layers of clothing, a scarf, and a wool cap, since Mr. Wizard had said that humans radiate 90 percent of their body heat through their heads. I had some corrective tape, but mistakes mostly just got written in. At Powell’s Block of Books in Portland last week, I came upon another Royal. This one had two spools of ribbon: one, the mainstay black, and one red. Wow. How different would my world have been? It was nice to have my moment of nostalgia, my arms sagging from 7 or 8 books I’d claimed for purchase.

You know what? I am a writer. A good writer, if I say so myself. Not the best, because I’m not that stuck on myself. But I like the things I write, or frankly, I wouldn’t devote such energy to them. I’ve parsed my writing in workshops with some really alcoholic, published authors. I’ve submitted myself to the whims and folly of the fearsome writing contest, like an ant taking on a flaming red dragon. I’ve done peer swaps for critique, sat through writers groups that never got anywhere near to writing anything, even if they were decent places to vent. I’ve come up with 67 Ineffective Methods to Prosper over Writer’s Block. I think I’ve earned some street cred here.

I’m not all that good at navigating the publishing world, but I’ll get there. And I think there’s an audience for my work. Hopefully I’ve hit the sweet spot for writers—energetic, focused, self-deprecating, persistent without being blind to my own limitations.

Oh, and I’m also nice, even if I get lost on the Cornell University campus.