Tell It To COACHIE

A few months after the HP arrived in Afghanistan, he sent me this file with his “Donut of Pain.” For some reason, it didn’t open when I first tried to look at it, so I concluded that I didn’t have Excel on my computer. Concluded, without actually, you know, looking to see if I have it on my computer. And I do. I only realized this today (and oh the spreadsheets and graphs I would have been churning out had I only known) when I wanted to get a picture of it to add to the post. I’m sure there is a way to link to excel and have the thing count down right there in front of your very eyes, but since I am not capable of even determining what software I have, clearly the applications of software are way beyond me. As you can see, I have even relaxed my no cussing rule to display it. (If you have a teeny little screen like me and you can’t see it, the headings are “Critical Dates” - arrival, departure and total days in theater, “Penance Paid” and “Penance Due” in weeks, days hours, minutes, and seconds)

My mom asked me if I thought it would be hard giving up control of some of the aspects of our household when the HP gets back. I have considered that question along with another observation one of our friends jokingly made when he left: “Well, he won’t be there to help with the kids, but you won’t have to take care of him, so really on the homefront it may be a wash.” Now that I have a lawn guy and have killed the fish, the only chore that the HP reliably performed that I’m still doing is taking out the trash, and he can have that back. I do appreciate that he never complains about the way I park in the driveway, which makes it hard to get the can back and forth. I complain about it to myself every week.

Another household matter that I turned over to him shortly after we were married is paying the bills. The HP doesn’t believe in saving ATM receipts or balancing the checkbook. He, like his father before him, prefers to call the bank every day and leave lists of numbers all over the house (and I have some strong suspicions that he occasionally uses his calling card from over there to hear his automated girlfriend at the bank). Every marriage is a compromise, and that sort of bookkeeping was so diametrically opposed to mine that I had to walk away, and let him handle the bills (after all, it was easier for me to stop balancing the books than for him to start). He’s never bounced a check or overdrawn the account, but somewhere deep inside of me I just feel that way of doing things is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. But there is no chance he’ll change, so when he gets home, he can take over the bills.

What else does he do around the house? He is usually quite willing to initiate happy hour and to make the trips to the liquor store (which have been rather burdensome on the days I’ve had to take the kiddies with me). When we’re out of milk he’ll always stop after work so I don’t have to load up the kiddies (so you’d better drink up those CapriSuns now kiddies, the milk will not be running dry so often any more). Sometimes he cooks dinner, and on the weekend he does all the dishes. He’s really good at making egg sandwiches for breakfast. He always plans the outings and searches out places to take the kids on the weekends. But what he does on an everyday basis is provide a level of energy, noise, enthusiasm, and happiness that increases the entropy but makes the household hum, makes the household exciting, makes the household a family.

What else awaits me? Well, he sleeps like a tornado, and every winter I have to get my own separate covers because he steals them all. He leaves piles of paper all over the house that are sorted according to his special system but never disposed of. He “helps” by “throwing in a load of laundry” that he will never return to, move to the dryer, or fold. He won’t put away his laundry, he tracks dirt all over the clean floors, and he leaves a mess of whiskers in our bathroom sink EVERY SINGLE MORNING.

I have told the kiddies over and over again, that daddy will miss one of everything, and then he’ll be back. They each had to get through one Christmas, one birthday, etc., etc., and then when we were getting ready for Christmas again, daddy would be back. I can’t imagine what I would do if he were arbitrarily reextended for six months like some of the units in Iraq. He assures me that it would take an act of Congress (and I am turning a blind eye to the fact that with this Congress, they just might do it) to keep him there one day past 365, so now with his flight out less than a month away, I am finally ready to tell myself that he is coming home soon.

It is a circle, a whole year that he missed, but a whole year that’s starting again. This year will be easier, and happier, and the year he starts rinsing out the sink. We all trudged through the deployment and we’ve all found new strengths. So now we’ll push this lesson way, way back into the dusty attic of our brains where we stick the stuff that we figure we’ll never need again. Hopefully we won’t, but it will be there just in case. This year is going to be a good one.

Hurry home HP.

Last year I started watching Top Chef near the end of its run, mainly because my mom was watching it. This year I started watching it because it occupies the timeslot of Project Runway, and like most junkies, I am compelled to turn on the TV at that time, hoping that I’ll find a new unannounced season has begun. Top Chef is entertaining in its own way, but it seems to have some problems that no amount of editing or drama manufacturing can cure.

Problem number one is the host. Last year it was Billy Joel’s current wife (well, she was current when she was hosting it, I don’t know if she has since gotten divorced or been maimed in a drunk driving accident). Even though she’s American, she seemed even more unfamiliar with the English language than Heidi Klum. Whenever she delivered her scripted lines, she sounded as if someone had taught her the pronunciation of all the words, but she just had no idea what she was saying or where any of the inflection should go. The new host is excessively skinny (okay for fashion, but rather unseemly on a cooking show), and while she was pretty good with her lines last week, this week she sounded like the people from Bravo called her in and said, “No, no. Billy Joel’s wife-it-up.”

Problem number two is Tom Colicchio, the (tor)mentor chef, who plays a mean, disgruntled version of Tim Gunn for Top Chef. Last year, rather than saying “Make it work” he would tell the chefs, “That will never work… you are in serious trouble…I hate you…I hate this show…No one should cook but me.” This year he is all smiles and jokes. Last year I thought he was too mean, but it turns out I prefer the mean version. Now I always think he’s being a faker. Of course, after the cheating part of tonight’s episode, he may not be able to keep that smile on his face.

Problem number three with the show is the judge’s discussion segment, which is always obviously either scripted or recorded several times, because no one ever says anything like it just occurred to them. A lot of the time, they don’t even appear to be discussing the same things at the same times. Maybe the Project Runway judges were better on their feet, but the Top Chef judges should make much more of an effort to seem less robotic (and less like they are making points fed to them by the producers).

Of course the overwhelming problem with any show on Bravo is the manufactured drama. The editing tricks are so obvious now that I’m usually not sucked in, but this week they reached a new low - the gratuitous vomiting shot. Everyone who watches Bravo knows that each episode’s featured contestants are the ones who are going to win or the ones that are going down. But today they devoted the first five minutes to the contestant who wasn’t feeling well, right up until the dramatic spewing footage, and then she basically disappeared for the rest of the episode. Her only contribution to the plot was a puddle of puke.

Maybe the editors were bored because something bad actually did happen in this episode and did not need to be manufactured. One of the chefs stole a box of lychees, and one of his fellow chefs ratted him out, and then he had to take them back to the store. I don’t know what lychees are, but I found this little tidbit online:

“The edible portion or aril is white, translucent, firm and juicy. The flavor is sweet, fragrant and delicious. Inside the aril is a seed that varies considerably in size. The most desirable varieties contain atrophied seeds which are called “chicken tongue”. They are very small, up to 1/2 inch in length. Larger seeds vary between 1/2 to 1 inch in length and are plumper than the chicken tongues.”

Ew. They might be a delightful fruit, but now I’ll never eat one.  They will always make me think of chicken tongues, whereas before I never even knew that chickens had tongues and really, how did that come to be a reference point when most people are not experts regarding the size of chicken tongues? Maybe the team should feel were lucky that the guy had to return them to the store.

At the end when all of the chefs were lined up for judging, the felon chef tried to say he didn’t realize until later about the whole stealing business. However, after an inspirational speech by one of his teammates: “If you don’t back up your teammates, you should just put your HEAD up your ASS!(um, what?)” he decided to take the blame and “bow out.”

Top Chef is definitely not as entertaining as Project Runway, not only because the differences between the contestants are so hard to judge (they are all very similar, except for hair and … well, no mainly hair), but because you can’t appreciate their final products. How can the viewer decide which dish is better without tasting it? That’s right, she can’t. But I’ll keep watching it, because I know that before it ends Bravo will start running ads for the next season of Project Runway, and that will have to suffice until it starts again.

I do not think that everyone I meet will like me. Some people will spend time with me and decide I am annoying or an idiot, and some people will have what my college friends and I dubbed an “irrational hatred” toward me. Everyone has irrational hatreds, people that they don’t like just because they don’t like the look of them. Although you have never conversed or interacted with the person in any way, you develop an overwhelming feeling that if you did converse or interact, you would hate him/her. I can think of two people who I knew had an irrational hatred towards me, and my friends all thought it was funny, because I am not controversial or colorful and I don’t evoke immediate, strong, responses. Most people don’t consider me long enough to hate me.

Due to my long, painful stretch in my horrible grade school, I am pretty much friendly towards everyone. I can usually find a level to relate to most people, whether it is limited to a wave or develops into friendship. I don’t like drama, and I don’t like arguing or hurting peoples’ feelings, and really, the only character attribute that I can’t stand to be around continually (other than like, homicidalness) is ego. Generally, I am pretty easygoing and agreeable with people that I meet. To quote myself:

Since college my new rule of thumb has been that if cool people need someone to exclude, I’ll always volunteer to be excluded. I don’t want to be on the inside looking at the “losers” outside (to a degree that it is almost my life philosophy). After wasting so much of my childhood worrying about whether I was ever going to be in the cool crowd, I can’t even stand the thought of being a part of it now. I’m definitely not some sort of saintly person, I’m really not even what people would consider very nice, but at least I can claim that I am inclusive and that I don’t rule out friendship without a reason(except of course with Jason Kennedy, the producers of ER and Grey’s Anatomy, terrorists, and the guy who came to remove the dead squirrel last Friday).

So imagine my shock when I found out that I am being badmouthed in the neighborhood, by a chaplain’s wife no less. I have previously brought forth my theory about why we are surrounded by chaplains in our housing area and why they are so unfriendly to us. Little did I know that they were not only ignoring me, but actively disliking me. The conversation that was related to me went a little something like this:

Chaplain wife: I see you’ve been spending time with our neighbor over there.

New Friend of Mine (they moved in over the summer, our kids like to play, we hang out at the bus stop and have similar parenting philosophies so we both have well-behaved, nice children unlike the chaplains): Yeah. She’s really, really nice.

Chaplain wife: Hmm. You’re lucky. I have tried over and over again to start a conversation with her, but she won’t talk to me.

That, my friends, is what is known as a bald-faced lie. From the moment we moved in here, she has not one time ever attempted to converse with me. On our very first day outside, when our kiddies were all in the kiddie pool and she was out in her yard with her much older children, she did not cross the street or even come to the curb to say hello. She didn’t even wave. I suppose in her mind I was being unfriendly by not taking my three young and dripping wet children across the street to introduce myself. I assumed that she was busy or shy or, you know, anti-Catholic, but from that time I always waved to her or said hello if I ran into her at the commissary. I’m not antagonistic. I figured she didn’t want to befriend me, and that was fine. Plus, her husband cut my grass that one time, so how much animosity could I really throw across the street?

It bothers me a little bit that she would disparage me in front of someone she knows is my friend as well as other neighbors that I only recently met. It bothers me more that one of her best buddies is another chaplain’s wife that I was once friendly with, but now we only exchange waves. I figured that as chaplains’ wives they had more in common with each other than with me, and really, I am not that desperate for company. I sometimes feel uncomfortable spending a lot of time with people who can’t relate to drunken college stories or recent ones about the kiddies identifying and recommending a bottle of Yellowtail in the liquor store (and I am friends with a Mormon who would appreciate those stories because they are funny regardless of the alcohol). Could it be that this chaplain’s wife badmouthed me to the other chaplain’s wife, and encouraged her to avoid me?

What bothers me the most is that I have been portrayed, behind my back, as a snob. Of all my many, many, many faults, I am not a snob. I am the Rodney King of every situation (no, not in the beatdown, brain injury way), wanting everyone to “just get along.” I will befriend just about anybody, and in particular the people who feel like outsiders (yes, I’m sooo great that I hate myself because I’m egomaniacal about it). One thing I never do is badmouth a person to others who haven’t met him/her, but are likely to meet him/her (if the odds are that the two people will never meet, I’ll badmouth away). I never gave my new friend my opinion on the unfriendliness of the chaplains’ wives around here, because I thought she would eventually meet them and draw her own conclusions.

When we were having our little discussion of the chaplain’s wife’s remarks, I did attempt to defend myself by saying that the chaplains’ wives had never shown any interest in me, introduced themselves, or welcomed me to the neighborhood. She has had exactly the same experience. So I guess in a way that chaplain’s wife was right. My new friend was “lucky” because at least she met a person in the neighborhood who was willing to say hello (pardon me while I pat myself on the back).

I’m too tired to go on at length with how pleased I am that Peter and Sarah are done for the season. They were so annoying that they almost drove me to Extreme Home Makeover (and that show has way too much emotion to watch on a regular basis). As a public service to those of you who don’t watch The Amazing Race here’s a little recap of Peter’s performance this season:

Early in the race: “I just love, love, love my one-legged girlfriend.”

Middle of the race: “My one-legged girlfriend is so slow and annoying.”

End of the race: “I think my one-legged girlfriend and I will probably just be friends.”

After Sarah tells Phil that Peter is not nurturing or kind: “How dare my one-legged girlfriend speak that way to me - I am going to f#$%&ng kill my one-legged girlfriend.”

And if you freeze frame that scene, you can see it all over his face.

I have previously remarked that I am willing to live with the crickets that cohabitate with us, provided that they stay in the closets. This has not always been a great arrangement; especially that time when I put my bare foot into a shoe containing cricket remains. The main problem I have with our crickets is that they are really, really slow. When faced with certain demise under a shoe or magazine, they just sit there. Usually I will try to nudge them toward the closet or behind a piece of furniture, but half the time I end up breaking one or more of their legs.

I recently decided that possibly the crickets appear in the middle of the floor because they are ready to die, perhaps of starvation. I have no idea what crickets eat, although I could probably name five or six things that eat crickets, including people in Korea if I remember correctly. I decided to ask the internet what crickets eat, to determine whether or not they are finding food in my closets. I’ll admit that I was also eager to confirm that they do not dine on mouse droppings or cockroaches or human remains or other things that I’m assuming are not in my closets.

While information on what crickets eat was rather hard to find, I did learn this information from Wikipedia:

“Crickets are popular pets and are considered good luck in Asia, especially China where they are kept in cages (Carrera 1991). It is also common to have them as caged pets in some European countries, at least in the Iberian Peninsula. Cricket fighting as a blood sport has also been popular, particularly in Macao.”

Um, what?

As it turns out, according to ezine articles:

“Crickets are omnivores and feed on almost anything-usually organic materials, plant decay, grass, fruits, seedling plants, fungi and even meat. Crickets need good diet otherwise they tend to feed on each other.”

So, I’m going to go with that last bit - that I’ve got squeaky clean closets and a crazy sect of cannibalistic crickets on my hands. The ones that come out into the open to die are obviously wracked with guilt over their lifestyle or weak from spending so much time in hiding from the more aggressive ones. All of that is fine with me. If the crickets need to work out their demons in the middle of my dining room floor, I’ll give them space.

What I will not tolerate, however, is their new trick of lurking in the toilet. Another interesting bit in the ezine article was: “Crickets also need a good supply of water. However, keep the water away from the food to keep the food dry and fresh. Insert cotton swabs into the water vessel to prevent the crickets from drowning.” Clearly they are not good swimmers, so why would they choose the toilet as a new hang out? Three times in the past month I have found rather large crickets perched inside the toilet bowl. Each time I gasped, shuddered, and flushed them down because bugs are gross enough without rescuing them from places of questionable cleanliness (want to come visit me?). They put on rather a dramatic show as they circle the bowl, first fighting against the pull and then almost shrugging as their thin little legs start to swirl around them with the force of the water.

I guess bugs in the toilet would not prompt most people to write an essay. Unfortunately, my repeated encounters with the crickets have brought to the forefront of my mind a horrifying story that my friend John told me in college. Apparently, one afternoon when his mother was using the bathroom, a rat came up out of the toilet. He said after that day she always kept a teakettle full of water on top of the toilet lid, in case anything else ever tried to come in that way. Honestly, since this was a true incident (and if you saw how he gave a little laugh and shook his head and said “my poor mother” you’d believe him too) and not an urban legend, for the past 20 years I have been uneasy that such a thing could happen. (Not to mention all those news stories about snakes in the plumbing). More times than I care to admit, I have glanced down into the bowl and inspected the pipes behind it and wondered if a creature could make it into my bathroom. I think that fear is a main reason that I am so quickly in and out of the bathroom at bars and parties.

And so the crickets will not earn any sympathy from me. Maybe they are thirsty, maybe they are hiding from their cannibalistic friends, maybe they are just looking for a way to die. But as long as there is even the slightest possibility that something that would like to eat a cricket is lurking in my plumbing and looking for a reason to surface, the crickets will be destroyed quickly and without remorse.