The Big Trip

Yours truly, on her first dive.

This weekend my folks are planning to update their website with photographs from their latest expedition. When I was a kid, they took three or four major photographic expeditions every year.  Usually one trip was The Big Trip-- an international journey to Mexico, South America, the West Indies, Australia or the South Pacific.

At twelve, it was my turn for a Big Trip. I joined my folks on the ship The Cayman Diver, chartered for diving around the Caribbean Islands. I had snorkeled since I was a tot, but I had to be twelve for scuba certification. My first ocean dive was beyond belief.

With Mom as my partner, my first dive destination was the shipwreck Balboa. Slipping into the cool, swaying water my breath dragged through the regulator like Darth Vader. Water enclosed me, isolated me. Sounds resonated strangely. Every breath I pulled seemed extraordinary. I was an astronaut, remote and alien from anything I ever imagined. A hundred years ago, could a twelve-year-old girl do this?

We swam to the wreck and explored. Strangely,  many specifics have been obliterated from my memory. Vivid pictures still remain, but unconnected to the chronology of our dive. I do recall returning to the Cayman Diver. I snatched up an odd looking fist-sized greenish glob. I displayed it to Mom. Curious, I gave it a few good squeezes. Mom replied with harsh hand signals. Instantly, I understood that the blob was a living sea creature and that I had thoughtlessly harmed it. I was deeply remorseful.

Other memories from my Big Trip  include being afraid of the well-meaning second mate who told me that nail polish was unbecoming on someone my age. Even at twelve, this seemed unsavory to me, since I wore it in such innocence.

The first mate caught me reading his dirty housewife book, which was endlessly fascinating to me. He wound up taking it from me three times.

I drank coffee for the first time. Dosing it liberally with cream and sugar, I had four generous cups before my alarmed mother rescued me. I recall protesting because it was so delicious and energizing.

When I went shopping for souvenirs, a portion of my money was spent on a small cosmetic kit, resulting in a lecture. I remember the lesson: don’t buy meaningless crap here that you can buy at home.

A small stubborn part of myself still defends my little purchase. I bought it because I felt I was becoming a young woman--it was symbolic. After all, a collection of Mother’s frosty eyeshadows captivated me as a child--I wanted to be just like her. Today, the make-up buyer in me is alive and well with a flourishing collection of plumping lip-glosses. Nevertheless, if I were in the Caribbean today, I’d spend my money on music, not makeup.

BT Returns!

BT returned home today! His haunted wipers were exorcised and the smoking steering column is no more. I found that you can become so accustomed to driving your own car that driving another is an almost hostile experience. Consider my experiences with E’s Taurus. It's cab forward design creates a volcanic interior when left even briefly in the sun, it's like driving on Mercury. The air conditioner mysteriously exhales a maple syrup scent. One turn signal has tachycardia and the all the controls have been fiendishly re-arranged to maximize confusion and inconvenience. It also tried to kill my big toe. Nevertheless, the stereo system is superb.

Insomnia Toe

At two a.m., an excruciating pain in my big toe woke me up. I lay there, half-asleep and thought, "Toe cancer. I’ve got toe cancer." The pain lingered and sleep would not return. My brain began to turn, "…toe pain = what?…toe pain = what?…toe pain = gout. Gout! Yikes!" I was fully awake then.

I immediately recalled a recent conversation with . High protein diets like Atkin’s can cause gout. I waited ten more minutes in bed, hoping the pain would diminish, thinking, "Gout…gout…gout… I have been eating lots of meat. ….Gout, gout, gout. This really hurts. Gout…" I hobbled to the library and consulted the Readers Digest Book of Illustrated Illnesses. After perusing it and the rest of out health library, I decided I was not afflicted with gout (or even pseudo-gout). It had to be toe cancer.

Only incredible self-restraint prevented me from going online to google "toe pain." From past experience, I know that searching the Internet at three a.m. will guarantee me more than a sleepless night, I’ll be awake and tormented by visions of my own impending and agonizing death (Visit Wrongdiagnosis.com!).

Why do I ponder my mortality so morbidly at night, when at noon I feel immortal? Does the sun have rationality rays intermixed with UVA and UVB? Can I buy a reality screen with SPF 15?

Perhaps this is a valid theory. Consider the effects of lengthening nights on our population’s holidays. Halloween celebrates the longer days with an innocent festival that only the sensitive embrace with frenzied abandon. The derangement culminates around the solstice celebrations (Christmas), when it’s clear that people have collectively lost their minds (the traffic, the tension, the potpourri at Dillard’s). New Year’s drunken revelry and unrealistic resolutions echo the relief everyone feels when the days begin to lengthen again.

Whew. I know someone else has certainly made this connection. Is it paranoid to wonder why the government isn’t doing something? I wonder if the government offed them. Will they off me too? Hmm. I think I’ll buy a full-spectrum bulb sometime soon

The Concrete Mall

I stopped by the mall today to purchase jeans for E.  The place looks like a Guatemalan airport.  They chipped up all the tile and swept it away. Bare, uneven concrete spans the entire establishment.  Victoria's Secret, with its pushy sales girls and glitzy panties looked especially unsavory--a place where you could buy cigarettes and bootleg porn with your bustier. Appearance is more important than I realized.

Bean Sprouts

They need to hire a crotchety old man to monitor Walmart's check-out lanes to prevent me from buying bean sprouts. I just threw out my third package this month.

Singin' A Song

I was organizing the multitude or washers, nuts, bolts and screws associated with our Big Fence Project in our garage when I heard the Taurus pull up in the driveway. Being in a jolly mood, I sang an improvised "La Cucaracha," expressing my joy over E’s arrival home and tonight’s dinner menu. Without a thought to his being home over forty-five minutes early, I trotted out to greet him at the front door (still singing loudly).
Instead of a smiling E, I encountered the cringing boyfriend of our neighbor Sioux. Apparently he was re-positioning his motorcycle trailer and needed to temporarily park her Taurus in our driveway. The poor fellow was red-faced with embarrassment for me. I laughed and waved. Sioux is well accustomed to my goofy antics--I swear I’ve heard muffled laughter at my vocalizations of "The Broom Song" and "Diggity-Doggy Diarrhea." I hope her guy recovers from his shock.  I’ll compose something special for him this weekend to mark the occasion.

Attack of the Tiny Shirts

After work today, picked me up for a five hour shopping expedition. We started off at Chile’s, where she treated me to appetizers and drinks (I forgot that we had an agreement not to eat out to save money, but the anticipation of margaritas gave me amnesia). Our server was an impeccably groomed but overly-attentive fellow that made me feel monstrously tall and muscular. He returned to our table repeatedly, anxiously asking if we needed anything. I might have thought he was captivated by my amazon figure, however, he probably hoped we would order more margaritas and food.

We spent the next several hours at the local mall, checking out the newest clothes. A preponderance of bo-ho fluff and tiny tee shirts confronted us. I’ll skip the obligatory commentary on the apparent shrinking of women’s clothing and say that Lycra makes me very "boobalicious." Not wanting to look like an extra on a Russ Meyer movie (Tura Rules!), I regretfully left a very sweet Corpse Bride tee at Hot Topic. Maybe I could sacrifice my modesty for the sake of art, since I adore Tim Burton.

After swearing we would watch The Corpse Bride together on opening weekend, we searched for the funky acre-wide Halloween store. No luck. A disappointment, since Ewbliette is helping to plan "Nukefest" with sweetheart Mucor (ask about Nukefest). This year’s theme is "Year of the Cephalopod," a combination of the thalassic with innuendoes of Cthulu mythos. I suppose I could celebrate the marine theme with a tiny tee shirt featuring fish, but E would be the only one who was horrified.

Anyway, we drooled over many, many pairs of shoes and tried on a hundred outfits. On an odd note, I found treasures in dressing rooms twice. In one I found a gift card, the other a gold ring with authentic looking gemstones. I turned them both in and gave Ewbliette two dollars for lottery tickets because I felt lucky. If we win, Ewbliette will take a limo to work to tell them to screw off and I’ll go back to school to study horticulture.

The only thing we forgot to do was to spend our obligatory hour (and paycheck portion) at Barnes and Noble. I suppose trying on all those tight tee-shirts must have cut the circulation to my brain.

Smokin'

Yesterday my car caught fire. I was making my daily journey to Lowe’s, this time to purchase a live animal trap for Socrates, when I noticed an odor from my childhood. The smell of burning nylon has been haunting B.T. (my truck) for the past four months. When I was a kid, my Mom used mountains of yellow nylon string during preparations for photo expeditions. She would cut a segment of string and melt the ends with a match to prevent it from unraveling. I can't recall why she needed the string, but when I turned seven, I was quite proud when string melting became my special chore. I liked it so much that I often continued to cut and melt mounds of string long after filling Mom’s quota. In fact, that string is probably still somewhere it my folk’s garage--they keep everything!

Anyway, I got a nose-full of string-smell, and thought "Huh. That smell again. Maybe Socrates will become a permanent visitor. Rats aren’t so bad after all." As I turned off the ignition, I glimpsed a wisp of gray smoke exiting the dash. I thought, "Huh. I might have to drive the car to my folks (they live near Lowe’s) instead of going home (five miles away)." I promptly replaced all thoughts of my truck with thoughts of our house guest Socrates and the bountiful home improvement goodness of Lowe’s.

I found a live capture trap and wandered through the garden area.  While selecting the perfect piece of lumber for E's special project, I jammed a tiny forest of splinters into my elbow. My cursing attracted the sympathy of an old man in a vivid red  cowboy shirt. He helped me transfer wood to my ugly blue cart and followed me to the register. We were in line together for a few minutes before his middle-aged daughter arrived and rudely haul him away.  It wasn't clear to me if he had dementia or if she did.

I felt sorry for him as I walked to the car. I started BT, waited for a few moments and determined I could drive him home safely.  As I exited the parking aisle, the smoke returned, this time in thick oily clouds. Panicked, I simultaneously rolled down the windows, honked, opened the door and pulled into the nearest parking spot. I turned off BT and dramatically leaped out of the car. I had visions of the whole machine exploding into a spectacular fireball, leaving me to explain myself later on channel nine news.

Fortunately, the smoke diminished, and I called home for rescue. Twenty minutes later E arrived, concerned less about BT and more about missing the presentation speech for the U.S. Open Men’s Final. I found out that I bought the wrong size of lumber and nearly made him late for his much anticipated Post-US Open Tennis Match with his Favorite Tennis Partner. 

Today,BT was towed to the shop. Now I realize that a host of strange phenomena--ghost wipers, psychotic turn signals, odd air conditioning moments and mysterious the radio station invasions may have been related to an electronic problem. I feel like the neighbor living next to a recently discovered sex-fiend/serial-murderer/cannibal, who tells Fox News, "He was such a pleasant, quiet fellow." I wonder what other obvious cues life is giving me, that I blithely ignore.

Save Me Willard!!

After watching another tepid Saturday Night Live (the incomparable Jude Law hosted), I settled in for an hour of Adult Swim before bed. Mid-Futurama, I heard the clanking of dishes in the kitchen. Assuming that the leaky kitchen faucet had caused a redistribution of salad bowls and plates in the sink, I ignored the noise. Five minutes later, the noise returned and again, I ignored it. But after the next interval, the clatter became insistent, followed by a faint tinkling. My heart froze. Grimly certain that a greasy four hundred-pound serial rapist/murder/dog killer was squeezing through the kitchen window, I went to investigate.

No one was there--no dishwashing Murderers, no fridge-raiding Peeping Toms. Turning to leave, I saw a RAT on our pantry rack. Remarkably, my first fleeting thought was that he was rather pretty; dove-gray and clean looking, like a quality stuffed-toy version of a rat. My second thought was "AAAAUUUGHHH! A RAT!!!"  I screamed like a B-movie queen, long and loud. In response, he leapt to the floor and scampered into the laundry room.

Now, my personal experience with rats is limited to countless viewings of "Willard" and having a girlfriend that dated a guy with a pet rat he took everywhere. Nevertheless, I see rats as unclean, loathsome creatures that spread pestilence and filth (curiously at odds with my first impression of the creature). As I barricaded the laundry room, E arrived at the scene (seven minutes after my shriek) to see what had happened. Clearly, he was in no hurry since I only screamed once and he reasoned that I was either already dead or harmlessly startled).

For the next forty minutes we tried to scare the rat out of laundry room and into the garage. Our efforts were futile, he found a safe spot under the washer and we were too exhausted to lift it. So I re-barricaded the laundry room and taking a tip from Willard, I used a sock full of coins to block an irregular opening.

First thing in the morning, I called the local animal and wildlife expert (my Mom) for advice. She patiently listened and asked me a few brief questions. Apparently our guest was not a common "sewer rat," but a harmless "pack rat," likely displaced by the rain and bulldozing. A visit to a website she suggested confirmed her suspicion. She recommended a live capture trap for the rat and another screening of "Willard" for me.

Pasolini's Decameron

I watched Pasolini’s Decameron tonight, a sampling of nine tales from the famed eponymous classic. The Decameron is a collection of 100 short stories written by Boccaccio in the fourteen century--it’s basically an Italian Canterbury Tales.

While Pasolini’s film was tagged as erotic, I found it far from salacious. I suppose some labeled it such due to nudity, in particular the frank depiction of an aroused young man’s majestic ruddy manhood. Not something you see at the local Cineplex (well, at least not in Southern New Mexico).

I’ve never been troubled by the lascivious aspect of adult movies, having been inured long ago by a cherished friend and aficionado of pornography. In college, his imposing collection of movies was shockingly diverse and disturbingly obscure (more on that another time). Consequently, I feel qualified to classify the Decameron as "bawdy," an innocent yet candid celebration of sex and humor--an excellent rendering of Boccaccio’s stories.

 An erotic film would be In the Realm of the Senses, a fact-based Japanese tale of obsessive love. This film is as blunt as the Decameron in depicting nudity (featuring instead a liver-colored member). However the extended graphic scenes obliterate any pretense of innocence. Despite its unabashed portrayal of sexuality, this film is not pornographic. The explicit scenes illustrate the story of obsessive love instead of standing alone for prurient pleasure.