Your car told me all about you

My kid needs a car sometime soon, so I've been asking people their opinions about cars. This process has led me to one inevitable conclusion: people think their cars represent their inner being, so they make sure to buy a car that demonstrates exactly who they wish they were, but will never actually be. The end result is that the car serves to emphasize the person's failings instead of covering them up.

The perfect example is, of course, the minivan. Every college-educated, suburban, middle-aged, upper-middle-class, two-child woman is desperately trying to pretend she doesn't drive a minivan. Of course, she drives carpool on Tuesdays with five kids, so she needs a car with a third row. She has four different sporting activities and routine trips to some giant warehouse club store, plus there's that homeowners' association-approved garden she needs to keep supplied, so she needs cargo space. The minivan, however, sends her over the edge, somewhere past post-partum depression and into the realm of deep, existential angst over her lost, non-mom identity. And this is where car dealers make their money.

For $10-15K more than a minivan,you can get a large SUV with essentially the same exact features as a minivan, but -- this is important -- it looks different. Sure, it gets crap mileage, the safety specs are generally lower, and no one with the standard quantity of eyes in her head can park the damn thing. Yeah, so what if the only way to get into the third-row seat is via Olympic pole-vault maneuvers. None of that matters, because it is an SUV and not a minivan.

Note to research department: investigate the very real possibility that "SUV" is actually secret code for, "I totally wanted to give up my kids for adoption and go back to re-living my college days, but I knew my sorority sisters would judge me, so I bought this vehicle instead."

SUV moms are only the most visible of the Drivers with Yearning Issues. There's the whole group of people who wish they hadn't been born part of the species that will soon destroy the planet, so they buy the Toyota Prius or the Nissan Leaf (unless they have money and a gadget fetish, in which case they go with Tesla). There are the men who wish they had grown up hunting and fishing more than once a year, who invariably buy pickup trucks of improbable dimensions. And of course, there are the guys who never really were cool, but they can now afford the sharpest car on the lot. They buy convertibles. Every. Time.

None of which helps me with my soon-to-be-sixteen daughter, who -- through some strange roll of the dice -- appears to have arrived on earth as a person satisfied with herself, who needs no vehicular affirmation of any kind. Strangely enough, there's a small minivan that she really likes.

My Sorting Hat

I've been thinking about race since the latest incident of cop-shoots–kid. I have no idea whether the cop shot the kid because the kid was black, but it seems that in all these instances, people make some sort of split-second decisions that lead to bullets flying. So what are those decisions that people make, and how many are racial, or racist? I'm sure brainiacs have written endless papers about the psychology of law enforcement, and how a cop assesses mortal danger, but I'm not inclined to look them up. Nor am I inclined to read Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink," if only because I'm tired of Malcolm Gladwell.  But I'm interested in the way we sort people into categories, like Hogwarts's Sorting Hat, based on whatever knowledge we gain in the first thirty seconds of knowing someone. The easiest way to sort, of course, is visually: height, weight, skin color, Charles Manson eyes, abnormalities of limbs or face. Race is one of those quickly-read, but often incorrect, sorting criteria. So think back for a minute and try to remember how you first learned that people were different races, and why it mattered.

Noticing differences among us is part of nature -- not just human nature, but the entire realm of that vicious bitch-queen, Mother Nature. I've heard a story of some creature that thinks one of three thoughts when encountering another creature: (1) this thing is bigger than I am, so I will RUN; (2) this thing is smaller than I am, so I will kill it; or (3) this thing is the same size I am, so I will try to mate with it.

Run, kill, or mate: those are the options. Now, I'm fairly certain human beings are slightly more sophisticated, but still, their initial social instincts are to categorize people: is this stranger like me, not like me, attractive, repellent, neutral...or is it  Geraldo Rivera, in which case all bets are off anyway? I wonder if this very basic sorting of people into categories is what begins our journey into racism. Someone is the same color as me, so then go into the "acceptable" bin without any real questions. Someone is a different color, so they go into a different bin.

When I was a little kid, we lived in Virginia, and it was there, in elementary school, that I have my first real memories of black people.  My parents had spent the latter half of the 1960s in Mississippi (where my brother and I were born) and Georgia, so I know that I was raised in the hotbed of civil rights and racial tension, but I recall very little of it.  As Yankee Catholics, my parents were about as popular with white southerners as rattlesnakes in a swimming hole, but even their popey category of social misfit was still a world away from being black. I don't remember much of anything race-related till elementary school, when I first encountered a sizable group of black kids.

 I remember being a little scared, and a little awed, and intimidated...and envious. They looked different, sounded different, moved differently, and for lack of a better word, they had an identity as a group, something that made them seem comfortable with each other -- way more comfortable than white people ever were with other white people. They tended to hang out together on the playgrounds, and of course back then I didn't realize that this was de facto segregation. I just figured they didn't want to hang out with us, and I couldn't blame them there. I'm not sure I wanted to hang out with the white kids either, but that's how it worked, and it never occurred to me to challenge the social norms. I was fascinated, but from a distance. I did try to imitate their "accent" once, and it was the first time I can remember trying to mimic another person. The word was "pencils," but they pronounced it "pailn-suls." How did they make that word come out so differently than I did? Why did it sound so exotic, so cool? I always felt hopelessly bland around black people. The funny thing is that I had no idea that in the social climate of the times, being white was actually considered valuable. I just knew there was this difference, some sort of otherness about these groups that I wished I could join sometimes.

Even on the television of my childhood, the black characters were the Jeffersons, Jimmy Walker, Cosby, Sanford and Son...and almost never did they interact with white characters. They had these inside jokes that were often about being black or making fun of the social norms, and I probably learned the most about such things from those shows.  They were hilarious shows, but they definitely had been sorted by race. Strangely, my dog seemed to categorize people by race, too; the only person she ever hated instinctively was the very kind black woman who coached the little league cheerleaders. I must have heard the N word regularly, but by that time, it didn't mean all black people. It meant some category of black people that seemed equivalent to white trash, much the way Chris Rock uses the word. It was another layer of sorting then, but it was finally, slowly becoming a word that nicer people didn't use.

What about communities that were nearly all white? How did the social sorting work when everyone had roughly the same skin tone? For that sort of question, I could always trek up north to see my extended family in western Wisconsin, where my young mind knew that racism could not possibly exist, because who the hell were they gonna be racist against? Redheads? But even there, I could listen to my grandfather telling Ole and Line jokes (jokes about Norwegians, similar to Polish jokes), and I learned there is a heritage difference between a person named Hansen and another named Hanson. Later, I heard some pretty virulent racism being spewed in those flat, nasal accents, and it shocked me to bits, in part because I thought racism required a southern drawl and a banjo. It was strange to hear those wholesome, Midwestern tones speaking the same hateful bullshit I associated with southern pickup trucks. I remember thinking, wow, I guess if you don't have any darker-skinned people in your state, you start subdividing the Scandinavians and making distinctions between blond people...sheesh.

And then we moved to Florida, and I encountered all new sorting schemes. Two of the guys I met in fifth grade were Ira Adler and Brent Goldman. I had never met Jewish kids, and when Brent asked, "Can you come over today, Ira?" it was in that musical, Brooklyn-Jewish accent I learned to mimic perfectly. It sounded, to my redneck ears, like aliens communicating. Now I had to learn a new social category, and I would hear people talk about kids who "looked Jewish." What the hell did THAT mean, I wondered; how could you LOOK like the people you went to church with? It made no sense to me then. And then, with each wave of immigrants from the islands, or South or Central America, I learned that they sorted each other, too. Cubans thought they were more impressive than Puerto Ricans, who were clearly better off than Dominicans, and everyone thought Haitians were the lowest. Later I learned that Cubans were treated far better because they were fleeing Communism, whereas everyone else was just fleeing brutal dictators, poverty, starvation, disease, and hopelessness. So the new Americans were being sorted according to the particular form of hell that inspired them to float to Miami in the first place.

This kind of sorting happens everywhere. Friends in Israel have told me that even there, Jews of the Diaspora are treated differently than Jews who came from other places. There are fine differences between migrating to Palestine in the 1920s and being shipped there from displaced persons camps after WWII. My Pakistani friend tells me that skin tone matters there, with paler skin being "better" or more desirable than dark skin. Various European nations are worried about losing their essentially white population as immigrants from North Africa and southwest Asia stream in. People who cover their heads to show respect for their gods are treated differently than people who wear baseball caps and earbuds. Regardless of where you are in the world, it seems there is some distinguishing skin-tone or cultural heritage that automatically determines your social standing.

So we tried an experiment, 15 years ago, on the newborn Cassie, which could be considered unethical, I suppose, if I had any ethics to begin with. We never referred to anyone by race when talking with her. We used names when we could, but otherwise would ask about her teacher with the red shirt, the kid who liked playing with blocks, the girl with the book Cassie liked, the man with the Falcons hat. We wanted to see how long it took till she absorbed some kind of race-sorting concepts from the rest of society. Of course, the whole thing ended up being a lesson for us, too, as we no longer used race-based terminology. It's fascinating to try cutting a whole category of words out of your vocabulary.  Try it.

She was about three when she realized an important (to her) difference between people: hair styles. A little girl in her class had a beautiful set of beads in her hair, set in intricate patterns and rows that looked like sculpture. Cassie realized that her own hair was different than that of the beaded girls. Later, we let Cassie get beaded, but still, she knew her hair just wasn't the same. A few years later, we were listening to a song that referred to people by "color," and she wanted to know what yellow people were. When I explained that yellow was for Asia, she was irritated, because, "No one is yellow; that's silly." So I asked, "How many people do you know who are actually black? Or really white? None of those color words make sense." And the conversation started there. We are still trying to sort it out year after year, particularly as black history is a major part of education here in Atlanta.

We have never gotten back to automatically referring to people by race. Once we realized how many other ways people could be sorted, race became a criterion of last resort. Simply by changing our behavior, our viewpoints shifted. I'm not saying this is particularly virtuous; we are not on some new plane of existence because of this little game we played. But it becomes really interesting, during times of racial tension, to try to guess what kind of Sorting Hat people wear, and how they could be redesigned just a bit.  It won't cure racism in a minute, but it is worth looking at how the Sorting works.

Cars for Kids

My daughter is going to turn sixteen in about eight weeks.  I’m not going to tediously rhapsodize about how time flies, nor will I yammer about my precious baby going from Cheerio-snarfing to AP History in the blink of an eye.  Sixteen years did not go by in the blink of an eye (editorial note: if it’s just one eye blinking, isn’t that a wink?).  We lived in those years, enjoyed them, were exhausted by them, and fully felt all sixteen of ‘em as they passed.  All along the way, we’ve been the type of overindulgent parents you see in magazines, the ones who go out and buy neglect-o-matic devices to keep baby happy, from bouncy chairs to doorway jumper-swings to floor mats with toys designed to enhance her intelligence and turn her into a miniature astrophysicist by the time she’s four. 

But now it’s car-shopping time, and my traditionally overindulgent streak is bashing directly into my intense dislike for making big decisions and spending fortunes.

Not that we have to spend a fortune here.  In my family, it is tradition for the kid’s first car to be the most embarrassing piece of rolling excrement any teenager has had the misfortune to drive.  I drove a baby-blue, 1977 Camaro in the mid-1980s, which meant the car was in that sad zone when a vehicle is way past new-and-hip, but has to wait another twenty years to become retro-hip.  In fact, I’m pretty sure the 1977 Camaro was one of the many vehicles never to experience a retro-hip phase, and instead became a parts-donor to more interesting cars around the country.  My brother, meanwhile, was driving my dad’s old Ford Econoline van, the kind of van pre-dated the “minivan” by decades.  It was black, with over-tinted windows, and had orange carpeting inside, and little orange flame accents around the windows.  It made a noise like a Harley, which made it easy to hear for four or five blocks away, perfect advance warning for cleaning up and repairing damages before our parents got home. It had two huge CB antennae, having been owned by a CB radio enthusiast before entering its luckless existence as the chief transporter of drunken football players and their bimbo dates.  I ended up taking that car to college for my first year or two.

Those cars were not just transportation.  They formed a part of our identity, made statements about our personalities – “I hate walking so much that I would even drive this car just to avoid hoofing twelve blocks home,” and, “Go ahead and laugh, I know it’s a piece of shit” – and they formed the basis of a thousand stories that still crack me up when my mind wanders over to them during meetings.  They did not cause debt, unlike cool cars that were new and impressive.  They probably made no discernible financial dents at all, other than repair bills from their constant breakdowns.

But that was thirty years ago, and it was Plantation, Florida, where the map is easily represented using graph paper -- and that includes topology.  The biggest hill in town, no exaggeration, was the turnpike on-ramp.  The streets formed right angles and the street next to 3^rd Street was 4^th Street, if you can imagine.  The streets were wide and flat and you could see other vehicles approaching for miles, and there were plenty of places to pull over if you broke down, a fact I learned through the multiple failures of the Crap-mobiles I drove. The longest drive any of us ever took was ten miles straight east, and that got us to the ocean.  If we’d gone ten miles west, we would have been appetizers at an all-alligator dinner bonanza.  Most of my life took place within a five-mile radius of home, except those beach trips on weekends.

Cassie, on the other hand, is growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta.  It’s a nasty environment for learning to drive, as it lacks every positive trait about driving in Plantation.  Her drive to school, around 11 miles, can include the Perimeter, which is a large highway that should be named “Crash Dummy Circle.”  Atlanta has ice storms, rain, perpetual construction, and potholes that could easily accommodate a good chunk of a Volkswagen.  None of the streets are easy to navigate; even the first turn out of our cul-de-sac is a tricky one.  Nothing is flat, straight, or logical, and every street is named {choose two or more of: peach briar forest glen stone wood oak haven crest tree grove view cliff vista pine fox chase trace trail}.  Most roads have no turn lanes and no shoulders.  All in all, it’s a bad environment, and I want my kid to be well-equipped to survive it.

So she needs a car nimble enough to avoid trouble, but not so fast as to be uncontrollable. Something safe, with great gas mileage (eventually she will have to pay for gas for the damned thing), and able to carry at least a bit of junk, as she will probably take it to college.  Something we can actually afford, and – maybe I’m being just a little bit bitter here – something that will cause her a character-building quantity of humiliation when she has to drive it.

 

Extra points for having a penis

Various of my friends are apoplectic over the latest reports about the income gap between men and women, the lack of women at top levels of certain fields, and overuse of the word “apoplectic.” I generally don’t address those debates, partly because my field has a fair number of women in the higher ranks, and partly because I actually like working with more men.  They’re much easier to manipulate.

 But there are places where the difference between men and women seem to be harsher, and people don’t comment on those as often.  These can be summarized as follows: situations in which men get extra points for doing the exact same thing as women, presumably because people assume that the presence of a penis somehow handicaps the poor fellows, and thus their heroic triumph over their phallic burden qualifies them for beatification.

 Nowhere is this more evident than in the diaper arena.  A woman changing a diaper is a perfectly normal, almost invisible scene.  A man changing a diaper is often accompanied by the heavenly tones of angels playing trumpets.  Passing women will comment on it: “That’s such a good daddy, you’re a lucky little baby,” and if the woman is of a previous generation, she will stop to discuss this with the baby’s mother, pointing out that her own husband would never have touched a diaper.  Men just didn’t do those things back then.  Sometimes, the woman will go so far as to offer marital advice to the spouse of the man changing the diaper: “You need to hold on to him, honey.”  Oh.  Right. He changed a diaper on the child who bears his very DNA, whom he helped to produce, so I should hold on to him, even if he happens to be a serial killer who recently barbecued our family schnauzer over a bonfire consisting of photos of my mother?  Or is it just possible, madam, that what you’d actually enjoy is a time-travel moment in which I go bitch-slap your fossilized husband for being a sexist bastard?

 This came up again in the oddest of moments.  I was talking to a veterinarian about putting our cat to sleep.  I explained that I had hoped to keep the cat going long enough so that my husband could get home and be involved in the whole decision, because he really loved this cat.  I’m pretty sure I actually heard the vet melt like a Mississippi chocolate through the phone.  “Oh, yes, your husband does love this kitty,” she sighed – I mean, seriously, she SIGHED – “And isn’t it just so sweet when men love their pets?”  Not to get all Freudian on your sorry ass, but why don’t we just admit that it truly touches your heart to see a man express ANY emotion, possibly because your own father was one of those robo-freaks who saved all of his emotional energy for weeping during the National Anthem at the Super Bowl?

 I should include the obvious disclaimer that yes, I adore my husband, and I think it’s awesome that he somehow manages to express the full range of emotions, despite being hampered by a pesky penis.  But I don’t think he should get sainted for doing what’s expected of any woman out there.  Unless, of course, he manages to give birth.  Then we can talk.

Maudlin meanderings

Remember when you were in fourth grade, and some well-meaning, but obviously clueless visitor would ask, "And what do you want to do when you grow up, dear?" Honestly. What in hell were you supposed to say to that? My brother always said he wanted to be a truck driver, and I believe his ultimate goal was to own a Kenworth. I haven't a clue what I said, but I know the only profession ever to raise my curiosity was what I later discovered was called an NFL statistician. I was always amazed, when a quarterback trotted onto the field, that a huge array of numbers could be cited immediately: "This is the fourteenth time Bradshaw has thrown a screen pass during a Sunday afternoon game played east of the Mississippi." Where did they GET this shit? I was hooked. But I never would have known it was a career.

Try to recall what you said when you were asked that totally unanswerable question. Was it remotely related to your current job? Did you even know your current job existed? Do you think Einstein would have said he wanted to be a patent clerk, or a theoretical physicist?

I bring this up because of the dozens of AIDS researchers and advocates on the flight to Melbourne, Australia, the flight that was shot down by some person who believed that killing a plane load of people was somehow an acceptable act of war. I bet that not one of the people on that plane, when they were asked as children, "What will you be when you're older?" would have said, "I'm gonna work on AIDS."  How were they to know this disease existed? How could they guess what kind of world-distortions this one little virus could cause? They probably said they wanted to be astronauts, or doctors, or whatever their parents were. Chefs. Fashion designers. Who knows?

So how did they get there? Some of them were there because of a personal passion, an experience that shoved them to the forefront of a historical crisis. Have you ever watched a loved one die in pain? Maybe you have; it's not so rare as we wish. Have you watched that person die in pain while suffering the indignity of prejudice, ignorance, fear, and hatred? Assuming you survive that experience with any vestiges of your sanity intact, it could very well turn your ass into an advocate. Or a policy wonk, a field worker, a treatment coordinator.

Some of the passengers were there because they wanted to work internationally, to bring health care to places where it wasn't, to change policies to make AIDS work easier. Some wanted to create new treatments, cures, vaccines, systems for preventing disease. A lot of them were idealists, a term that unfortunately gets swept away into a bin between "dreamer" and "zealot."

But then there are those who, like me, ended up in this strange little niche of the working world through a series of utterly unremarkable events. I often wonder how many different places I could have ended up, had I gone down any of the roads not taken, but I don't ponder this with any regret or wistfulness. I like my strange, twisty road and all the characters along it.  And I'm thinking a lot about it, thanks to those passengers who are no longer here. So here is my little tale:

I knew from a very young age that I wouldn't take on certain jobs, because I'm half blind. I would never go into the military, or fly, or do anything requiring decent depth perception. It never occurred to me to regret any missed opportunities; they just weren't there.

I was always one of the smart kids in school, easily finishing my own work and half the teacher's grading in plenty of time to disrupt the class and irritate the hell out of people, cracking jokes. I was too good at school, really; I never learned to work at it, which would bite me in the ass later. I did everything I was assigned, did it well, and never gave it a lot of thought.

The smart kids were all supposed to answer the career question with high-paying career options like doctors, lawyers, presidents, astronauts. No one ever said they wanted to be a tax attorney or own a chain of paint stores. No one wanted to manage a software team or train people to give speeches. Nothing that real people ever did.  So somehow, I became the person who wanted to be a doctor. Was there ever a bigger cliche?

I got to college and was rudely awakened: some kids knew how to study. Apparently that involved opening a textbook and reading it. I always thought textbooks were things you flipped through, looking for the answers to hopelessly easy questions. A weed-out chemistry course ended my pre-med career, and nearly ended my scholarship. I was horrified that I could possibly suck at something so much, and for years I considered by subsequent change of major to be a cop-out. It never occurred to me that psychology grabbed my interest enough to make me want to read a textbook for the first time in my life, and maybe that was a valid reason to major in something.

All along this path, the other topic that consistently amused me was math. I loved math, everything about it, but especially the fact that you could work a problem, figure out the answer, check it, and go to the next one. I loved the instant gratification of getting a problem right. And I adored the fact that other girls hated math; what fun to be good at something that all the pretty and popular girls feared! Had I been born a great beauty, would I have cared about math? I don't know, but I loved being good at something that other people feared so much.

The psychology majors were pretty typical math-haters. They all wanted to "help people." I must have heard a hundred people yammer away in class about how much they loved to listen to people's problems, how they really felt they could help, how they wanted to heal minds...it was like listening to eight-year-old girls talk about the princes they would marry, and the unicorn that would fly them on their honeymoon. Revolting. I doubted I could help, because for the most part, I had noticed that no one ever listened to a piece of advice, no matter how sincerely they had begged for help and guidance from the offeror. I was totally disinterested in healing people's disordered thoughts.

Luckily, this was college, and the greatest thing about college was finding paths that you never knew existed. I could combine math and psychology, it turned out, in the field of psychometrics: literally, measuring the mind. Measuring height, or weight, or speed is easy; measuring anger or intelligence or happiness, not so much. Now that sounded like fun.

So I went to graduate school, and worked with wonderful people to learn all kinds of things I don't remember at all, but mostly I learned how to think. I learned about science, which is merely a structured way to ask questions and not a method of undermining family values after all, and I learned amazing ways of exploring the world of the mind with mathematical models. Part of this I learned in classes, but another chunk was learned while interacting with hundreds of other smart people: weird, quirky, poorly dressed, pizza-eating, cheap-beer, hilarious people. My kind of people.

I did a brief stint in academics, and I adored my job, but I never would have succeeded, ultimately, because I really didn't want to write esoteric papers about small-sample properties of statistical models. I just wanted to go play with numbers, and get answers to questions, and then get some more questions to answer. I was still the kid who loved getting the right answer, and having lots of numbers to cite. And it was Greg's turn to go tenure-track, so I followed him onto the job market, and landed at CDC.

The Division of STD Prevention was the first job offer I received at CDC, and I thought it would be the only one, because I didn't know the hiring process. Once I took the job, I felt I couldn't back out, and I should stay at least a few years to avoid looking like a job-hopper.

And I never left. I just can't. It's the same thing all over again: it's a topic like my high school math, something no one enjoys, no one likes to discuss, something that makes polite society desperately uneasy, and yet it's so common. So universal. How can I resist a chance to study a topic that disgusts people? My fantastically subversive nature is totally drawn to this. But more than that, the people who work in STDs are in many ways the same as I am: a sick sense of humor, a real joy in understanding things that people would rather keep hidden, and -- yeah, we can admit it now -- a desire to help somehow, even if it isn't by listening to people's problems.

And why would researchers want to study HIV? Because every scientist loves to find the problems that no one else has solved. Partly it's because you have to work, to publish, and have a field of research. You need to distinguish yourself somehow; but more than that, HIV represents a world of unsolved questions, and nothing is more  exciting to a researcher than a new question. I realize this is ignoring the human side of AIDS, and I don't mean that scientists devalue the humanity. In fact, some of the scientists approached this topic specifically because they cared about the human face of the problem. Some landed in this field because they are simply drawn to interesting problems of any kind.

I should probably point out, parenthetically, that I'm not a scientist in the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. I'm in STDs, which for many reasons is a different Division at CDC. But HIV is the best-known and most-publicized of any STD, and we all work on the same basic problems.

But this brings me back to how people can end up on a plane to Melbourne, Australia, and what kind of people are now gone from here because of those jackasses with missiles. The tragedy isn't a tragedy simply because they are AIDS conference attendees; it would be the same tragedy if they were veterinarians, or botanists. But the field of AIDS work is a niche that I understand, to some degree, and I wanted to explain how the fourth-grader with no answer to the career question could end up in this crazy corner of the working world. This corner is a lot less bright now.

I know I'm memorializing them by babbling about myself, which is both narcissistic and ridiculous. But I did not know them personally. I just know that they were all devoted to this fight, and I wondered how they all got here, to this field. And why they're gone.

Mental notes of a mental mother

Leave house 8am. Attempt to locate Nicky's camp on Agnes Scott campus in a blazing inferno of summer morning. Walk around campus wondering why no college campus is ever even slightly intuitive in design.  Where in hell is Winship Hall? Why, it's next to McCain Library. Terrific.  Have you people heard of numbers on buildings?

Find where the hell Nicky's camp is meeting 9:15am. Hand him over to nice people who take him to a place called Buttrick Hall, which is probably a memorial to fart literature.

Mental note: donate a building to a college campus on the condition they name it after a sexual risk behavior.

Arrive at work in time for sweat to evaporate slightly before 10am meeting. Not that it matters, as colleague's office is covered in smell of hand lotion anyway.

Work all day. Successfully avoid making anyone cry. Nice guy in the cafe keeps the grill open long enough for me to get some lunch at 2pm, because he is aware that I will cry when blood sugar is low.

Mental note: don't use the crying thing too much. Consider faking seizures instead.

Pick up Nicky (half an hour late) just before 6pm. Sign him out while self-doctoring the bite/sting that was generously provided to my arm by some hungry bitch of an insect.  Get late-fee amnesty from kind and concerned camp counselor.

Mental note: when picking up child late from camp, always show a repulsive, swollen bug bite to the counselor to avoid late fee.

Drop Nicky off at dojo. Sigh and proceed to hardware store to buy enormous garbage cans to replace the ones gleefully flung all over the culdesac and destroyed by our trash collectors. Tell cashiers, who are slightly surprised that I'm buying such enormous trash cans, that I'm using them for disposing of bodies. Random store worker explains that I do remind him of a woman on "Snapped," which is apparently a TV show about women who snap and kill people.

Mental note: sue someone over the rights to that show.

Purchase large amounts of caffeine at Publix, and develop momentary paranoia about people judging my grocery purchases, which are Diet Dew, raspberries, strawberries, potato chips, orange juice, milk, and a giant cup of ice.

Mental note: grocery paranoia is a little, tiny sign that you're losing it.

Return to dojo and call Cassie in Spain so she can talk to dojo peeps, whom she misses. Glad she misses someone, even if that someone is not me.

Pick up dinner for Nicky and me, reflecting on the number of restaurant staff in Atlanta who know our orders by heart. Sigh.

Home, 8pm. Subsequent hour spent washing dishes, folding laundry, medicating cat (twice), dialysing cat, feeding cats, feeding fish, more laundry, take trash out, take the recycling to the curb, and clean up the raspberry smash created by cat leaping into newly purchased box of raspberries.

Mental note: single parents do this shit every day. It amazes me no end.

Money

I try not to talk much about money; for that matter, I try hard not to think about it. Partly that's because money is such an impolite topic, crass even, and partly it's because no one is ever happy with the amount of money they have, especially when someone who is (choose one or more of: dumber, uglier, a bigger jerk, more selfish, amoral, dickish, insensitive, uneducated, weak) makes a lot more. If I think too hard about the salaries of teachers compared with the salaries of mid-level managers at Coca-Cola, I will turn into one of those rage-filled monsters from a horror movie, or worse, I'll go into politics. No good can come from those mental meanderings.

But with Greg in Spain, my main life-support backup system has been wiped out, and sometimes that leaves me floundering for how to keep our lives moving forward while he is gone. I'm not saying I depend on him for money (that will not happen); I'm saying I depend on him to pick up Nicky if I'm running behind, help me take the cars to get serviced while we are at work, pick up an ingredient for dinner at the store, or find an extra flash drive for Nicky to take to nerd camp. He figures out what's wrong with the remote (hint: I'm using it wrong or it needs batteries; those are the only two options), and he finds the band whose latest track Nicky wants on his iPad. He disposes of insects. He hangs out with Nicky in the pool and takes the cat to the vet and feeds the fish. He says things like, "Hey, this unopened bill has been sitting here since the Clinton administration...do you think we owe late fees by now?"

And that doesn't even get into the whole sappy-emotional-support stuff, which you certainly can't buy. Maybe you can rent it, but that's a whole other story.

So while he's gone, I find myself solving problems with money more than I normally would. I'll just buy Nicky a new flash drive rather than sift through the desks. I'll get ten extra things at the grocery store so I won't need any more trips this week. I'll buy a new pair of cheap reading glasses instead of trekking my ass back home to get the real glasses I forgot. I will buy a new, long-handled algae scraper for the aquarium, rather than sticking my hand in that damn fishy-stank water. Ten bucks here, twenty there, and life is far, far easier. I'm not spending fortunes because I don't have fortunes to spend, but those extra tens or twenties have solved a couple of life-management problems.

Oddly, that means I'm not asking people for help. All in all that's okay, because I don't want bother people, but sometimes people actually WANT to help each other. They want to hang out and sit by the pool with kids or wait with me for the car to get fixed and have some coffee. They want to laugh at my issues with the remote and maybe witness that moment when I go totally batshit and fling it into the rain barrel. By throwing money at problems, I avoid asking for help, but I also avoid being helped. And I'm being utterly dishonest and pretending I can still manage our lives as-is. No one likes a super-woman, especially a phony one.

In the end, I'm finding myself totally awed by the people I know who are raising a kid alone on a small salary, figuring out all their problems without being able to cushion any of it with those little buy-out moments. I don't know if I could find the strength and perseverance to do it. I take my hat off to them, and I know even that much respect isn't enough. I wish I knew a way to conjure up some cushion-moments for people who so completely deserve them. I wish I could create a system in which money never had to be discussed.

Meanwhile, I wish Greg would get home. These fish tanks are nasty.