a bold move.

I have a dilemma. I have something that I am dying to share. Yet, it is so ridiculous and silly, and I think that it makes me look like a very silly person. Not fun silly, but shallow silly. I'm just going to lay it out there and you can think what you want. Maybe you already think I'm shallow.

I commissioned a portrait of my dog.

I know, I know. If that isn't an indication that someone needs to adjust their priorities, I don't know what is. Bear with me, though. Let me try and justify myself.

Josh's step-mom, Carol, is an artist. She had been painting since she was a teenager, but like a sensible person, she did not really attempt to paint for a living. Instead, she went to work at Wachovia as a program manager, and she did that for twenty-some years. She was successful at this job and she enjoyed much of it, because she has many of the skills required. But inside, she felt like a painter. You'd be surprised at how many sensible people have secret artists living inside them.

Last year, she quit her job at Wachovia, now Wells Fargo. She was still a sensible type, because she left when the company was encouraging people to leave by offering them very generous packages. And she moved up to the mountains with her husband to be an artist full-time. When I play board games with my brother's family, and someone does something that appears to be crazy, but could turn out great, we say they are making a bold move. So while I might say that what she did was brave and admirable, someone else might call it crazy and stupid. Let's just meet in the middle and say it was a bold move.

But you know what? I think it's wonderful and amazing when people do that. I admire risking your own financial stability to really take a running jump at something important to you. If I did not admire that, I could not be engaged to Josh. Smartest person I know, college drop-out, waits tables, works hard at playing rock music because when they asked him what he wanted to do for a living, that's what he came up with. I think that's awesome.

It's completely and totally true that some of this is me living vicariously through the artists in my life. Once upon a time, I was going to be a starving writer. But I am a sensible person raised by sensible people, and I became a software engineer. For some reason, writing computer words is much more lucrative than writing people words. Seeing Josh and Carol makes me feel like I chickened out sometimes. I should be suffering for my art, too! Instead, I write software, which is something that I enjoy and that I am good at. I get to wear jeans to work and drink free soda while I am paid to use my brain. I have one of the best jobs in the world. Each of us contains many possibilities, and there is no one right one. And who knows? Maybe in twenty-some years, I'll quit to move to the mountains and write people words (don't worry, Mama, you'll be dead by then).

The nice thing about being a software engineer with a secret artist inside is that I have the means to support other people's art. Josh has eaten Ramen before, and he'd do it again, but he doesn't have to. Likewise, I wanted to support Carol's art. I came up with the idea of asking her to do a portrait of my dog. I floated the idea by her, with lots of room for her to turn it down. She responded enthusiastically. I offered money, which she declined. I sent her a bunch of pictures I had taken of Remix, and between us we picked out which would work the best.

Then she sent me updates as she worked, starting with the rough sketches and then moving on through the process of creating a painting. It was fascinating to someone like me, who would have no idea how to go about making a painting. Apparently, there are steps.

And now, I have a custom piece of artwork, featuring the dog of my heart, made by an artist that I know personally. Every time I see it, I will be happy, because that is my awesome dog. And every time Carol see it, she will feel proud and supported as an artist. It is a silly thing, but I think it's the good kind of silly.

liquidation.

Last week, at book club, one of the ladies mentioned that a local secondhand bookstore was going out of business. Yes, that's very sad, boo hoo hoo, but what are they doing with all their books?

I stopped by on a Saturday morning. The sign on the window said that all books were a buck apiece. I started looking through them, one at a time. By around the the third shelf, I found one that I really really wanted, and I knew that I would be here awhile. So I left the shop to walk across the parking lot to McDonalds and bought a cup of coffee. Then I grabbed a shoulder bag from my car. It was the equivalent of rolling up my sleeves for book-shopping.

I skimmed the titles, one shelf at a time. I probably missed some that I would've liked, but I was willing to take that risk. Occasionally, I found something that went instantly into my bag. Other times, something about the title or the font or whatever made me pick up a book and look at it. Some of these went back on the shelf, others into my bag.

The shop was pretty busy, which was probably a sad irony for the owners. One lady asked where she might find the "women's reading" section. The shop owner was understandably confused. A family with a couple of little boys was building quite a pile, with a particular focus on educational materials. I think they were homeschoolers. One of the boys discovered an old chemistry textbook and was determined to buy it. Ah, a book hoarder in the making.

I was honestly a little irritated by the people who came in with a list of specific books that they wanted. These are people who are used to shopping at Barnes & Noble or Amazon. They asked the shop workers about half a dozen different books, none of which were in stock. And then they left without buying anything. I wanted to turn around and tell them, "You're doing it wrong."

When books cost so little, the best thing you can do is just look through them all and see what catches your fancy. Read spontaneously! Shop serendipitously! Judge a book by its cover and discover a new favorite. If you don't like it, heck, it was only a dollar. When everything is cheap, shopping is not about finding the exact thing that you want, but being open to what is there.

Whatever. More for me.

why do you hate electric cars?

Thursday afternoon, Josh sent me an email with a link to a CraigsList ad for a car. It was an all-electric car, a Chevy truck that had been altered to run on an electric motor and batteries. They were asking $9500 for it. Since Josh sends me all kinds of ridiculous links when he looks for cars, including old convertibles that don't run and military jeeps lacking speedometers or roofs, I didn't take it very seriously. Just one more goofy car being sold on CraigsList that some other poor woman will have to tolerate.

But the next time I saw him, he asked if I'd looked at it. Apparently, he was serious about it, which just goes to show that you can never underestimate how crazy your loved ones are. I told him that I found a couple of the specs to be troublesome. For one thing, this was seriously a truck that had been modded by some guy. Sure, Chevy made the body, but the motor was put together by Some Guy. Did Some Guy offer a warranty? Secondly, because it ran on batteries, it had a range of fifty miles. So he could drive his nice electric truck anywhere he wanted, as long as it was within 25 miles of home. Then he'd have to come home and plug it in.

I pointed out these incredibly sensible objections, and he got very mad at me, saying that I hated electric cars. He did not say that I hated Mother Nature, nor did he call me a peon of the oil companies, but he may have thought it. He then said that he could just go get a loan on his own if he wanted the car. I thought about how I was going to be marrying this lunatic who could not tell the rational from the irrational. It suddenly occurred to me that when your spouse makes a bad decision, and I was pretty certain that buying this truck would be one, you have to live with the consequences of it. This fact never comes up in romantic comedies.

But I could tell that this was important to him, so I said, hey, call the guy up and we'll go on out to Carrboro and have a look. Saturday afternoon, that's what we did.

Some Guy turned out to be at the beach, but we talked to Some Guy's Nephew, who knew a lot about the truck and also drove around a VW Rabbit that had been converted to electric. He popped open the hood and explained everything inside. There were something like twenty batteries stashed here and there - under the hood, under the truck bed where the gas tank used to be, in a toolbox in the bed. He was clearly an evangelist for the electric car. He talked about how being a mindful driver made driving a much more fulfilling experience. He compared it to having a kid, which probably would have offended me if I had any children.

Josh had asked about extending the range by adding more batteries. That's possible, but because the batteries are so heavy, each additional one (around $100) only adds about 2.5 miles. There are better batteries coming out on the market that are more lightweight, but to switch over all the batteries in the truck would be an additional cost of $3500.

As we drove back home, I did not say anything, so as not to be accused of hating the electric car. But Josh picked up that I was still pretty much against buying this truck. I thought Some Guy's Nephew seemed like a nice and knowledgeable guy, and I honestly felt reasonably confident about buying a car off of him, even a rigged old Chevy. But a car that won't go more than 50 miles without having to be plugged in for 12 hours just doesn't fit our lives.

I have nothing against electric cars. I don't care how a car works, honestly. But if it doesn't function as a car, meaning it doesn't get me where I need to go, it's no good to me.

I left it alone and just hoped that he heard my point and recognized it as good sense. That night, he started looking again at CraigsList, at boring old gas-powered Toyotas and Hondas. He did show me a cherry picker that he thought was cool. Sunday night, when he told his dad about the electric car, the way he told the story was that he was a crazy person with a sensible girlfriend who helped him see the light. It was a pretty funny story.

adults.

Way back when, Josh's car, Gypsy, died. And I wrote an anguished blog post about how bittersweet it was to get rid of an old car. But just in time for the end of the entry, I came to the conclusion that it was okay to pass a beloved auto-friend to a new owner who would continue to use it. Well, we're several months down the road, and none of that stuff happened. We did not sell the car to Nick. Nor did we donate it to our local NPR station.

We donated a completely different car, a 1994 Honda Passport, to our local NPR station. I'm sorry, did I not mention that I had an additional disabled vehicle in my driveway? Gosh, I guess I assumed I was talking to regular folk here, all of whom have broken-down cars in their yards. That car was Josh's old old car, the one he drove until it stopped turning left. That was just a bad CV joint (look at me, talking about stuff like I know what it means), but the thing had gone for 240,000 miles. Due to some mysterious ailment within, it wore through belts every month or so. It's nice to think of ourselves in Honda commercials, talking about our old car that went a million miles and never let us down, but this car was done. Soon after its last left turn, I sold Gypsy to Josh. The Passport sat there, not doing much, for a couple of years. It's amazing how easy it is to get used to giant eyesores. Well, for me, anyway.

Finally, I caught Josh in the right kind of mood to extract permission to get rid of the Passport. And before he could change his mind, I registered online with the car donation people. The next step was to send in the title, which took a month because I dragged my feet about getting to the safe deposit box where we kept the title. But whatever, it got done and we immediately looked less like rednecks.

A couple of days before Nick was going to come get Gypsy, Josh had a change of heart. He had talked to a buddy of his who had rebuilt a Mazda, and he had decided that he was going to fix this car himself. Now, Josh has no experience with fixing cars. Nor did we really know what was wrong with Gypsy. I mean, we had a list of things that the AAA garage was going to try in order to fix it, but whether or not those were the issues was unknown. But that was fine, because Josh didn't know how to do those things anyway.

My Joshua is a sweet, sweet man. He's very talented and capable and smart. He has big ideas. He thinks he could do anything, and I don't dispute his ability, just that he would need to build a time machine first, because no one has the time to do all the things he wants to do. The reason that Honda Passport sat for so long is because Josh was determined to teach it to turn left again. But he was too busy with his job and his band and his poetry club and also his whiny girlfriend, who has very high snuggling needs.

Even knowing this, I said it was okay if he wanted to fix Gypsy himself. Does that make me supportive? Or just crazy?

So, a couple of months after Nick did not buy the car, we were still sharing the Fit, while Gypsy got sadder and sadder at the top of the driveway. It became a point of tension between us. He wanted to do it this way, I said fine, do it, and then he didn't do it. It was inconvenient for both of us to share the Fit. It was also aging her prematurely. I was frustrated with his apparent inactivity. For his part, he was trying to save up the money to get the parts. He would get a little bit saved up, and then something would happen (for example, a diamond ring).

He was also feeling less and less confident about his ability to fix her himself. So he would look at used cars on CraigsList, only to find that the ones in his price range looked a lot like Gypsy. Cars that could crap out at any minute or that might drive happily for another 50,000 miles. At least with the crappy old car we already had, we knew her history. Should he fix her? Pay someone else to fix her? Buy another used one? Not that he had the money to do any of those things, and oh yeah, his girlfriend, now fiancee, was on his back about it.

One morning, while Josh was driving me to work, he said, "Can you do me a favor?"

"Whatcha need?"

"Can you take care of Gypsy? I can't do it. I can't even think about it without getting all stressed out. I can't think about it anymore. I'll pay you back."

My first reaction was fury. Why should I have to do this, when you said you were going to do it months ago? Why did we have to go through months of sharing my car if you were just going to ask me to pay a mechanic to fix yours? You're a freaking adult, do it your own self.

I did not say these things. Instead, I thought about the holes in my house.

Several months ago, we discovered that we were housing some carpenter ants. Despite their name, they do not build anything. They just eat houses. We treated the outside of the house, but a couple of the boards in the siding would need to be replaced. The boards had even been removed, because they were barely hanging together, what with the little tunnels the ants had left in their trip through the house buffet. So for about six months, there had been two places on the outside of the house where there was no siding, just a couple of trash bags taped over holes.

I don't even know why they let people like us own anything at all. We are clearly unfit.

So I thought about the holes in my house and about how hard it is to be an adult. To get things done, to take care of your own mess all the time. That's why we pick teammates, so that we can help each other out.

"I'll fix Gypsy if you patch the siding on the house."

"Okay."

I fixed Gypsy. The thing that was wrong with her was completely different from what the AAA garage said. She also needed new tires and a realignment. All told, it was about $1300. The mechanic said she would need new brakes soon, too. But I said I was tired of spending money that day and declined the repair. Then I asked Josh if he thought brakes were something he could handle. He said yes, and he did it. He also patched the holes in the house with boards that did not quite match, but it's not that noticeable.

Car fixed? Check.
House patched? Check.
Sense of accomplishment for both parties? Check.

Yesterday, this happened.

I give up.

nerd camp.

Between my junior and senior year of high school, I went to nerd camp. It's a nice self-deprecating way of explaining Governor's School to those who don't already know about it. The long version is that GS is a six-week summer program for rising high school juniors and seniors, specifically the nerdy ones. Students stay at one of two college campuses where they attend classes. It was started as a way of giving students additional training to give the U.S. of A. an edge in the Cold War. While I was there, we speculated that the only reason to continue such a program after the fall of the Soviet Union was to breed a race of superbabies. But then again, we were seventeen years old, away from home, and surrounded by other nerds for the first time, so what we were thinking about doing was different than what the General Assembly of North Carolina wanted us there for.

Basically: nerd camp.

I hung out at the fish pond, which was a little landscaped area with benches and a tiny pool of water. There were no fish, but there were weirdos. I was not a weirdo, but I sure wanted to be, seeing as how I had never quite mastered being normal. I saw some kids with freaky haircuts and all-black clothes hanging out there, and so I sat there, too, reading a book, eavesdropping until there was an opening in the conversation for me to make a good joke. I was glad to find that they were pretty much just people and didn't mind that I was a square. At some point, I realized that having orange hair doesn't make you a cool person unless you are already a cool person, but by then I had met some actual cool people there, too. I don't know how or why these people started hanging out at the fish pond. Probably a silly reason just like rebellion or trying not to be a square. We were all trying to be something, rather than just being. We rejected labels by trying on new ones.

At GS, you have an area of concentration, creatively called Area I. That was the standard pick up line of the summer, too: Hey, what's your Area I? Not that you asked, but mine was Math. There were also Areas II and III, which were seminar classes, with discussions about ethics or philosophy. It was all to challenge us, first by making us think hard and then telling us there was no right answer.

Aside from all that, there were seminars, guest speakers, and performances, all outlined on weekly schedules printed on neon copier paper. Most of the them were optional, but during the opening assembly, we were told that you get out what you put in. Some of the performances were by students who had Area Is in the arts (visual art, music, dance). They were neat, and frequently bizarre to a left-brained individual as myself. It's possible that those classes were weird to those students, too, like my 3-dimensional geometry classes.

I don't remember a lot of things I went to, and I'm sure I've forgotten most of what I learned (except for the math, all of which I learned again in college). I don't think the point was to remember particular things. Some people say the point was to give us a questioning mind - trust nothing, question everything - but the spirit there was more light-hearted than that. They weren't trying to indoctrinate us so much as to disabuse us of the idea that we already knew everything. Hey, kid, shut your cocky mouth for a second and look at what is out there. The world is big and crazy.

Also, I met Josh there, next to the fish pond. So maybe that superbaby thing was more right than we knew.

just beyond nutty.

I ended the entry about making boutineers out of old hymnal pages by saying that my paper crafting could get ridiculous. In fact, it has. Actually, it went soaring on past ridiculous, bypassing preposterous, and landing just beyond nutty. Because once you start asking the internet about paper crafts, the internet will tell you more than you ever wanted to know. I kept finding different styles of paper flowers, and I kept making them.

Just think: if I had never gotten engaged, I would have never known that I am apparently really into paper crafts. Do we ever know ourselves at all?

It really wasn't a big step from deciding to make the boutineers to thinking, hey, might as well make the bouquets, too. And then Josh said that we should make all the flowers for the whole shebang. I thought he was crazy, because that just sounds like a recipe for origami-induced carpal tunnel syndrome. But as flowers piled up on my coffee table, it didn't seem so off the wall.

A friend went to a wedding and brought back a vase of paper flowers from the reception (my guests will be encouraged to take home souvenirs as well). While I was a little put out to find that I was not such a trendsetter, I consoled myself by the fact that my creations were way cooler. These flowers were made of tissue paper and plain white paper. I've seen them made out of crepe paper and coffee filters, too. You can do some neat things because of the properties of those materials, but I'm going to stick to making flowers out of paper that had a first life.

Besides the hymnal, I've since ripped up an atlas, a calculator instruction manual, a pictorial German language primer, a bunch of magazines, and a Betty and Veronica Double Digest. I have put aside any qualms about destroying books, because I am helping these discarded items have a new and unexpected destiny.

I love the way the page contents, be they words or pictures or international borders, become simple inkmarks on paper once it's all folded into another shape. On the page, our minds are trained to recognize and translate them into the information they are conveying. When they are presented as designs on flower petals, we notice the shapes and the colors that were there all along. It is familiar and unfamiliar all at once.

Okay, I'm probably overthinking all that. I just think it's neat, is all.

drooly dreams.

I don't know when my parents started saving for my wedding, though I suspect it was the day after my sister got married. They paid for her nuptial event by chopping down a bunch of trees on their land. Or maybe that was just a coincidence. In any case, I was seventeen at the time. A few months later, I picked my college based on which one my boyfriend was attending, and so it might have looked to them that they might have to finance another bride before too long. They're savers, and so that's what they did.

Roughly twelve years later, I got engaged. It took a little longer than anyone expected, but life's a funny thing.

I'm pretty sure my parents stopped adding to that wedding account a long time ago, once it reached some sort of maximum. They probably matched the tree money, you know, keep it fair. I have an idea of how much it might be, but I haven't asked.

I can't tell you when it first occurred to me, but sometime after we got engaged, I decided that I did not want that money. I'm going to be a thirty-year-old bride. I have been consistently employed in a good-paying job for the last seven years. And, like my parents, I'm a saver. At some point, adult children should pay for their own weddings. So thanks for the offer, Mom and Dad, now go spend that money on something else. Take a cruise through the Panama Canal.

Josh thought this was a great idea. He even thought it was a great idea once I told him that we probably would not be going to Europe on our honeymoon, because there just wasn't that kind of money. We will have a fun and fabulous honeymoon, but it will be stateside. He agreed that continuing to pay extra on the mortgage was the first priority. See? We're building a marriage here. And once we pay off that house, we'll have all kinds of money lying around.

As for the rehearsal dinner, I figured we'd leave that up to Josh's folks. I am all maxed out on things that I am going to pay for, and by the way they were already offering to pay for little things, I could tell they were itching to pitch in. So yeah, I was ready to let them buy me and the rest of the wedding party a nice dinner. Heck, they could even pick where they bought me dinner, I wasn't picky. I was already having dreams of my sister's rehearsal dinner at Ruth's Chris steak house. They were drooly dreams.

Then Josh destroyed my drooly dreams by deciding that he wanted to pay for the rehearsal dinner himself. See? You start volunteering to be a grown-up and you talk yourself out of a fancy dinner.

I did not see that coming at all. But what can I do? Josh will tell you that most of what he knows about money-management, he learned from me. And though I was a little sad as the steak-filled thought-cloud went *poof!*, I am proud of him. It will be more casual than fancy and the dinner party will likely be a little more inclusive, but who cares? We're getting married! We'll be happy no matter how much or little of our own money we spend.

lost sheep.

When the cat's away, the mouse will...go to church?

At least, that's what Josh did the weekend I was gone to Boone, among other things (the mouse also will explode some marinara in the microwave, apparently). He went to a church, but did not go in, because he was twenty minutes late (rather than the five minutes late that he thought). I was surprised when he told me. We've talked about going back to church, but always in a oh-yeah-someday-we'll-do-that kind of way. We both grew up in the church but haven't been regular attenders in years. I miss the extended family, but I sure do like sleeping in on Sundays.

The church he picked was a Lutheran one a couple of miles from the house. This being a big city in North Carolina, there's pretty much whatever kind of church you want within five minutes' driving range. Josh grew up Lutheran. I've been to the church where he grew up; in fact, I will be getting married there. It's a beautiful church. However, I find the Lutheran service exhausting. There is a lot of ritual and reading along. There are also songs that are so old, they are from another era of understanding about music. Their structure is incomprehensible and unpredictable to my modern ears. The program is several pages long. It's like being in a musical, and while I have the script here in my hands, I have missed all the rehearsals. Josh says I'll get used to it. His mom says that she finds the structure comforting. I say bah humbug.

When I'm not bewildered and lost, I mostly don't care for all the ritual. It seems very easy to float along, following the script, without any of it meaning much of anything to the actual participant. I actually remember the moment I figured this out: I was a kid, reading along with the psalms, and I realized I had no idea what any of it meant. I suppose you get out what you put in. Compared to the Lutherans, the Methodist church where I grew up had very little ritual and therefore more of the service was taken up by the sermon. Lutheran sermons are short, so maybe they're onto something there. Lutherans also really like communion. Josh insists that they don't have it every single time. I will believe it when I don't see it.

The next weekend after Josh failed to go to church, we got up at the right time and tried again. We were late, but the doors were still open. While this church was similar to the one he grew up in, I enjoyed the service much more. Apparently, how much I like a church depends mostly on singing songs that I already know. There were no random melody songs either, another plus. It was still a lot of ritual, but I must be figuring it out, because I didn't feel so flustered the whole time.

I do like this church. It is alive. There are three services every Sunday (one in the evening!), and a shuttle goes to a local nursing home to pick up attendees. There are a lot of programs going on, though Sunday School ("Christian Education") is off for the summer. The middle schoolers are doing local mission work. Another group is doing a program for children with developmental disabilities. The kids go to camp at Lutheridge and Lutherock. The official membership roster must be huge, but it didn't seem so big from the 9:45 service. I don't like too big churches.

There are a lot of different people in charge, and I don't understand their relationship to each other. The main one wears a clerical collar, but no robe because she is pregnant. There is also an older man who wears fancy robes, another guy in a collar, and a lady vicar. Having only ever encountered the word "vicar" in Agatha Christie novels, I was surprised to find that they're not just for the British.

Our first visit coincided with the beginning of a new sermon series about the Psalms. Each week, we focus on a different description of God and. In the entrance, there is a big banner set up where people could write their own completions to the sentence "God is..." There was also a basket full of small green stones with those words printed on top. I took one, because, hey, free stuff. Now it sits in the bowl where I put my keys, and every morning and evening as I am leaving and returning, I see it. Also, and this blew my mind, the pregnant lady preacher and the older man preacher wrote a psalm. The words and music were printed in the program, credited to them, all rights reserved. It was about God being a good shepherd. They sang it to us (thelady played guitar!), and the next Sunday we sang it with them.

Yeah, we went back the next Sunday. There was communion. I don't know what will happen next. This is motivated by Josh, who feels like he needs to get back to church. And while I don't necessarily feel that pull, I'm not against it. We wear nice clothes, he drives my car, and we walk inside holding hands. We look like a nice young couple looking for a new church home.

I guess we are. Maybe I'll become a Lutheran. That might be okay. I asked Josh who our rivals were, and he didn't understand at all.

"Well, the Methodists say that we need to hurry up and get to Cracker Barrel before the Baptists get out. Who do the Lutherans have to beat to Cracker Barrel?"

"The Catholics."

Good to know.

flag of treason.

There were a lot of new signs in Boone. Some of the buildings were new, but mostly only the signs had changed. The vintage clothing store's sign had been replaced by a glass blowing shop sign. What used to be the movie theatre marquee was now advertising space for rent.

However, the newest sign was made with white spray paint on a shop window. The words are not fit to be printed where my mother might see them. That sign was brand-spanking new. In fact, it seems like it had occurred sometime during the night before we saw it.

The store was a little house-shaped building, slightly apart from the rest of the downtown buildings. There seemed to be multiple businesses within. An eye doctor and a white-water rafting company shared the downstairs. And upstairs, a place called "Dixie Pride." It specialized in Confederate memorabilia and history. The stars and bars flapped in the breeze from a top balcony.

Sigh.

Vandalism is no good, guys. I am pretty sure that my beliefs are much more in line with whoever was bearing the spray paint than the store owners, but property damage does not advance your cause. Although, I have to admit that writing "OBAMA 2012" on the side was a little funny. Again, probably not helpful.

I remember years ago, when South Carolina was fighting about whether to fly the Confederate flag over the capitol building. Whatever we might like to tell you, we North Carolinians are not so different from our more southerly brethren. Kids wore Confederate shirts to my high school, where I was taught in U.S. History that the Civil War was really about states' rights. And so when some people said that flying the flag was about "heritage, not hate," that seemed reasonable to me. After all, I was proud to be southern, because it is the place I first loved. We have good food and hospitality here! That didn't make me a hateful person, so maybe the flag wasn't necessarily hateful either.

I don't believe that anymore.

A couple of years ago, I started reading the blog of Ta-Nahesi Coates, a black Civil War buff (and fantastic writer and all-around interesting human being). Most of my ideas about The Civil War are ripped straight from his words. One of TNC's main themes is how much the discussion and narrative of the Civil War leaves out the slaves entirely. "Heritage, not hate" does the same thing - omits the heritage of a big chunk of the population. You know, the descendents of slaves. Is the flag about them?

TNC refers to the Confederate flag as a flag of treason. And, man, if that doesn't get right to the heart of things. It's the first phrase I think of when I see it anymore. Before, it was a mildly obnoxious symbol of my home. You know, like a drunk uncle you tolerate at holidays. Now, it just makes me cringe. Even if we generously assume that it is only about heritage to the flag-waver, what does it mean to the people that see it?

Again, don't go vandalizing. Because it doesn't help your cause, any more than that stupid flag helps the South's.

paper crafts.

I saw something online where someone had made some roses out of paper, and I thought that was a great idea. Flowers! Out of paper! What if I made the boutineers for the wedding out of paper roses, wouldn't that just be the sweetest? I decided to give it a try to see how hard it was.

The internet paper roses were made from the pages of an old book, which is two good ideas in one. How appropriate that would be for the wedding of a couple of certified bookworms! I just needed a book. I only had about a thousand in my house, but those were off-limits.

On my next tour of the local thrift store circuit, I looked through the books. And I didn't buy a single one. Not because I didn't see any; most thrift stores are lousy with books. But I had a really hard time finding a book that I would want to rip up to use in my wedding. I didn't want to destroy a book that should be saved for reading purposes. But I didn't want to pin just any old crappy book to the lapel of my beloved.

Finally, I happened upon a Methodist hymnal from the 1960s. And I knew that this was my book. There are plenty of Methodist hymnals out there in the wild. It seemed unlikely that anyone else was going to save this one from the Goodwill. And yet, it had sentimental value, too. I grew up singing hymns from a hymnal very much like this one. In the very front, where I knew it would be, I found John Wesley's Rules for Singing.

I brought my new old hymnal home and discovered that it's very hard to rip apart a book. For one thing, it feels wrong on pretty much every level. For another thing, those dang hymnals are really well-made.

But once I got the pages out, I started making flowers. My first one was a total failure. My second one was not-much better. Despite having clear pictures and written instructions, I was clearly missing something. Everything looks easy on the internet.

So I tried a different style. And I thought hey, that's nice.


Josh loved it, too. After flipping through the hymnal remnants a bit, he even wanted to pick out the songs that would make his boutineer. Not to be relying on gender stereotypes here, but it seems like anytime you can get the groom enthusiastic about any of this wedding stuff, it's a good sign.

Well, that takes care of about 10 hymnal pages. What to do with the other 850?

This could get ridiculous.

old stompin' grounds.

I spent the weekend with my old roommate in Boone, where we went to college. You might say that it's our old stompin' grounds, which is a phrase my dad used to describe pretty much anywhere he had ever heard of before. He usually used the words to dismiss the concern of any passengers who had noticed that a shortcut he had taken had turned out to be more of a scenic route. Later, when we had finally got to wherever we were going, he would explain that they had changed it on him.

They did go and change Boone on me. They widened some roads, tore down some buildings, and built new ones. Businesses that we used to think of as established had disappeared and new storefronts had established themselves in their places. Appalachian State, my alma mater, seems to be doing quite well. I like to think that somewhere in the new library that I never got to use are bricks paid for with my tuition. Most everything in town seemed new and shiny, except for the alley down to our old apartment, which was somehow even worse than when we had lived there. Where before there had just been weeds and mud, now there was discarded furniture and mattresses.

But really, the thing that had changed was me. I was a tourist now, not a student, not a local. I was one more person driving slowly, not quite sure where I was going. I walked at a leisurely pace downtown, as if I was on vacation. It's not as if any of the natives gave me a mean look, but I could feel my otherness. I was just another tourist, here today to be in the way, replaced by someone else next weekend.

Saturday night, we went to one of those new (i.e., not there seven years ago) restaurants. It was not a place we could have afforded back when we lived in an alley apartment, but now that we were graduates of the Computer Science program, we even had drinks and appetizers, too. The waiter asked where we were from, and we hastened to tell him that we used to live here, really, just down the street. He smiled and pretended to care, then asked us if we wanted another round. We did. Later, when we asked for our checks, he acted sad that we were leaving. Maybe he was, because he just barely made rent and really needs to fix the transmission in his old car.

But we left anyway, to go further down the street to Murphy's, a dive bar where we used to eat french dip sandwiches on seats that leaked stuffing out of long gashes partially mended with duct tape. It's been refinished and is much nicer now, too, but it's still a dive. And we both felt more comfortable there, like we belonged. Because who else besides a local would go to Murphy's?

vasco de graceland.

Once, a handsome man with light blue eyes and a mischievous grin was at his local Goodwill. It was his day off. He was not looking for anything specific. Though he could use a new belt and maybe some work shoes, mostly he was just checking out what was new this week to see if anything caught his fancy.

His fancy was caught by a conquistador in a golden helmet. From across the room, he saw the painting and his interest was piqued. But when he got closer, he discovered - alas!- that the piece was a velvet painting. Now, painting on velvet is a very old and established technique. Marco Polo brought the idea and the fabric over to Europe, and there are velvet paintings in the Vatican. However, this particular medium has been tainted. In the 1970s, there were assembly lines in Mexico producing velvet paintings of Elvis and John Wayne and wolves, where they then went to live in people's basements with orange shag carpets and chrome lamps. Because of this, any velvet painting ever, even the ones in the Vatican, are tinged with the funk of kitsch.

The young man, disappointed, was just about to put down the painting, which he liked but which was, through the association of countless velvet Elvises, incurably tacky. Then he remembered something.

His fiancee has always wanted a velvet painting.

Since he has committed himself to marrying this woman, to tying his life to hers for the duration, it is possible, even likely, that he may someday find himself tied to a velvet painting. And if that's going to be the case, it might as well be one that he himself also likes, rather than one of the thousands of other velvet paintings which are tacky for being themselves, rather than this one, which was only tacky by association.

He flipped the painting over to see the price, scribbled in black Sharpie on the back of the frame: $8. So he bought the velvet conquistador. And later that afternoon, he made his fiancee very, very happy.

party planning committee.

I met with my wedding planner last night.

Ugh, I know. I go back and read that statement and I am already annoyed with myself. Doesn't "wedding planner" seem like such an unnecessary job? The fact that a title like that exists indicates that society has gone nuts and is too concerned about the wrong things in life. Not that I have much idea what the right things are, but planning weddings is not in the list.

I guess the idea is that throwing a wedding is stressful, not to mention time and labor-intensive. Most people who are doing it have not done it before, so they should hire a professional, right? I guess that makes sense, but I just don't want to pay money for this service. I'm cheap, and weddings are already expensive.

The thing is, it did not take me long after my engagement to figure out that some women are just not that into wedding stuff, and I am one of them. If someone was offering to take care of the wedding stuff and I just had to show up, that would be pretty darn okay with me. Men get to do that. It is completely acceptable for a groom's eyes to glaze over with disinterest as soon as someone starts talking about invitations and centerpieces. But I'm supposed to care deeply. And I tried, but I don't. I feel like a failure as a woman.

It's not that I don't care at all. But while getting engaged seems to be an excuse to look at magazines and blogs for hours on end, filling a folder with pictures and ideas, I haven't been interested in doing any of that.

Back in high school, when I was going to prom, the mother of my boyfriend called and asked me what color of rose I wanted in my corsage. There were two options, and I swear I think they were both some shade of red, though the descriptions were meant to obfuscate that fact. I told her that either one would be fine, because it didn't matter to me. She insisted that I pick one, because I might care someday. If I didn't care about a flower I wore on my wrist for a few hours when it was actually happening, why would I care later? But I picked one, and it was fine. At least, I don't remember anything about the corsage other than the telephone conversation about the color.

That's how I feel about wedding stuff. It's all one big day of corsages, and I'm supposed to spend months picking out the colors.

So I hired a planner. I offered to pay one of my friends, Carney, who is not a professional, but is already more interested in my wedding than I am. When she found out that we were engaged, she asked all kinds of questions that I hadn't even known were part of it. While the idea of paying some random stranger who really likes weddings to care about my big day sounds awful, I don't mind paying someone I know, who cares both because she likes weddings and because she likes me and Josh. Problem solved.

I met with her last night, our first planning session. We looked through some magazines she brought, and I quickly got bored. Looking through wedding magazines is a lot more fun when you're not actually planning one. If you are just imagining some future fairy tale event, it can be anything you want. But when you are thinking of an actual date and an actual man, it's not as fun. Anything you want probably costs too much.

We didn't decide anything. We did determine that I was not very interested in wedding planning. She frustrated me by asking about my official wedding colors and I frustrated her by being stubborn, obtuse, and generally uncooperative.

But I realized that hiring Carney was a great decision. Not only is she genuinely interested in the whole thing, she does a good job of figuring out what I want. Because if you ask me a question like, "What is your theme going to be?" I just sort of scowl and ask whether I have to have a theme, themes are stupid. But then she started asking me specific questions that were less about weddings and more about what kind of things Josh and I like, and those questions were easier.

I feel much more confident about being able to pull the whole thing off. She can tell me that I have to pick a corsage color (or a theme or a centerpiece), and then she can help me figure out the answer. I mean, it may be pulling teeth for her, but I'm feeling pretty good about it.

monday, 11:21 pm.

There is a poetry club happening in my kitchen, spontaneously, because that's the way these things happen. Just hours ago, there had been a pile of laundry on my kitchen table.

Here, in the living room, I sit, reading other people's blogs on my phone (while sitting next to the laptop). Remix is chewing on a Nylabone while lying on a partially destroyed old comforter in the corner.

There's no point to this. That's just what's happening.

how to fix a dishwasher.

How to Fix a Dishwasher That is Not Washing Dishes at All, Merely Heating Them

1. Notice that your dishwasher is not working. Pressing the START button makes the panel light up, but then nothing happens. When the lights go off, signifying that the dishwasher has completed, notice that the dishes are still dirty. This is the main indicator of a broken dishwasher.
2. Press the start button again. Notice once more how the lights go on but no running water sounds occur. Open the door, confirm that there is no water inside. Close the door again, shrug, and allow the machine to heat the dishes up once again.
3. Take out the removeable trays that hold the dishes in the dishwasher. Make sure the spinny things spin. See that there is a toothpick in the bottom. Pull it out. Run the machine again to see if the toothpick was the problem. Find out that it was not.
4. Notice that some parts are merely clipped inside the dishwasher. Take them out. Having done that, notice that other parts are merely held in with screws. Attempt to remove them, but become immediately foiled by the fact that you've never seen a screw with a design like that.
5. Google "star shaped screw." Learn what a torx screw is.
6. Get ready to go to store for a torx screw set. Realize you already have one in your multi-set screwdriver and that you'd always wondered what it was.
7. Unscrew and remove more parts from the dishwasher. Find more toothpicks, as well as broken glass shards and a whole lot of gross stuff that probably used to be food.
8. Find a piece that won't come out. Pull harder. When it finally gives and comes out of the dishwasher with a motor attached, realize that you probably should not have pulled that part out. Put it back.
9. Run the dishwasher again. Notice that it is still broken.
10. Decide that you must pull the dishwasher out from under the counter to really find the problem. Unscrew the two screws holding the dishwasher to the underside of the counter. Wonder if those are the only thing really holding it in there.
11. Try to pull the dishwasher out. Determine that there are more things holding the dishwasher, namely a water pipe, a drainage pipe, and an electrical cord. Try to pull out the dishwasher anyway.
12. Get to point where you cannot pull dishwasher out any further because of electrical connection.
13. Use a flashlight to look around under dishwasher through gap created by pulling it out a few inches. Notice that it is very very dusty.
14. Follow the water connection to a hose on the right side of the dishwasher, where it dumps into a plastic container that you suspect goes into the interior of the machine. Decide to test your theory by dumping water directly into it. Realize the challenge of this, since the dishwasher is still mostly under the counter. Decide that a long-necked watering can would be perfect for this experiment.
15. Remember that you do not own a watering can. You happened to see some really cute ones shaped like hippos at Target last week for only a dollar, but you did not buy it because you don't have any houseplants.
16. Locate a straw, a funnel, and some duct tape. Combine appropriately.
17. Put the straw end into the plastic water compartment. Pour a glass of water into the funnel.
18. Wipe all the water off the floor.
19. Take apart straw/funnel contraption. Do a better job attaching them with the duct tape. Test new design over the sink.
20. Put the straw end into the plastic water compartment. Pour a glass of water into the funnel.
21. Check the inside of the dishwasher. Notice that it is now wet. You have confirmed that water that comes out of the hose goes into the dishwasher, but you've forgotten why you ever wanted to know.
22. Remember that you are trying to find out why the water is not coming into the dishwasher.
23. Decide to test the hose that empties into the plastic water compartment. Attempt to remove it. Rip off the plastic thing instead, which was apparently glued on.
24. Try to reattach the plastic thing, but be thwarted by the fact that you've got about one inch of space to maneuver your hand, since the dishwasher continues to be mostly under the counter.
25. Realize that you will have to pull the dishwasher all the way out. Use the flashlight to follow the electrical cord from a metal box attached to the dishwasher all the way to a hole in the floor. Wonder why anyone would design a system that had to be plugged in under the house.
26. To avoid going down into the crawlspace, try some more to stick the plastic thing on. Decide that you need more room to maneuver, but the cabinets are in the way, so take the doors off, just because at least you know how to do that.
27. Lie in the floor and think about how creepy it is in the crawlspace, particularly on the side directly underneath the dishwasher, where it is actual crawlspace, rather than crouchspace.
28. Go watch TV for a while.
29. Take the flashlight down to the crawlspace. Check for snakes or spiders. Scare a few camel crickets. Crouch-walk until there is not room. Use the flashlight to look around. Crawl on your hands and knees until there is not room. Scan the room with the flashlight again. Crawl on your elbows and belly until you are all the way to the wall. Realize that the electrical cord looks exactly the same down here, so it's actually probably connected in that little metal box underneath the dishwasher. Feel like an idiot.
30. Go take a shower.
31. Watch more TV.
32. Call your mother
33. Google "how to disconnect a dishwasher." Learn about the removeable panel on the front of the dishwasher, below the door.
34. Turn off the power to the dishwasher at the breaker box. Be thankful that previous owners labeled everything.
35. Turn off the water to the dishwasher under the sink using a wrench. Think about all the tools you're getting to use today.
36. Remove the panel at the bottom of the dishwasher.
37. Remove the little metal box hiding the electrical connection. Disconnect the electrical connection.
38. Disconnect the water pipe.
39. Decide that the drainage hose can probably just stretch out far enough.
40. Pull the dishwasher out from under the counter.
41. Easily stick the plastic water compartment back onto the side.
42. Push the dishwasher back under the counter.
43. Reconnect the water pipe.
44. Reconnect the electrical connection.
45. Push the start button, just for kicks. Hear the sound of water running into the dishwasher. Use the flashlight to confirm that no water is dripping onto the floor.
46. Feel triumphant that you fixed your own dishwasher, even if you're not sure what you did and you did take a completely unnecessary crawl through the dirt underneath the house.
47. When the cycle is finished, put all the pieces back into the dishwasher, including the racks of dirty dishes. Run the cycle again.
48. Go online and brag on social media that you totally rock at fixing your own dishwasher. Leave out most of the story.

really unfinished.

Not to speak ill of the dead, but I went to the estate sale of some bona fide hoarders today. Not that hoarding is necessarily bad as long as it doesn't interfere with your quality of life. And in fact, it makes for a great estate sale. The whole house was full. It was so full that the people running the sale couldn't even bother to price everything individually. So they priced the nice items, the antiques and whatnot, and then left everything else up for negotiation.

In fact, there were even parts of the house that hadn't been thoroughly excavated. In both the attic and the basement, there were rooms that looked like they hadn't been touched in years and years and years. I guess at some point, the estate sale people have to draw a line. They will not go through any more dusty crap, but they will allow any willing customers to go through the dusty crap. If you find something good in there, they will kindly sell it to you. I came across a man in the basement who was filling a box with carburetors. Why were they there? Why did he want them? As someone with my own particular taste in treasures, I've learned not to ask.

The weird thing about this basement is that it was unfinished. Really, really unfinished. There were big rocks in the middle that I guess they couldn't get out, so they just dug around them, installed shelves on the side and stored some more of their junk.

Besides hoarders, people with interesting hobbies make for good estate sales. These people qualified on both counts. Scuba, anyone?

Someone in the house was really into ceramics. There were shelves and shelves full of homemade dishes, figurines, and novelty items like lighters. There were two kilns, making today only the second time I've ever seen a kiln secondhand. I saw a sign in the really unfinished basement about student projects, so maybe someone taught a pottery class right in the home.

Oh yes, and the dolls. Some people are into dolls, but you probably already knew that. However, the people who are interested in both dolls and ceramics can make their own dolls. In addition to the dolls, doll cases, and doll books, there were doll parts everywhere. Legs, arms, bald heads with no eyes, it was all there for me to buy as much as I wanted. Which was none of it. There was also a whole wall of cabinets full of doll hair. I don't particularly like dolls, but partial dolls and fake hair give me the willies, particularly when I'm trapped with them in what appears to be some sort of bunker.

I did buy a tall green glass bottle/vase. It was sitting in the basement, next to one of those machines with a belt that you strap around yourself to jiggle the fat away. Like everything else in there, it was sad and musty, but something about the shape and the color caught my eye. Then as I was looking at it, someone breezed by and told me I could have it for $2. Which seemed like a good price for a dirty, slightly cracked bottle out of someone's basement, but maybe I have a weird value system.

As I was toting my glass monstrosity through the house, several people mentioned that they also had noticed it, sitting amongst the carburetors. One of them, an antique dealer, said he almost bought it, but said he didn't know enough about glass to risk it. He probably didn't know that it was $2. He said it was definitely hand-blown glass and may be more than 100 years old.

I have no idea if any of that is true. I'm not an antique dealer. I just like to shop in other people's basements.

regular dog things.

We were on a pack walk one day - a pack walk meaning me, Josh, and Remix - when we came upon a group of our neighbors shooting the breeze in the street. Our neighborhood is very low-traffic, being thirty or so houses and no outlet, so using the street for a chat or a game of roller hockey is not uncommon. One neighbor we knew. He introduced us to his son and another neighbor, Carl. We've lived there for more than three years, and have done a miserable job of getting to know everyone. But something about the number of trees in the neighborhood suggest that maybe we're surrounded by other introverts.

Remix is hit and miss with strangers. She has growled at them, which was thoroughly embarrassing (she growls while backing away, so it's not an aggressive growl, but still). Even when she just wants to go give them a slobbery kiss, she looks like a big and scary dog. I keep treats in a little bag attached to the leash, so I can make her sit. She has gotten much better about not straining the leash to go personally meet everyone we pass, but sometimes, for whatever Remix reason, she wants to go make a friend. If she really likes them, she'll jump on them. Lots of dogs do this, but not all of them are sixty pound pitbulls.

Part of owning a pitbull is noticing all the things that other dogs do, regular dog things, that my dog could never ever get away with.

But when we met this little group of neighborly neighbors, she was great. She sniffed each new friend, but Carl took a step back, clearly not wanting to interact with her at all. I shortened the leash to remove him from her circle of influence. Carl said he didn't do big dogs. I've seen his wife walking their dog before. It's a chihuahua. When it sees Remix, it starts barking and pulling at the leash. Heart of a lion, that one. Of course, all that riles up Remix, who starts pulling at the leash to go meet this noisy little rat. Then the owner of the chihuahua simply picks it up, while I'm wrapping the leash around my wrist over and over, my feet planted as I engage in a mighty struggle an animal that may be stronger than I am, but who doesn't push it.

Remix was getting a little jumpy with her new best friends, so I got out a treat and held it in a loose fist at my side. She sat very nicely and kept her attention on me, occasionally sniffing or nosing at my hand to see if she could unlodge the delicious corn-based bone-shaped processed treat. I wondered if Carl thought I was nuts, putting my own hand in between a pitbull and what it wants.

He told a story about his cousin, who had a pitbull, a nice family dog that one day attacked their toddler. The little girl has had nearly 20 operations to repair the damage wrought by sharp teeth and strong muscles. During the attack, the mother only got the dog to stop by shooting it. And then animal rights people came and protested at her house.

It was uncomfortable hearing this story, about a terrible terrible thing that happened to a family, while my own pet monster sunned herself on the warm pavement. There was nothing to say, except to commiserate with how awful it must have been. I have lots of things I can say when people talk about pitbull attacks (statistics, differences in the level of media attention give to attacks by other breeds, the difficulty many people have in identifying an actual pitbull), but I did not try and defend pitbulls in general or my dog specifically. He had given his statement on the matter, and my statement rolled over in case anyone wanted to rub her tummy.

I trust Remix. Her favorite games are the kind she can play with her teeth, and in the course of a few games of tug, my hand has gotten in the way. Whenever that happens, she immediately corrects her grip. Remix knows that play is play, and no one will play with you if you bite them. I've sat and held tempting sticks in front of me. She stalks, then runs and pounces, but again she knows how to control herself so that only gets the stick. If she has something that I actually want (rather than something that I pretend to want for the sake of the game), I can get her to let go of it by putting my finger into her mouth.

But awful things happen. All kinds of dogs attack, family dogs, even chihuahuas. Pitbulls are capable of tremendous damage. My dog could kill someone. If I were being attacked, having such a powerhouse in my pack would be great. But can a dog always tell when that level of force is needed?

As we continued on our pack walk, Josh asked if I thought we should get rid of Remix when we have children. I shrugged. Wait and see.

goodwill bride.

You may not know this, but Goodwill sells wedding dresses. You can see where this entry is going already, can't you?

I have known about the small bridal section for a while, just because it's hard to miss the mass of white lace hanging next to the regular dresses. I never looked very closely at them, because I had no need. But now, I do, and so I've been making a point to flip through the rack every time I go in. And I've been trying on a few. The sizes are not always labelled, and so I've dented my self-esteem a bit by attempting to get into dresses that would never fit a woman with my hips.

I still have months and months to go before I actually need to wear a big white dress, so the slim pickings don't bother me much. Plus, this is the essence of secondhand shopping - it takes time. Having spent a couple of weeks actually paying attention to the selection, I am surprised to find that it does change. People are buying these dresses, and other people are bringing more in. As long as there is turnover, then I have a chance to find something. And if not, I guess I'll go to the outlet center in Burlington with my mom like a regular person.

I felt doubt about a Goodwill dress the first few times that I tried on things that didn't fit. While I had no doubt that I would eventually find something, isn't your wedding dress supposed to be more than "something?" You know, The Dress? Even with my natural contrariness, I am not immune to that kind of advertising-based brainwashing. The dresses that I tried on were lovely, but they weren't necessarily ones that I would pick if given a whole store full of dresses. They were dresses I would pick off a rack of six dresses, five of them being from the puffy sleeve era.

I shoved my doubt aside, because I knew that I was smarter than the myth of The Dress. Hadn't I already proven that I was above the myth of The Ring? Whatever dress it is, it will be The Dress the second that I decide it is. I am the bride, I grant mythical status around here. Plus, I do believe in the principles of secondhand, one of which says that there is no such thing as perfect, but there are lots of good enoughs.

This past Thursday, I decided to try on a dress that I'd passed by a couple of times, mainly for the fact that the skirt was all bagged up in a plastic bag to protect it and I didn't want to bother with it (see how committed I am to finding a dress? I am thwarted by loosely-tied plastic bags). I always feel self-conscious taking a dress into the fitting room because they are so cumbersome and ostentatious. There's me, carrying about fifty pounds of floofy stuff, trying not to be conspicuous. It's a silly thing to be self-conscious about. I should be throwing a parade. That's right, bride coming through here. I'm going to go try this on, and I WILL LOOK LOVELY IF I CAN ZIP IT UP BY MYSELF.

Trying on this dress made all my doubts about Goodwill wedding dresses disappear. Forget lovely, wedding dresses have the magical power to impart radiance. It fit perfectly, and thanks to all that boning in the torso, I somehow looked thinner and bustier at the same time.

I did not buy the dress, though I did take some pictures of myself wearing it while making a stupid face. It was $99. I've noticed that some of the dresses have crossed-out prices (this being Goodwill, prices are written in Sharpie on the inside of the dress). I have time, and so I want to keep looking. I would happily get married in that dress or maybe I'll get married in a different one that I like better. Whatever. I'll find something.

ONE MORE!

Jack told us that the Red Elvises were the funnest of all the bands that he had ever seen. This is saying something. Not just because you can't really name a band that Jack didn't see in concert way back when, but because his job as the sound guy at a downtown Raleigh music and beer hall means that he sees bands most every night of the week. As the significant other of a bass player, I've seen a lot of bands. Josh has seen many more than I have. I can't even imagine the sheer amount of live music that Jack has taken in. Based on my own sampling, I bet a lot of it was crappy.

But Jack said we had to come Thursday night, because these guys were awesome. It seemed like the Red Elvises always had a poster up in the bar. Whoever they were, they were apparently making a living playing music. Before I fell in love with a bass player, I had no idea how large the term "success" was in terms of the music business. I thought there was either playing stadiums and talking about your drug problem on Behind the Music, or there was keeping your day job. Making all the money or making none of it. But of course there is a whole range of levels in between. For one thing, there is losing money. But there is also never making it anywhere near a stadium, but somehow still making it. Quitting their day job to make about what they made at what was probably a low-wage gig. But that is success, to be a professional musician, and for the people who are really in it for the joy of playing music, it may be enough. I am happy for them.

Based on the fact that the Red Elvises seem to be making it around to Raleigh every couple of months, when they are based out of California, I conclude that they are making it. They also have professional-looking merchandise, nice instruments, and a swank touring minibus. It even has their band name on it, while Josh's band's van is emblazoned with the name of the church they bought it from.

The Red Elvises play simple, crowd-friendly pop songs in a mash of styles. There are some clever verses, and a catchy sing-along chorus. By the time the chorus comes back around, anyone who was even halfway listening can sing along, too. The musical influence is all over the place - reggae, punk, surf rock, country-western, soul, polka - and it always has just a dash of something...Russian. Because the Red Elvises are here from Russia with love. The three-string bass was even shaped like a balalaika.

When we got to the bar, the show had already started, or maybe it would be better to call it a dance party. There was a conga line, or whatever you call a conga line during a Russian surf rock song. A giant crew of Elvis fans had come out from Wilson, NC to see the show. They were all wearing yellow t-shirts that had various Red Elvis song titles on them. Whenever the front man (Igor, of course) announced the next song, someone in a yellow shirt would scream like their name had just been selected for the Showcase Showdown. The Elvises themselves were wearing suits made of animal-print fabrics that might have come from a remnant pile.

It was all just so infectious. The music seemed to enter in through your ears and then take up residence in various parts of the body that would then begin to move. Your head bopped, your hips wiggled, your whole body bounced on the balls of your feet. I am not a good dancer, but I make up for it in enthusiasm. I decided a while back it was more fun to dance badly than to not dance for fear of doing it badly. But even if you had not made that leap, I think the Red Elvises would push you right over. You can't not dance. So we danced. We danced like Uma Thurman did in Pulp Fiction, though only during the song called "Dance Like Uma Thurman." Other times we did the John Travolta disco point or made an attempt at that squat dancing thing the Russians do or just flailed our arms and legs like idiots because it was fun. It was a sweaty show.

At one point, Igor told us that he was about to play a polka song. He strapped on an accordian, and they got down as only polksters can. I bounced to the front - because I couldn't move without bouncing with this music going on - to take a picture of the accordian action. Jack interpreted my sudden relocation to the front as an indication that I was ready to polka with my bad self. He asked Josh for permission to dance the polka with me. Having gotten permission, Jack asked if I knew how to polka. I was never so sad to answer "no" in all my life. The lesson here is that we should all learn to polka, because you never know when such a skill will come in handy.

They had a great drum solo, too. Drum solos are hard to do. Even if you have a great drummer, audience members can sort of lose interest in it because it's hard to dance to. But when the Red Elvises have a drum solo, they don't mean the drummer is solo, they mean the drums are. All four of the non-drummers pulled out their own set of drum sticks and took up residence next to the drum kit. And they all played the drums.

After only a few songs in the second half of the set, Igor said they were going to play just one more. Well. He asked us if we would like to hear just one more. We, being mere dancing putty in the palm of his sweaty Ukrainian hand, answered "ONE MORE!"

"One more?"

"ONE MORE!"

They played about five more songs, each time asking if we would like them to play one more. Finally, they said goodnight and started packing up. Jack started up a chant of "ONE MORE!" and we only had to yell for another thirty seconds or so before Igor responded, oh so casually, "One more?"

"ONE MORE!"

"Okay, we do one more." And they did. One more bouncing, head bopping, sweaty, arm-flailing, vaguely Russian song. I am happy that these transplanted musicians are making it, because as far as I'm concerned, they are providing a valuable service. The only question I had at the end of the evening was whether they played weddings.

For your pleasure, but this does not do them justice. They are this weird in person, but the live show is infinite fun.

the paris wife.

Our most recent book club selection was The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, a novel about Ernest Hemingway's first wife Hadley and their time in Paris, hanging out with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound and F.Scott Fitzgerald and all those literary types. I have to admit, that after reading the book about Frank Lloyd Wright's mistress, I'm a little tired of reading books about women whose main claim to fame is that they married famous men. Now, these men were also famously difficult, and I'm willing to believe that interesting people pick interesting spouses, but surely we can find a book about a woman who did something besides get hitched.

Anyway.

This book, along with the FLW book, lives in some sort of cross-genre where it's not fact and not quite fiction. The authors do a crap-ton of research, reading public records, newspapers, letters, and journals to put together a picture. And then they fill in the details with their imaginations. No doubt after immersing yourself in someone else's life for a while, you probably do feel like you know them. So while we know that Hadley went to Chicago at this time and met Ernest, we don't necessarily know what she wore or what she said or how she felt about it. Maybe she left journals, so we do know some of those things, but at some point, the author has to put together everything she knows about a person from the research and make a good guess. For some reason, this bugs me, but I can't put my finger on why. I think it's because the lines between verifiable fact and imagined fact are so blurry. We should have a name for this genre, just to stress that there is some fantasy involved. How about "research-based speculative autobiographical novel?" Catchy, huh?

Regardless of whether Ms. McLain gets her material from an old journal or from inside her head, I can tell you that she nails certain aspects of being involved with an artist, a topic that I have some familiarity with. For one thing, Hadley is very self-conscious about being just a regular sort of person, surrounded by all these geniuses. Almost everyone Josh and I spend time with on a regular basis is some kind of artist. And I am a software engineer. Even if I think there is a certain artistry in writing code, I can't help but feel sort of square and boring around people whose brains are surely more colorful than mine. In fact, I sometimes am at a loss as to why my artist was attracted to me. Not that I am not awesome in my own number-based way, but it seems like he would want someone who is on that wavelength. Then again, I am coming from a position of someone who has always been drawn to artists. Maybe he is someone who is attracted to engineers, and who can even explain these things anyway? Josh sometimes worries because I spend 8 hours every weekday surrounded entirely by men who also think like me (and who also make a lot more money than a starving artist). Aside from most of them being middle-aged and married, I have found software engineers in general to be lacking in imagination. They do not melt my butter.

Hadley also feels like she has to compete with her husband's work. Maybe this could be true for any profession. But the thing about art is that it can happen any time. I do not resent his time spent waiting tables, nor even his practice time with the band, because those are scheduled events. But sometimes, we are just sitting at the house and inspiration hits him and he has to go write. Then I get all whiny, because I feel like I already get so little of him as it is, and we have a little fight. This is bad, bad, bad. For me to set myself as being in any way against his work is going to cause problems; I figured that out with regards to the band a long time ago. Even if I "win," there will be resentment, bubbling, festering resentment. So I really can't win this one. I have to let it go.

Of course, having related so much to parts of the Hemingway's marriage, it was very hard not to use a little faulty logic to jump to the conclusion that the rest of it applied as well, mainly the part about Ernest Hemingway being a rotten cheater. It was doubly worrisome reading this right after getting engaged. Everything that happens nowadays is colored through the lens of being about to jump off the commitment cliff. So I have to relax, and tell myself that I am not marrying Ernest Hemingway (who wrote a whole book comparing being married to being impotent). I can't read a research-based speculative autobiographical novel about Hemingway's first wife and imagine that I can assume anything about my own relationship, any more than I can assume that I know much of anything about the actual Hadley Hemingway.