lunch hour.

The first stop was the bank. I have a safe deposit box at the main branch on Wade Avenue. Having such a thing makes me feel like a grown-up, with special grown-up things that need to be kept in a safe and separate place. I mostly just have a bunch of paperwork related to home ownership (grown-up). I don't even know what most of them are about, but I had to sign copies of them, and by gum, if ever anyone showed up on my doorstep and demanded to see them, I'd have them. Or at least, I'd be able to get them immediately, given a half hour drive to Wade Avenue, as long as it was within bank hours. I'm on a waiting list for a safe deposit box at a closer branch.

Something else that I keep in the safe deposit box is the title to the car, and it was that which I needed. I needed it so that I sign the back of it while a notary watched me so that he could then put down his official I Saw This Happen stamp. Then I would give it to some local tow truck operator, who would take it and my car with the tree-shaped dent to an auction house. Four to six weeks later, I will get a statement that says how much my car raised for the public radio station that plays a bunch of jazz. This is not to be confused with the public radio station that received the donation of one of our cars four months ago. I get a tax write-off, but honestly just being rid of the thing is enough of a weight off my shoulders. If ever you want to just get rid of a junker and don't care what happens to it or whether you get any money for it, this is a convenient way to do it. And then you can talk about how you donated it to charity, aren't you a nice person?

I was in and out of the bank in minutes, car title in my purse. And then what? I'd killed less than half of a lunch hour, and despite my opening sentence, really the only stop I needed to make was the bank. It was hot, and that made me decide that I wanted bubble tea. Then I thought, no, there's no need to go out of my way to spend three dollars on a novelty drink, no matter how refreshing. Then I remembered that my mom had asked me to get her something at the Asian grocery store. And that's fine, because I can buy a refreshing novelty drink as long as I have a reason to go to the store in the first place.

Have you ever had bubble tea? It's silly. It looks silly and it tastes silly, and it's so silly that it requires a special straw, also silly. It's some kind of iced tea with milk, and they add little chewy things they call bubbles, but which are actually tapioca. You drink the tea, and sometimes the tapioca bubbles come up through the special silly straw, so you can chew them. They don't have much of a taste, but the texture is fun. If you eat all of them, though, you get that same weird feeling in your stomach that you get after a gummy worm binge. Full, but not sated, as if what you ate expanded. For all I know, that's exactly what happens.

I called up my mom's email on my phone, because I couldn't remember what I was supposed to get for her. I walked confidently into the store, ready to fetch some shichimi togarashi. And then I realized that I had no idea what shichimi togarashi was. Some kind of mushroom? So I googled it and found out that it was a spice blend, which at least helped me get to the right aisle of the store. I looked at the many, many packages, but none of them appeared to be the right thing. But then again, a lot of the packages were not in English. An official-looking man with an official-looking clipboard was in the spice aisle, so I showed him my phone and asked if he had this, not even bothering to make a go of the pronunciation. He thought for a second, then walked over to a shelf and tapped authoritatively on a small spice bottle before walking away. Nothing on the bottle was in English, except for the brand name. I tried to compare the characters on the bottle to the characters in the Wikipedia article. They seemed pretty close, and I figured my mom was not likely to know the difference anyway. Besides, I felt silly examining a bottle that I could not read even a little bit.

On my way to the register, I happened to find myself walking down the candy aisle (okay, I diverted myself there). I love Asian candy. It is inexplicable and delicious. I examined the packages, which gave only a slight indication of what might be inside. I picked up one, realized it had some kind of fish paste in it, and said, "Ew!" as I put it back. A man came around the corner as I did so, and I worried I had offended him. Silly white woman doesn't appreciate good candy. The Asian grocery store makes me worry about stupid things like that, mostly because I feel so conspicuous in the first place. He might think that kind of candy is gross, too.

I couldn't figure out the candy packages, so I picked up some mango-flavored Hi-Chew, because I know that it is yummy. Between that and the bubbles in the bubble tea, I had such a gummy tummyache that I didn't eat my packed lunch until after 4 in the afternoon. It was totally worth it.

broughton brownies.

I bought a new-used cookbook a few months back, when we were checking out a thrift store that happened to be having a book sale. It was the Capitol Cook Book, distributed by the James T. Broyhill for Senator campaign. Back in 1986, a furniture heir was running to represent North Carolina in the United States Senate. He'd been a representative of the 10th district for twenty-some years before being appointed by the governor to fill a Senate seat vacated by a guy who died. Then he had to actually get elected to the Senate seat, which he did not, and thus ended the political career of James T. Broyhill.

Yeah, that's all pretty boring. EXCEPT. I happened to have grown up in North Carolina's 10th district. More specifically, I share a hometown with the Broyhills. Lenoir is not much of a place, but we had furniture factories.

In the course of his Senate campaign, Jim Broyhill released a cookbook. I guess he gave them out at fundraising events. According to the excerpt on the back cover, there was a previous edition of the Capitol Cook Book, perhaps made during one of his earlier congressional campaigns. I dearly wish I had a copy of that earlier book, but surely any existing copies are going for millions on eBay are rotting in some basement in the 10th district. Also according to the back cover, the "booklet was authorized by and printed at the expense of the Jim Broyhill For Senate Campaign."

Pretty much everything you see in the secondhand market feels like fate, but it was pretty weird that I, a woman from Lenoir, happened to find a twenty-six-year-old Broyhill campaign cookbook in a Raleigh thrift store. Of all the people who come through that thrift store, how many had come from the 10th district?

So I paid a quarter for it, just to look through it (actually, I looked through it at the store, clutched it to my chest, and said "I MUST HAVE IT."). The first section is mostly Broyhill family recipes. And then the rest of the book is full of recipes supplied from various politicians. I found this part hilarious, even though I was annoyed that the recipes were credited to "Representative and Mrs." You know what? I bet Pat Roberts has never made a pumpkin chiffon pie in his life, so we might as well give credit to his unnamed Missus (I looked it up - her name is Franki).

I do not recognize all the names, though I suspect they are probably mostly Republicans. You can make the Secretary and Mrs. Caspar Weinberger's Apple Rum Cake or Congressman and Mrs. Trent Lott's Chicken and Wild Rice Casserole. While Strom Thurmond the man might make me cringe, his (and his Mrs.) recipe for barbeque sauce looks pretty tasty. The last couple of pages even have recipes courtesy of the Reagans. I intend to make the Gipper's Mac and Cheese, because, well, why wouldn't I? The recipes are mostly pretty simple and a lot of them sound good.

I was nearing the end of the book when I came across something that I instantly knew I needed to make: Broughton Brownies. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

Just like I was one of the few people in Raleigh that would have any interest in James T. Broyhill's campaign cookbook, the people who might get a kick out of Broughton Brownies have to come from a specific place, say around the 10th district.

Needham Broughton was a prominent North Carolina businessman in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He gave the state a lot of money, so he has a high school in Raleigh named after him. His nephew, J. Melville Broughton, the 60th Governor of North Carolina, was the namesake of Broughton Hospital, located in Morganton, North Carolina (in the 10th district!). That's nice, isn't it? Had a hospital named after him.

See, Broughton Hospital is a mental institution. We can all agree that it's not very nice to poke fun at mental illness, you can bet your britches that little kids growing up anywhere near Morganton used Broughton Hospital in their insults. You know, yo mamma so crazy she had you at Broughton Hospital. Or something, I never was very good at those kinds of jokes.

At some point in high school, I met some girls from Raleigh, and they talked very casually about how they went to Broughton. Of course, they meant the high school in the nice part of town. But I didn't know that. I was amazed that not only does the loony bin apparently have a high school attached to it, the kids that go there don't even know enough to be ashamed of going there.

I made Broughton Brownies for an office potluck. I did not tell anyone where I got the recipe, because A.) it would require too much explaining, and B.) it would ruin the fun I had watching them all eat asylum brownies. They had nuts in them, too! GET IT?

The recipe makes a dense and dry marbled brownie. They're not bad. I imagine that if I had to spend some time in Broughton Hospital, I would develop a complicated relationship with such delicious symbols of my incarceration and mental instability. Josh went on and on about how they were no good, because they did not have nearly enough chocolate in them. He did this while shovelling them into his mouth. Once I pointed out that he had eaten them all, he revised his statement to say that they were not actually brownies. I'm okay with that explanation. It would make sense to me that Broughton Brownies are not actually brownies. They just think they are.

GET IT?

peacocks in the front yard.

"Did you ever notice that a bathing suit allows you to wear a dress over it that would be completely inappropriate to wear over regular underwear?"

Whoa, deep.

I did not hear the response to that question, because I was just walking by. I was coming back from the keg station, carrying a beer over to the tent where my chair was. It was a slip 'n slide party, but I was not wearing a bathing suit. I was wearing a dress, and since I was wearing it over regular underwear, it was reasonably concealing. Under the tent with me were two other women. One of them was also wearing a long dress, no bathing suit, while the other was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. She even had a jacket, which she attempted to use to keep the sun from burning her shoulders. I offered her some sunscreen, but she said she had to go to work soon anyway. The other tent and the rest of the yard was inhabited by women in bathing suits and the kinds of dresses that you can really only wear over bathing suits.

Why would someone go to a slip 'n slide party and not wear a bathing suit? Actually, let's back up and ask another question: What is a slip 'n slide party?

Presumably, you know what a slip 'n slide is. It's a long piece of plastic with a irrigation tube on one side. You plug it into a garden hose, which makes the plastic very wet and very slidy, so that little children can take a run at them and then slide faster faster faster all the way to the end, where they will either land in a pool or get a bunch of grass cuts on their tummies. Commercial slip 'n slides are not recommended for adults, due to danger of spinal injury.

You're quick, so you've by now figured out that a slip 'n slide party is a party where there is slipping 'n sliding. However, I was at THE slip 'n slide party. It gets the definite article because it is an annual event. A fellow that we know throws a party at his house. He gets a couple of kegs, supplies a bunch of food, hires a band, and constructs a massive slip 'n slide going down his inclined yard.

Since this party has been happening for a few years, the slide construction is down to a science. First, there is a thick layer of carpet over the grass going down the hill. There are rolls of carpet on either side to prevent people from sliding off to either side. A thick layer of clear plastic covers the carpet. At the bottom is a giant inflatable pool. Last year, the pool was more of a kiddie-variety, and a couple of sliders with too much momentum bounced right out of it like skipped rocks. The water comes from a holey hose that is strung from tree to tree across the top of the slide.

So now you know all about slip 'n slide parties in general, and also THE slip 'n slide party in particular. Back to the original question: why wasn't I wearing a bathing suit?

I agonized over that decision, let me tell you. Aside from not particularly wanting to shave my legs, I didn't want to appear in public in a bathing suit. Good old-fashioned body shame. I looked at the other women, all tan and thin in their suits and tiny dresses. I consoled myself that they all probably hated their own bodies, because that's just the way women are.

That's all old news, though. I'm not here to talk about how women hate their bodies (well, except for those previous five paragraphs). Because there was something else that I could not help noticing. Just as the women were all either self-consciously covered up or uncovered, so were the men. Some guys kept their shirts on even as they went down the slide. Others paraded around shirtless, tan, and toned. Some preferred that you not look at them, while others competed for your eyes. It was equal-opportunity body shame (and eye candy) out there.

That's probably not a new thing. I just never noticed it before, because I was too busy worrying about myself. It was funny to me, actually, to see men worrying about their appearance, like they ought to know better. With their brightly colored swim trunks, I couldn't help but think of peacocks.

And then. Over there, under the band tent. There was a guy who kept his shirt on. It was a tee shirt meant to look like a boy scout uniform. He also wore a ridiculous pith helmet and some silly sunglasses. He was not covering up, nor was he strutting, though his outfit did draw attention to him. It made me wonder what kind of person I was, that out of all the peacocks in the yard, mine was the one in the pith helmet.

the march 2 bug.

Before I fell in love with my house, another person did. Well, I never met him, so I can't say for sure how he felt about it. All I know is that he put an offer down on it, the offer was accepted, and he went under contract. It might be that he bought it for a hated mother-in-law, or perhaps he just wanted a place to keep his howler monkeys. In any case, four days before he was going to sign the papers for the house, he lost his job. That meant that he couldn't get his loan, so he couldn't get the house.

Then came me. I went under contract and I had a month to think about that poor guy who lost the house so that I might buy it. I was terrified that something would happen that would prevent me from buying it. I stopped talking on my cell phone while driving that month, because I didn't want to get in an accident. My logic was that if I totaled my car and had to buy a new one or if I had sudden overwhelming medical bills, I might not get the loan. As soon as the house was mine, I went back to driving and talking on the phone. Remember kids, it's okay to do potentially dangerous things, as long as you are not under contract to buy a house.

I was also afraid of losing my job. This was in the scary days of early 2009. We'd all watched the stock market plummet and the unemployment number grow. No one had been let go at my company, but I had the least seniority. I seemed like the easiest cut to make.

I took off work on a Friday to sign the papers and buy the house. Up until quitting time on Thursday night, I lived in fear of being laid off and I did not use my cell phone while driving. Friday, I bought a house. While driving from the lawyer's office to the house, I called my mom.

Monday morning, two people were laid off at my office. I was not one of them. I felt relieved, of course. But it made me wonder whether it would have been worse to have been laid off before I bought the house or after. I would not have gotten my wonderful property, but then again, I wouldn't be newly unemployed and 130K in debt at the same time.

* * *
This year, on the second day of March, whenever any of our customers fired up our product, they were greeted with an error. And then the program crashed. That was it. No one in the whole world could run our application on March 2. When we all got to the office in the morning, the people overseas had encountered this problem hours before. People were unable to do their jobs because our program was not running.

That's a pretty bad bug.

We have a web site where customers can report problems and get help, either from other users or employees of the company. One of my coworkers happened to check the web site on the night of March 1, when those foreign customers started complaining. He found the problem and posted a message on the web site about how to fix it. We were all properly impressed the next morning when we saw his message, which was posted at 1:03 AM.

The bug was a simple math error, and the fix was to add an equals sign to a comparison (greater than or equals, rather than just greater than). The buggy code was a couple of years old, and disaster would only happen on March 2. It hadn't come up in previous years because there was no code that called the bad code. As it happened, I was the one who called the bad code, but of course, we all blamed the person who wrote that very bad code in the first place. First, because it really was his bad code, and second, because he'd been one of the people laid off a couple years ago. The general rule is that the last person to leave a company gets blamed for all the bugs.

The really funny thing is that he was laid off on March 2, 2009, which I remember because I bought my house the Friday before. And so it was like some spooky revenge that he set into motion on his way out. I don't think he did, but after spending a morning scrambling around reassuring angry customers whose very expensive software product suddenly quit working, it was funny to think of it that way.

thingies.

Thing 1: Put 'er there.
Someone at work sent me a video that had told the story of a half-dead pitbull puppy showing up on somebody's porch. The person was going to take it to the pound because of all the nasty things they'd heard about pitbulls, but a soft-hearted sister convinced him not to. Fast forward a year, and the dog is happy, healthy, and knows all kinds of tricks. I watched this and immediately felt bad that my dog could not pick which hand held the coin. She can sit and lie down and roll over. But I thought it would be neat to teach her to shake paws. Then later, we'd move on to teaching her to bake cookies, use the toilet, and fold laundry.

She learned to shake in about two minutes, and I felt like an idiot for not teaching it to her sooner. I also felt sort of irrationally angry, as if she had known how to shake the whole time and yet had not told me. Why hadn't she come up to me and offered her paw when we first met?

Thing 2: Jeepers Creepers.
I've been buying up interesting books to rip up and turn into paper decorations. Among those books were three organ music books that I bought because they had sheet music on colored paper. Once I found myself the owner of an organ (and after I had cooled down about that fact), I dug them out and gave them to Josh, who immediately sat down to learn to play "Jeepers Creepers, Where'd You Get Those Peepers." The books had specific instructions about how to use all the befuddling buttons on the organ, such as the spectretone setting. Sometimes it is cool that I happen to have just the right thing already stashed somewhere, and sometimes it's actually a little embarrassing. Either way, I guess Josh and I deserve each other.

Thing 3: I found a feather.
I now have two feathers in my house, picked up outside and kept for being beautiful natural objects. The other one is blue with black stripes. They are kept tucked into the trim of the shade on my beloved bird bath lamp. Like anyone who spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid, I've found enough feathers to make at least one mismatched flightless bird, but I can't recall ever having found a red feather. I don't know that something as ho-hum as "I found a feather" counts for a Thing for someone out of elementary school. But I did take a picture, and then I wrote this little paragraph, so that counts as enough, right?

I found a feather. It's red.

committed.

Last week at work, my cell phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number, out of my area code. I let it ring. Ten seconds later, it rang again. I figured it might be important, so I answered. It was the American Red Cross, asking me to make an appointment at a donation center, because blood supplies were critically low. I sighed at being tricked into answering the phone and thought that they always say that their blood supplies were critically low.

In case you were wondering, yes, I do believe that mine was about the most selfish possible reaction to a plea from the Red Cross. I realized it immediately, and as penance, I made an appointment to give blood the following morning.

They call me, because my blood is magical. Know how? Well, they can take my blood out of my body, and then if someone else loses a lot of blood, they can put my blood into their body, and that person will then not die from lack of blood. See? Magical. What? You say your blood is magical, too? Well! You should get on down to the Red Cross!

I've given blood bunches of times, but I've never actually gone down to the Red Cross for it. My donations have always been a part of a blood drive. In the last few years, all of my blood donation has taken place on a bus. I consider myself to be committed to blood donation. I always sign up for the blood drives, even though I sorta hate doing it. I don't mind the weird questions about trips abroad and I like the cookies at the end, but I will never get used to the part where the needle goes into my arm. However, there doesn't seem to be any way around it.

But it occurred to me that if I only give blood when it's convenient to me, as in when the blood bus comes to my door, then that is not very committed. Only driving out of one's way early in the morning implies commitment. Or something. Once, I worked at a blood drive at church, and an old man came in who had donated multiple gallons over the course of his life. It takes eight donations to make a gallon, and you can safely donate about six times a year, so it takes a while to rack up gallons. That guy was committed to giving blood. Someday, when I am an old lady, and I go visit the Red Cross, the volunteers will be amazed at my lifetime giving record. They may even clap, while I smile modestly. No, no, it was nothing. Extra cookies? Well, maybe just seven one, to be polite.

Unlike the blood buses, which have little room for decor, the Red Cross' walls are littered with art meant to inspire your bleeding. Once, at that same church blood drive, one of the sponsors had her fourth-grade class draw artwork for placemats. There were a lot of pictures of syringes and blood drops. The American Red Cross chose a different route, displaying framed posters featuring women in WWI era nurse outfits. One of these nurses was holding her arms out plaintively, begging you to either join up or take her blood. She looked a little like a zombie. There was also a set of Disney posters, featuring Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, and Donald working for the Red Cross. The Minnie poster was particularly striking - Minnie comforts a little girl while a tornado pulls apart a house in the near background. That's great, Ms. Mouse, but shouldn't we get underground now?

The nurse asked me if I was here for a double donation. I'd never heard of such a thing, so I said no. In fact, that sounded kinda dangerous, since they're usually pretty strict about how often you can donate. But they were talking about a double red blood cell donation, where they take twice as many red blood cells, but give you back the platelets and the plasma. They use a special machine. I said no, but decided that I would look into it later, because I am committed to blood donation. The double donation is something they ask only of people with type-O blood (~90% of the population can receive O-positive blood, while everyone can receive O-negative).

It was really cold in the Red Cross, just like it's always cold on the blood bus. That's intentional. Because there is already a danger of people passing out (you know, from having their precious bodily fluids taken out of them), a warm or even comfortable temperature would only make that worse. If you do feel like you're going to pass out, they point an oscillating fan directly at you. Sometimes they put an ice pack on your chest (guess how I know these things!). Anyway, the cold is a necessary nuisance. When I was waiting for my turn with the nurse, a lady sat beside me reading a book, with a folded blanket in her lap. It was clearly not her first time at the Red Cross. She was committed to blood donation.

Finally, I was sitting in a right-arm bleeding chair, shivering but otherwise comfortable, considering that I was having my life-force drained out. The TV was set to CNN, which was reporting that someone had shot a bunch of people at the Empire State Building. Though it sounded sensational, it turned out to be just another of the awful things that happen every day. I guess that's why the Red Cross always says their blood supplies are critically low.

I always feel upbeat after a blood donation. It's a very easy and very good thing to do. But I felt better than usual that day, the difference being that I had gone and done this, not that I had happened across it and said okay. I am committed.

embrace the mystery.

A couple of Sundays ago, on the way home from the Lutheran Church we've been attending, Josh said something about joining up. And I said, whoooooa there pardner, isn't that just a bit hasty? I mean, I like the Lutherans and all, and these specific ones are swell, but I'm not sure I'm ready to put my name on the books. I dunno, I just don't feel Lutheran, you know?

It was the only church we'd tried. Josh picked it because it was the closest Lutheran church to our house, and you like what you know. I know, because I had already eyed a tiny Methodist church a couple miles out in the country. We'd talked about getting back into a church habit for a while. We'd both grown up in faithful families, and we missed church. Drifting back to your childhood faith in your late twenties is maybe cliche, but here we are.

I personally was intrigued by the Unitarians. I wanted to give them a try, just to see what the service was like. My only impression of them was that they were a place for people whose beliefs didn't seem to fit into any of the approved boxes. I wonder how many people in the pews of other churches have personal beliefs that are different, even at odds, with the messages being preached to them every week. The Unitarians seemed to be embracing that: "Hey, there's lots of ways to think about these questions, and frankly, it's impossible to know, but let's get together, sing songs, and talk about how to be good people." Josh did not trust the Unitarians ("They're not even Christians." "Some of them probably are, and I bet most of them are down with Jesus."), but was willing to try out a service. But we never did, because the only church is twenty minutes away. So I guess if you asked how interested I was in the Unitarians, the answer is less than twenty minutes.

But the Episcopal church was only five minutes away, closer than the Lutherans even. So I said, hey, let's give them a whirl. And Josh said okay, because he trusts the Episcopalians.

It's funny searching for a church together, because we each have different ideas of what we want out of it. He grew up with a few different traditions - first Baptist, then Lutheran, with a dash of Catholic school thrown in. He likes high church, with lots of rituals and candles and robes. I grew up in the archetypical old country church, a Methodist community that was constantly on the verge of dying out with its elderly members. I like small churches, with strong connections between members. Neither of us can abide contemporary music.

The Episcopal church was smallish, with traditional music - so far, so good. And their service? Well, Josh referred to it as "really high church." A good Lutheran would come to the Episcopal church and say that they liked it, but that there was kind of a lot of ritual. There is a procession coming in and one going out. There are lots of opportunities to sing, even if you're not in the choir. There is a reading from the Old Testament, a Psalm, and a excerpt from the New Testament. And then, there is a reading from the Gospel. The two acolytes and an altar boy have a mini parade down the middle aisle, leading a priest carrying a book. They stop halfway between the front and the back, and the priest reads a little good news.

I'm not actually sure if the guy was a priest. They had four people in robes up front. I think they all had different titles, which confuses the heck out of me because I don't know the difference between a priest and a rector and a vicar. In my low church tradition, we had a preacher and that was it.

The first time I experienced high church, I was confused and frustrated the whole time. I always felt half a step behind, even though everything was listed in the program. I guess I've been to enough of these services to be able to follow it, but it has still mostly felt...empty. Rote. Like I was following a script. But at the Episcopal church, I sorta got it, and I honestly can't say if the difference was in the church or in me. Maybe I had enough of a feel for the flow that I was able to actually pay attention to it rather than fumble to keep up the whole time. But it didn't feel empty and rote, it was solemn and reverant. Maybe my problem with high church was that it hadn't been high enough. Or maybe I just really wanted to like the Episcopalians.

The sermon blew my mind. I grew up with well-meaning but not particularly insightful or inspired sermons. Small country churches are really more about the good salt-of-the-earth people in the pews, because they can't afford a good orator up front. The Lutherans, despite being a larger city church, were similar - solid messages, but not something you'd go home and discuss further. However, because of all their liturgy, the message was generally brief. The Episcopal priest spoke from the aisle, using no notes. He started with a story from the Kabbalah. And he talked about not interpretting the Old Testament literally.

I looked around, waiting for the angry mob to form. Obviously, my experience with Christianity has been very limited. I knew there were some who read the Bible as symbolic, but I figured they were isolated sects who lived off the grid and shunned outsiders. I was used to places where if you called the Bible's literal truth into question, ladies would start fainting.

The priest talked about the specific story of God raining manna from heaven. He said we should not think of this as literal bread falling from the sky. Nor should we try to explain it by saying that there was a certain type of flowering bush that produced something similar to what is described. After eliminating those two options ("supernatural literalism" and "historical realism"), he ended the message. I waited. If it's not A, and it's not B, then there must be a C. The preacher is supposed to tell you the C! But if there was one, he didn't mention it. At first, I thought it was a glaring oversight, but then I decided that was the point. The church was not telling me what to believe. They had addressed a couple of interpretations and outlined the downfalls with them, but then they left the rest of it to me. They embrace the mystery, and I really, really like that.

Mind blown.

The Episcopalians may be vague on their interpretations of Old Testament miracles, but they are emphatic about loving Jesus. They have Communion every single Sunday. It's right there on the front page of the bulletin, under the church's name - "Eucharist-centered worship." While I teased Josh about how often the Lutherans communed ("You know, the way the Methodists do it, they don't have to do it again for months. Much more efficient."), I've accepted that some people really like the holy meal.

The Lutherans intinct, which is a fancy word for dipping the bread into the wine and then eating it. Growing up, we got little shot glasses of grape juice at the Methodist church. The Episcopalians share the cup. You have the option to intinct, or you can forego the wine altogether. We took a when-in-Rome attitude. I think I've used a communal cup maybe once before, but I've never had the priest hold the cup up to me as I knelt. I felt profoundly humbled by it, and once again, I felt like I was being introduced to a whole new Christianity. Are the Episcopalians different or am I?

As we left, Josh said we could start going there instead of continuing to court the Lutherans. I was relieved, after feeling like I'd dragged him there when he was all ready to get his Lutheran card stamped and sign up for a retreat at Lutheridge (or was it Lutherock?). So. Episcopalians! Who knew?

*Note: When I talk about big groups of people like "the Methodists" or "the Lutherans," I am speaking about the specific congregations that I am familiar with. There is great variety even within denominations, because it's a big world.

husqVARNA!

It was time to buy a chainsaw.

A couple of years ago, a tree fell in our yard. It missed the deck by about an inch. Josh said he'd chop it up and we'd get some free firewood. Because when you live at the mercy of trees, the best you can do is pray that they don't hit anything and then enjoy burning them in retaliation when they do. I sent an email to my brother, who is my official tool expert, asking about axes. He recommended that I get a gas-powered axe made by Husqvarna.

Josh said no, real men uses axes. I said whatever, bought the ax, and let him do the work.

A month ago, a tree fell on two other trees. The combined trees, a mighty woody force, fell on Josh's car. They also fell all over the driveway and onto some smaller decorative trees that actually fared much worse than the Toyota. A neighbor walking by offered to let us borrow a chainsaw. In fact, lots of neighbors stopped at the bottom of our driveway to marvel at nature. Some of them offered help, others offered unhelpful commentary like "That's a big tree." Undoubtedly, they all considered why the lot of us are stupid enough to live around all these leafy monsters.

Josh said that he would chop it up. And he probably would have, except that it was really hot outside, and he had to work a lot of hours, and did I mention that it was hot? Record-breaking temperatures. Real men stay inside in the conditioned air.

I told him about the friendly neighbor with the chainsaw. Shrug. I said, I will buy you a chainsaw. He said he didn't want one, because . I said that while I respected his silly-illogical-real-macho-reasoning, dear, but the task will never get done this way. LET ME BUY YOU A CHAINSAW. Seriously? Most men would love to have some nice woman offer to buy them a chainsaw.

I sent an email to my brother, who still recommends Husqvarna. I looked up chainsaws online, sighed at the price, then cheered myself by saying "HusqVARNA!"

We went to Lowes on a Monday afternoon. We'd gone to the post office earlier, because they used to have Lowes coupons in their change-of-address packets. This is very dishonest. You should never take a change-of-address packet unless you are moving. You should not go to the post office for free coupons just because chainsaws are $300. Do not do this. For one thing, the coupons aren't even there anymore.

Being thwarted at the post office prepared us for our next thwarting at Lowes. They had two Husqvarnas, but not the size we needed. I pouted, and consoled myself by saying I would now have time to order Lowes coupons off eBay, possibly sold by unscrupulous persons who live near post offices that still give away coupons. I said "HusqVARNA!" some more.

Tuesday afternoon, I drove up the driveway after work, and I noticed that the tree situation had been taken care of. I could tell that whoever had done it had used a chainsaw. It probably made him feel powerful, like a real man.

The thing is, Josh didn't do it. There was no note, no nothing. Someone happened along and chopped up our tree. Maybe the person who owns the vacant lot where the tree used to grow, maybe some neighbor who felt a little sorry for our pathetic attempts at home maintenance. I wish I knew who it was, so I could bake them some cookies. So now we have lots of free firewood, and still no chainsaw. Maybe next time.

cheese and crackers.

After booking a reception venue, the next thing to look at was catering. We had hoped to hire a friend of ours, Big Rig, who is a real, live chef at a restaurant. He's the guy you call to work the grill at a party, just because he likes to do it and always does a bang-up job. We must have each thanked him several times for cooking up so many chicken wings at Josh's birthday party, and the next time we saw him, he mentioned that he was interested in catering the wedding. He was already doing the food at the wedding of another friend of ours, and he was confident that he could handle our 150-guest affair.

I was intrigued. It was the kind of thing that could turn out brilliant or terrible. We would have total control over the menu, and would be basically just paying for the food, with a little extra thrown over to Big Rig. I have no doubts about the man's cooking, and I was willing to be convinced that he could handle food on a mass scale. Plus, I liked the idea of people asking me who was doing my catering and then me getting to answer, "Big Rig."

It was not meant to be. Big Rig would need an on-site kitchen, and short of offering up Josh's mom's house, we couldn't figure out how to make that work. Also, most reception venues are very picky about caterers. Some of them insist that you use their own. Others have a list of approved companies. On none of those lists did I see "Big Rig." They don't know what they're missing.

The venue we chose has a list of accepted caterers. If we choose a different one, we can have them added to the list of accepted caterers, for a fee (which covers the administrative cost of...something or other). I started with the list. Several of them had very delicious-sounded menus available, and I was excited about getting to go have a tasting day where we picked out our own menu. Then I started looking at the prices, and I lost my appetite.

I thought about that money, still sitting at my parents' bank, that I had turned down. I thought about a honeymoon. I thought about the car we would need to buy for Josh. I realized that we could pay for the wedding ourselves if we really, really scrimped on the festivities or if we went into debt. A fresh new debt is not how I want to start my marriage. But neither did I want to serve my guests cheese and crackers in the church basement. Having these kind of expensive demands for my wedding made me feel very shallow. If you can't afford the wedding you'd like to have, I guess you can't have it, right?

I called my mom and asked if the Sandra Wedding Fund was still available or if they had already picked out a new pontoon boat. She laughed at me, and said of course, it's yours, shall I write you a check? She didn't want to eat cheese and crackers either. And this was what the money was for - me to have the wedding I wanted, and what I wanted was a fun party for everyone. I'll happily wear the Goodwill dress and some borrowed pearls, but it was important to me that people actually have a good time. I want good food, alcohol, and a band. Is it less selfish if my wedding demands have to do with the things that are for everyone?

I knew that the money was still mine for the asking, but it was a very humbling phone call. Not just because I had already made a big deal about paying for it myself, but also because I don't like the idea of taking money from my parents. It's like I think that not paying my own way all the time makes me less of an adult, even when it's money that has been set aside for years for this very purpose. They're not supporting me, they're giving me a party. That's what I tell myself. I also tell myself that it's stupid to feel bad for failing to live up to a requirement that I pretty much made up on my own.

As soon as I got off the phone, a huge weight was lifted off of me. I was able to look at caterers' websites and not get a worryache. But then I quit after about five minutes, because this wedding stuff overwhelms me.

And the piano sounds like a carnival.

One Thursday evening, not too long ago, I came home and found an organ in my living room. No, Remix had not brought me the still-beating heart of my nemesis, it was the musical kind. An electric organ, six feet wide and extending four feet out from the wall, with a huge speaker on each side.

I don't know what you guys think about all the silly things I admit to owning or the enthusiasm I have for what even I would call junk. I recognize that my tastes are not universal. So it's totally okay if you assume that I was really happy to find the organ. It's fine if you figure that this was something I wanted, as I know I have given you every indication that all I want out of life is a bunch of crap to put in my living room.

Actually, I was really very pissed off.

I had seen this organ before. It had been sitting at the Durham Rescue Mission Thrift Store for months. It was the kind of thing that I admire briefly and then move on, because c'mon, that thing is huge and ridiculous. It would be an incredible thing for someone else to own. Unfortunately, Someone Else turned out to be my fiance, who had thoughtfully set it up in the living room and then left it for me to find while he was at work.

Surprise!

I fired off some angry, angry text messages. I said unkind things. When he said it would grow on me, I compared it to cancer. I. Was. So. Mad. I briskly walked the dog, and I was still mad. I cleaned the floors, and I was still mad. I wrote in my journal, and that just made me madder. I went out in the backyard and pulled weeds, and that helped. Then later, after he got home from work and we were both there staring at it, we had a good old-fashioned in-person fight.

She said: Do not bring giant things to live in the house without discussing it with other house members.
He said: ORGAN!
She said: Could you not wait until you saw me to talk about it? You could have called from the store. Did you have to have it right that second?
He said: ORGAN!
She said: So when you were driving to go get the band van and find three friends to help you move this thing into the house, during all that, did it never occur to you that I might not want it?
He said: ORGAN!

Basically, Josh really really really wanted the organ. He thought it was beautiful and amazing, the desire for it was self-explanatory: ORGAN. He'd wanted it from the first time he saw it, and only recently had it been marked down enough to consider buying it. Once it got to that price point, he was convinced he had to act at that very moment, before someone swooped in and bought it out from under him. He further assumed, like maybe you did, that I would really want it, too. I mean, if I was okay with the sarcophagus, why would the organ be any different?

Answer: I had been present at the purchase of the sarcophagus, therefore my approval was implicit. Also, you could fit like ten mummies in that stupid organ. Fourteen, if four of them were cats.

I felt a little sorry for him. His enthusiasm, which I had swiftly and deftly murdered, was very earnest. He had even talked to me earlier in the day, after he'd bought it, and it was all he could do to not spoil the surprise that awaited me at home. He was so sure that I would love it, just like he was sure that someone else would buy it if he did not (Note to self: Josh very bad at estimating other people's desire for electric organs). Then I compared it to cancer and hurt his feelings. I felt bad for ruining his new toy high, and I could see why he would figure that I would be okay, even happy, about it. But I reserve my right to be angry about giant musical instrument purchases made without consultation.

It would be hilarious if it happened to someone else (as I'm sure you well know). I bet there are lots of folks out there who buy ridiculous stuff that their significant others do not want. I don't know what those other ridiculous things are, but I think that for most people, it is not an electric organ. This is a common situation, made unique by the fact that it's us. Someday, I hope that I will find it funny. Right now, I do not, even as I play it up for laughs on my blog.

I am accepting it, because there is not much else I can do. The next morning, when we were no longer fighting, but the sight of it still made me burn inside, he remarked about how he was going to be glad that he bought it every day for the rest of his life. And I felt the rest of the room fade away so it was just me and the organ in all the world, as that phrase echoed in my head, "the rest of my life." I'm going to marry this man, which is marrying his stuff. The movie of our marriage will have a soundtrack full of carnival music.

"Why couldn't you just have gotten a piano? I like pianos. Pianos don't stick out so far or have huge speakers."

"We can still get a piano."

"And get rid of the organ?"

"No, we'd have both!"

"It'll be a really cool piano. And we'll put the organ on CraigsList and find it a good home with someone who will play it and love it."

"It has to be a reeeeeeally cool piano." A pause. "A player piano."

"That would be amazing." Pause. "Challenge accepted." We shook on it.

profiled.

We were on our way to church this morning, a new-to-us church that is across the street from the Food Lion and next to the Korean Baptist Church. As we approached, a dark-haired man crossed the street in front of us, coming from the Food Lion and on his way to Sunday worship.

"Maybe he's an Episcopalian," Josh said, on the lookout for people we might soon meet.

"I don't think so. I think he's going to the Baptist church," I answered. "I just racially profiled him," I admitted.

We turned into the drive that is shared by the two neighboring churches. As we continued, we came upon a pair of guys in plastic vests, directing traffic with orange wands. They waved the car ahead of us to the right, into the Baptist church overflow parking. As we got closer, the waved us to the left.

"I think we just got racially profiled," I said.

qubic.

We recently did some stuff reshuffling to make room for a new piece of furniture. Somehow, this game. came up to the surface out of some closet. I vaguely remember buying it - Josh picked it up with the intent of giving it to his brother. We were at a church yard sale that was closing down and eliminating stock by having customers fill paper bags for a dollar.

As much as I love the stuff-a-bag time, I tend to end up with all kinds of weird crap (more than usual). It's not hard to go a bit crazy. Really, the first thing that you put in a box costs the dollar, and then everything else is free. So once you have committed to buying the bag, anything else you see that even remotely appeals to you ends up yours. At least, that's the way it is with me, but maybe y'all have more self-control in shopping spree situations.

Anyway, we've had this for a while without ever having even opened the box. I was feeling in a purge-y mood, and I thought this was an easy toss. To give it a fair shake, I set it up. It's flimsy and brittle little thing, and the fact that it's in such good condition indicates that the previous owners didn't get much use out of it either.

Of course, once I got it all put together, we remembered why we liked it in the first place. Ever seen an old episode of Star Trek where Spock is playing 3D chess?

This is like that. Except rather than chess, it's like Tic Tac Toe or Connect Four. Vulcan Connect Four!

We've left it set up on the mantle in the living room. That way, we can have ongoing Qubic games. Maybe we can invite company over and have tournaments!

That will probably never happen, but at least it looks cool.

alumni day.

At the Governor's School Reunion last month, I:

1. Bought a small piece of art. There is an Art-o-mat in the Fine Arts Center, and I bought a tiny album of pinhole photographs. I took it home and put it next to the art I bought twelve years ago at Governor's School. That original piece is a block of wood with a small leather flap nailed to it, hiding an old photograph of a family.
2. Ate a lot of bread. We tried to get lunch at three different places and failed at each one. First, we went to Mayberry, a little diner in Old Salem, but the line to order food was out the door. So we went to the Rat Factory, but it became obvious that the alums were not supposed to eat there, because, well, why would they want to? Next we went to the courtyard where alums were supposed to get bag lunches. When I was third in line, they ran out of bag lunches. Finally, we went back to Mayberry, where the line was still ridiculous. I ended up going downstairs to the Old Salem bakery, where they only sell bread by the loaf. We went back upstairs and sat on the porch. I ripped chunks off a loaf of rosemary bread and washed them down with Cherry Coke.
3. Distributed some paper boats. Josh and I wanted to leave our own pieces of art. We made paper boats out of an old copy of Strunk and White and then left them at the fish pond, though I kept one to put on the fridge.
4. Shared the rest of my bread. I couldn't eat it all. Lots of people were eating lunch there, and we made new friends as people sat down at our picnic table. They were current students and alums from other years, extroverts every one. I offered them each some bread and they reached over and ripped off chunks delightedly. It was highly symbolic. Later, I gave the rest of the loaf to a choral student, who thanked me more than was necessary. I mostly just didn't want to carry it around anymore.
5. Wished there were more seminars. Twenty seminars, but only two time slots. We chose carefully.
6. Wandered around the Fine Arts Center. We used to hang out in the FAC when we weren't at the fish pond, because the FAC had air conditioning. We visited old class rooms while the sound of the weird orchestra concert going on in the auditorium got louder and softer depending on our location. Josh sat down in a classroom and wrote a poem. I sat in the floor and thought about how unlikely things could end up being sometimes.
7. Took a beat-boxing class. We learned some basics, which we have been practicing ever since. It confuses the dog.
8. Attended a lecture about Harry Potter. The professor pointed out some themes in the stories and how our culture's wide acceptance of the stories implied acceptance of the messages, too. While maybe that's not so bad when the message is that love wins, sometimes the message is that natural talent beats out hard work or that it's okay to break rules whenever you want. He compared Hogwarts to Governor's School and we all felt chastised, yet special.
9. Learned about elbow licking. One of the kids we met at lunch told us that he had heard that if you licked someone's elbow, they wouldn't notice. It was exactly the kind of dubious, yet irresistible, information you might pick up at Governor's School.

The Day after the Governor's School Reunion, I:

1. Licked Josh's elbow. He did not notice.

rat factory.

"What about reception venues?"

"Oh, well, we were wanting to have it at the Salem College cafeteria," I answer with obvious excitement. Carney gets a look that I have learned to recognize since we started talking about wedding stuff. It's her usual sunny smile, frozen in place, her eyes betraying her terror. She teeters on the edge of hoping that I am kidding and fearing that I am not. I take a perverse delight in making her get that look, and so I smile blandly back at her, as if I think that anyone would jump at the chance to get married in an institutional cafeteria.

"A cafeteria?"

"Yeah." I decide to give her a break. "Salem College is where we went to Governor's School together, where we met. We used to have 3 meals every day in that cafeteria." Throw a little sentimentality on something, and Carney will get on board. Her eyes grow soft, like suddenly cafeterias are romantic after all. Later, she found links online of cutesy school-themed wedding decorations. She's a trooper.

The cafeteria is actually called the refectory, though we called it the Rat Factory. And it looks like any college cafeteria. I could imagine my guests walking in and looking around in wonder - what is this place and why would anyone throw a wedding here? We'd have to explain it to them. No, no, it's not weird and ugly, it's romantic.

None of that matters at all, because Salem College doesn't rent out the refectory to outside parties. Jerks.

The next best thing would be Old Salem itself. Salem College is a small private girls college in the middle of the historical town of Old Salem. Every fifth grader in North Carolina visits Old Salem at some point, where they can walk down the cobblestone streets, talk to a real life blacksmith, and buy too much rock candy at the gift shop. There is a very nice visitor's center there, which does rent to outside parties. We stopped by the visitor's center to, well, visit, and check out the space to see if we wanted to throw a party there. The room was beautiful - lovely hardwoods, pretty molded designs on the walls, and a great big pipe organ. Not sure what the organ had to do with anything, but it was very nice. However, the room was on the smallish side. I wasn't sure if it would fit 150 people with room for a band and maybe dancing. On the bright side, rather than getting a caterer, we could just give people a few bucks apiece to go stuff themselves with rock candy.

I admit, my heart was already set on Old Salem, but we checked out some other options, just to be thorough. We dropped by the church where we are having the actual ceremony. We could just throw the reception in the fellowshop hall, and since it's a Lutheran church, we could still have beer and wine (Woo Lutherans!). As church fellowship halls go, it was new and spacious and fine. Also, use of it came free with the marriage ceremony. But the thing about a church dining room is that you feel like you're in church. We'd probably save a bundle on alcohol, just because no one would feel comfortable drinking any.

Finally, we stopped off at the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts. We refer to it as the Sawtooth Center, which is actually just the arts and crafts school located there. There is also a theater, a gallery, and several rooms available for rent. We didn't have to look for very long before deciding that this was our place. Larger and cheaper than Old Salem, it is a really beautiful and modern space. Plus, it's right downtown, so after our guests wish us well, they can walk a block and continue celebrating our nuptials (on their own dime).

Josh was particularly excited, and in a peculiar reversal of roles, he nagged me about reserving it right away, fearing that someone else would come along and snatch up the room on the exact same date, eight months away. Monday, I mailed in the deposit check. It was the first big money I've spent on the wedding. It kinda hurt, even though it's nice to have one more thing settled.

Then I started to look at caterers. This wedding stuff is a racket.

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.