He Had Me At "Motherf___er"

So a little while ago, Joan showed me how to load a "podcast app" on my cell phone.  In case I forgot to tell you this, my new car talks to my cell phone. Put one inside the other and I can talk to people through my stereo speakers and stream music from Pandora.  Which is pretty cool.  But not nearly as cool as having a "podcast app." I've subscribed to a couple of podcasts, including one about history, one about space science and two or three about Buddhism.

I have, most of the time, a half-hour commute to work.  Sometimes a little longer.  I'm seriously annoyed to discover that for ALL THIS TIME I could have been learning stuff on the way to and fro. I have, like, six months of lost time to make up for.  So there's not a minute to lose.  At the moment I'm making my way backwards through what is by far the coolest podcast I've ever discovered.  It's called "The 12-Step Buddhist" and it is absolutely awesome.

It's run by a guy named Darren Littlejohn.  He's a yoga instructor, "life coach" (whatever that is--I have yet to hear a good definition) and a few other things.  He's also a person in recovery who happens to be a Buddhist.  He's Tantric and I'm Tiep Hien but the principles are basically the same, and best of all, he's addressing the fundamental thing, the thing that gets you in the most trouble in 12-step meetings of any stripe when you bring it up: Despite all that talk about defining a Higher Power of your own understanding and that the Twelve Steps should work with any faith or even the lack thereof, the Program is very, very Judeo-Christian.

Really, there's no way of getting around that, no matter what they tell you at meetings.  The Twelve Steps came out of the Oxford Group's Six Steps and those were based on the Bible.  The Oxford Group was a Christian mens' organization and it didn't change much when it morphed into Alcoholics Anonymous.  The people who wrote the Big Book were Christian, and the way the whole Program was set up followed typical Christian principles.  (In fact I was once told that if I didn't become a Christian, immediately, I would never recover. No kidding. I've been told a lot of stupid things by a lot of stupid people.) Sure, technically you can work the Program if you're a Hindu or a Muslim or even a pagan, but all of those faith systems presuppose a belief in some kind of deity, whatever you happen to call it.  Buddhism doesn't presuppose that (and doesn't deny it, either).  If you try to get a straight answer from ten Buddhist monks as to whether or not there's a God, you'll get twenty different answers and 400 deep discussions.  So if you need a Higher Power, and your tradition doesn't really have one, what's a Buddhist to do?

Well, one could do a lot worse than listen to Mr. Littlejohn's podcast or read his book, The Twelve-Step Buddhist.  It came out in 2009 and he's written other books since.  While you're at it, you might wanna pick up Mel Ash's The Zen of Recovery, as well; I think I've mentioned him on this blog before.  But back to Mr. Littlejohn.  The parallels here are a little eerie.  He moved to San Diego fairly recently.  During one of his blog posts, a big airplane flew overhead, and I thought, "I know exactly where he lives.  He lives in Little Italy."  (Or maybe Banker's Hill, but my money's on Little Italy.)  He talked about Overeaters Anonymous for a while in another one of his posts, which was awesome because personally, I think OA gets ignored in the recovery community.  (I mean, it's just food, right?  It's not illegal to possess it and nobody's going to kill you if you deal in it.)  But the thing that really got me was his explanation of what it's like to be enlightened vs. not enlightened.

Paraphrasing very roughly here:  Let's say you're an alcoholic.  You drink, you rage, you yell at your loved ones, you cause a lot of misery.  The next day you wake up, realize that you caused a lot of misery, and you're miserable.  So you drink more, to feel better.  And you rage again and you yell again and then the next day you--yeah.  And this keeps going on and on because you don't realize addiction is a sickness, you don't know that you're sick, you don't grok that your sickness is following a predictable path, and you don't understand that there's even a way to get out of it, much less that you might succeed if you give it a try.  Until somebody comes along and says, "Hey.  You might be an alcoholic.  Why don't you give AA a try?" And maybe you do and maybe you don't but the point is, now you have new information.  Now you know there's a way to end this endless cycle.  Once you know that, you can't go on drinking in ignorance.

Being unenlightened is very similar.  You go about your predictable routine.  You suffer, and you cause suffering.  The next day you realize you've caused suffering and you feel bad, but you don't know how to not cause suffering, so you do it again, and then the next day you feel bad but you don't know how to not cause suffering and...you get the idea.  Until somebody comes along and says, "Hey, there's more than this."  And now you know that there's a way out.  And once you do, you can't keep bumbling mindlessly along...

I'm not explaining this very well.  What I'm saying, though, is I got it.  I mean I really got it.  It went straight past my cerebral cortex and down into my lizard brain.  I've been a Buddhist for a while now, seven or eight years, and nobody's ever explained it to me in a way that made that much sense.  I mean, wham.  Straight to the brain stem.  I almost drove off the freeway in sheer surprise.

Yes, I listen to his podcasts while I'm driving.  I'm not sure what a good idea that is, because he has a pretty soothing voice.  Anyway, if you're interested in Buddhism or the Twelve Steps or both, you might wanna read what Mr. Littlejohn has to say.  If nothing else, he's engaging, funny and profane. One of his blog posts is called, "Get Nondual, Motherfucker."  That pretty much sealed the deal for me right there.

Whiplash, Part I

WARNING: THIS IS A LONG BLOG POST.  If you get tired, please move to the rear of the blog, where cake will be served.

People have had occasion to ask me what the hell I’m doing, working at a law firm.  Why aren’t I a great fiction writer or something, swapping yachts with Stephen King for the weekend or partying all night with J.K. Rowling.  Well, firstly, I get seasick.  Secondly, you might not believe this, but it’s actually very hard to get a novel published, especially if you’re not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.  (Who owes me five bucks, now that I think about it.)  I’m speaking as one who has tried.  And one who currently isn’t trying.  I dunno if that means I’m done trying, exactly.  Come back in a year and ask me again.  And yes, I’m Working On Something right now, even if it’s spasmodic weekend work at the local Half Price Books while my idiot neighbor is throwing a birthday party for his twelve-year-old granddaughter and the dance tunes are making my house vibrate.  (My house vibrates all the time.  We have a trainyard nearby.  But still, kinda different when it’s vibrating to Can’t Stop Till You Get Enough.  Michael Jackson, unlike the Burlington Northern, is usually in tune.)

But here’s the thing.  I actually like working at a law firm.  I’m good at it, for one thing.  Litigation is a strange and hairy beast, but I’ve gotten to know it pretty well and at least when I’m around, it only bites occasionally.  There are certain things that need to happen in a certain order and certain problems that are bound to crop up needing to be solved.  I’m good at solving problems, and the larger and more complicated, the better.  I also know a lot of stuff about the law.  Not necessarily the theory of the law or why such and such judge did such and such thing (though I know a little bit about that, too), but other stuff.  Important stuff. Like, for example, if you’re electronically filing a document in the state courts of Texas, you have until midnight to do so, not just ‘til five o’clock.  Like if you need to file anything with the appeals court, you need to send paper copies to the court as well, one for each justice.  Yes, it may sound like useless trivia, but its important stuff, folks.  This is all about getting your case heard or not heard, and if you want your case heard, you need a good paralegal.  I am a good paralegal and I will get your case heard.  And these skills, nifty as they are, just really don’t have a place outside a law firm. 

But that’s not to say I have always worked at a law firm.  Au contraire, I actually worked in a law library for ten years first.  And before that I was in music school (!).  The plan at the time was to become one of the great bassoonists.  (Have you ever met a great bassoonist?  No?  How about you?  No?  You?)  So, okay, great bassoonists don’t exactly set the world on fire. They don’t do solo concertos in front of the orchestra very often and honestly, I don’t think many of them make like Kenny G and record New Age albums. I have never seen one win a Grammy or shake hands with Nelson Mandela or get invited to North Korea to play for the despot-in-charge-at-the-moment. But they do have nifty jobs playing with major orchestras.  Because who wouldn’t want a job playing music all day long?  That would be a great job.

Where you run into trouble here is that there are only about 17 major full-time orchestras in the United States, and each of those probably have three or four bassoonists apiece. There are something like 1,200 other orchestras, which makes up another 4800 jobs, but those jobs are part-time and usually don’t have any benefits. So maybe 4,868 jobs for professional bassoonists of any sort in the United States.  And when you figure that most of those jobs are already occupied to begin with, and there are probably at least another 1,000 brand-new bassoonists graduating from music schools every year, you can see how the math might maybe start to work against you there. In short, if you’re not one of the very, very best, you’re not going to be able to swing it professionally.  And I was not one of the very, very best.  I was good, though.  I won awards and stuff.  And a college scholarship.  Ask anybody.

The reason I bring all this up is that I just saw “Whiplash” with Joan and a couple of friends. As it turned out, three of the four of us had been to music school.  There are two kinds of music students: The very, very best and everybody else.  Everybody else are the ones that eventually get ground down by the machine and pitched out to find other careers as librarians or district managers or, I dunno, paralegals.  This could have led to a fascinating discussion, but all four of us were so stunned by the movie that nobody really talked about it afterward, except for saying how accurate they thought it was to his or her experience of music school. And for the record, I think it’s pretty fucking accurate.  I never had a teacher as bad as Fletcher—nobody ever hit anybody, or threw things at people, as far as I can recall--but I had plenty of instructors who did their share of yelling in people’s faces and hurling insults as fast as they could think them up. And, I mean, I could tell stories all night long.  Here’s two.  There was this one piano teacher that we called the Dragon Lady.  She had this thing about people with long nails—girls, mostly, but I knew my fair share of male guitar players with long nails on their right hands.  Anyway, if she thought your nails were too long to play the piano properly, she would chop them off.  With this pair of industrial-strength sewing scissors she kept in her purse.  I am cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die serious. And the scene where each kid got to play exactly one measure to prove they belonged in the ensemble?  That happened daily.  I saw people sent from first chair to the bottom of the section—or worse, out of the room for all time--because a reed squawked or a string broke or something, and I mean to tell you I saw it more than once. 

So why do it at all, you ask.  Why go to all the trouble and expense and take the abuse and spend four years cutting the throats of your fellow students in any way possible only to get out and start cutting throats all over again to find a job, any job, while trying to keep your own throat in one piece in the process?  I mean why does anyone do it?  Well, I’ll tell you why.  Ask a mountain climber why he climbs mountains.  Ask a paramedic what it’s like to save a life.  Ask a lawyer what it feels like to put the perfect argument to the perfect court on the perfect day and come away from it knowing not only that you won but that everything is going to change now, today and into the future, because of the words you just spoke.  The answer is that you can’t help it.  The answer is that it takes you over.  Because every now and then everything all comes together and everybody spectacularly plays the right note at the right time and the sound just detonates around you like a hydrogen bomb, and you and the group and the audience and the music all turn into one single organism, and people, if you’ve ever been there, you will know what I mean when I tell you that it’s better than drugs, it’s better than sex, it’s better than true love’s first kiss.  And once you’ve had that, all you want is more of it.  And so it’s worth all the abuse and the backstabbing and the constant sniping. 

I regret to inform you that, although I like being a paralegal and what I do is sometimes pretty cool, I have never had a moment like that at a law firm.  Nor do I ever expect to.  The best thing that ever happened to me as a paralegal is when a judge quoted one of my paragraphs from a motion in his ruling.  I had the ruling framed.  But was it the same as being at a Ground Zero detonation of sound and light and the entire meaning of the universe coalescing into one final E-major chord?  No.  It was not.  And while I personally never had a choice between staying in music school and finding something else to do with my life (they really, really don’t like it when you fail piano), I sometimes wonder if I sold out.  Gave up.  Took the easy way out, though it wasn’t easy then and it still isn’t now.  I have a steady job and a regular paycheck, which especially with my Delicate Medical Condition is probably the best possible outcome.

But still.  That whole detonation of sound thing. It’s pretty awesome.

Stomach This

In case y'all missed it, the FDA recently approved a medical device that, like previous devices (the ear staple, the copper bracelet, the lap band) is supposed to help you lose weight. This sucker is by Entero and it's called the VBLOC or vagal blocking device.  The idea, as I understand it, is that you have this thing installed inside of your abdomen and it then emits a signal that is supposed to confuse your vagus nerve.  (Hence the term vagal.  That sounded mildly dirty when I read it the first time.)  The electric signal will then temporarily disrupt the nerve conductions from the stomach to the brain and vice versa, which will then make you not hungry.  Supposedly, if you are not hungry, you will not eat, and therefore will lose weight.

HA HA HA HA HA HA--Sorry, just trying to stop laughing over here.  Where in the everloving fuck did these scientists get the idea that fat people eat because they are hungry?  I mean, I realize I can't speak for all fat people, but me, and the ones I know, eat because we're anxious.  Because we're sad.  Because we're happy (glass of champagne and some chocolates).  We eat pretty much for any reason at all, or no reason at all, and we eat more than we should.  Being hungry has nothing to do with it.

Now, before you jump all over me about personal responsibility and willpower and blah blah blah, I'd like to suggest that it's not only fat people who eat when they're not hungry.  Most of us do.  We are a country, and perhaps a species, of celebratory and emotional eaters.  In fact, when was the last time you were hungry?  Not just feeling like it was time for a meal but stomach-growly, headache-pending, ready-to-eat-a-live-chicken hungry?  I'd venture to say never.  Or at least not since you were a teenager (kids inhale food between twelve and nineteen so they can fuel those growth spurts and the sudden development of gonads).  In fact, I'd venture to say most of us are never hungry.  Why should we be?  Most of us eat three times a day, or at least every three or four hours.  That's really not enough time to get very hungry.

Which is why I predict that this new VBLOC is dead in the water.  We're used to eating on a regular schedule, not when we're hungry.  It's also not going to help that the device is only "recommended" for patients over 18 who have a BMI of 35 to 45 and an obesity-related illness (though, as fat people can tell you, if you're overweight, your doctor will tell you that any illness is a weight-related illness.  Sore throat?  It's because you're fat.  Bad knees?  It's because you're fat.  Terminal cancer?  It's because you're fat, but don't worry, you'll lose lots of weight on your way out the door.)  It also doesn't help that you have to have two surgeries to install this thing; one to put the "pulse generator" in your chest and another to stick the business end up against the vagus nerve near your stomach.

But here's the kicker; it doesn't actually work.  The manufacturer had a double-blind study (what if they threw a double-blind study and nobody showed up?) in which all the participants lost weight.  Everybody had the device implanted, but in about half, it wasn't turned on.  The people with the devices turned on lost a whopping 8.5% more weight than the people who didn't have the devices turned on.  Sounds impressive, right?  Sure, except we're talking an average of 16 pounds lost for the people with the device turned off, and 24 pounds lost for people with the devices turned on. That's a difference of eight pounds.  Eight pounds for two major surgeries, risk of infection, a hospital stay and a weird foreign object permanently lodged in your chest and stomach.  Eight pounds isn't even statistically significant, folks.  And here's the thing, the participants in the survey all lost weight because they were staying at a hospital and doing a diet and exercise program.  Eat less food and exercise more and you are guaranteed to lose weight.  However, only about 4% keep it off for more than a year.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, 1 in 6 Americans don't know where their next meal is coming from.  In Texas, the ratio's more like one in 5.  They're calling it "food insecurity" now, which I guess sounds better than "hunger."  It means there aren't enough groceries to last the month.  That the last few days before the paycheck, you might be having dinner with the homeless or not having it at all.  The technical definition of "food insecurity" is "the condition of being unable to provide adequate food for a healthy life for all members of a household due to lack of money or other resources," but what it basically amounts to is hunger.  And let's not forget that around the world every day, 21,000 people die of hunger or hunger-related illnesses every day.  Every day. That's one every four seconds.  That's one town the size of Minot, North Dakota, per day.  Almost eight million people a year.  But hey, the Pope still thinks that people shouldn't use birth control.

Anybody want to invent a medical device that can cure food insecurity?  Like maybe taking the money this stupid thing must have cost to develop and market and, I dunno, feeding India for a year or something?  Just asking.  Y'all have a nice day, now.

What Happens in Phoenix...Part II

Aha! You foolishly thought I'd only write one blog post about our thrilling experience flying to Phoenix!  No such luck. After all, we'd only just managed to get to Phoenix.  We still had to get back.  And why it should be any less interesting on the return trip, I have no idea.  Neither did the travel gods, who for some reason just didn't care for us this time around.

I might add, though, that the time we spent in Phoenix was fine.  We hung around with my parents, sister and other relatives, went to an amazing museum (the Musical Instrument Museum in Scottsdale; definitely check it out if you're ever in the neighborhood) that I had to pry Joan out of with a crowbar, and caught up with some of my friends.  But getting there was not half the fun.  Getting back wasn't very good either.

For the record, I am firing myself as staff travel agent.  Not only did I get us a flight out that required us to catch a Wonder Shuttle at four o'clock in the blessed morning, I got us a flight back that changed planes in Albuquerque.  Flights that change planes need to be avoided like the plague.  Any time you change planes, you multiply the chances that something can go wrong.  And given a chance to go wrong, most things will oblige, at least occasionally.  So we need a new travel agent.  Applications are being solicited through this blog.  All applicants must be marginally sane, understand Expedia.com and believe, as we do, that all airlines are evil, though some are more evil than others.  Okay?  Okay.

Moving on:  Our flight actually arrived in Albuquerque about ten minutes early, and it also showed up at the gate right next to our next departure gate.  This meant that not only did we have time to buy a sandwich, we also didn't need the nice wheelchair guy that showed up to help.  Unfortunately, I'd bought a sandwich in Phoenix, assuming that we wouldn't have time to buy one in Albuquerque.  So we had this slightly smashed roast beef sandwich to share, complete with soggy bread and smears of what looked like salad dressing on the outside of my purse.  Oh well.  It was pretty tasty anyway.

Upon arriving in Phoenix, though, we had a problem.  No ground transportation.  Joan called Wonder Shuttle, which told her to wait until we'd picked up our bags and then call back.  We got the bags (or rather, I got the bags - note to travel agent applicants: I'll still get the bags.  It's why they pay me the big bucks) and Joan called Wonder Shuttle again.  The dispatcher guy told Joan they were "having trouble getting drivers to return to the airport," so it would be 30 to 45 minutes before they could pick us up.

Mind you, they knew we were coming.  We had to give them our flight numbers and all that when we booked (and prepaid for) the ride.  Why they were now telling us, close to midnight at the end of a very long day, that they couldn't pick us up for close to an hour made absolutely no sense.  And what were they doing, in the 15 minutes between our first call and our second call?  Playing "Tetris," apparently.  Or maybe something ruder that can't be typed into a religious-type blog like this one.

Anyway, spending 45 minutes standing outside in the dark and cold at Love Field, which isn't exactly the wisest place for a pair of women to hang out alone at night, wasn't high on either of our lists.  I had some money left, so we basically said "fuck it" and grabbed a cab.  And as always happens when we grabbed a cab, we took our lives in our hands.  Not since we whipped around the statue of Benito Juarez in downtown Tijuana on two wheels have we had such an entertaining high-speed cab ride. I dunno what the speed limit is in Highland Park, but we probably blew through it by about double.  In between clinging to the lord help me Jesus bars inside the cab and covering our eyes as we careened through red lights, Joan said, "Why don't you call Wonder Shuttle and ask for a refund."  I said, "If we survive this, I certainly will."

We reached the freeway and were forced to slow down to around seventy miles an hour.  I called Wonder Shuttle, told the annoying voice-automated system that I was requesting a refund, and got the dispatcher Joan had talked to before.  "Hey," he said, "I think I can have a van to you in about ten minutes."  "I'm sorry," I told him,  "We're already in a cab and gone."  He transferred me to a supervisor, who apparently was supposed to talk us out of it. Out of what?  Out of being in a cab and gone?  

Ponder this:  I had only very recently been asked if I was sure I was in Phoenix. Now somebody was trying to talk me out of wanting a refund.  I don't normally handle situations like this very well.  All the same, I didn't blow up and I didn't tear this guy's head off.  I just used my Best Paralegal Voice to tell him, "We were told 30 to 45 minutes.  That's unacceptable at this hour, so we got a cab.  And we'd like a refund."  My Best Paralegal Voice must still work, because he said, "Okay, that'll take three to five business days."  By the end of this sentence, we were in our driveway.  I think the hyperspace thrusters on this cab were kind of warn out.

Anyway, we made it home in one piece, I didn't yell at anybody and nothing disappeared from either of our suitcases, except Joan's grey robe, which thankfully reappeared.  So all's well.  Sort of.  Except for needing a new travel agent.  Again, I'm screening resumes.  The salary's not great, but the benefits are pretty cool.  Er, or so I hear.

STOP THIS IMMEDIATELY.

EBOLA HQ, Texas -- It was the cruise ship that did me in.

Like everybody else on the planet, I've been watching the public meltdown of Texas Health Presybterian Hospital Dallas and just kind of shaking my head.  Presby is a respected institution with a lot of recognized programs, but you'd never know it if you're watching TV.  And honestly, I have seen some BAD PR emergencies in my time, but this is a clusterfuck of such monumental proportions that I've never seen anything like it, except maybe when the Space Shuttle blew up, and I doubt I'll ever see anything like it again.  I mean, it's just astounding.  Every time I think we've hit the bottom of the barrel, it turns out that underneath it is a whole 'nother barrel.  Emergency rooms turning away patients with potentially fatal diseases.  Nurses treating a contagious patient without protective equipment.  Piles of biological waste accumulating because no one knows how to deal with it.  An entire pneumatic tube system possibly contaminated because some idiot sent a sample that way instead of walking it down, per protocol.  Next up I'm expecting a couple of the nurses who treated the poor Ebola guy will get sick. Oh wait, that's already happened.

To some extent, people's fears of catching Ebola are reasonable.  It is, after all, a highly fatal disease (this strain is 50-70% fatal, which is bad, but it can be and does get worse; some strains of Ebola are over 90% fatal).  But  what's infecting Dallas right now is a little thing we call mass hysteria.

Mass hysteria has an interesting history.  In the Middle Ages, a number of outbreaks occurred among cloistered nuns, including an episode where an entire convent full of women began meowing like cats.  In Salem in the 1600s, mass hysteria over suspected witchcraft led to the deaths of 27 people. In 1835, an erroneous news report suggesting that "bat men" had been discovered living on the Moon led to sightings of bat men all over Europe.  More recently, in the United States, pandemonium broke out when a radio broadcast of H.G. Wells's  The War of the Worlds was mistaken for news reports of an actual attack.  And now, in Dallas, we have the Great Ebola Panic of 2014.  Splatter everything you touch with hand sanitizer and don't come within three feet of anybody who might have once been in a graduating class with somebody who once worked at Presby.

As I was saying, it's the cruise ship that did me in.  Okay, an infected nurse who was showing symptoms flew on a public plane.  Yeah, that was bad, and yeah, I can see the people who sat near her on the plane being a little freaked out and maybe wanting to stay at home for a while to make sure they're not sick.  But now we've got schools closing and buildings being scrubbed down with bleach.  We've got people being kicked out of their offices.  We've got elder statesmen howling about banning all flights to and from Africa.  We've got a motherfucking cruise ship, for the love of God, being held off the coast of Belize because one passenger worked as a lab tech at the hospital where the first Ebola patient was being treated.  And the United States Government is going to pay to air evac this person, who is not sick, has no symptoms, and who wasn't really at risk to catch anything anyway.  I mean this is not reasonable, people.  This is insanity.  No, worse.  It's mass hysteria.  Next thing you know all the nurses will start meowing like cats.

I'd like to point out that it's actually rather difficult to catch Ebola, unless you're a nurse or someone else in close contact with the patient.  You have to be splattered with bodily fluids of some kind to be at risk.  This is gross, so I'll decline to elaborate, but shaking hands will not get you Ebola.  Somebody sneezing in your vicinity will not get you Ebola.  Touching something someone with Ebola has touched will not get you Ebola.  You have to work at it. It's not as hard to catch as, say, AIDS, but the science is getting thrown out the window in favor of, once again, mass hysteria.  And the more CNN drones on and on about the same three or four points of fact it's been droning on and on about for the past three days, the longer it's going to continue and the worse it's going to get.  If this continues for long enough, anybody with a cold is going to end up arrested.  We do NOT want to go there.

So.  Everybody take a deep breath.  Let it out slowly.  Very good.  Take another one.  Yep, just as deep as the last one.  Let it out slowly.  One more ought to do it.  Deep breath.  Let it out.

There.  Feel better?  I thought so.

Now STOP WATCHING THE EBOLA COVERAGE.  Just stop doing it.  Turn off the TV, don't listen to the radio, ignore the newspapers and do not, I repeat do not get on CNN and troll the chat boards.  Just don't do this.  It's very very bad.  I speak as one who knows.  In all seriousness, the more the media hypes this thing, the worse it's going to get.  The best thing that could possibly happen would be for all of us to just accept that life itself comes with certain dangers, that probably 99% of us will never have to worry about catching Ebola, that the few who do already know who they are and are probably monitoring themselves, and that the rest of us would benefit hugely if we would all just chill the fuck out.  Immediately.

On a point of personal irritation: Anderson Cooper's been in town for three whole days now, and he hasn't once been to my place for dinner and cheap sex.  The nerve.  I wonder if he's seeing someone else.

The Walking Dead, or, How Not To Be The Next Corpse Hooked To A Machine

(Alert: This post is kind of gross.  You might want to skip it if you don't want to know anything about human decomposition or how certain organs work.  Those who elect to get over it, read on:)

It's been a good year for zombies.  In case y'all aren't fans of The Walking Dead, the brilliant show on A&E, here's a quick primer.  Somewhere in Georgia, where we lay our tale, a rapidly-spreading virus turned most men, women and sometimes children into ravenous flesh-eating brain-dead zombies. (You know, like Ted Cruz.) We don't know what's happened to the rest of the world because there hasn't been any communication, but this part of the U.S. is a postapocalyptic nightmare.  Our group of civilians, who are either immune to the virus or have had the good luck not to catch it, attempts to survive around zombie attacks, natural disasters, political infighting and occasional conflicts with other groups of civilians.  It's not pleasant watching but it's very real.  You get the feeling that this is how people would probably really act in this situation, and that you, yourself, might not do any better.  Warning, lots of people die in this show.  Don't get too attached to any particular character.  The producers aren't shy about killing off lead characters, either, providing numerous shocking moments.  (Spoiler alert!) When twelve-year-old Sophie, who had been missing for most of Season 2, suddenly reappeared as a zombie, I about jumped into Joan's lap.

Zombie children are not restricted to TV this year, though.  In Oakland, California, a 13-year-old girl named Jahi McMath died on December 12 after surgery on her tonsils and adenoids.  We don't yet know what went wrong, though something clearly did because although she awoke from the anesthetic, she began to bleed heavily and went into full cardiac arrest. The docs got her heart beating again, but her brain died.  Brain death, by the way, means that there is no electrical activity in the brain and no blood circulating from the rest of the body to the brain.  If you meet those two criteria, you're deceased.  Oh, they can hook you to a ventilator, which might keep you breathing and your heart beating for a little while, but as soon as you disconnect the ventilator, the heart stops for lack of oxygen.  There's no brain stem (it's dead, remember?) to remind the heart to keep going.  

Before we get any further into this, let me just clarify that brain death is not a Terri Schiavo situation. The unfortunate Ms. Schiavo did not have a dead brain.  Instead, she spent fifteen years in what was suspected to be a "persistent vegetative state," which means a person has some unknown level of awareness but is not "awake" or "conscious" in any real sense. After she died, her autopsy indicated that she was probably not conscious at all, owing to the massive brain damage on the parts of her brain that controlled consciousness.  She was also blind, which is only interesting if you saw that video that was repeated on TV over and over again (viral video wasn't a "thing" yet) which allegedly "proved" that she was watching a balloon drift across her room.  (Ie, couldn't possibly have been watching the balloon because was blind, and yes, I do have to spell it out like that.)  

The difference between brain death and a persistent vegetative state is huge and unmistakable.  People in a persistent vegetative state are alive. Many of them can survive without a ventilator and some even regain some ability to communicate, though they remain severely disabled. Brain death is death.  No one "comes back from it."  In fact, without a blood supply, the brain begins to decompose and leak out of your ears (like your mother said would happen if you watched too many episodes of Keeping Up With The Kardashians). Other organs quickly follow and eventually, the whole body. The only reason brain dead persons are not considered "truly dead" by some people is that the heart will keep beating for quite a while, as long as it has an oxygen supply.  Of course, it will eventually fail because the other organs are dying (kidneys, for example, last less than a week) but one can be dead and hooked up to a machine that makes it appear that one is alive for weeks, maybe even a couple of months.  

Jahi McMath's story has become somewhat of a spectacle, as her parents are trying to move her to a nursing home on the belief that she might suddenly wake up.  This will not happen, as I'm sure most of us know.  Jahi is dead, and soon she will start to decompose.  No legitimate skilled nursing facility would take a brain-dead patient because the patient is, you know, dead. Which makes me seriously concerned about these nursing homes that the parents claim to have found.  I suspect that these "homes" are much more interested in keeping Jahi's body going for a while so they can get chunk of dough from the eventual lawsuit--which is something else a legitimate nursing facility would not do. As lots of persons who have had to negotiate the nursing-home maze on their own behalf or for a loved one are painfully aware, legitimate nursing facilities want to be paid up front, on time, and often.

  

Meanwhile, here in Texas, we have our very own zombie.  Marlise Munoz, who died on or around November 26, 2013, is still breathing thanks to a ventilator and the state of Texas.  Ms. Munoz was a paramedic, and one can assume that when she said, "I don't want to be hooked up to machines if anything bad happens," she meant it.  Oh, did I mention she's pregnant? See, there's the rub. In Texas and some other states, it is illegal to disconnect life support from a pregnant woman.  The fetus that Texas is so worried about suffered the same loss of oxygen that Marlise did when she died, and it may well also be dead, though it still had a heartbeat last time anybody checked.  Marlise was only 12 weeks along when she collapsed from a pulmonary embolism.  If she was, say, 32 weeks, the fetus might have a decent shot at survival (if it's not brain-dead itself, which is likely), but this early in the pregnancy, the fetus's survival odds are pretty close to zero.  Legally, though, the hospital has no choice but to keep this dead woman alive as long as possible and hope for a miracle. I don't believe in miracles.  Sure, they happen once in a while, but there's usually never one around when you really need it, fickle bastards that they are.

The Jahi McMath story is a tragic soap opera, and I feel sorry for everybody involved, but the outcome is preordained and won't take long to come about.  Ms. Munoz's case, though, is seriously irritating. There are options here.  This could end.  The husband, who has stayed out of the media glare for the most part except to say he doesn't want to be involved in a legal battle, could transfer Ms. Munoz to another hospital in another state and disconnect her life support there. He could also go to Federal court and obtain an order to have the life support disconnected, because the Texas law is unconstitutional on its face. But he won't, or at least he hasn't.  I think on some level he might be hoping against hope that the fetus will make it.  I can understand that.  It's his wife, for God's sake, and his hoped-for child.  But if it were my wife, I'd be doing everything possible to honor her wishes--up to and including taking a gun to the hospital, ordering everybody out of the room and turning the life support off my damnself.  Let a jury decide what it thinks about that.

(I am not a licensed attorney in any state, but I'm thinking it will be hard to convict someone of murder if the allegedly murdered person was already dead.  I read a sci-fi novel about something like that once. It turned out the ex-wife did it.  But anyway:)

Here's the important question, though.  How can you, a living, breathing person reading this blog post, keep from becoming the next corpse hooked to a machine?  Better still, how can you stop something like this from happening to a loved one?  

(Once again, I am not a licensed attorney in any state, and nothing that follows should be construed as any kind of legal advice. Yes, I hate disclaimers too, but I live in Texas, people.  Texas don't like it when you act like a lawyer when you're not one.)  

Well, first off, GET A LIVING WILL AND A MEDICAL POWER OF ATTORNEY, or, as it's called in some states, an Advance Directive.  This is easy to do and you don't need a lawyer.  Every state allows persons over the age of 18 (and sometimes younger persons) to refuse medical tyranny, er, medical treatment.  (You'd never know it from some of the stories I hear, but that's a whole nother blog post.)  Most states have preprinted forms (here's a set for Texas) that you can find by Googling "living will form" or "advance directive form" and the name of your state.  However, you don't have to use the state form; you can also write your own.  Hospitals generally have them available in the admissions office.  You might want to talk to your doctor, who might have a form of her or his own and will probably also have answers to any questions you might have.  In addition to a living will, you need to designate someone, called a medical power of attorney, to make decisions for you if you can't. You can be incredibly specific in your advance directive (mine, for example, covers kidney dialysis, burns over a certain percentage of my body and medically-induced comas) but things happen and sometimes the situation needs to be assessed by someone with a brain. A living brain.  

Second, if you know or live with someone that is terminally ill or might become so in the near future, HAVE THAT CONVERSATION NOW.  Let the person tell you what he or she wants done and when.  Write it down, if you can, so there's a record.  In fact, have this conversation with all of your loved ones, or at least the ones for which you might be called to make decisions.  

Thirdly, don't get pregnant in Texas.  Well, that's good advice for anybody.  Myself, personally, crossed out the supposedly legally required language (I later found out the language doesn't have to be on the form to make it valid) that stated life support cannot be withdrawn from a pregnant person.  I instead wrote in the case citations to Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 (1973), Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health 497 U.S. 621 and Cruzan v Mouton CV 384-9P (Mo. Cir. Ct. December 14, 1990) and added that I instructed my medical power of attorney to immediately begin litigation if the medical facility refused to terminate life support, regardless of the reason. No, I don't fuck around with this stuff.  Why?  Because what if you can't leave?  What if you're dead, you've even moved out of your body because it's started to smell, but because your heart is still technically beating you can't go on to the next life or the next plane of existence? What if you're stuck there? For years, maybe decades?  Who knows how fast time moves after you're dead?  What if the health care facility you're stuck in doesn't even have a decent library?  

Fourthly, and this is going to sound very strange, DON'T CALL 911.  Again, if you know or live with someone who is terminally ill, and you know what that person wants done, you don't want to call the paramedics to haul them off to the hospital if something happens (unless, of course, they've told you they want to go to the hospital).  We're trained from childhood to call 911 in case of an emergency, but a terminally ill person dying is not an emergency.  It's what's supposed to happen.  And you can't expect paramedics to stop and read a legal document that tells them what they can or can't do.  That's not their job.  They exist to take the afflicted person to get medical treatment.  It can be days, even weeks after you call 911 before you regain control of the situation, if you ever do. 

If you're taking care of someone who's in imminent danger of dying, and that person collapses, stops breathing, or if God forbid you walk into the house one day and find the person already dead, what you want to do is call the person's doctor.  Tell the doctor who you are (presumably she or he already knows you, but you might be just a tiny bit stressed by the circumstances and not sound like yourself) and that you just arrived home and found Person X dead, or whatever else happened.  The doctor will probably take a few minutes to calm you down and then give you some instructions.  As long as they're in line with what you know Person X wants, do whatever the doctor says.  Then the doctor, not you, will contact the police and inform them that Person X has died.  Stay there until the police come and then let them take over.  If they feel at that point that a call to 911 is in order, it probably is.  

In case you're wondering, there's no hard and fast Buddhist doctrine about end of life decisions.  Buddhists tend to be pro-life, but that means pro-all life, including ants and bugs and paramecia and even germs.  However, there are several instances of prominent Buddhists, who were sick, old or otherwise didn't want to hang around anymore, committing suicide (three times with full knowledge and approval of the Buddha himself; here's a citation that means nothing to me, but will point the scholarly among you to where in the Dhammapada these stories can be found: S.v.344 (Diighaavu); S.iv.55, M.iii.263 (Channa); S.iii.119 (Vakkali); S.iii.124 (Assajji); M.iii.258, S.v.380 (Anaathapi.n.dika). Also, I came across an article that discusses these contradictions and makes some suggestions as to how Buddhists should approach end of life decisions.

But really, the most important thing you can do to protect yourself and your loved ones from becoming zombies is talk to them.  Make sure you know what they want.  Make sure they know what you want.  And stay the heck out of Texas while pregnant, unless you're in your third trimester.  

Completely Inappropriate

This is one of those posts that's probably not going to make it to Facebook.  Which means Joan and maybe two other people will ever see it. (Thank you. Both of you.)  But hey, if you can't have a few stealth blog posts that might offend a bunch of people, what's the point in having a blog?  Actually, what is the point in having a blog?  I haven't figured that out yet and I've been doing it since 2008.  That's a long time to do something for which you don't know the point.  But I do know this; I feel better when I do it. So onward.

I called my mom the other night around ten.  This was a mistake, because if I call my mom around ten I'm probably going to call Rhett or Marcia or Kristen or Kevin around 10:15 to vent about whatever my mother just said (because Joan was asleep), which pretty much guarantees I won't get into bed until 11 and won't get to sleep until 11:30, when my brain winds down, if indeed it ever does.  That said, however, I called my mom the other night around ten.  She said, "I'm glad you called," which is kind of nice to hear, and "Did your aunt send you a Christmas present?" Which is, uh, not.

I have eight aunts.  Four of them are still living and all the same, I knew immediately which one she meant. The one who lives with her, of course. (Insert joke about my father and his two wives here. On second thought, forget the joke.) "Yes," I said, because she had.  A pretty nice one, too. "Well, did you send her a thank you note?"  Another thing I'm not accustomed to hearing, though I heard it when I was, oh, eight or ten.

"Christmas was two days ago, Mom," I said.  "Well, you shouldn't wait.  You should write it the same day you open the present," she said.  "Mom, there's no mail on Christmas," I pointed out.  "Well, there's mail the next day.  You're already a day late." (Yes. She said that. She said that.) "I have the stationery right here on the table," I said, which I was making true as we spoke. "Good, then it won't take you long," my mom said.  "Mom--" I began, and she said, "Yes, I know, I'm still telling my children to mind their manners.  You need to send the note. Immediately."  

So I said I would, and we went off to something else, and 10:15 came and I was already on the phone to Rhett, winding down from that conversation. By 11:45 I was in bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering what the fuck.  And the next morning I did send the note, because I said I would and once I've said I'll do something, I have a hard time letting myself off the hook.  Here it is three days later and I'm still wondering what in hell just happened. I mean, the last time I checked, I was I think about 45 years old.

Why is this bothering me, you might ask.  Everybody's mother has her overbearing moments.  Well, for one thing, there are people who write thank you notes and there are people who don't, and I'm firmly in the former category.  Just ask Joan.  I do a great imitation of my mother when I need her to sign one. People who know me know this.  Second, it was the way she said it.  Not just the being-overbearing part but the lowering-her-voice-and-muttering-into-the-phone-like-she's-trying-to-get-around-a-kidnapper part.  That says, to my discerning ear, that said aunt is right there in the room and she's trying not to be overheard.  Which leads to an inevitable conclusion that I don't like, and that's this: There is no privacy when talking to my mom anymore.  Or my parents in general for that matter.  Anything I tell Person 1 will be immediately known by Persons 2 and 3, regardless of the content.  Which makes it damned hard to find out what someone wants for Christmas.

The other thing that's bothering me is that she was so overbearing.  My mother is not a very touchy feely person, and I'd describe her as "clingy" and "hovering" right after I described her as "stupid" (which she most definitely isn't).  I mean, she's nice, but a helicopter parent she is not.  Unless whatever's going on is somehow affecting her directly.  So what I suspect here, and I'm probably right, is that Aunt was leaning on Mom about the thank-you note issue and Mom, rather than telling Aunt to either mind her own business or ask me about it her damnself, decided that she had to make everything Fine again.  Remember, the Scandinavian household is eternally under siege by the tyrannical army of Fine.  If everything isn't completely Fine, it's the end of the world.  Trust me, I had to tell her I was gay.  Cue the catapults and the battering rams.

In case I haven't mentioned this part in a while, Aunt has something on the Aspergers/autism spectrum. Never officially diagnosed, just kind of obvious if you ever look at a symptom list. One of them is that she'll get fixated on something and won't let it go. Can't let it go, I think now (having listened to her complain about someone smoking on an airplane, back when that was allowed, for eight hours between Atlanta and London).  So if something happened to cause her to think that I didn't get the present, or didn't get it on time, or--whatever, she might have been obsessing for days about when she was going to receive a thank-you note. And just because Mom lives with her doesn't mean she's figured this out, or knows how to handle it even if she has figured it out.

This is not Aunt's fault.  She never asked to be Aspergers/autistic.  She does things sometimes that are completely socially inappropriate, and she doesn't pick up social cues that the rest of us use.  Ferexample, when a topic of conversation comes up that makes someone uncomfortable, other persons in the conversation will usually drop hints that it's time to change the subject, ie, "How interesting.  Fred, so good to see you, how is that merger thing going at your office?" Don't do this with my aunt.  She won't get it and she'll go straight on with whatever the topic was.  If you want her to drop a subject, you have to tell her.  "Aunt. Stop it." Or "Aunt. Drop that subject, please."  Which, if you're me and you grew up in a Scandinavian household in which virtually nothing was ever openly discussed (see Tyranny of Fine, above) seems amazingly rude.  Especially when directed at an older person.

So here are my unpalatable options when something like this happens.  I can just let it happen and tell myself in a Buddhist-y kind of way that I don't have to respond to something just because I don't like it.  I can call Mom back and say, "Um, I'm 45 years old, don't you think that was a little inappropriate?" and see what happens.  I can say to Aunt, "Aunt. Stop it." Which, if you think about it for half a second, really isn't rude. I mean, you communicate with people using the language they understand, right?  And if I, who know she has this Asperger's thing and that certain things just don't compute, find her difficult to deal with sometimes, imagine how total strangers must feel.

(Luckily, she is a pretty good mimic of normal behavior, when she wants to be.  A trick I wish I had picked up somewhere down the line.)

That's a lot of baggage for one stupid thank-you note, but hey, that is just the way I roll.  And whose interactions with their grown parents/aunts aren't layered with decades-old coats of meaning? Anyway, that's my domestic drama for the week.  What's yours? And did you write your thank-you notes yet?

Buddhist Terror

I am so embarrassed.

Okay, maybe that's not the best reaction to a bunch of people getting killed in the name of religion.  But still.  I am so embarrassed.  My teeny tiny religion based on kindness, nonviolence, compassion for all beings and just in general being nice to everybody finally makes the cover of Time, and what's the headline?  "The Face Of Buddhist Terror."  Great.  This has to be the best thing to happen to the international Buddhist image since the sarin gas attack in Tokyo.

Not, by the way, that you're actually going to see this cover.  This is the international edition cover.  We in the United States got a cutesy cover of veterans painting a wall, which is of course the cover itself, with a dripping wet-paint headline about national service and how it might save the world.  I'd paste it in here, but one stolen cover image per post is probably plenty.  Still, international-edition readers get the real news.  We get some cleaned-up version that's meant not to disturb us too much, I guess, lest we all jump up in a group and demand that the corrupt bag of bastards running our country fucking do something instead of just sit there.  For real news, try some of these Web sites: Alternet, Huffington Post, Common Cause, RH Reality Check.  And for fake news, there's always Fox.

Back to Myanmar, though.  If you don't know where Myanmar is, it's in the Far East and it used to be Burma, east of Bangladesh and a little bit north of Laos.  If that doesn't help, it's near India someplace.  Anyway: For the last several months, gangs of Buddhists armed with machetes (Gangs of Buddhists.  That is just the most antithetical phrase.) have been going into Muslim areas, beating up Muslims, burning their houses down and in some cases killing them.  And if you're a Buddhist and your head isn't spinning around at this piece of news, what kind of a Buddhist are you?

Obviously this is completely out of character for Buddhists anywhere, even Myanmar.  It's not Right Thinking and it certainly isn't Right Action.  It violates the First Precept and the Second Precept (I'd argue that burning somebody's house down is the same as stealing; you've certainly taken from them their use of that house, and anything in it).  Why on God's green earth would Buddhists behave this way?  Well, apparently because of the guy on the cover, Wirathu, who calls himself the Buddhist Bin Laden.  (Yes, he said that.  He said that.)  Wirathu says that the Buddhists are only defending themselves from Muslim corruption.  The Muslims come into an area, he claims, and they marry all the Buddhist daughters, spread their religion and take over.  Myanmar needs to remain Buddhist by any means necessary, and apparently the means necessary (as determined by him) is, uh, anything goes.

I'm blown away that so many people are listening to this guy and are willing to go along with what he says.  Rather than listen to the values they've lived by all these years, they'd rather listen to somebody who validates their fears and tells them to do what they want to do anyway.  I guess that's no different than people listening to Christian megapreachers on late night TV, going in to work the next morning and firing the gay guy who works in the mail room, but I just thought Buddhists were above this stuff.  Part of being human is being endlessly disappointed in your fellow humans.  Or, as my receptionist keeps telling me, "People are strange. People are strange. People are strange."

This is killing me, personally, because I love Muslims.  I am fascinated by Islam, though always from the outside because they'd never take me. (The whole lesbian thing, you know.)  I love their art, I love their music, I love their culture, and I love their food.  I love to go to Afrah on a Thursday night and hear Arabic spoken.  If Muslims and Buddhists become enemies again, they might not let me back in, and sales of pita bread in Richardson would plummet and create a miniature black hole that would spread and suck down the entire U.S. economy.  I mean it could be chaos.

Unfortunately, Muslims and Buddhists have a history with each other.  From the 9th century battles with Sunni Turks  to the destruction of the Buddhas at Bimayan in 2001, a lot of blood has been spilled, even if it had less to do with religion and more to do with living space.  And usually, the Buddhists came out on the losing side of these conflicts.  One thing about Muslims, historically speaking:  You don't want to piss them off.

Anyway, Myanmar isn't the only country to experience this kind of conflict.  Buddhist/Muslim riots have been reported in Indonesia, southern Thailand and Sri Lanka just in the last year.  The Dalai Lama has condemned the violence. Thich Nhat Hanh sounded off in Tricycle Magazine with a list of co-authors that read like a Buddhist Who's Who.  And both of them said what I suspected all along: This isn't about religion.  This is about two groups of people who are deciding not to get along, and using religion as a handy excuse to fight with each other.

Well.

I just want you all to know that there are 448 million Buddhists in the world, and most of us are NOT LIKE THAT.  Oh, sure, we get pissed off.  Myself I get angry about injustice and rape and lack of ethics in government and men trying to control women's bodies and bad drivers and $7,000 sewer pipes and bad faxes from opposing counsel and workplace pettiness and large companies that are "too big to fail" so they get away with anything and cats howling in the middle of the night and waking me up and people who won't look at the big picture and my idiot neighbor (who is an idiot) and so-called Christians who picket soldiers' funerals and the people who work on the 12th floor of my building who dress like it's Saturday and they're going to spend the day shooting up.  But I've never taken a machete to any of them and I never will.  When I took refuge and accepted the Five Precepts it meant something.  A religion is not a cafeteria, people.  If you're going to live by a set of values, live by them.  Full time.  Not only when it's easy but especially when it's hard.

When Real Estate Deals Go Bad

Oh yeah.  We were selling the house, weren't we?

Well, we were, and then we weren't.  And now we're not.  And in case I never got around to telling that story, here it is.

The whole point, you know, of selling the house was that it needs an expensive sewer pipe repair.  Not only is it expensive, it's also annoying; we'll have to move out for at least a couple of days, we don't know what to do about the cats during that time, the logistics are mind-boggling even if you aren't mentally interesting and the whole thing upsets my wife, and what does it say in the marriage manual on page one?  Never, ever upset your wife.  In italic print, no less.  So somehow, it seemed like a great idea to just sell the house and let someone else deal with it.  As if packing up, buying another house (with problems of its own, considering our budget) and settling into a weird new neighborhood was going to be less stressful than just fixing the damn sewer pipe, already.  And trust me, they were weird neighborhoods.  There was this one where we looked at a duplex that--actually, I liked that duplex.  A lot.  I just wanted it to be built somewhere else, that's all.

The first sign that This Was Never Going To Work was when our wonderful real estate agent, who helped us find this place after a day of running around in the rain, suddenly didn't work for the agency anymore (we never did find out what happened) and the agency assigned us another agent.  The new agent was--well, it didn't really matter, because I never gave her much of a chance.  I tried to.  I even muttered it through my teeth; "Give her a chance, Jen.  Give her a chance."  The truth is that I have very little patience for certain kinds of professionals, and one of them is real estate agents.  Before we found the Wonderful Real Estate Agent, I fired three others.  (Or was it two?)  In that particular transaction, we had 48 hours to fly into Dallas, buy a house and fly back out again.  We. Did. Not. Have. Time. To. Fuck. Around.  So the second one of them started messing with us (and they do that; they give you weird hand signals during a viewing that you're supposed to understand sight unseen, they show you places that have everything you don't want and say things like "Just wait until you see the kitchen", they show you places you can't even remotely begin to afford and say, "Now, with an FHA loan, you only have to put down 3 1/2 percent!"), I fired them.  But I was fair about it. When the next one came on board, I'd say, "Don't do this, this or this."  Then either they did, or they found a new and exciting way to mess with me, and I fired them.  God has a special place in Her heart for these people.  They had to put up with me, after all.

So here we are with this new agent, and already things aren't going well. She wants us to "dress up" our house so it'll sell faster, which basically means stripping it of everything that suggests two human beings live there.  She wants the pictures gone, the paintings gone, the craft stuff gone, the bells and chimes gone.  She wants the frick'n meditation cushions gone and makes some crack about it doesn't look good to homebuyers if you're worshipping a pagan god.  (Damn. Well, reschedule the human sacrifice til next week.)  She wants the doors replaced, the kitchen painted, the back yard redone.  Oh, and she has no sense of humor.  She didn't actually curl her lip at us and say, "How charming," but she could have and I wouldn't have been at all surprised.

The other thing was that she had a specific kind of person in mind to buy the house, a "target market," as it were.  Which was great, if the specific kind of person was ever going to come within fifteen miles of our neighborhood.  Our neighborhood was built in the late 50s/early 60s, and apart from the fashions and the presence of people who have skin colors other than white, it's kind of like it never left.  Kids ride bikes around and toss the football after school instead of going to some expensive day care. What's more, they walk to school.  Both ways.  In the snow.  Our street is about half white, half Hispanic with a smattering of Other, largely working class, largely multilingual.  Our across-the-street neighbors just got here from somewhere south of the Rio Grande, and on most weekends they have friends over, barbecue something, drink beer and tell jokes until the wee hours of the morning.

It's not suburbia, is what I'm trying to say here.  It's really not the scene for the soccer mom and the downtown lawyer dad.  Yet when we tried to suggest they print the flyer in Spanish, she looked at us like we'd just grown nine heads.  And when it arrived, a beautiful four-color laminated flyer that was all in English, we'd also lost a bedroom.  Somehow we went from a 3-bedroom 1-bath to a 2-bedroom 1-bath with an "extra living space."  But that wasn't supposed to have any effect on the price.  People like extra living spaces. Um, I checked Zillow and Realtor.com until my scroller got sore and there wasn't a single 2-bedroom 1-bath anywhere around listed for as much as we were.  3-bedrooms, sure, but no 2-bedrooms, extra living space or no extra living space.

Then the agent e-mailed me and suggested we drop the price, because there hadn't been very many showings.  Hey, was that the crack of doom I just heard?  I was delighted--not about dropping the price, but because I didn't think there had been any showings.  I immediately called her up to see what people had said during the showings.  Was there something particular they liked or didn't like, something we could fix, play up, learn from?  No reply for a while.  Finally she said there actually hadn't been any showings.  At all.  None.

I can put up with a lot, but when I lose respect for you, I do it all at once and very hard.  In this case it wasn't the lack of showings, it was the fact that she lied to me.  It was a ridiculous lie, too; all I had to do was call the lockbox company to find out how many showings there had been.  It was a good thing we weren't having too much luck finding something to buy, either, because I was about to fire another real estate agent.

Only I couldn't.  We'd signed a contract.  The only way to get out of it was to take the house off the market.  So that's what we did, and we're still in our little house.

Which is good.  I love my little house.  And my shrink, when I mentioned all of these goings-on, got a bit annoyed and said, "You know, if you'd told your psychiatrist you were considering this move--and you should tell your psychiatrist, when you're planning a major life change--he would have told you not to do it, because it would be a lot of stress you wouldn't need right now."

Oops.  Duly noted.

No, the sewer pipe isn't fixed yet.  If you have seven grand you don't need, you could send it our way.  And maybe come pick up our cats for a little while.  But anyway, that's what happened with the selling of the house.  And now (Paul Harvey voice) you know the rest of the story.

It's My Birthday! And On June 12...

...Joan of Arc leads the French army to victory in the Battle of Jargeau.  (1429)

...Death warrants are issued for Samuel Adams and John Hancock by British general Thomas Gage, who also declares martial law in Massachusetts. (1775)

...the United Irishmen fight the Battle of Ballynahinch. (1798) 

...Ulysses Grant pulls his troops out of their positions at Cold Harbor, giving the Confederacy a victory. (1864)

...The Phillipines declare their independence from Spain. (1898)

...One of the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history kills 117 people in New Richmond, Michigan. (1899)

...The Baseball Hall of Fame opens in Cooperstown, NY. (1939)

...German troops liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Brzezany, Poland, and kill 1,180 men, women and children at the city cemetery. (1943) 

...Medgar Evans is murdered in front of his house by a Ku Klux Klan member. (1963)

...The United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia declares all U.S. state laws which prohibit interracial marriage to be unconstitutional. (1967)

...and then I come along.  Pretty cool, huh?  And since I've been around...

• I played in a bagpipe band for eleven years.  Well, okay, I was in one bagpipe band for six years and the other one for five years.  Booze, drugs, wild sex, constant travel, loud music--it all kind of runs together, ya know?
• I bought a condo in San Diego, California with Joan, and then sold it for twice what we paid for it, after I exasperatedly told our real estate agent that there was no way on earth anybody would shell out that much money for an 800-square-foot space with high ceilings. 
• And so I was rich for about five minutes.  After which student loans and cars and credit cards and moves to Texas got paid for, and I was no longer rich, but that was okay.  
• I went to England one summer and followed Big Country around.  And here it is, twenty-something years later, and I'm getting ready to follow Big Country around...three dates in Texas.  (Well, hey, I'm not a wide-eyed kid anymore.) 
• Despite several attempts, I never got arrested for civil disobedience.  For some reason, by the time the police showed up and said "You have five minutes to clear the area," I always figured the point had been well made.
• That, and there were maybe ten liberals on campus where I went to school.  And they weren't very good company.  If you're going to be locked up overnight, you need good company.
• I went to music school for two years.  It's John Lennon's fault I didn't graduate. 
• I've been through ten-plus cats.  There must always be cats.
• I worked in a public law library for seven or eight years, during which I contended with:
• A guy who was sure that the copy machine was reading his mind and transmitting his thoughts to the government.  He came in every Tuesday.
• A man who stated that the CIA had bombed his town with nerve gas that caused everyone in the town to forget that this had ever happened, and that he needed to file a Freedom of Information Act request but he couldn't remember the name of the town, and the CIA kept denying that this had ever happened.  
• A sweet little old lady that would come in, walk around the whole building and sprinkle holy water on everything while whispering something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like "motherfucker."  
• A guy who'd been ticketed for having a dog at the beach, and was trying to prove that since he was actually in the water at the time, he was not "at the beach," and if that failed, that he was in "international waters," where the police had no authority.
• I was born in Texas.  I live in Texas.  I want to die in Texas, and have my ashes buried under a live oak someplace because I ought to provide some nourishment for something, after all those trees went through all that fruit growing to nourish me.
• Okay, I was born in Laredo and left almost immediately, but I still count as a native Texan.  That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.
• Since we moved to Texas I was unemployed three times in five years, and never once did we fall behind on the mortgage payments.
• Why? Because we bought a house we could effing afford, that's why. Imagine.
• I wrote a trilogy of thriller novels that are called the Mindbender books while I was unemployed, and they're really good, so if you're a literary agent or a publisher or something, or if you know a literary agent or a publisher or something, drop me a line so we can both make a few bucks. Thanks.
• I was a little manic while I was unemployed. Just a little.
• I have a Garfield bowling ball that's bright orange and says, "Let the Fur Fly."
• I can't bowl. Well, I can throw the ball down the lane and occasionally hit something, but so can your average chimpanzee.  
• Bowling is a lot of fun, though.  I like it a lot.
• I play on the law firm softball team, the mighty Law Dogs.  We are the worst team in the league by a comfortable margin, but we have a good time. 
• I took a writing course once from the mighty F. Paul Wilson, which is kind of like taking a painting course from Vincent Van Gogh.  Totally awesome.
• I've been married to the lovely Joan for the last 18 years.  Yep, that's long enough we could've had a baby and raised it to adulthood.
• I have no interest whatever in having a baby and raising it to adulthood.  
• I sometimes have dreams I have a son, though.  And he's a teenager, and he's taller than me. I have to look up at him to shake my finger under his nose. 
• Joan and I actually got married three times.  I think the third one was "legal."  At least it was at the time.  What's the Supreme Court said lately?
• I was really kind of disappointed that we couldn't get married in the church, but the pastor didn't want to get into a fight with the bishop and Joan didn't want to get married in the church anyway. 
• The next same-sex couple that the pastor married, got married in the church.  About which I have no comment. 
• Since October 2007 I've been dragging myself awake at five a.m. to swim a mile in the morning before work.  
• If you added up all those miles I bet I could've swum to Hawaii by now.
• I enter a swim race every year, a 2k distance race, which I sometimes manage to finish in under an hour. Dead last, I might add. 
• Joan's ex-husband and his wife are friends of ours. It's very Noel Coward, no?
• Just this afternoon, Joan scored us tickets to The Book Of Mormon. Sweet!
• Joan got me a meditation cushion and mat for my birthday. Best. Gift. Ever.
• I paint a little.  My favorite painting is one of a school of fish, swimming through the air in a desert landscape.
• I used to have dreams that my fish could swim around in the air, that it did them no harm.
• I miss my fish, but I think aquarium fish are incompatible with one of my cats.
• Someday I wanna go tornado chasing.
• I have a bad feeling I might actually catch one, and then what would I do with it?
• I became an "official" Buddhist about two years ago.
• Who ever thought that Buddhists would dig tornadoes?
• Despite my occasional bitching, life is actually pretty good.

Cheers, all!

Packin' Up

Ah, Thursday night.  A loaf of (pita) bread, a jug of (lemonade), and a laptop.  One night away from the chaos and mayhem that is our house as we frantically pack up the library and move it to a storage unit in preparation for the (drum roll, please) Listing of the House.  We need that room empty, pleasant and dust-free, something it wasn't when we first moved in and hasn't been since then, either, to Give Potential Buyers the Opportunity to Imagine Their Own Belongings In This Space.  It's actually a pleasant room, once you get stuff out of it.  It's just that at the moment, as the books and their shelves head out the door, it's filling up with--empty boxes.  Well, to be fair, we've got to put them somewhere.

You have no idea how much dust can accrue in a library.  Back when I worked in a library, one of my Daily Tasks was to dust a section of books.  So out I'd go with my feather duster, like Magenta from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and run it over a section of books until they looked, well, dusted.  One Sunday, a bunch of us met at the library to move the Southwestern Reporter Second from one room in the library to another room in the library.  (It was, of course, a law library.)  I quickly found out how ineffective my feather duster actually was.  The lower shelves were the worst.  Behind the facade of being halfway clean, layers of dust stacked up on top of each other like paleolithic eras waiting to give up fossils.  That was bad, but it got worse when I pulled out an armful from the lowest shelf and half a dozen silverfish ran up my arm.  Thus followed about thirty seconds of shrieking and cursing and dancing around as I tried to get them the fuck off me.  That's one of two times I've ever said fuck in front of my boss.  May there never be a third.

Anyway.  I realize we just started this whole packing-up-for-the-buyers thing, but I'm already heartily sick of it.  We've spent entire weekends down there, shoveling through the books and the dust.  Once we finish that room (arguing, of course, that we ever do and it's not like the Augean stables or something--rivers being some miles from the house), we need to move on to the living room and the kitchen, and then, I guess, my room, and then--

You know, Joan's room might just be the one we lock the cats in.  Not because it's dirty.  It's not.  (I clean it.)  It's just--cluttered.  Joan has stacks of things she's in the process of going through, needs to go through or has already gone through but hasn't decided what to do with.  She has some boxes and some bags and a couple of bookshelves.  There are things peeking out of the closet that are not clothes, and things on the bookshelves that are not books.  It looks very homey and lived-in, like a nest.  It's just very--cluttered.

Some people are like that.  They just like having stuff around.  A big room with nothing much in it makes them nervous, agoraphobic even.  There are all those shows on TV about hoarders.  Joan is not a hoarder.  She's a collector.  There's a difference.  As we've pawed through the library, every third box has gone not to storage but to our local Half Price Books.  It would be hard to get a true hoarder to give up that many books.  That's 1/3 of the collection.  That's a lot of Greek mythology and science fiction and vampire books and home improvement hardbacks.  (Not to mention my entire collection of Ms. Magazine back issues.  Yes, folks, it's just time to let them go.)

For some reason, I don't remember our move to Dallas going this well, at least as far as the tossing-out of stuff.  Of course, there wasn't time.  From the day we knew Joan had the job to the day she had to start, we had about 28 days, and that's not a lot of time to sell a house, buy a house, pack up and move.  If memory serves, we were just tossing shit into boxes and marking them with colored stickers in hopes that we'd have some vague idea where they came from when we got where we were going.  Actually, it worked out pretty well, except for one of the movers falling through the ceiling.  I hate it when that happens.

Well, I'm sure we'll both survive and find a new place to live and nothing will explode and somehow it'll all be Fine again.  (I'm a recovering Lutheran.  When you're a Lutheran, you must make everything Fine at all times.  It's in the Bible, right next to recipe for lutefisk.)  Meanwhile, if anybody sees my little stuffed Dalai Lama doll, will you pack it with the office supplies, please?  I need it for work.  No, really.  I do.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Let it never be said that Buddhists don't get mad.  We tend to be more even-tempered than your average bear, and we don't get mad often, to be sure.  When we do get mad, though, it's usually because we see some being giving some other being, who doesn't really deserve it, a hard time. At least, that's when I get mad.  And when somebody's giving an entire group of people a hard time, regardless of what group of people, I tend to hit the fucking ceiling.

Before I go any further, though, I'd like to offer a general apology to Muslim women.  Not just the one or two of you who might have been in the Baylor Tom Landry Fitness Center dressing room this morning at about 7 a.m. local time.  No, I think this one should go out to all .8 billion of you.  I had a chance to stand up for you today and I didn't take it because I am a fucking coward.  I'm sorry.  I hope I really mean it when I tell you it won't happen again, because the things I regret in my life are by and large the things I haven't done.  The jobs I didn't take and the adventures I didn't go on and the confrontations that I avoided because I was scared.  I have a way with words, ya know, and when I waste a chance to make them count I just seethe inside.

So, okay. Tom Landry Fitness Center, 7 A.M.  Look, I know the Concerned Women of America work out there.  How can they not? It's a nice, tony place. Sort of a country club without golf.  I'm just a low-rent swim team member who gets to use the place for an hour or so in the morning. And I hear these conversations that make me shake my head in amazement and sometimes want to pound it against the wall.  Most of the time I can ignore them, though.  I mean, people don't like total strangers walking into their conversations to correct the facts of something they picked up from Fox News.  And it's none of my business, anyway. I've got much better things to do than save people from their own stupidity, especially when I know they won't even be a smidgen grateful.

But this.  This was beyond the pale.  This was two ladies talking about the Book of Revelation and how it was all "coming true."  How it said in the Bible that in the end times, our President would be a Muslim.  That the Muslims claimed to have a peaceful religion, but in reality they wanted to take over the world and force everybody to be a Muslim.  That they wanted to institute global jihad because they believed their messiah would only come back to a state of chaos.  That even if only 1% of Muslims believed this way, there were so many of them that the world was in serious danger.  It said so in the Bible. "It's really scary," one of them said to the other.  Yeah.  Bullshit is scary.  At least until you REALIZE IT'S BULLSHIT.

I have an exercise I do when I hear what appears to be hate speech.  I change the group of people being mentioned to another group of people and see how it sounds.  If it sounds unbelievably racist to say, for example, that the Jews claim to have a peaceful religion but in reality they want to take over the world and force everybody to be Jewish, or that the blacks want to institute global jihad so the black messiah will return, then it's hate speech.  This was definitely hate speech.  I'm fortunate not to remember all of it because I think I'd start foaming at the mouth.

Anyway, I struggled out of my clothes, tried to get my stuff together, while half my brain ran to the end of its chain and barked and the other half of my brain held onto the chain and kept repeating, "Do not go over there.  Do not involve yourself in that conversation."  I thought of the time some bitch was going on and on about Obama and I'd burst into song to shut her up. I was too angry to do that; I'd have had to sing something by AC/DC or Stiff Little Fingers instead of Beethoven, and AC/DC and Stiff Little Fingers are not popular among the Concerned Women for America set. The only thing I could really do was get my earplugs in as fast as possible and get out of the dressing room as fast as possible, so I could get into the pool as fast as possible and swim as fast as possible so that I could cool the hell down as fast as possible.  Which took about 45 minutes, in case you're wondering.

I'm not gonna bother to refute most of those statements, but the President-as-Muslim one is just too ridiculous to let lie.  The Bible, or rather the Book of Revelation, was written a good 70 or 80 years after the death of its supposed author, John the Baptist.  It reads like a good acid trip and was probably brought on by poisonous mushrooms.  I'm supposed to believe that this book references the President - of a form of government that does not yet exist - of the United States - of a country that does not yet exist, on land that is not yet known to exist, across an ocean that is not yet known to exist - and states that he will be a Muslim, a religion that does not yet exist (around the year 600, people, in case you're wondering)?  Even for me, who once believed that she could be recalled like a defective automobile and stripped for spare parts, that's a bit of a stretch. Yet the Concerned Women for America are all over it.  Have they actually read the Book of Revelation?  Or anything else in the Bible?  Or do they just take Cal Thomas's word for it?  I mean, seriously.  Is there any thought process that goes into this stuff whatsoever?

Here's the part that really frosts me.  I took off out of that dressing room because I didn't think there was any way I could say anything without totally blowing my stack.  Once I'd calmed down a little, I realized I could have shut the whole thing down without even raising my voice.  All I would have had to do is walk over there, put my hands down on the counter and say, in a soft voice, "Ladies, there are Muslim women in this dressing room right now.  Go ahead and talk smack about them if you want to, but please keep your voices down."  That's it.  That's all that needed to be said.  It wouldn't have been rude, I wouldn't have come across as a bitch, I just would have made them aware that their conversation was being overheard.  That probably would have stopped it entirely and if there were Muslim women in the room (and the odds are in my favor there; lots of nurses and nurse's aides use the fitness center, and lots of those nurses and nurse's aides are from Someplace Else, and lots of those Someplace Elses are Muslim countries), somebody would have spoken up for them.

Believe me, there are plenty of times I wish somebody had spoken up for me.  The times I've overheard conversations about "the gays" this and that, or "the crazy people" this and that, or better still, "so and so did (insert bizarre behavior here), he must be bipolar."  And there I stand, invisibly lesbian, more invisibly bipolar, thinking to myself, "I'm nothing like that.  We're nothing like that.  Where is he getting that?" and not having the guts to speak up.  It happens less and less often these days, since I'm getting older and my tolerance for bullshit is dropping, but there's always a sense of threat there, a fear that if you out yourself as a member of the group being discussed, all that negative attention will turn on you.  If you're lucky, they'll just yell at you and call you names.  If you're not lucky, they might beat you up or kill you.

That's why we need to speak up for each other.

I'm sorry I didn't do that today.

Talk Thursday: Convention

As I crash the Muslim restaurant of my sweet dreams, I'm pondering the whole concept of convention.  Why?  Because it was my idea, that's why, and also because everybody I follow on Twitter is absolutely refusing to shut up about the hurricane that's going on down in Tampa.  No, the one in Tampa, not the one in New Orleans.  You know, the one where whoever's keynote speaking can't go more than two minutes without saying something stupid that offends half of America.  Or the other half.  Sometimes both halves.  I'm trying not to pay it too much attention.  I may just have to sign off Twitter for the duration.  And I'm not sure what I'm gonna do when that other convention fires up.  Different keynote speakers, same two-minute habit, except they generally don't offend me personally.  The last few days I've felt like scaling Fountain Plaza and yelling, "Can't we all just get along?" as the helicopter buzzes by to film the opening sequence to Dallas.  

Apparently we can't.  Apparently it's been the fate of personkind to be divided into two factions that fight over everything since we were cave men (and women).  The only thing that's ever united the two feuding factions is the presence of a bigger, badder enemy.  So, unless there's an alien invasion (we can always hope), we're stuck with our two sets of clowns until November.  Which, despite all appearances to the contrary, slowly approacheth.  

(A guy I know on Twitter is trekking all over Europe.  When he was in Scotland last week, a Scotsman came up to him and asked if he was American.  When he acknowledged that he was, the Scotsman asked, "Are the lot of you fucked in the head?"  The sad thing is, I don't know if he was talking about Todd Akin or our latest mass shooting.  Latest.  Mass.  Shooting.  Think about that for a second.  I mean, that's like saying World War Two to a space alien.  "Wait a minute.  You had a world war and you did it more than once?!"  How embarrassing.  Please, if any of you ever have a close encounter of the third kind, try to keep off the subject of recent American history.  It's best if you just explain about Steven Spielberg and go from there.)

Meanwhile, I've been having a tantrum.  Tantrum, midlife crisis, whatever you want to call it.  I saw one of my docs today, and he summed it up pretty well by saying, "I imagine it's pretty hard to be you."  Well, uh, it is.  Thank you for noticing.  I have, as they say, A Lot On My Plate.  The latest thing that I feel absolutely outraged at not having under my firm control is the fact that I have nothing under my firm control.  That is, I'm forty-three years old, I have a house, car, cats, wife, responsible job and all the other trappings of adulthood (even my very own credit card debt!), and yet I can't take care of myself like an independent human being.  

I can hear all of the Buddhists laughing out there.  There is, of course, no such thing as an independent human being.  All of us rely on each other.  Don't think so?  Well, take a look at this laptop, here.  The one I'm typing on.  I didn't build it.  Yeah, regardless of what Obama said or didn't say.  It's true.  I did not build this laptop, yet it is essential to my well-being in ways that only become screamingly obvious when you take it away from me.  And I do mean screamingly obvious.  I didn't make my clothes, my mala bracelet, my car or even this unbelievably delicious fried kibbe and akawi pie that I'm snarfing down between sentences.  Other people did all that.  I need them, and they need me.  You can't navigate a lawsuit without a paralegal.  (Well, I suppose you can, but you wouldn't want to.)  You can't run a law firm without the guys that make the copy paper and the pens and the cute little laminated tabley things that pass as desks anymore.  You can't make copy paper without trees, and you can't make trees without dirt and sunlight and a lot of time.  So, technically, I am a product of sunlight and dirt and time.  And I can't take care of myself.  That's obvious.  So what, then, is the Big Deal?  

Well, the Big Deal is that besides the dirt and the sunlight, I seem to need a team of advance-degreed professionals.  Sometimes I end up in their offices, like I did today, and they say stuff like, "I imagine it's pretty hard to be you," and send me into a tailspin.  I called up Joan and ranted and complained and wanted to know why, after all this time, I still couldn't take care of myself.  And she said, "Jen, you are taking care of yourself.  You're going to see your doctors when you're supposed to.  You're taking your meds when you're supposed to and you're doing everything you're supposed to do."  She's right.  I've even been off sugar for (gulp) seven days now.  The New Guy has inspired me to new heights of--of high things.  "But I don't want to have some committee following me around for the rest of my life," I said.  "I want to be able to stand on my own two feet."  "You do stand on your own two feet," she said, "and those two feet take you where you need to go, when you need to go there."  (Well, she said something like that.  I have a good ear for dialogue, but it's not perfect.)  

Big sigh.  Minor grumbling.  Settling down, wiping the foam off my face.  Okay, okay.  I may not be able to exist as an independent human being, since no one really can, anyway.  But that doesn't mean I have to like it.  And I don't, just for the record.  It'd be interesting, though, if we could get everybody in the same place at the same time and just hear what all of them have to say.  The New Guy and Dr. Patel and Dr. Simon and Dr. King and Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed and what's-his-name from China.  Throw in Avalokishvara for some variety and maybe a little Vishnu.  Good heavens, it's starting to sound like--a convention.  Nobody call Fox News.