Everything is Easier

Everything is easier now. Grocery shopping, logistics, laundry, dishes, homework help. I fold four piles of laundry instead of five. The food bill is noticeably smaller. I set four places for dinner, and buy half a gallon of milk a week instead of two gallons. I don't have to stock up on frozen pizza, frozen waffles, and Log Cabin syrup every week.    

The house is exponentially quieter: the doorbell used to ring so often that we were tempted to crush it with a baseball bat. We'd open the door and inevitably it would be one of Aidan's friends from the neighborhood. "He can't come out right now," we'd tell the kid. "He'll be out in an hour." Ten minutes later the doorbell would ring again; this time it was the brother of the previous ringer, or another kid.

"He can't come out right now," we'd say--only this time, with a bit of an edge. "He'll be out in an hour. Don't ring the bell again." Five minutes later, it would ring again. "AAARRGH!" we'd all agree. Apparently, they didn't pass the word along.

Now the doorbell doesn't ring at all. (C. Peevie's friends usually just let themselves in.) And the basement is often dark and quiet--no shouting at Madden NFL, no Mario Kart races, not even much ping-pong. We don't have to navigate around six extra pairs of gym shoes when we walk in the front door. Almost every day four boys would huddle on the front stoop around stacks of Pokemon cards, analyzing, trading, and battling; now the stoop is just a stoop.

Everything is easier now. There are no middle-of-the-night conversations about death or tachycardia or the meaning of life; there is never a bony boy crammed in bed next to me, seeking comfort from a terrifying nightmare. 

I had just started to look into classes and options for the next home school semester, but now there are no home school logistics to arrange. Aidan had started to get the hang of taking CTA buses to X-Mom's house for his weekly science class with her precocious son Big L. He'd take the 86/Narragansett bus to Irving Park, and then hop the 80/Irving Park west to Pioneer Court. But his other routes gave him ulcers. He tried bravely to navigate two buses and two trains to get to his co-op classes in Skokie and Evanston--but with CTA stations closed for construction, and city streets closed for repairs, the route changed every week. He'd call or text us for technical and emotional support every time. 

Now Aidan is buried in the cemetery that stretches along that Irving Park route, right by his stop at Pioneer Court, in a section of Acacia Cemetery called West Portal. It sounds like a place he might have invented for one of his stories or fantasy card games. "This card will transport your character to West Portal, where you can visit the mage and regain your spells," he might have said.

Everything is easier now. We hardly ever see any "ologists" any more: our orthodontist and pediatrician appointments are down by a third; our dentist and optomotrist appointments down by a fifth. No cardiologist, no endocrinologist, no electrophysiologist, no neurologist. I don't remind anyone to take their meds every day; I don't make trips to Walgreens for prescription refills other than my own.

Everything is easier now. The toilets, formerly obstructed every three days with ordure of epic  proportions, never need to be plunged. There are no skinny-man boxers with skid-marks mouldering on the floor of the shower.

Everything is easier, but nothing is as it should be.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one;pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.;For nothing now can ever come to any good.                 

                      --W.H. Auden, Funeral Blues, 1938

Another Weird Neighbor Story

Here's something weird and...well, just weird. I have a weird life. Weird neighbors, weird relatives, weird colleagues. Maybe that's just the human condition.

Anyhoo, here's what happened tonight, just now, at midnight: I'm down in the basement, switching back and forth between Angel DVDs and Saturday Night Live, and suddenly I hear "squeak, squeak, squeak!" It sounds like the faucet on the outside of the house.

I get up and go upstairs to the front door. I open it quietly, step outside, and peek around the corner. Lo and behold! A garden hose snaked its way from my own outdoor faucet to my neighbor's backyard.

Huh.

Seriously. Who hooks up a hose to their neighbor's faucet in the middle of the night, to fill up buckets of water on his back deck?

My neighbor, that's who.

Shortly after I wrote about his backyard jungle, his current girlfriend showed up. She was hacking down the two-story weeds in his yard. By herself. At night.

"Hey, girlfriend," we said, introducing ourselves. "Where's The User?"

"He's home. Sick," she said, chopping down a 40-foot Giant Hogweed with a chainsaw.

"Wow," we thought. "How does he keep finding girlfriends to do his manual labor for him? He does not look like he is all that."

So now the weeds have been manicured, but apparently, he still needs assistance cleaning out the rental property. So he showed up tonight with a couple of friends and helped himself to our water. They filled up buckets of water and carried them indoors in the wee hours like confused vandals.

Not that his taking our water actually costs us anything. In Chicago, we still get semi-annual water bills based upon a nebulous and mysterious figuring that does not relate to the amount of water we actually use.

But still. If you were going to hook up a hose to your neighbor's house, wouldn't you at least ask them for permission first? I'm not so much of an Obamocialist yet that I don't care whether my neighbors are helping themselves on my property without so much as a how-de-do, you know?

Strange.

As I watched from my darkened kitchen my neighbor and his pals fill up buckets with contraband water, I wondered what I should do. Should I confront the nefarious water-stealing neighbor? Because I will totally confront dudes in the middle of the night. When C. Peevie was a tiny, sleeping baby, we lived in a neighborhood where people thought it was appropriate to drive up to a house and honk their horn in the middle of the night. I would get out of bed, throw on my robe, stalk across the street and accost the idiots who did not realize that the simple act of getting out of the car and ringing the doorbell would allow a sleep-deprived new mother to avoid going INSANE.

Mr. Peevie was sound asleep, getting his beauty rest in advance of running the marathon tomorrow. It didn't seem like a true emergency, so I let him sleep. I watched my neighbor for a few more minutes, but I decided in the end that it was just a case of Neighbor Lacking Appropriate Social Boundaries, rather than Neighbor Doing Nefarious and Harmful Bad Stuff; and I let it go.

It's very strange and boundary-crossing, don't you think?

Seriously?

The most hilarious consumer item since The Clapper is the Chia Obama.

Every time I hear the radio ad it cracks me up--and then I click on the web-site and find out I can order a "Happy Chia Obama" or a "Determined Chia Obama"--or BOTH! I could watch Determined Chia Obama's hair grow over and over on the Chia landing page for hours.

In a ludicrous development, Walgreens decided that it would be inappropriate to sell Chia Obamas because some customers complained that they are offensive. Do they not hear the patriotic music playing in the background of the ads? This is not a product that mocks our president; it is a product that celebrates the fact that we finally have a president with curly hair. Duh.

I must have one. The only question is: Determined, or Happy?

Creepy, or Just Me?

A boyfriend from eons ago--let's call him David McCall--contacted me through LinkedIn. He used his American name and had shortened his long Middle Eastern last name to a less ethnic-sounding name. He was ostensibly looking for an editor for an engineering report and his resume. I wondered who the guy was, and why was he asking for rates from a writer in Chicago when writers in LA are a dime a dozen.

Then I put two and two together: the first name, the still-recognizable last name, the engineering specialty, the LA location, and most importantly, the LinkedIn connection through the university we both attended--and I figured out who he was. But why the sneakiness? Why contact me as a potential client instead of coming right out and saying, hey, it's me, how the heck are you?

It felt sneaky and manipulative to me, so I did not respond.

The next day, I had another email from David McCall--this time using his full name instead of the Americanized version. This time he was straight up, re-introducing himself, asking about my parents and siblings, and hoping to get re-connected. He also mentioned the engineering report--but I still think it's a smokescreen, a way for him to say how he found me without saying he was looking specifically for me.

I don't know--maybe I'm a little too optimistic about my own attractiveness. But hey, who wouldn't want to hook up with me? I might be a middle-aged, overweight, mildly depressed, unemployed, happily married mother of three above-average-but-incredibly-loud children, but I do have great hair and a killer sense of humor.

But since he was honest, and since I was impressed that he remembered my parents names and the names of all my siblings 20 years later, I responded to his email with an email of my own. I was friendly, but not too friendly, and included details about my perfect family and my deliriously happy marriage, so that there would be no misunderstanding about my intentions.

(Listen to me. I really do have an inflated sense of self-worth, don't I? Like if I'm not careful, every man on the planet who once vaguely knew me would be knocking on my door if I wasn't clear enough about my lack of availability. I crack my own self up.)

When David M. wrote back, I was immensely relieved to find out that he was married, with two very young children. I thought, finally, he's reached a happy, healthy place. (Early on in my marriage, this guy would call me once every four or five years, and tell me yukky stories about his pathetic lonely life and tell me I was still his best friend; and I could not wait to get off the phone. I was happy when he finally stopped calling after about ten years.)

Anyway, I started regretting accepting his friend invitation on LinkedIn when he called me on my cell phone one afternoon shortly thereafter. On my cell phone--after no contact for almost 20 years! My own parents don't call me on my cell phone! Where the hell did he get the number? I wondered-- and then I realized: it's on my email signature line. I gave it to him myself.

And here's the weird part: I picked up the call because the number had a 773 area code--the area code of my part of Chicago. I thought it was going to be a neighbor or a friend, and when I heard this voice from my past, I was flustered, creeped out, and probably rude. I told him I couldn't talk and to call back later. My stomach was still churning hours later--but that might just have been the tuna I had for lunch.

How and why was he calling from a 773 area code? Does he have some kind of magical re-routing software to hide the origins of his calls? It's very 24--and again, this felt slightly manipulative to me.

Later I found that he had emailed me again, requesting my parents' phone number because, he said, "I miss them." My parents. He misses them. Oh, and he asked again for a quote on revising his resume. Doing his resume will require talking to him on the phone for about an hour, and frankly, I don't really want that kind of contact with an old boyfriend who got a little too clingy after our relationship was over. I didn't respond.

About a week later, I got another email from him alleging that that he had heard about the shooting at a church in Illinois and was worried about my family's safety. Again, a little disingenuous. David McCall knows I live in Chicago, and the shooting was nowhere near Chicago. He asked again for my parents phone number.

I wrote back, curtly told him yes, we were fine, and said that I'd need to check with my parents first before giving out their phone number. I never did get back to him with the phone number, or with a quote on his resume. I should have emailed him and just told him it made me uncomfortable--but I didn't.

This week, a month later, I got another kind of weird and freaky email from him, written all in the third person about a man who happened to be surfing the internet looking for a technical writer when he happened upon the profile of a writer who turned out to be his old friend. He even mentioned the earlier calls from 15 - 20 years ago, and specified that he had no ulterior motive, "particularly after knowing that his friend is also happily married."

Doesn't that clause imply that if his friend were not happily married, that there might have been an ulterior motive? I wonder what his wife thinks about that.

His email continued,

"The man kept waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a response from the writer, but for some odd reason, the writer never, ever bothered to get back to the old friend...Was it right for the friend just to put off the man and deny his friendship? Probably not. The good book says the following..."

--and then quotes three Bible verses, including this one from Job: "My relatives and my close friends have failed me." He asked me--in the third person still--to delete everything he sent me.

He visited my blog at least four times the first week that he contacted me--but I don't know if he still comes by The Green Room. He might be reading this right now and thinking, hey, what a bitch! Or perhaps it will give him a clue about normal social boundaries. Part of me is thinking, how does he have time for all this, with two very young kids and a wife and a big-ass engineering job? I can barely get a blog post written once a week even though I have no clients and my kids are in school all day!

The more I think about it, the more irritated I am that this person has any expectations of me at all, let alone has the nerve to send me an angry, manipulative email quoting the Bible at me! It's exactly this kind of response that confirms for me that my instincts were correct.

I'm probably I'm not being very Jesusy here, but at this point, I don't even know what Jesus wants me to do about this.

Is it creepy, or is it just me?

Waiting for a Diagnosis

Well, with tuberculosis in the news because of an infected doctor making the rounds at several local hospitals, I decided I might as well join the fun.

I think I have TB.

We'll know more tomorrow after we get the results from my chest X-ray.

All's I know is, I have all the symptoms except the ones I really wouldn't mind: loss of appetite and unexplained weight loss. Those would be excellent, really. The only time in my life when I had appetite loss was when I was preggers with M. Peevie, God bless her. I was so happy to be un-hungry, and the doc confidently (if insultingly) reassured me that she'd easily live off the fat of the land, so to speak.

But back to the topic at hand: my imminent death from tuberculosis. The symptoms I could do without are non-productive cough, chest pain, and a fever that keeps coming back at night, with chills and night sweats. It's hard to catch my breath sometimes, especially after a huge coughing fit.

Wait, where are you going? Stop backing away! You do not need to worry about infection, as TB is not typically spread through blog contact.

The good news from Dr. Zippy today is that my blood pressure was back down to normal and my weight was down by about three pounds. (It wasn't unexplained weight loss, however, as I spent the last month trying not to drink much alcohol, limiting my caffeine, and reducing the number of times I ate potato chips for breakfast.) I also improved my spirometer score, pushing the little red marker up to about 350, and once to almost 400. Not perfect, but definitely an improvement over "Are you even alive?"

But the TB-type disease is making me tired and a teeny bit cranky. Plus, I stupidly googled "TB treatment" and learned that treatment is complicated and lengthy. Four simultaneous antibiotics, one of them for 6-9 months; blood and sputum tests; no alcohol for the duration; and no Tylenol for the duration. As a person who hates and fears pain, takes Tylenol at the first twinge of a headache or any other kind of ache, and is allergic to all pain relievers except acetominophen, this might be the worst aspect of treatment.

If I actually do have TB, which, of course, is highly unlikely, except I really do love speculation about worst case scenarios, which is why we're having this conversation, I will be all achy, cranky and needing an adult beverage for six to nine months. Look out, world.

And if it's not TB, then what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks is going on inside my chest? The docs agree it's not pneumonia--I guess they can hear pneumonia through the stethoscope. Is it just a particularly long-lasting strain of bronchitis? Is is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)--which, BTW, is the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S.?

Cancer? Brain tumor? Catastrophic lung failure, require double lung transplant?

Stay tuned.

Monument to Ego

Mr. Peevie recently brought this to my attention: Roland Burris' headstone, a monument to an enormous ego.


On the right side, Mr. Burris has listed his Major Accomplishments, and on the left, hilariously, his Other Major Accomplishments. (I borrowed the photo from the Politico.com blog The Crypt, which offers commentary on breaking news in Capitol Hill.)

Two additional, carbon-based monuments to his own Goliath ego: Roland Burris' two children are named Roland and Rolanda. Seriously. He even uses the Royal We to refer to Himself. Mmmmmkay.

Roland Burris, like most of us, wants to know that his life had meaning and significance. That he wasn't just another blip on the timeline of humanity--but that his existence added value, so to speak. I get that; I really do. Sometimes, when I'm wiping the smell of pee from my bathroom floor (why can't those boys aim better?!), I wonder about the meaning of life, and in particular, the significance and value of my own life. When I'm folding underwear, or scraping crusty batches of nature from various surfaces in my house, I wonder what people will say at my funeral.

"She was a lousy housekeeper, but she sure had a good throwing arm."

"She really didn't have much of an edit function in her brain, but she was mostly not a horrible person."

"She sure did watch a lot of television."

But anyway, to get back on point, Mr. Burris has written the script, basically, for his eulogy, and had it engraved on his stone crypt, which he sensitively endowed with a comfortable bench for those of you who would like to rest in the shade while you visit with the Spirit of the Trailblazer and ponder his Major Accomplishments and his Other Major Accomplishments.

Seriously.

Does he really not understand that by accepting this contaminated appointment from our legally plagued, morally ambiguous, allegedly sociopathic governor that he is causing his own reputation to depreciate rather than to appreciate?

Or is he so blinded by his own ambition that his brain keeps blocking out messages about integrity, process, and character, and the only ones getting through are the ones that say, "Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em all. I'm getting this title because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me."

Not that he'd use language like that. He's not the governor, after all. He's a church-going man, causing some of the rest of us church-going folks to wince mightily. Burris even boldly, if not sacrilegiously asserted that his Senate appointment was ordained by the Big Guy.

I'm sure Mr. B has his headstone engraver on speed dial.

Meanwhile, my brother Deedee, who lives in Argentina, accurately and a tad meanly pointed out that Illinois is a lot like a third world country, with its political scandal and pervasive corruption. It's nice to know that our state is the source of so much entertainment to the rest of the country, even the world.

Step away from the Senate seat, Mr. Burris. Drop the weapons (supporters who play the race card, blind ambition, ethical ambiguity), and step slowly away. There you go. Now you can salvage what's left of your reputation.

Surreal Babysitting Adventures, Part II

In case you missed it, here's the first installment of Surreal Babysitting Adventures.

If I knew that K-Nut would be in charge of dinner, I'd do my best to make sure that she had a ready-made, simple-to-prepare dinner solution. But without fail, my plans failed.

One time, I got out all the fixings for sloppy joes: ground beef, buns, a canned sloppy joe sauce, and frozen corn. I even got out the right pan to use to cook the ground beef. I thought it was fool-proof. This was a woman who had somehow raised one child to adulthood, and a bunch more were well on their way to surviving childhood with no obvious long-term effects from food poisoning. They seemed relatively normal and healthy--so I figured she'd be capable of making and serving one batch of sloppy joe to my kids without anyone ending up in the ER.

Well, as Mr. Peevie and I were getting ready to leave, K-Nut started making dinner. She flipped the ground beef into the pan and started browning it. Moments later, however, I was grossed out when she opened the can of sloppy joe sauce, dumped it right on the raw beef and started stirring it around.

Who makes sloppy joes this way? Who in this hemisphere does not know (or can't read the instructions on the side of the can telling you) that you must brown the ground beef first, pour off the fat, and then dump the sloppy joe mix in? Not only were they in danger of eating raw meat--because how would you actually know when the meat was browned when it was already coated with tomato sauce--but they'd also be eating an extra 1500 calories in straight lard.

I was flummoxed.

I hurried to the kitchen, one shoe on and one in my hand. "K-Nut," I said, "I've never seen anyone make sloppy joe this way."

"Oh, I've never made it before," she said. "I just figured that you put the sauce in with the meat and then cook it."

"Generally, it's a good idea to brown the meat first," I said gently--on the outside; but on the inside, I was thinking a) have you never cooked with ground beef before? No matter what you're making--shepherd's pie, spaghetti sauce, chili mac--you brown, drain, and then mix; and b) did it occur to you to read the instructions? I'm just sayin. My insides are frequently bitchier than my outsides.

"It's going to be harder to tell if the meat is done with the sauce already mixed in," I added, "So just make sure you cook it really, really thoroughly."

"How have your kids survived for so long if this is how you cook for them?" I desperately wanted to ask, but refrained.

We shook our heads at many other clueless choices that K-Nut made as a babysitter as well. She'd leave the window shades up when she put the kids to bed--even when it was still light outside. She'd put them to bed fully clothed, without having them change into PJs. We learned to leave specific instructions about what they could and could not eat, because otherwise, they'd scam her into letting them have an entire carton of ice cream or a whole bag of cookies.

"Oh," they tell her, all innocent-like, "my mom lets us have 10 cookies for dessert all the time." And she'd believe them.

One time, we came home well past bedtime, and found A. Peevie awake and playing on the floor of his bedroom. "Um, K-Nut," I said, "How come A. Peevie is still up?"

"Oh, he said he wanted to sleep on the floor, so I told him he could," she said. "I didn't think you'd mind."

Well, what I did mind was that my child was still awake two hours after his bedtime because my space cadet babysitter made some creative bedtime decisions.

By now you're thinking, why in the name of all things holy did we continue to use this babysitter? Well, we'd call her to see if one of her daughters could sit, and often they could, but when they couldn't, K-Nut would show up in their place.

But also, part of me was wondering: Is it me? Am I just too rigid? Am I the strange one here? Eventually, Mr. Peevie and I decided it was just too stressful to have her over and be wondering the whole time we were out what surreal babysitting stories we'd be telling the next day.

Also, our kids got older, and our need for babysitting diminished dramatically. Unfortunately, this did not happen until AFTER the bathroom caught fire.

Stay tuned for the next episode of Surreal Babysitting Adventures.

Surreal Babysitting Adventures, Part I

We've been fortunate to have, for the most part, babysitters who love our children, who make wise decisions while caring for them, who rarely lose them and who almost never give them overdoses of OTC drugs.

In fact, one of our sitters, my dear friend Roseanne, has this motto: "No bleeding and no choking on my watch!" So far, the kids have cooperated, even the one taking a blood-thinner. She's also really, really good at turning their tears and whining into giggles and tickle-fights. Every single time she walks into the house, the kids run to her--even the teenager--and give her a big hug.

But we have also had our share--some might say more than our share!--of babysitting stories that you will swear I made up. But I didn't.

One of our babysitters--let's call her K-Nut--was apparently raised by wolves. She's a book-bright woman who did normal everyday things--like make dinner, do laundry, or wash dishes--in such incomprehensible ways that she appeared to be totally unfamiliar with the strange ways of the people in this flat land of Chi-Kah-Goh. (And BTW, I didn't ask her to do those extra things--she just did them. Until I asked her to please stop.)

She'd wash dishes--God knows, there were always plenty in the sink, and she'd head straight there when she walked in the door, but I wasn't offended, because I will never object when someone wants to wash my dishes--wash them, and put them straight from the sink to the cabinet. Dripping wet. I am not even kidding. More than once I pulled a plate from the cabinet, plopped a slice of bread on it to make a sandwich--and did a double-take when I realized that the bread was all-of-a-sudden soaking wet.

She'd wash my kitchen counters--I think she was morally offended by my low housekeeping standards--and leave puddles of water deep enough to stock with game fish. K-Nut must have had an aversion to drying things, because sometimes I'd come home and find my laundry washed, dried, and folded in neat piles on the bed--but the folded clothes wouldn't actually be dry. They'd be more wet than damp, and had to be tossed back into the dryer to finish the job.

See what I mean? Raised by wolves. Or aliens, on a different planet. The planet "What The Hell Is She Thinking?"

K-Nut was raising a mob of children with a complete dearth of cooking know-how and common sense. Knowing this, I'd try to make things easy on her by preparing a crock-pot meal that she'd just have to serve at dinner time. Easy-peasy, right? Not so much.

One time I had crock-potted a delicious pot roast, complete with potatoes, carrots and onions; I turned it on, and left written instructions for when it would be done and what time to serve it. Later than evening when I asked the kids how dinner was, they said, "Great! But the blueberry pancakes were a little burned."

[It was like a surrealism joke: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Two: One to hold the giraffe and one to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools. HA! Thank you, thank you, enjoy the veal, we'll be here all week.]

Blueberry pancakes? "What happened to the pot roast," I asked, mystified. It seems that K-Nut had served the pot roast and vegetables, along with blueberry pancakes (burned) and blueberry muffins. On the same plate. The burned-on pancake pan was still soaking in the sink, so I knew that my jokester kids were not scamming me.

See? I told you you'd think I was making it up.

K-Nut was sweet and gentle with my kids, which I always appreciated. They loved it when she came over, because she'd always make brownies with them. Unfortunately, she never got them quite right. They were frequently wafer thin and crispy.

"K-Nut," I said, "This brownie mix calls for a smaller pan. If you use the loaf pan, your brownies will be the right thickness."

"OK," K-Nut agreed, and added redundantly, "I'm not a very good cook."

"K," I teased, "You don't have to be a good cook. You just have to be able to read the instructions on the box."

She laughed, but the joke was on me. The next time she made brownies they were double-thick and raw in the middle.

"K-Nut, what happened to the brownies?" I asked her.

"Well, I used the loaf pan that you told me to use, but the brownies didn't get cooked in the middle," she said.

She had made two boxes of brownie mix, doubling the volume of batter--but she used the same size pan that was recommended for one box. Because that's the pan I told her to use.

More surreal babysitting adventures to come. Stay tuned.