When the moment is cold, will I be ready?

I am taking Cialis.
Yes, you read that correctly. I am a 29 year-old female in the suburbs with Bachelor episodes on my DVR and organic milk in my fridge, swallowing erectile dysfunction meds in 5 mg tablets.

Allow me to explain while you choke on your diet cola.
It is for my appendages.
Okay, bad start. Not that appendage.

The story originates during my junior year in college while studying abroad Down Under. I decided to hike Franz Josef’s glacier during a blizzard - in jeans. I froze my cheeks off. All four of them. And when I returned to Sydney a nice pudgy pink welt flew back with me, protruding from my middle finger.

My housemates quickly organized a pool that leaked out to the majority of University of New South Wales students. Bets were on about whether I had lecherous fungi living off my knuckle or if the rare Themognatha Yerrelli Beetle had taken a bite out of me. The clear favorite was that the alien bump was in fact a venomous Funnelweb spider sac and that one imminent night while I lay sound asleep, a stampede of scampering baby specimens would rupture through my skin. And kill me on the spot.

Horrified of being an arachnid-hatching host, I poked and prodded at the protrusion with violent force, but it only grew more swollen and painful by the day. By the time I returned back to The States, I had resolutely accepted the fact that a promising career in hand modeling would not be in my future. Still, I was a pro at concealing my blemish by sitting with my hand tucked under me or making a fist on the commuter train. It became a part of my anatomy and I affectionately referred to it as my “nodule” among friends.

After college, when I irrationally traded in California palm trees for Chicago sleet, my bump decided that it was time to start a family and procreate. This conveniently coincided with the only six-month period in my life when I depended solely on a slimy serpent for health coverage- Cobra. I was young and naïve and thought it prudent to visit every dermatologist, rheumatologist, and hand surgeon in the county before my Hyatt Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance kicked in. Of course, 22 year-olds are riddled with expensive life mistakes as much as sixteen year-olds are clogged with colossal forehead pimples. I’m chalking it up to a rite of passage.

The doctors were puzzled. They ran tests, biopsied flesh, drew blood, analyzed pee in Petri dishes, and informed me that I was a medical outlier. Young and healthy, but with hands like an arthritic great aunt. It was quite the accomplishment. One rheumatologist even took high-resolution photographs to show his doctor buddies over Thanksgiving in effort to generate a differential diagnosis over cranberry sauce and stuffing. That January, he included a photo of my fingers in a medical textbook he was publishing. My nodules had made it to Hollywood.

The resounding hypothesis was that I had a type of Raynaud's disease. Finally, a name by which to define my oddity. This pretty much meant my circulation was lousy and blood was not making it to my extremities, especially in colder temperatures. Yet, doctors were still puzzled why the vascular swellings had latched on to just two of my fingers. Typically Raynaud’s does not show preference to certain piggies, but rather infects all fingers, toes, and sometimes even the nose for abysmally unfortunate saps.

It was only a matter of time.

I remember having cold fingers since I was a little girl, but it wasn’t until I reached the age of holding hands with the opposite sex that I realized how frigid they actually were. Of course, I had always received a range of shocked expressions when I offered “peace” at church, shook hands at a party, or changed a diaper while babysitting. Growing up, my grandmother, Baba, affectionately called them, “Rucichke zaba” (literally “hands like a frog” in Czech) as she rubbed them warmly between her own. They were hands from the morgue, but I didn’t actually feel self-conscious until a boy in college labeled them cold and clammy. An excellent combination for the ocean, but not for boosting the confidence of a shy, pale, pubescent girl.

By the time I hit 24, I exhibited a classic case of Raynaud's – painful toe nodules that throbbed when I shoved them into socks and knuckles that could have been cast over the cauldron in Snow White. I did everything a good Raynaudee should do in the winter. I raided L.L. Bean catalogs and North Face websites with feverish desperation, hoarding Thermo fleece mittens as if they were cans of spam during Y2K. My hands were so restricted under the layers of wool, I could barely pick up my own purse let alone steer a car. I began buying shoes two sizes too big to accommodate my “sock sandwiches” and I clopped around the house in wool slippers fit for the arctic. I cranked up the heat and even broke down and bought a pair of Uggs. Still my nodules hung around like a family of stray alley cats.

And then I met the pharmacist. Convenient, you say? I agree, but I promise I am dating him for more than his drugs. For one, I appreciate his meddlesome curiosity. This is a guy who thinks outside the box. Way outside. He figured if Cialis can increase blood flow in sexually defunct men why wouldn’t it help Emily’s incompetent circulation and deformed paws. This is the kind of forward logic that put pineapple on pizza and the internet in our pockets. I was willing to give it a whirl, but not without a fair bit of scientific interrogation first.

“You’re absolutely sure I won’t be humping my desk chair by this afternoon?”
“I’m sure.”
“Or orgasming during dinner?”
“I’m sure.”
“And, I won’t....grow a penis?

That, I just got a look for.

And so, here they are. Little white Cialis pills on my nightstand and I’m hopeful they will offer some relief or at least save me from an overzealous glove-buying compulsion. But, I implore you. Please. If you spot me lounging naked in some bathtub with feet, gazing out a vast emerald lake while clutching hands with an old guy in the next tub – by all means, intervene.

Especially if it’s cold outside.

Fuzzy in a Techie World

Bring on the Boogey Man, Swine Flu, Slasher films with flannel-shirted babysitters, and rabid dingoes that stalk baby carriages. I can handle it. I don’t tremble during power outages or avoid public transportation after 9pm. I won’t glance up from French Women Don’t Get Fat during cabin-rocking turbulence or hide under the covers during a thunderstorm. I am that tourist who tiptoes to the edge, off the path, around the bend, past the warning signs – just to get the best camera angle. As the novelty t-shirt I bought after bungee jumping through a New Zealand canyon declares, “If you aren’t living on the edge, you are taking up too much room.”

That said, I admit I feel a bit squeamish around spiders and experience a disproportionate glee after sucking them up with my vacuum hose from corner crevices. After all, everyone has his or her kryptonite. But, my paralysis, my blood-draining fear - what keeps me awake at night and triggers the sweat glands on my forehead is that black rectangle on my work desk.

I am petrified of my laptop.

Sure, he may appear innocent enough, but I know his true colors. And when heads are turned and the Geek Squad has vacated, he can be devious.


Ever since college, I have bought into the doom and gloom approach of making my acquaintance with technology. I was one of the last standing to get a cell phone, I use only five buttons on my remote control, and the VHS player had to be pried out of my hands in my first apartment. On campus, every student was pre-labeled. You were either a “Fuzzy” who studied allegory and alliteration in Beowulf while huddled in drab 10x12 quad pods or you were a “Techie” who wrote computer code in the shiny, twenty-story edifice with stadium seating, water sculptures and glass elevators that Mr. Packard donated in the late 90’s.

My destiny was written and it was not in code. The one Computer Science class I elected to endure senior year in a quest to break down barriers and challenge my young academic mind - (I was in Silicon Valley after all) - was wrought with disillusionment. A fellow psych Fuzzy and I decided we would coax an odd Pac-Man looking cartoon to dance the jig on screen using complex java script algorithms for our final project. After two consecutive all-nighters with empty Sugar-Free Red Bull cans and O-KE-DOKE popcorn wrappers strewn about our workstation and only three lines of elementary code, we decided to call in the paramedics – my partner’s tech-savvy boyfriend. I still say it wasn’t quite selling out since I didn’t sleep with the guy, but we were fuzzy damsels in cyber distress and thus, instigated my rocky relationship with the computer.

Gigabytes, megabytes, RAM, PPI, Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, IP addresses, processors, memory sticks. It is the language of nerds. Those skinny, pimply guys named Ben whose hands sweat and couldn’t get a date to prom have since inherited the right to ridicule. I find myself flirting with “Herald” on the Geek Squad, offering him a plate of homemade ginger cookies if he can get my modem to blink properly and humbly promising to name my first-born child after him if he can actually get me back online. Herald - for goodness sake!

You see, I work from home. The privilege of pony-tailed conference calls in bunny slippers with coffee breath comes at a cost. There is no IT person in the cluttered office down the hall with wires exploding from industrial cabinets like the crazed tentacles of a giant squid. When the mega-shit hits the fan, I am on my own. The Geek Squad and I. And the awkward fifteen year old sophomore down the block who graciously set up my network, router, and vonage device last summer, only to slip an invoice on frizzed spiral notebook paper for $225 in labor fees through my mail slot four months later.

But, when the screen goes blank, when the error message appears where the adorably outfitted Google icon is supposed to be, I panic. All I know to do is to jiggle the Ethernet cords, quietly shut it off, take a deep breath, retrieve a giant bowl of ice cream and then return, peeking out of the corner of my eye as I hit the power button. If that doesn’t work, I go for a long walk. Maybe he just needs some space. Maybe I’ve been suffocating the guy. I remain stumped.

There are days at a time when the computer is working brilliantly, only to then be arbitrarily followed by a morning of total system failure. My only rationale is that there are these miniature, glassy-eyed creatures prancing around when I sleep, injecting cryptic viruses, worms, and bacteria into my hard drive because they can smell my vulnerability. It is not dissimilar to the modern day TSA where rules are shrouded in mystery. Where there is fear, there is great power. Suddenly, Evian water bottles are a national security threat as are my lip gloss and Speed Stick, unless properly buckled down in a benign quart-size Ziploc.

To my dismay, a few weeks ago, a company technician informed me that I needed have my laptop reconfigured so that they could install a firewall in my home office. I nodded professionally on the phone and agreed to drive out to the Oak Brook location to pick up said firewall.

Firewall? Firewall? What the heck is a firewall? I was picturing a shoebox diorama you might find in a 2nd grade classroom with bright orange construction paper jutting out at jagged angles. I fought the desire to ask, “Is this something that I can fit in my car?”
I had some notion that this device was supposed to ward off those very glassy-eyed creatures that prey upon my laptop at night, threaten to steal my identity, and use my credit card to fly to Tahiti. But, in all honesty, the guy could have handed me a geranium plant and instructed me to place it on top of my desk and water it three times a week with 7-up and I would have probably believed that I'd successfully installed my security system.

It turns out a firewall is a pretty boring looking grey box with countless jacks and drives lining the back and blinking yellow lights up front that I glance at suspiciously every few hours to confirm its good behavior. We are monotonously cohabitating and thus far, my laptop doesn’t seem to mind his new comrade.

However, I was reminded just yesterday that we, Fuzzies, still have fleeting moments of vindication in this tech-laden world. In the late afternoon, there was a soft knock on my door. I pulled it open, ready to tell the Seventh Day Adventists that I couldn’t pledge $5, when I saw the fifteen-year-old neighborhood kid with shoulders slumped forward on my front stoop.

“Yes?”
He peered up at me with red-cheeked abashment and handed me a manila folder, “My mom told me I should have you edit my English essay.”

Tonight, I write my invoice.

No Dice

So, I have this theory.

That there may be an indirect correlation between basic intelligence and junk dangling from people’s rear-view mirrors.

Essentially, the more Mardi Gras beads you have strung up in your Subaru, the less chance I want you constructing Macy’s parking garage or programming my PC. Don’t we have enough arenas for self-expression that our four-wheeled vehicles can martyr themselves to just being practical? Can’t they simply be an exoskeleton for transport?

It seems our Hondas and PT Cruisers have been morphed into the cluttered living rooms of the open road. People drape rabbit’s feet, crystals, dream catchers, metallic crucifixes, and those ridiculous furry dice their 4th graders snag in quarter-claw machines at dingy pizza joints.

But, the regurgitation of paraphernalia doesn’t end there. The mullet seeps around to the rear dash with choirs of stuffed Snoopies, grinning Garfields suctioned to the glass, and hairy felines with creepy bobbing heads. More often than not, I find myself staring at the likes of a deranged taxidermy display or a fantastical cartoon petting zoo while I’m bumper to bumper on the Eisenhower.

Somehow along the way, our cars became microcosms of who we are as individuals. Whether we like it or not that Prius screams worm-composting, cloth-bag toting, sans-deodorant wearing hippie. And that Lexus SVU has khaki-colored, pedicured, Estee-Laudered, private-school suburbanite written all over it.

Just as an ironed dress shirt can make or break an interview, the swinging of rabbit’s feet in your windshield may determine whether or not I find you worthy of a friendly merge. I offer no apologies. I am telling you outright. Flaunting the car bling is on par with sporting a pitted-out wife-beater to the movies or cut-off jeans to church.

So I ask you? What messages are you projecting about yourself when you dangle the dice? Frankly, you look dumb. I’d personally prefer to have my fellow stop-sign runners focused on the interstate rather than being mesmerized by their bouncy pink prisms.

Now, I’m not judging the decaying autumn maple chards littering your floor mats or criticizing the paint nicks on your passenger door. I view those love pats as normal wear and tear. But, I do wish to reintroduce the notion of “car etiquette”.

I’m even speaking to those of you who swallow the “scented leaf kool-aid” or swoon to the seductive stature of its more masculine cardboard cousin, the pine tree. You know who you are. You are desperate for your stinky interiors to exude subtle whiffs of sarsaparilla, orange sherbet, or Colorado mountain air. You crave that causal compliment from carpool friends, “Wow, your car smells so……..western.”

So you lost that lovin’ new-car-smell feeling. It happens to all of us. Don’t swallow the potpourri Prozac from your local 66. There has got to be something a little classier we can use to lavenderize our upholstery.

After all, those stuffed animals take a lot of shits.

365

Desiree, today I passed on the baton.

You’ll know what I am talking about – the 2 x 3 inch magnet that has clung obediently to my refrigerator door, pinning up Tide coupons and Hair Cuttery business cards. For a year.

Initially, I’d glance at it every morning when I went to pour milk over my oatmeal. Sometimes, it would invigorate me -feed me a fighting-feminine vitamin boost - while other mornings it just made me chuckle. Mostly, it made me think of you, Desiree, and what a compassionate friend you were to me during my short time in Tucson. Admittedly, after a few months, I stopped noticing it. Occasionally, a visiting friend would point at it, wheeze with amusement, and I’d smile and say, “Yea, that’s on loan.”

Well, today I passed it on.

“Here, you need this more than I do now,” you had insisted, securing it inside the palm of my hand. “Keep it until you don’t need it anymore and unfortunately, discover someone who does.”

Desiree, I want you to know that it is going to Wichita. It is bound for Wichita with a childhood friend who found her way into my life this afternoon after a chance encounter at Gap among the khaki shorts. She is moving there in three weeks to start over. To live forward and mark each day as one sluggish step towards healing. It will reside on her fridge for a while or maybe on the file cabinet where she stashes her tax returns from the last five years. Either way, it has a new home and after hearing her story, she deserves it.

I told her what I think you advised me, but was too in shock to remember verbatim. I admitted that it won’t be easy - that the pain and anger is real and raw and eats at you for a long time. I told her your story and my story and that our club is not anything to envy, but the only thing positive about it being larger than anyone would ever want is the amount of support out there. And I asked her to pass it on – when she was ready – to peel it from her Wichita kitchen and seal it in the palm of someone just starting out on her journey.

It’s funny. I wondered quite frequently when and to whom I would give that magnet away. I somehow knew I would recognize the precise moment as vividly and surely as someone senses deja vous or exclaims out loud that they are in love. And it seems fitting that tomorrow is the first anniversary of the rest of my life. July 8th. Something eerily ritualistic, yet poetic about the timing of it all, but I have stopped being as surprised by how much life can surprise you.


Three hundred and sixty-five. 365 days and a lifetime of difference.

365 twilights ago I was on the other side of the country, tucked in bed under a desert moon, oblivious to the fact that dawn’s arrival would forever alter the course of my life. Oblivious to the fact that 365 nights later, I would be drifting off to sleep in my hometown, guiltily happy, thoroughly loved and at peace – having bid goodbye to a simple magnet that had zigzagged from DC to Tucson, to Chicago and now onto Wichita.

A simple magnet handed to me by someone who recognized my grief as her own: “It is better to have loved and lost than live the rest of your life with a psycho.”

Safe travels.

Pipe Cleaners

Today, I hugged my therapist goodbye.

Eight months of 50 minute sessions in her office with the scruffy green couch and mammoth space heater that resembles a robot. Early on, I’d sit rigid and serious, recounting my story, giving my grief voice. I only cried once or twice. The Kleenex box was always in the same place. On the right side of the coffee table next to a smattering of twisted pipe cleaners in fluorescent tones that inexplicably changed shape every week –sometimes in hearts, spirals, or squares. I often wondered who played with them. If it was part of some child’s play therapy or perhaps for adult patients who needed something to fiddle with while recounting the most vulnerable details of their lives. One visit last September, they had been molded into a set of stick figures, all holding hands: a family of neon orange, yellow, pink, and green. The next week, they were crooked lines again.

After a few months, our time together diminished from once a week to once or twice a month as our topics expanded past the divorce to work anxieties, family relationships to uncertainties about dating again. Our sessions always concluded the same way. After I had zipped my coat and placed the check on the table, she’d inevitably smile and firmly shake my hand by the door, “You’re doing great.”

I consistently left feeling a little bit lighter, a touch more confident than when I had stepped in. And I always felt compelled to race home and write. Sometimes, I’d scribble notes on receipts from my coat pocket while delayed at a stoplight, anxious that I’d forget her catch phrases or morsels of wisdom by the time I pulled into my driveway. One afternoon, I even wrote, “Your pain has purpose!” with eyeliner on the back of my Southwest Frequent Flyer card out of a desperate lack of paper. Once home, I’d whip out my hardcover journal and douse the page with scrawled ink, emitting thoughts and emotions like sweating pores.

This afternoon, I mentioned to her how fitting it was that I had just run out of paper. I had written on its final page the week prior. It is a rare occurrence to suck so much life out of a notebook and this one had stood by me, steadfast, as I penned and jotted. Sometimes resting on my knees. Sometimes retrieved in the middle of the night. Sometimes absorbing my teardrops in its binding.

I had glanced back earlier this week at the first entry dated in August, a month after I returned from Arizona:

I went downtown yesterday to attend the Northwestern Continuing Ed Session on Creative Writing. Fascinating to know what is out there, but maybe not for me yet. I took the “el” home, watching the neighborhoods, trees, headlights, and abandoned tricycles whiz past me below. I spotted a cozy apartment on Oak Park Ave through its slits in the shades. Twin Chinese lanterns cast a butterscotch hue on a beige couch and burgundy throw pillows. The television flickered in the background and two figures reclined, their arms around each other in shadowed comfort.

I had owned the same lamps in my home in Tucson. My home. I could locate the light switches in the dark. I knew where to find my keys or a water glass when I returned, parched after errands at the market. I had memorized the precise sliding factor of my cotton socks on the tile. I recognized the chirping of quails at dawn and exactly where he was in his morning routine by the noises he made from our bathroom vanity – if he was rushed or had time to eat muselix while I complacently sipped my tea.

It is not as if I do not know the house I grew up in or could potentially get to know a new one, but it was mine and I liked it. I wasn’t asking for a replacement. He was gambling it away while I was sleeping upstairs. I know I am enormously lucky to have parents who welcomed me back and took me in. But, this is where I did my fifth grade math homework and the driveway I learned to reverse in. At this moment, there isn’t anywhere else I’d rather be, but I suppose there was just something about those lamps that made me sad.

This morning, I talked Mom into driving up to the lake house, despite the 90% chance of thunderstorms. I knew I had no memories of him here. He never came. It evolved into a glorious afternoon and we strolled the beach at sunset, savoring the cool lapping of water and the reds and browns and grays of the lake stones. I started collecting sea glass in my pocket.

I watched the sea gulls congregate on the sandy slopes and take off in synchronized flight when I neared and then marveled as they circled back once I had past. There could have easily been a thousand of them.

Tonight, I am curled up in bed, having discovered my muse. I feel recognized. Writing to Save your Life by Michele Weldon. Her words slice through me with a poignancy I have never gleaned from any other book. It is as if she is sitting perched on the edge of my mattress, granting me permission, fueling me forward, aware that I have a story to tell.

I was only on page 4 when I reached for this journal.
********

Afterwards, I flipped through 250 crinkled, dog-eared pages of black and blue cursive, scanning a paragraph here and there, reminiscing about the waning of summer, my endless evening walks, laughing again, the coming of autumn, another birthday, new friends, exploring the city, the falling of leaves, spontaneous vacations, Hyatt co-workers, holidays, a first kiss, a budding romance. Eventually, I reached the finale, my entry from last Wednesday.

********
Haven’t written for a few weeks, but I have an excuse and a scapegoat. I have been busy falling in love. It seems entirely appropriate that this will be my last entry in a book that has buoyed me through a journey of transition and growth.

Journal, I want you to know that I am genuinely happy. Elated, inspired and optimistic to the degree that anyone feeling like crap may just want to strangle all that obnoxious positive energy right out of me. But, I don’t care. I have met someone amazing.

He is gentle, but strong. Thoughtful and witty. He buys flowers, yet rocks out on the guitar. He remembers how I take my tea. He uses adorable, salt-of-the-earth, Iowa expressions like “Holy Smokes”, but can still drop the F-bomb for emphasis when recounting a story. He is willing to drive 45 minutes after working a 10-hour shift, standing up, to meet me for pancakes. He looks great in a tux. He knows my birthday. He listens. He appreciates a well-poured Guinness draft. He repairs his own doorbell and shovels the snow so his landlord doesn’t have to be bothered. His brother is his best friend. He can name every player on the Cub’s starting line-up – probably from the last five years. He tells me he misses me. He savors the chunky bits in Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and eats around the marshmallows in his cereal to save them for the end. He owns a vintage Price is Right t-shirt that smells like pine. He recycles and turns the thermostat down – often too low. He can talk wrestling with my dad. He is the only other person I know who has multiple cans of black olives in his cabinet. He sends postcards to his nieces and nephews. He recites nostalgic commercials from his childhood – verbatim. He is starting to finish my sentences.


********

Today, instead of a handshake, I hugged my therapist goodbye and stepped out into the March wind. The sun was blinding white and although the air was cold, I thought I sniffed the first fragrances of spring daffodils. “Keep writing,” she exclaimed from the doorway. “You’re doing great.” I glanced back and nodded. I would go home as I always did and write, but first I needed to stop at Border’s to buy a new home for my words.

When I got to my car, I paused and looked back at the building that had become a familiar sanctuary to me this year. I grinned and put my head down. I only wish I had remembered to ask her about the pipe cleaners.