42

 

(is it weird of me to say that there's a photo of me as a little girl where i have the same look?)

habie turns one tomorrow.  and because we're big on birthdays in the hcmm/cwmm household, and because, well, to paraphrase loretta from moonstruck, "ma, i love her awful," i've been thinking a lot about the big day.  on my way home from dinner last night, i started reflecting on how her first birthday means that i've now had habie for half her life, that we've made it through six months together, and how i wondered if i could put into (non-schmaltzy) words how transformative it's been, how i feel like a better person every time i look down at her and realize that she's not only alive, she's thriving, how every night, when she settles down on the bed with her back pressed against mine, i fall asleep within minutes.  (okay, totally failing on the non-schmaltzy part.)

and then i got home from dinner, and in addition to pooping in the house, ripping the curtain down from the front door, and shredding the contents of the trash can,  habie had also managed to chew open a bottle of antidepressants and eat two or three.  i didn't know beforehand, but antidepressants are really dangerous for dogs.  cue panic.

she's fine now, but there were a tense couple of hours, and may i never ever ever again have to force open my dog's mouth and pour a hydrogen peroxide/milk solution down her throat.  i didn't cry throughout the whole thing, couldn't take the time or energy or distraction, but after it was over and she crawled up on the bed, i lay beside her, listening to her heartbeat, making sure that it wasn't too fast, tracing the wrinkles on her head until she went to sleep.  it was only then that i realized how clenched my jaw was, how tight everything was, how terrified i really had been.  

i got habie the day i moved into my house, a week after moving to kentucky, and so everything that's gone right or wrong or been too hard or strange or weird or just plain incomprehensible has had her in the background, a constant reminder that this too shall pass and soon i will be home on the couch listening to her snore.  this place makes more sense through her lens: she is my kentucky dog who loves red trucks and tracks helicopters across the sky as they return to fort campbell.  she gets me out of bed when i am tired, forces me outside when i'd rather stay in.  because of her, i can land a stuffed animal squarely between the dining room table and chair and find and attach a leash in the pitch-black of three am.  she isn't easy, but loving her is the simplest thing i've ever done.  

so happy happy happy birthday, habie.  even when you are bad, you are still the best.  you may not eat puppy food anymore, but you're still a baby to me.  now, please:  next time just stick to the shoes, okay?

41

i'm trying to stay up late enough to find out who wins the gold in ladies figure skating, not because i'm so invested (really!  i swear i'm not!) but because this is the grandmommy of winter olympic events, and since i've already spent a week and a half committed to this international spectacle, i might as well see this thing through.  only i fell asleep at 9:30 the last two nights, so it's a little hard to not look longingly toward my bed and trashy mystery on the bedside table.

maybe going to bed would be the smartest thing to do, because it's definitely been a "and sometimes the bear gets you" kind of day.  is that even the right phrase?  i get that one confused with the one from casey at bat,  "there is no joy in mudville" and the aforementioned "sometimes the ups outnumber the downs" from cartoon robin hood when i'm trying to steal words to express things going awry.

there are a ton of signs that i'm getting older, but the clearest one of today is that the thing that made me feel best about today was scrubbing my bathtub.  i don't like doing housework, and i'm certainly the slowest vacuumer in the west (seriously?  is it supposed to be so hard?  there's always a moment in the middle where i give up and lie on the floor and think that there is no possible way that i will ever finish, that the vacuum will have to just become a permanent fixture in the living room and that eventually the habie hair in the corners will grow until a new habie springs forth, demanding just as many walks and belly rubs, and as much as i want another dog, i don't think parthenogenesis is the way to go), but there is a satisfaction that comes with the work, with knowing that it makes a difference, even if just temporarily.

okay, anecdotal tangent that's too confusing if tucked in a double set of parentheses:  when i was studying abroad in hyderabad, i was in the university library--a large open concrete room--one day early in the semester, so not only was i the only white girl in the room, but people on campus hadn't stopped staring yet.  i'm sitting there, sweating and willing this slow machine to please please please start working because i just want to read my email.  when it finally works, i open one from my friend that contains a link.  and that page takes another oh, six or seven minutes to load, and at this point i realize that this is madness, that the heat and humidity and rickety dial-up are not going to ever concede, but my stubborn side just keeps holding on.  and then miracle of miracles, it's finally up, and it's this.

and reading it, i start to smile, and then laugh, and then really really laugh, and then i'm cotackling and it still doesn't stop, so that tears start running down my face and the people who were only pretending not to look are now openly staring at me.  when i finish the article, i actually run out of the building, because really, at this point, i cannot make any more of a scene, and so why not give the public a good exit. 

and now, filed with tamarind so sour my tongue burns and buses full of women in burqas with bejeweled feet poking from underneath and the seven-year-old who made my clothes at the local tailor under "what i remember of india" is little ethel and her prehensile claw.

i am not going to make it to eleven o'clock.  not even the kiss and cry's going to keep me up.  time for me to put this day to bed and hope that the scrubbing and the dish washing and the laundry doing have served to shift the balance, put the bear back in its (hopefully olsen-free) cave.

40

i spent the torino olympics at my mom's house, underemployed and anxiously waiting to see if law schools would accept me.  when i think back to that year, that lost year between seventeen straight years of school and the next three, it really should be called the year of the craft.  because when one is burnt out from too much lit crit and holocaust theory and idyllic liberal arts college, and one has a disposable income for the first time in her life, then one's friends get packages in the mail with cookies in their likenesses and decoupaged lightswitch plates.

oh those lightswitch plates.  i would sit in front of the tv, watching curling or skiing or whatever was on that night, and i'd be surrounded by hundreds of glossy magazine pages, organized by color because really, what else did i have to do other than cut out tiny pieces of paper and mod podge them to wood?

i'm not sure that i have any better of an answer to that question four years later, but the mod podge is in the office and i'm in the living room and so no crafts will be attempted this olympics.  and law schools were gotten into, attended, and graduated from, but i'm still sitting on a couch glued to whatever nbc decides to show me that night.  well, watching whatever sport is on and counting down the minutes until figure skating is on (growing up in the nancy kerrigan/tonya harding era, i went through a wee figure skating obsession for a while.  okay, not so wee.  all right, i watched non-olympic, non-championship meets.  fine, fine, fine, i went to the campbell's champions on ice show.  um, three years in a row.  and i'd say that i'm over all of that, and i certainly haven't stayed in the mix of things.  but there may have been some youtubing of some of my favorite old routines earlier in the evening . . .). 

but maybe i'm missing the point with mod podge ennui, because it's not always how much or how little things have changed since a prior benchmark.  it's that you've gotten to a new measuring point at all.  winter olympics come every four years (except for that glorious 1992/94 funfest), and four years ago i was already out of college.  which isn't surprising, since my five year reunion is coming up in just a few months.  and if it's five years since college, then everything that happened in college is even further back.  that awful rainjacket that i bought when i was going abroad, the one currently hanging in my coat closet--even though it seems impossible that this is true, when i subtract fall of 2003 from winter of 2010, i realize that it's been with me for over six years.  six years of thinking a rainjacket is stupid and continuing to pack and unpack it anyway.

i'm not someone who usually freaks out about time passing.  but i turn 27 in 2010, and apparently 27 is my scary age.  not that it's the edge of the cliff or the peak of the hill, and goodness knows i hatehatehate those people who anguish over the first wrinkle (check) or gray hair (check), but my brain has 27 conflated with grown-up, and considering that during my mom's visit last weekend she cleaned my floors and paid for my groceries, i'm pretty sure that whatever grown-up is, this ain't it. 

so fine, i'll readjust.  i've done it before.  when i was in first grade, the sixth graders were impossibly big and tall and swaggering, and then i was one of them, only i was short and wore planet hollywood boxers as shorts.  and then going off to college was the line, and i did that, but learning to play flip cup and "discovering" derrida don't an adult make.  and so now the line'll get pushed back further, so that by the time of the sochi games i'll have a financial "portfolio" and a clear career path and a new hometown.  and if that doesn't make me feel grown-up, then there's always 2018.  but that location is still TBD, and so i'll give myself a break right now, tousle the oh-so-soft ears of the dog snoring next to me, eat some more homemade bread (surely that's worth some adult points?) and be very grateful that the nagano games era of braces and badly dyed hair is long long past.

39

i am really really really glad that i finally figured out that the "redneck karaoke" i'm going to on saturday isn't officially called that, but has merely earned the nickname because of the influx of attendees from the county over.  because oh my, could that have been disasterous. 

also, in the animated robin hood (which is easily in my movie top 5, and firm top 5 rather than in the 5/6/7/8 positions, which swap places every season, or however often i reevaluate random rankings, which usually coincides with long solo car trips), the rooster plays a song while everyone's in the debtor's prison with the lyric, "sometimes the ups outnumber the downs, but not in nottingham."  this gets stuck in my head whenever i'm moping.  but this has not been one of those times:  in fact, the ups have been outnumbering the downs pretty steadily all week.  good job thus far, february.  keep it up! (please?)

and finally, to be completely honest, the above two paragraphs are just an excuse to get to a photo of the habes, who celebrates her fifth month with me tomorrow and her first birthday at the beginning of march, and who is still the cutest most incorrigible dog i know, even/especially when she snatches the lid to the peanut butter jar off the counter and leads me all around the house in chase (and then twenty minutes later conks out next to me while i watch trashy tv, stirring only to snore)

 

(look at those tiny golden eyelashes!  says the still-smitten mama)