Heat wave

JK and I are going to Arizona in a few days to visit The Brother and Sister-In-Law. I can't wait. The temperature in Phoenix will hit 80 degrees this week. So far this winter, we've had 80 inches of snow.

I'm becoming one of those people obsessed with the weather. For example, our high this Saturday was 26. I've never before so eagerly anticipated 26 degrees, not even when I hated 7. Twenty-six means taking the dog for a walk without your nose hairs freezing. It means mittens are optional. It means the ice on the road turns to mush, and you no longer need to be terrified of driving to the grocery store.

To put it in perspective, 26 degrees is 38 degrees warmer than the temperature one morning last week when we woke up to -12.

We drove to the store Saturday afternoon with the windows partially rolled down. Passing by the lake, I could almost mistake the glare of sun on snow for the reflective glint of white-blue water, and I convinced myself the people skiing on the lake were surfers. "Isn't this great?!" I said, to no one in particular.

At the store, people walked around with stupid grins on their faces, liberated from scarves and balaclavas and practically jumping out of their long underwear. "Can you believe this weather?" they asked each other. Indeed, weather is almost all anyone here ever talks about anymore.

"Come on," one surly store clerk was overheard saying at Trader Joe's. "It's not that warm," to which a long line of customers responded with a collective gasp. If the relative heat wave hadn't instilled such euphoria, the crowd might've pelted her with their mini-muffins and packages of frozen edamame before kicking her out onto the freshly de-iced sidewalk.

The truth, though, is that 26 is cruel. Because tonight we're expecting another 4-6 inches of snow and freezing rain. And honestly, it's not like 26 degrees is anywhere close to warm. One might even say it's decidedly cold. We haven't seen grass since November, and we're not on the verge of seeing it again anytime soon.

The shine of 26 will wear off in a couple of days: We'll realize we really do need those mittens, the roads will freeze again, and we'll all continue going a little crazy as we wait impatiently for the end of April, when the three feet of snow outside will melt into dirty water and flood our basements.

But hey -- at least we'll get to wear T-shirts as we mop it all up.

Older

Instead of New Year's Resolutions, I've decided to make Birthday Resolutions. The passing of one year of my own life seems much more meaningful than the random turning of the calendar.

Earlier this month, I turned 32. In the two weeks preceding my birthday, the following things happened:

1. I received a letter from my doctor, informing me of alarmingly high cholesterol.
2. I found my first gray hair.
3. I had a conversation with a friend, in which one of us said to the other, "You know, we're rapidly approaching the age when it's strange that we don't have children."

I've been thinking a lot about the passing of time lately and also the imperative to make moments count. Maybe not every moment -- I don't need to fondly recall the 30 minutes I spent in line at the airport ticket counter, for example -- but more of them than not.

They say 30 is the new 20. I hope 32 isn't the new 22. I don't want to be wandering aimlessly through the doorway of adulthood for the next 12 months. There comes a time probably for most of us, when we realize we know who we want to be. And we realize we have all the tools and powers to make that happen. And to not make that happen results primarily from our own laziness.

I want to be the kind of person who writes thank-you notes and sends tea bags home to sick co-workers and would rather take a walk with the dog -- under the sun, with wind on my face -- than watch old TV shows on DVD with the shades drawn. And lately, when I find myself hitting the "play" button on the remote control, with the blinds closed on a fine Sunday afternoon, I know I'm making a choice. The thank-you notes won't go out tomorrow. The dog remains unwalked. My world remains confined inside the walls of my living room.

JK and I were talking last night about the relationships we have, as adults, with our friends. When you live far away and lead busy lives and barely have time for your own family, friendships become valuable real estate. Sometimes ties become strained, and sometimes they snap altogether, for reasons of distance or time or inconvenience. The people who make your world a bigger, more enriched place tend to stick around. The others fade.

I'm thinking about this as a guiding principle for how to be the person I want to be: Does this decision or action or person expand my understanding of -- or impact in -- the world around me?

So this year, my Birthday Resolution (well, in addition to not eating as much cheese - check - and also to start exercising every day - check) is to live more deliberately, to make moments matter, and to choose paths that force me to live in the larger world, instead of staying tucked in my living room, with the television for company.

Yeeeee-Hawwwww

(This post includes pics, so you lovely email subscribers may want to pop over to the web version. Four words to make it worth your time: fun with hula hoops.)

Last weekend, some friends and I pulled off a huge feat -- a surprise graduation party for JK, who finished his grad program right before the holidays. Because he didn't go back to Alabama for the graduation ceremony, we decided we'd bring a little 'bama to him, in the form of fried chicken, okra, collards and cheap beer:


Our friend Adam is a semi-professional hula hooper (such things do exist, yes). He makes his own hoops and brought his nifty light-up one to the party -- the first pic is his wife, Stef; the second pic is Adam:



JK's parents came up from North Carolina for the festivities, as did friends from Chicago and Alabama. The best part was seeing JK's face when we arrived at Katy's house (ostensibly to "help move a dresser" at 7 p.m. on a Saturday), and his good friend Brian from Alabama answered the door.

I couldn't have pulled it off without the help of some very dear and patient friends (especially this one). Not to mention I now have enough left-over mac and cheese to last the rest of the year.

Squirrel

You know it's cold when you need to scrape the ice off the inside of your car windows. That's how cold it's been this week. And last week. And the week before that.

This afternoon I got home from the gym to find a squirrel dying in our front yard. It had managed to climb most of the way up a wooden trellis that stands between our house and the house next door, on its way to some tall tree branches. The squirrel was gray with dark brown speckles on its back, and a thin, droopy tail. It held a light-colored shell of something between its teeth, but its back legs kept giving way, and it lost its balance. To hold onto the trellis, it had to let go of the shell, which meant turning around and climbing back toward the ground. No use climbing all the way up the tree without food.

The squirrel was either injured or partially frozen. I checked the temperature when I later went inside -- it was 14 degrees with a wind chill of 3. At what temperature do squirrels start to suffer?

As soon as it reached the ice-covered ground, it paused, looking defeated, and then it fell over. From the front porch, I gasped. I think I actually clutched at my throat. Since winter started, the squirrels have been acting funny. They've been bolder and braver and a touch desperate, coming within a foot or two of a person, just to get a seed or something. Just after Thanksgiving, a fat one chased me down the sidewalk. I didn't think I could handle finding an actually dead squirrel in the yard, especially not one I had seen in pain while alive.

"Get the shell!" I said out loud. "You can do it!"

The squirrel righted itself and scampered around the base of the trellis, searching for something it could take back up the tree. Its back legs kept buckling and slipping to the side, which, as it walked, made it look sort of like a drunk person trying unsuccessfully to walk in a straight line. It trembled, its front paws especially shaky, and again it tumbled over.

I almost ran inside to tear up the last of the bread that was slowly going stale in our kitchen, but then I gave myself a silent lecture on the dangers of human intervention. "This is what happens in nature in the winter," I told myself, "this is what's supposed to happen."

The squirrel failed to find the shell. Instead it turned to look at the street.

"No!" I shouted. "Don't do it! You won't make it!"

The squirrel didn't listen. Luckily the roads were still bad from two days of winter storms, and the traffic on our street was thin. You know how squirrels leap and scamper? Imagine that, but in excruciatingly slow motion. Each time it landed on its way across the road, I could almost see it wince. This squirrel was making its last stand.

I watched as it reached the driveway across the street, then it paused under a parked car. As I waited to see what it would do next, I thought about all of the dramas that play out in this urban wilderness -- where people and cars and domesticated animals aren't the main players, but the backdrop, a few unnatural predators to avoid. Even here, in the middle of a small city, where concrete, bricks and asphalt far outnumber trees and grass, nature finds ways to take hold.

Our house is in a densely populated neighborhood, with yards the size of postage stamps and only a few feet between buildings. Before we moved in, our house had been vacant for several months. And we soon discovered that nature had started taking over, as if the natural parts (wood beams, wood floors) of this human-made building were being called home. Things -- who knows what -- were living in the walls. Centipedes and spiders had started colonies. Part of me felt bad about cleaning it all out -- the part that liked the idea of nature fighting back and reclaiming what is hers.

The squirrel emerged from under the car and made its way up the driveway. I watched until I could only see the tip of its tail. It was gone. And then I went inside.

Yippee!

Have you ever had the experience of really needing to do something, but then you lollygag a little, and suddenly time has passed, and you haven't done that thing you really needed to do? And the more that time passes, the more you need to do it, but for some reason you just can't?

And you look at the clock or the calendar and think to yourself, Gosh, I really need to do that; but with every passing hour or day, the task becomes increasingly impossible. So you feel guilty and possibly ashamed, and you silently berate yourself and lose sleep over that thing you need to do but haven't, and you tell yourself, Other people don't have this problem, other people are responsible.

Or maybe that's just me.

I approach procrastination as if it were a contact sport -- one that requires years of practice and knee pads and is rewarded in the end with trophies and cash endorsements. I usually procrastinate over the rather mundane, like doing the laundry or writing thank you notes. But every now and then, I play in the big league and partake in the kind of procrastination that can lead to night sweats -- the kind connected to something important, something big, something that involves other people or big future dreams.

I have neglected finishing a Very Important Document (read: book proposal) for three months. I often would wake up sometime before 2 a.m. and silently fret, then promise myself that tomorrow I would finish it. I am very happy to report (not that this means anything to anyone but me) that just a few minutes ago, I finally -- yes indeedy -- finished the stinkin' Very Important Document and sent it off to The Agent. It needs more work, but at least it's no longer sitting on my desk, giving me the evil eye.

This is reason to celebrate. I think I'll put off starting on my taxes and instead relax with a little Law & Order that just arrived from Netflix...

Daughters

For a variety of reasons that aren't important to this post, I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton for President. I find her pretty uninspiring, and I don't think political dynasties so overtly displayed are in the best interest of our country.

But last night I was reading JK's Newsweek, and a little blurb caught my attention. It was part of an odd feature Newsweek recently added, called "Soundbytes", where, in an apparent attempt by to seem more multimedia, the magazine displays freeze-frame photographs and quotes from three commercials and Internet videos.

The last of the three, there on the bottom-right corner of page 27, was a still-shot from a Hillary for President ad, showing Hillary and her mother leaning in together behind a small table donned with cups of tea. Below the picture were these words:

"I think she ought to be elected, even if she weren't my daughter."
Would-be First Mother Dorothy Rodham, in a new Clinton campaign ad in which she explains why her daughter, Hillary, should be president.

The last 10 or so words caught me. Yes, Hillary Clinton is a woman. And yes, Hillary Clinton has a mother. Neither of these facts ought to garner Clinton any votes purely on their own. But here is another fact: Generations of little girl children have known that only little boys grow up to be president.

Now, thanks to Hillary Clinton (and the fact that Americans are beginning to realize that the possession of ovaries doesn't immediately negate one's ability to lead), we've suddenly been ushered into an age where someone can speak in the national media about why their daughter should be president, and that person is taken seriously. I think that's pretty damn cool.

The Office

JK and I indulged in an evening-long marathon of the British version of The Office last night. After the third episode, I started feeling a little funny. I began almost dreading the next one.

The show is well-written and smartly acted. The humor -- much of which involves male characters making off-color remarks and gestures directed at female co-workers -- makes us cringe and squirm so much that we almost have to laugh. I laughed. But after a while, I realized I was doing more cringing than laughing.

The writers' portrayal of workplace sexual harassment supposedly illuminates the absurdity of this behavior. That's why we think it's funny. The show doesn't require us to accept the idea that sexual harassment is acceptable in order to laugh at it -- quite the opposite, really. We're not exactly encouraged to identify with the guys tossing around the off-color jokes and ogling their female co-workers.

But we also laugh because workplace harassment (of women) is familiar. It's expected. The show draws its humor, in part, on our collective understanding that this kind of environment is a regular -- although theoretically unacceptable -- occurrence in the lives of many women.

I usually think smart, ironic humor is a good way to shed light on -- and even educate about -- social issues (Margaret Cho and Chris Rock are sometimes good examples of this; Sarah Silverman, in my opinion, is not). But every now and then, I wonder whether the "smart, ironic" part is just a cover that allows people who are usually male to get away with stupid, sexist jokes that otherwise might be considered tasteless.

I don't blame all individual men for the existence of sexism. But I do think that adults with Y chromosomes tend to be a little more comfortable laughing outright at an expression of sexism without any pause to consider its real-life origins or implications.

After six episodes of The Office last night, I suggested we call it quits. "Are you getting bored?" JK asked.

"No," I said, "honestly, I'm just kind of tired of the harassment humor. It's getting a little old."

He had no idea what I was talking about. Sure, he noticed the jokes, but he was able to watch them purely through the lens of humor. He didn't cringe every time a new character who shared his gender walked onto the screen, knowing full well they were about to experience a barrage of behavior meant to humiliate them.

Sexism -- and sexual harassment in workplaces and schools -- is still a real problem. And I think humor can play a part in addressing it. But at the end of the day, there are countless other things I'd rather be laughing at.

7.

The first winter I lived in Maine, my roommate and I didn't own a car. So KL and I walked everywhere -- up the hill to the laundromat, up the hill to work, up the hill to the coffee shop or the diner or the bar.

In the middle of the town where we lived was a very tall bank. On top of the bank was a giant digital sign that alternately flashed the current time and temperature and could be seen for miles around.

One morning in mid-January, KL and I were trudging across a recently plowed sidewalk on our way to Marcy's Diner, where we liked to get egg sandwiches and coffee on Sunday mornings, and because the booths were smacked up against the open kitchen, so it was about the warmest place in town.

On our way, one of us glanced up. "It's SEVEN degrees!" we said.

We had never knowingly experienced seven before. One of us is from Texas (me), and the other is from Maryland.

"No wonder we're freezing," we said.

Ever since then, seven degrees has marked a dividing line for me. Warmer than seven=fine. Colder than seven, and I can no longer distinguish between one temperature and another, so it might as well be -15.

So I grew a little uneasy when Joe woke me up this morning with the following announcement, delivered with a mix of awe and alarm: "It's negative-eight out there!"

I recalled my friend BJ, who grew up in North Dakota and once said it could get so cold that your eyeballs were at risk of freezing. I thought about calling her, and asking if she'd been speaking in hyperbole, or if I should consider purchasing goggles.

But when we went outside, it didn't feel so bad. "This doesn't feel any colder than yesterday," I said, pulling my scarf a little tighter.

And so now I'm reconsidering seven's bad reputation. It wasn't seven's fault that my first Maine winter was borderline miserable. It was the fact that I hadn't yet developed a full appreciation for wool.

I grew to love the constant presence of snow, and the ritual of donning ten layers of clothing just to run to the grocery store, and the sound of ice under my boots. I loved that when it reached 35 degrees, it felt too hot for a winter coat. And I loved the first day of the year when the Time & Temp building flashed 50 degrees: All of sudden, people stripped off their jackets and outer layers to expose their flesh to the elements for the first time in five months. Total liberation.

I think I should call KL and tell her I might be changing my mind. "Seven's not so bad," I'll say. "It's just misunderstood."

Sigh.

I am about to become the kind of person who does this to their animal. And I am sorry. If you see us walking down the street, please don't point your finger, or snicker, or say to the person walking next to you, "Oh my god, can you believe that?! Some people are so ridiculous."

Because that's what I say. And if I do this, I won't be able to say it anymore. And I will want you to refrain out of sympathy.

It's not that I care about what other people think. I care about what I think. And these violate my sense of what is right and wrong. Buying them -- and then admitting that I bought them, through the act of using them -- will mean I'm no longer privy to the jokes I once made about People Like That.

Admittedly, this is a far cry from a diamond-encrusted water bowl, or a facial at the doggie day spa. But it's a little more than I feel comfortable with, in the let's-personify-our-pets department. It means I'm contributing even more towards the $40 billion a year that Americans spend on their pets (seriously, people, we could feed a small nation with that).

This almost crossed the line for me --


-- but not quite. It's not like my dog wears his Christmas outfit (which is more of a plaid collar ringed with jingle bells) in public, or anything. Or for more than one day out of the year.

These are different. These are about as public as it gets.

But dude, the dog's feet are frozen. We can't walk the two blocks to the video store without him crying in the middle of the sidewalk. So I figure this is better than that.

Addendum. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. If you, dear friend, put boots on your dog in the winter, whether you live in Alaska or Alabama, I still love you. And no, I've never pointed at you and laughed. Honest. Oh, that time? No, I wasn't laughing at you. I was laughing at, um, that mime, you know, the mime who lives across the street and happened to be practicing his Britney Spears impersonation in his front yard. Seriously!

The Gross Post

I have something to say; and frankly, I'm going to be a little graphic.

We got adopted by a cat last month:

Being a two-pet family has its perks: In the winter, it keeps the bed a few degrees warmer. And plus, cats don't beg for walks or table scraps, so it's twice the animal-fun without double the guilt-trips.

And yet, despite the domesticated bliss, we've been having a problem lately. And to be honest with you, it's growing a bit untenable.

The worst thing about having a cat is the cat shit. And the worst thing about the cat shit is that the dog loves to eat it.

So far, our solution has been to block the entrance to the hallway with a baby gate, leaving enough space for the cat to slither through to reach her cat box.

This means that every time one of us needs to get to the bedroom or the front door or the linen cabinet, we're forced to hurdle, straddle or trip over the damn gate. And at least once an hour, I stop whatever I'm doing, stricken with panic that one of us forgot to replace the gate just so.

One afternoon, I realize I haven't seen the dog in a while. I find him in the hallway, with his face coated in litter-crumbs, eating away like it was an all-you-can-eat buffet. Before I can open my mouth to holler, "you dirty-mouthed sack of bones!", his eyes widen and he primly sits down. Then he glances around, as if to see who on earth could have caused such a mess.

The cat poop thing would merely be disgusting, if it also didn't come sprinkled with hearty amounts of litter, which, apparently, can harden into clumps in a dog's intestines and require surgery to remove. So, after dragging him into the kitchen while repeatedly shouting "bad dog!", I call the vet's office.

"My dog ate a bunch of cat litter," I say.

"How much," asks the receptionist.

"I don't know," I say. "He wasn't just eating it like a little appetizer. It was definitely more bottomless bowl, if you know what I mean."

To this, there is silence.

"So, um, maybe a few cups," I guess.

"Lemme get the doctor," she says.

A few seconds later, the doctor comes on the phone. She sounds alarmed and asks me to bring him in immediately, so they can pump his stomach. Can't I do that at home, I ask, to which she sounds a little disappointed. Yes, she says, just give him some hydrogen peroxide. It should do the trick in about 15 minutes.

"This is your own fault," I tell the dog, a few minutes later. "But I'm still sorry for what I'm about to do."

Pinning him to the linoleum floor, I force-feed him 50 milliliters of hydrogen peroxide with Joe's stainless steel turkey baster. He gurgles a lot of it up in a spray of white foam, and then looks at me as if I just stepped on his tail on purpose. Poor guy. I will only say that what happened next was truly, insanely gross, and that now I feel a few steps closer to being ready for human parenthood, if ever that should happen.

In a non-icky-bodily-fluids kind of way, the two-animal family seems to share yet another similarity to parenthood. Every time I play with the cat, I feel guilty. I worry I'm hurting the dog's feelings. I worry he's keeping track of who gets what attention.

After all, he was here first.

Is this how parents feel when they bring home a second kid? Is this how my parents felt? Did they overcompensate somehow, and that's why I'm a little screwed up? Am I screwing up my dog, in a vicious, never-ending cycle?

So far, we have yet to repeat the turkey baster episode. And the dog has only managed a small swipe or two at the cat box. I'm hoping he's learned his lesson. But if he really is keeping score, I suspect I know how he'll act out.

Snow

It snowed here over the weekend. Bucketfuls. Three days earlier, Joe emailed me the forecast: "Up to five inches! The high tonight is 14!! 32 on Saturday!!"

I've been getting a lot of emails like this from Joe lately. Until a few months ago, the northernmost place he ever lived was North Carolina. He checks the weather report every hour; the first thing he says to me in the morning is, "What's the temperature outside?"

So we knew well in advance of the storm that we needed to prepare. For example, we bought a shovel. Being Southerners, we also thought we should head to the grocery store with a U-Haul and stock up on necessities, like bread and bottled water and batteries and those weird vegetarian versions of Vienna Sausages.

The store was surprisingly not busy. We must have beat the rush, we said. We smirked as we drove away, pitying the poor people who waited until the last minute. Ha! We could handle this northern-living stuff, no problem.

A couple of days before the snow came, Joe asked his co-workers if they were ready.

"Ready for what?" they said.

"The snow," Joe said.

"What do you mean?" they said. Now they were looking at him as if he'd forgotten to wear pants that morning.

Hmmm, we said to each other later than night, eyeing the bags of candles and canned goods in the corrner.

On Sunday, we woke to find the car and the house and mostly everything else buried under several inches of snow and ice. Joe immediately grabbed the shovel and ran out the front door, while I shouldered the burden and made coffee in my pajamas. When I stepped outside to ferry him a cup of coffee, I found him banging the edge of the shovel into the top of the concrete porch steps. The sound ricocheted off the porch and filled the block with a very annoying clanking. A couple of dogs started howling nearby.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Getting rid of this ice," Joe said.

"I think we should have bought salt for that," I said.

He paused for a second and looked up, with that look on his face that usually precedes a Very Good Idea.

"I have a very good idea!" he exclaimed. "Listen. There's a box of canning salt in the kitchen, on the bottom shelf. I need you to bring it to me."

Now, canning salt doesn't look a whole lot different than table salt. It's a hint grainier, but still not as coarse as, say, sea salt. And it's definitely not the same thing that the city trucks spread all over the roads to make them drivable.

But I just shrugged, glanced at him suspiciously and then retrieved the box from the kitchen (wondering, on the way, why on earth we owned canning salt in the first place).

Back outside, I handed the box to Joe and then looked around. Across the street, a man with an industrial snow-blower was clearing his driveway. The guys in the street digging out their cars weren't even wearing coats. And now, in front of the whole neighborhood, we were about to use a puny box of kitchen salt to try to remove a 2-inch sheet of ice from our front steps. And everyone would laugh at us, and realize that we have no idea what we're doing.

So, instead of being a Very Good Girlfriend, I went inside and watched from behind the mini blinds.

But, it turned out the canning salt kind of worked.

"Wasn't that a great idea?" Joe asked, when I tentatively stepped back outside. "Now," he said, "let's go do your car."

My car was at the curb, under a big snowdrift. Joe shoveled, and I steered. Or, I sat in the driver's seat and moved the steering wheel, but nothing happened.

"Hit the gas!" he yelled.

"I am!" I yelled back. "I don't think you shoveled it right!" A big mountain of snow was blocking my left tire. Eventually, I got the car to back up at an angle, with its butt smacked against the curb and its front dangling into traffic. But then it wouldn't budge.

"Need some help?" The sound of the voice made me wince, because it belonged to our next-door neighbor. The guy I don't like. The one who oozes smarm and smells like stale cigarettes and stole our parking space when we moved here. Great.

But Joe said, "yes, please!" because, unlike me, Joe is the kind of person who values people for their strengths.

So the guy pushed. And then his wife came out, and she pushed. And then, suddenly, like giving birth, my car popped out of the ice and into the road.

As I drove off in search of a cleared parking space, I almost didn't look back, but then I did. And our neighbors were standing on the sidewalk, waving.

Wow. They must've gotten lots of emails.

This just in from The New York Times. Good job, Verizon. Now, if we can just get the government to stop spying us...

SHAME on Verizon

In a brainless move, Verizon Wireless has taken up the mantle of Big Brother, deciding to police the political actions of its customers.

When NARAL Pro-Choice America, a national pro-choice advocacy group, asked Verizon to let its customers participate in the group's texting program, Verizon refused, claiming NARAL was too "controversial" and "unsavory" for its business. (NARAL's program allows cell phone users to sign up for legislative updates via text message, by sending a message to a five-digit number known as a "short code".) All other major wireless carriers have signed on.

Apparently, if Verizon doesn't approve of the content of a text message, company policy allows them not to send it.

“No company should be allowed to censor the message we want to send to people who have asked us to send it to them,” said Nancy Keenan,NARAL's president, in today's New York Times. “Regardless of people’s political views, Verizon customers should decide what action to take on their phones. Why does Verizon get to make that choice for them?”

If you find this at all disturbing, you can do something about it. NARAL's website provides this nifty form you can use to send Verizon an email, telling them exactly what you think.

Day Two

What do you wear when you're about to meet a retired beauty queen?

In the living room of our friend JM's house, I dug through my duffel bag. My wrinkled road-trip clothes seemed hardly worthy of meeting someone who almost became Miss America. I couldn't wear anything too old, or anything mismatched, or anything with holes in it. Because she might not talk to us. She might look out her peephole and think we were a couple of hitchhikers looking for a place to use the bathroom.

It had to be over 90 degrees outside, so I needed to balance looking somewhat adult with not being miserably hot on the way there. I finally settled on a pair of not-too-stained khakis and a yellow tank top. This would have to do.

Sarah and I left Des Moines around noon. This would put us in Elwood by 2:30, solidly after church hour, when Darcy Benton and her family were sure to be home.

We had a list of questions to answer: How had winning Miss Iowa changed Darcy's life? What did she do now? How did she feel about being the most famous person in town? How did she fit -- or break -- the stereotypes of being a beauty queen?

About halfway there, I turned to Sarah with a start.

"What if she doesn't live there anymore!" I said.

Somehow, this idea hadn't occurred to us.

We looked at the digital picture of the town's welcome sign that we had taken the day before: "'Home of Darcy Benton, Miss Iowa 1986,'" I read aloud. "So either she lives there now, or she was just born there."

We recalled how paint-peeled the sign had been, and how old-looking, and kept driving.

Just west of Davenport, we exited I-80 onto a small country road heading north. We drove through Dixon and Wheatland and Toronto, and past miles and miles of corn. The road narrowed and curved, and in a town called Lost Nation, we turned right, onto county road 136. We had been here before, the road that led to Elwood.

Day One

We are about to eat greasy biscuits and eggs at a diner in Des Moines before we hit the highway, curling east from this city through miles of cornfields and big blue sky.

Yesterday, my friend Sarah and I drove west from Madison, WI, to Des Moines to see an old friend. Today we backtrack, heading east for a three-day drive to Vermont. But before we leave Iowa, we have a beauty queen to track down.

Some back story: Sarah wants to go to a radio conference in Chicago later this year. They're paying the airfare and waiving the conference fees for the person who submits the best three-minute audio piece inspired by one of the following subjects: a package of mouse traps, a bike horn, or the quote, "Well-behaved women rarely make history."

We were brainstorming ideas while we drove yesterday, somewhere in eastern Iowa, when we missed a turn. We didn't realizing it right away, so we had to navigate some very small roads that cut through even smaller towns, to get back to the highway.

One of those small towns was a town called Elwood. And at the entrance to Elwood stood a sign facing the main road that said, "Welcome to Elwood! Home of Darcy Benton, Miss Iowa 1986."

And we thought, well, Darcy Benton apparently made history (at least in Elwood) -- wonder if she's well-behaved?

So today, we're retracing our steps to find Darcy Benton.

Vacation

Rage Is Good is taking a vacation.

We are heading south, to the desert, and yes we know it's summer, but we have a dear friend who's in need of a little rage right now. And also we are packing plenty of sunscreen.

We'll be back next week, although we may be a little distracted by the book that will be waiting for us when we return, and finding out whether Harry will, in fact, die. (She wouldn't do that, she wouldn't, she couldn't...)

In the meantime, check out the Top 20 Protest Songs that Mattered, over at Spinner.com. (You can listen to them for free, which is groovy.)

p.s. Michael Moore announced this morning that Sicko hits 500 new theaters this weekend, so if you haven't seen it yet, go! (SM, it's even coming to Waco. Now I know there must be a god.)

The Post I'm Not Going to Write

I can't even talk about the Michael Vick thing. I can't talk about dog fighting. I can't even make myself go to the CNN website and link to the story. So you'll have to Google it, if you don't know about it already.

I got this email from J yesterday:

"C, I love you. And because I love you, I need to ask a favor--"

(at this point I'm thinking, what?! did I leave wet towels on the floor? But very quickly, my defensiveness gave way to devoted relief.)

"--You probably don't know about this news story yet, but it has the legs to catapult from the Sports page to the Front page. The particulars concern one of the best pro football players in the game today, Michael Vick, and charges brought against him for dog fighting. You may be tempted to know the details. Please don't read anything about it. I love you."

This is the nicest thing anyone has done for me all month.

I avoided every news website for the rest of the day and was very thankful that we don't have a television that works. And so, because I didn't actually read any of the coverage, I can't tell you exactly what I think about this story, except that I think Vick is less than human.

Because hurting a person at least involves emotion (rage, anger, passion, whatever), which suggests that the person doing the hurting at least retains some resemblance to an actual human being.

But this -- using all of one's spare time to set up a company that specializes in training dogs to tear each other apart, and then charging people to watch them kill each other in the name of entertainment -- isn't fueled by emotion. It's not like Vick hates dogs. He's not angry at them. He simply doesn't care.

Maybe I am a wimp. Maybe I am old-fashioned. Maybe I am a prude. I don't think violence is entertaining. I don't think watching animals pull each other's limbs off in a big concrete pit is fun.

This isn't surprising, though. We live in a world where rape is legal in many countries, and only marginally illegal in our own. We live in a country that started a war in which hundreds of thousands of civilians have died, and yet our president still doesn't seem to care. We know global warming will be one of the biggest crises in the next 50 years, yet we still buy SUVs.

We are taught from the highest levels that we don't need to care about the consequences of our actions. So we can't be surprised that some depraved football player didn't realize why it was wrong to torture a few hundred animals. It's not like he hurt anyone, after all.

Solidarity

I want to be in Alabama right now.

I want to be in Birmingham, to be exact. I woke up this morning with a knot in my stomach, the kind that means regret and unease and anxiety, and it's there because I should be in Alabama right now, but instead I'm hundreds of miles away.

Because Operation Save America has descended upon Alabama this week, in an attempt to shut down one of the last abortion clinics in the state -- "storming the gates," in their words, to "push what is left of the abortion industry into a deep grave."

I want to be with my Alabama sisters and brothers, as they fight back.

I live in a state now with a pro-choice governor and a pro-choice state senate, and my member of congress is openly gay. I live in a town where the "Christian Coalition" is considered quaint and anachronistic. I live in a town where most women my age wouldn't understand why they'd need an escort to help them get from the clinic parking lot to the front door.

The greatest gift from living in Alabama is that I no longer take any of this for granted. The stakes are clear now. The battle (and it is a battle) is no longer theoretical. People die because of this.

The anti-abortion crowd tries to distance itself from the doctor-killers, but their "mainstream" smokescreen doesn't fool us. They are willing to murder doctors, nurses, women and anyone else who gets in their way, to prove their point that abortion is murder. Somehow, in their twisted sense of logic, this makes sense.

Last year, Operation Save America tried to shut down Mississippi's last remaining abortion clinic. Yes, just one, in the entire state. But they failed. When more pro-choice supporters showed up for a counter-protest, anti-choicers responded with a bomb threat.

Obviously, they are very selective about which lives they want to save.

In 1998, a man named Eric Robert Rudolph detonated a bomb made of dynamite and nails in the doorway of the same Birmingham abortion clinic targeted this week by OSA. Rudolph's bomb killed a police officer and maimed a nurse. The OSA siege in Birmingham this week happens to coincide with the anniversary of Rudolph's court sentencing. This is not an accident.

Chances are, pro-choice demonstrators will outnumber OSA's "army" in Birmingham, just like they did last summer in Mississippi. But I don't want to be there because I think the movement needs me.

I want to be in Alabama right now, standing silent, arms linked, forming a human-chain safe zone around the clinic to keep it open during the so-called "siege", because that's the only sane response to OSA's insanity.


(87% of all US counties do not have an abortion provider. If you have the resources to do so, please consider helping to make sure Birmingham/Jefferson County isn't one of them.)

Oh. My. God. Your single-payer health care is HOT.

So, I'm sitting at this community forum about the movie "Sicko" the other night -- in the cramped and kind of hot backroom of a hippie coffee shop down the street -- and I'm listening to a bunch of people go on and on and on about the horrible problems with our health care system (yes, it's horrible!), and how medical bills account for half of all bankruptcies and are the #1 cause of homelessness (yes - outrageous!), and how the whole industry is set up solely to deny care and make tons of money (ditto, and ditto!).

And the whole time I'm sitting there, I'm thinking, "Yes, yes, and yes. But how can we make health care reform sexy?"

Because that, to me, is the real question.

Because real Americans vote when something gets them excited enough to turn off American Idol and get down to the polls. And real Americans like sex appeal.

Because we would totally have affordable, accessible health care by now if, say, Paris Hilton or Brad Pitt refused to take their clothes off on camera until congress passed it. The U.S., it seems, is tired of hearing the same ol' shtick -- it's like one big, collective, "Yes! We know already! Some people have to choose between buying food and buying medicine -- we get it!" (And the silent second half of that response: "And we don't really care!")

Because if we did care, god (or goddess) knows, we'd've taken notice of all the poor people and homeless people and skyrocketing medical bills crippling the middle class.

But we didn't.

Instead, Larry King dumped Michael Moore for Paris Hilton, because Larry knows that more people wanted to listen to her attempt to speak in complete sentences than be forced to listen to something depressing and boring like the problems with health insurance companies (even though the movie was riotously funny in parts, but maybe didn't Larry have time to watch).

But what Larry didn't know is that health care reform can totally be sexy. We can have national slogans like, "Nobody comes between me and my low-cost prescriptions," or, "Is that a national insurance card in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" or, "Single-payer health care is for lovers."

I think this could work.

Somebody call Paris. I have a proposition to make.

aura-tastic

TK: "we worked on our auras today. i feel like a million bucks."

me: "great! i mean, not that i think your aura needed a face lift. i thought it was perfectly attractive as-is."

TK: "heh."

me: "out of curiosity, how exactly does one 'work on' one's aura?"

TK: "i'm not telling. it's a secret for the yoga sisterhood. you have to join the club first."

me: "alack! now i need to know."

TK: "no really, i'm not telling."