Gee, Thanks

I was waiting for Happy Mr. Pharmacy Supplier to fill a Happy Pill prescription recently, and, as though I had another reason to be thankful at that moment, I came upon a gift book ordering me to experience gratitude for 500 other things.

That’s the whole book.  It’s a list of five hundred thanks-inspiring items, and I failed to show full gratitude by paying $10.99 for it.  I did, however, stand there in the pharmacy and read it cover to cover, to judge the full extent of my apparent ungratefulness.

For starters, I am thankful that there was no one author listed on the jacket, because now I feel comfortable with letting everyone know how much it sucks.  This was a book by committee.

Not surprisingly, it also reads like the Bible of Things Guilty White People Are Supposed to Like.  YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE THANKFUL FOR THESE, DAMMIT:

• soy milk
• Oprah’s Book Club
• farmers’ markets
• brown rice
• recycling
• Bob Dylan
• trail mix
• natural food stores
• Anne Lamott books
• hyper allergenic soap
• Maya Angelous’ poetry
• NPR
• Bono
• bran

The remaining items of 500 Things To Be Thankful For were generated by hurling a dictionary against a wall and typing the first word to strike the ground:  “Guacamole!”  “Party hats!”  “Coo coo clocks!”  “Sports mascots!” What, tubas don’t get any love?  The U.S. Government Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry?

Once that well’s drawn dry, however, there’s nothing for it but to fill out the 500 with repetition.  Man, why is gratitude so haaaaaaaaard?  Probably because TV’s on a hiatus until November sweeps, and it really, really sucks, you know?

• hiking in the woods
• hiking
• a beckoning mountain trail

And:

• home gyms
• exercise DVD’s
• “There’s a lot of cool exercise equipment for the home.”

And:

• songs around a campfire
• stories around a campfire
• ghost stores around a campfire

And:

• the armed forces
• our brave men and women in the military

This last one, I can’t get to pissed about, because if anything deserves a double mention, it’s the military.  But The Firm?  Not so much.

I grabbed my Smile Drugs and ran.  I’d need a double dose today, having realized that we living in a society in which someone decided that we needed to be reminded for all we have… and then couldn’t think of enough of them.

grateful for The Readers, and will say so FOUR times at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Les Freres Heureux

So here’s what’s been happening in the home of Julie The Nephews Mama:

Oh sure, it looks cute.  But you’ll note that nothin’ ain’t gettin’ by Sam The Newborn Nephew. He’s got one eye on each older brother, and has probably wrapped his knuckles in foil beneath his fuzzy suit.  He’ll need it.

“It’s a baby!” Will The Smaller Child Nephew announced when Sam was first carried into the house, as though this were the first he’d heard about it.  Jim The Child Nephew, meanwhile, no fool he, is wondering just how long this is going to go on:  “Sam’s still here,” he said in dubious tones when his mother handed him the phone last week.  I tried to speak to Sam as well, but he was not receiving callers.  Will, however, was:  “HI AUNT BETH!”  he shouted into the handset.

“That’s the first time I heard him do that,” his mother reported.  “Usually he just stands there and looks at the receiver and then hands it back.”  Not a phone man, the middle child.  Probably because it’s a security risk.  He must keep his plans secret until the proper time.  I’m thinking middle school.

looming at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Padded

En route to the launchpad last week, the space shuttle Atlantis passed a gap in the pipes which line the rocky path. That space, I was told when I worked at the Kennedy Space Center, represents a phantom Mars launch complex, one planned but never built.  The closest we got was the emptiness.

I hated that gap.  But I liked knowing that it had at least been made.

Then again, there was once another place I didn’t like to look at, drive by, or even think about.  Sometimes I passed the hurriedly constructed, unmarked building where the shattered remains of Columbia were deposited:  the sturdy hoop of the airlock, singed bits of wire known only to the techs and God. Shoving our faces up against the stars—these feats of bending the great steel laws of gravity—can end this way sometimes.

Those techs are some of the very few permitted to see the orbiters with their bras off and their airframes showing.  Don’t tell Atlantis I said this, but upon close inspection, the shuttles are beaters.  Carbon scoring, replacement parts, tiny dings in the white tiles—these are the marks of working women, orbiters who have been there and seen that and really don’t need to appear on Dancing With the Stars in order to validate their existence.  Filmed from a distance of four miles away at the press stands on launch day, they are young and pristine.

And then they spit fire.  Back off.

Some tried to inch closer recently, when NASA ruined everybody’s Twitterday by hurling a bomb into the Moon, an experiment in search of water.  This was a great disappointment:  The debris plume wasn’t plumey enough.  The fire didn’t burn brightly enough.  Jon Gosselin’s face was in the way.  Booooooooo, Moonbomb.  Sometimes space travel is nasty, dirty– we have the dusty suits to prove it, the lunar soil scrubbed into the white folds of the fabric.

But the Ares I-X rocket is scheduled to launch later this month, tiny toes in the ocean of lunar exploration, and then, maybe, Mars.  It’s right next to Atlantis now, there on the launchpad.  I wonder what they talk about at night.

Perhaps it’s this national gumbo of great expectations and low self-esteem, easy government money and hard choices.  In any case, I like to think of Atlantis and Ares, present and future, side by side at their gantries, speaking of a nation– maybe bored, maybe scared, maybe weary or plain old distracted—which can’t help but hold its space program at arm’s length.

launching at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

The Third

Meet Sam The Newborn Nephew:

You will note his fashionable hat.  Note it well. It’s pretty much the closest we’ll come to playing dress-up with him for the rest of his life.  “I knew it was a Sam,” Uncle Josh The Pilot announced when I told him he had a fourth–fourth–nephew.  Mommy had a long pregnancy and an even longer labor.  She sits gingerly, and Sam, over an inch longer than either of his brothers when they were born, raises furor only when he becomes unswaddled.  That’s his biggest problem in life.  We are blessed.

I walked past the Pink Aisle today– you know the one– dress-up clothes, Barbie dolls.  The boy aisle contained things like owl puke kits and battery operated rats.  This is the aisle I was forced to stand in to find So Long To Everyone’s Attention gifts for Sam’s big brothers.

Now that Julie The Nephews Mama has hung a “closed” sign on her uterus, the only way I’ll see a descendant of ours share the girl’s high school we attended is to produce one of my own, and we all know that ain’t happening.  In the meantime, my Alumnae Endorsed Application to The Womb grows dusty.

If Sam were a girl, she was to have been named Hannah.  The little face and hair I thought she would have–her mother’s– evaporated the second Sam emerged with the ability to pee standing up.  Missing Hannah, and the appointment we were to have for a Princess Makeover at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, doesn’t mean I love Sam any less.  It just means that I sort through the trucks and cars and perhaps book a Pirate League Experience instead.

I almost took home a car track which hurls a Hot Wheels into the air, through a stream of water, and into a small plastic pool, at which point the car changes color.  This was completely awesome and horribly messy; my sister would have haaaaaaaaaaaaated it, and because I like being in her house, I left it on the shelf.

But I recognized it as fully nephew-focused, which means I might be able to maintain Christmas without plastic Dream Homes.  Just might.

“Let’s keep Sam.  I like him,” Jim The Child Nephew said as Will The Smaller Child Nephew announced, “I hug and kiss Baby Sam.”  We’re all getting used to the idea.

has his Mommy’s hair anyway at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

It’s a Colt

RACE 3
October 16, 2009
Maiden Special Weight

3 Samuel Alexander
Owners: Julie The Nephews Mama and Country The Brother-In-Law
Blonde coat, 4 hours 19 minutes old
Sire: Gregory Britton (Gregory Gerald)
Dam: Julie Ann (Melvin Ronald)
Breeder: Roman Catholic Church
Trainer In All Things Destructive and Fun: Aunt Beth
Pitocin, 9 lbs, 2 oz
Forced start;out of gate before medical assistance, hung up at the wire
Bullet Work: 3:48 PM

Truck Full of Babies

As I type this, I am suffering some cramps that pinged their way past the Advil and my post-op knee twinges every so often.  Then again, my sister is in hard labor.  (But the knee!  It twinges!  When I climb steps!)

Will The Smaller Child Nephew, as of last night, was processing his pending big brotherdom by hurling every doll baby he could find into a big plastic dump truck, then shoving the cargo around, announcing, “Truck full of babies!”  Because that’s where they come from.  The Big Yellow Dump Truck of Doom pulls up in front of the house, dispatches a baby, and suddenly you aren’t the center of attention anymore.

As for me, I went to a doctor’s appointment, ran to the grocery, and entered the gym while my sister lay in a stiff hospital bed, desperately awaiting the epidural.  I wished I had a tee shirt:  “ASK ME ABOUT MY IN-LABOR SISTER.”

This is the last time we’ll go through this, for Baby The Third is the end of the road.  I must enjoy the vicariousness whist I can.  So I’m off to drink.

pink Champagne or blue curacao? at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Beer Saves

It took about three and a half hours to get my flu shot yesterday, which would make me a disgruntled health care client indeed were thirty minutes of that not spent attempting to turn around on a highway after I overshot the sole pharmacy in town that hadn’t run out of the vaccine.  There are no shots for Failure At Life.

I signed in as thirteenth on the waiting list, and was left to sit on the floor beneath the dandruff shampoo and try to read amidst the wails of the persecuted, vaccinated children– or, I could wander the aisles worrying about my turkey.  There was a third-pound of shaved deli meat in my car, purchased three pharmacies ago, and it was quickly becoming angry at me, angry at the rising temperatures within its little bag.

As I uncovered my eyes after passing through the pressing wave of foreboding in the form of a Christmas cards display, I found myself face to face with a set of refrigerator cases.  Five dollar flavored water, and string cheese– and beer, which I was particularly glad to see, and not just for the usual reason.  This beer was in the form of cases, not bottles, and it was about to do me an enormous favor.

I left the store, merely eighth in line to be shot, and retrieved my bag o’ poultry.  It passed the remainder of the forty-five minutes  snugly tucked behind a twenty-four pack, cool and content.  As opposed to me, on the floor and awaiting a freaking shot.

the things I do for my dependents at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Dear WalMart:

The next time you want to advertise your nasty-ass store brand roller rink pizzas, you might not want to depict it in the hands of a person walking down a hallway dressed as the Grim Reaper.

7.99 at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Air Margaritaville

See this?

This is a flight strip.  In the past, air traffic controllers used them to keep track of the airplanes coming into their care.  They don’t use them much anymore.  Most air traffic facilities are entirely computer-based, rendering the flight strips obsolete.  There’s really no reason to print them out anymore, unless a controller wants to ask a question, clarify some flight information, or TAKE THE STRIP HOME TO HIS WIFE TO PROVE THAT HE FREAKING WORKED JIMMY BUFFETT’S FREAKING AIRPLANE.

A while ago, I told Josh The Pilot to watch for airplanes with tail numbers ending in “JB,” as an even more terrifying Buffett-stalker than I has cataloged all of his aircraft.  Because whenever I sit back with a couple minutes of “Boat Drinks,” all I’m thinking is, “What’s the engine thrust on Jimmy’s Dassault Falcon 900B?”

Josh The Pilot did not speak to the pilot of N908JB, but Jimmy did not crash into any other airplanes, even Captain Sully’s, which Josh’s sector also worked last week.  So between Josh working Buffett’s airplane, but not talking to him, and me being like ten feet away from Jimmy while bodyguarding his dressing room for one concert but also not talking to him, we have… we have… we have a flight strip.

Awesome.

4,080 nm at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

And Here’s to the Silver Sea

I thought I’d read everything Mark Twain ever wrote, even the horrid “I wish I could just die now so I can not meet the God that doesn’t exist” essays from the end of his life, so I was taken aback to find that I had one of his books in my possession which had heretofore gone binding-unbent.  Why hadn’t I read Letters from Hawaii?

I turned it over to study the price sticker, to perhaps locate a barcode clue, and then the postcard featuring the Hawaiian state fish fluttered to the floor.

Oh.

Letters from Hawaii was purchased at the Volcano House on the Big Island, where Twain stayed while exploring the then-Sandwich Islands.  I’d bought it while visiting there with Not-Josh, Graduate School Edition, who is a native of Hilo.

I was, at the time, very much under the impression that we were to be wed.  He was not, and told me so in an email a few weeks after I returned to the mainland.  I stashed the underwater pictures, I cried all the way through my thesis, and I shoved the book in a back corner so that I wouldn’t find it until I had formed the ability to drive past a dashboard hula girl without cringing mightily.

The slow transition to a day when I could stare at the cover with a furrowed brow instead of welling eyes took a solid decade. I read it not between fittings for a bridal gown to wear to a marriage which would have been doomed from the buffet line, but in a Beltway townhome, lying next to a sleeping man who buys the wrong kind of cottage cheese, buts cooks with it while I’m grading papers.

Sometimes the answers come from within.  So speaketh the humuhumunukunukuapuaa.

luau at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com