The bathroom in my office building

My confessions, musings and memories about public bathrooms, in no particular order:

1. I have never been able to defecate in a public bathroom when anyone else was present. The fact that every single one of the nigh 7,000,000,000 humans on the planet performs this bodily function, every day, sometimes more than once, does not apply in the slightest. The public bathroom is the site of a rare puncture of the veneer of civilization that rests so delicately upon us Americans. (I have no idea if it's the same way in other places of the world.) I can pee freely ("Hello? may I speak to Mr. I. P. Freely?" - giggles), but somehow there is conditioned shame associated with, well, as we called it as kids, "number two".

This often leads to a show-down. For instance, I'm sitting at my desk working, and I hear somebody knocking at the back door. I head to the women's bathroom in my office building, enter, and choose the second stall. (It's always the second stall; my synaesthesia has strangely mapped the five stalls as representing Monday through Friday, and it's always Tuesday for me, even though the crack between the door and the frame is widest in the Tuesday stall, and I always think someone can see me when they walk by. I use Thursday if Tuesday is taken, but never Friday, as that is for those in wheelchairs or with large jet packs or suitcases.) I realize that someone is sitting in Wednesday, right next to me. I can see her black patent leather pumps with the hideous gold buckles that remind me of clothing stores my sister drug me through when I was a child.

She might be a co-worker; then again, she might not; there's a farmer's market out on the street near our building, and it renders our bathroom a glorified indoor Porta-John for the public. It's easier if I know the person is a stranger, but not much easier. And ever since I walked in, she's been silent. I lower my garments and sit down, and wait. Nothing happens. I'll be damned if I'm going to do anything; I'll just wait for her to finish up and leave the room, and then I'll be free to do as I wish. But she's waiting, too. Nothing. Silence. No rustle of toilet paper, no click of the heel of a shoe on the tile floor. Nothing.

We have our own personal Cold War going, here in the middle of the week. But I'm a veteran, unbeknownst to her. I've held out in wars longer than this one, sometimes ten or fifteen straight minutes, an absurdly insane age of tension, racing heart, sweating palms, and shallow, noiseless breathing. I always win. And this time is no exception. She caves within two minutes and does her thing, flushes, washes her hands, checks her make-up in the mirror over the sink, brushes at her eyebrows and bangs a few times, and clicks across the room and out the door. I go so far as to listen for shoes clicking away down the hall, fading into quiet assurance that she hasn't stayed at the door to listen as an act of purest spite. And then I'm safe again, whatever primal instinct pertains assuaged.


2. When I was a teenager, I heard a joke on Prairie Home Companion and tried to retell it to some friends. You know the one about the bear warnings. Only instead of "smells" I accidentally said "tastes", and earned my daily dose of humiliation.


3. I often wonder how, exactly, being a closely-watched public figure, Senator Craig learned the system of hand signals under bathroom stalls that signify that the occupant is interested in finding a partner for sex. At the time he was caught and arrested, was he old-hat with the process, or was this a fumbling first time that he totally screwed up?


4. They say that a public toilet is cleaner than the top of your desk.


5. On two separate occasions in the 1980's, my grandmother exited the bathroom at church with her slip and skirt tucked into the back of her pantyhose.


6. In the Tuesday stall, there is a series of strange sort of V-ish shaped markings from a black magic marker on the stainless steel plate above the toilet paper holder. There are a lot of them; it took some time. So I'm imagining which 10-year-old girl sat there years and years ago, swinging her legs, taking her time, inflicting her indelible art on the stall for future generations.


7. I now rate the bathrooms at restaurants, hotels, malls and stores based on exactly two criteria: one, whether the hand soap is that nasty pink or green industrial-smelling stuff or nice, pleasant-smelling foam; and two, whether there are paper towels available instead of some stupid air-dryer.


8. The one thing more disconcerting than a silent co-occupant in a public bathroom is a co-occupant who is talking loudly and obliviously on a cell phone while doing things that simply should not be conveyed to another human being via cellular waves.


9. I can think of eleven different times I've run to a public bathroom to have a good cry. Sometimes, they're havens.


10. My aunt lives in a nice, new house in a nice, new, shiny and soulless subdivision. When it was built, they included one of those water-saver toilets. Fuck that shit, no pun intended. I like the toilets in public bathrooms, the ones that go "WHOOOOSH" and, in three seconds flat, completely eradicate the highest volume of whatever you care to throw at them. Not included are the public toilets with computerized sensors, found far too often now in interstate rest areas and Hardee's, among other places. It's too startling to stand up and start pulling up your drawers and then hear a sudden, loud "woosh" behind you. It feels like being told to move along, next, hurry up, next please, get out. Effing martinet toilets.

Fallout ....

I completely blew it with my son this morning.

I spent the entire drive to work after leaving him at gymnastics camp contemplating the various neuroses I had just created with my words and behavior, the possible explanations I will have when he's in his 30's and comes to me wanting to know why I made him feel wrong for wanting to be near me. He clung to me and wouldn't let go, wouldn't let me turn and leave, wouldn't accept any comforting suggestions or pleas for bravery and understanding. He's five. He wanted his mother, end of story. I lost patience and became angry with him. "Get *in* there, NOW," I said under my breath. He scowled and clung harder. I counted to three, and he burst into tears, caught between a conditioned response of obedience and his emotional distress. I reacted to this dilemma by angrily taking his hand and "marching" him back to the room where the teacher was and leaving him with her. She took the cue and began her miraculous distraction techniques, but only after I'd turned and left in the wake of my son's grief and sense of betrayal.

Go, me. I can think of many occasions on which I've shaken my head in disbelief at the bad parenting the above represented when I've seen or read about other moms doing it.

I don't get separation anxiety. I didn't have it myself, because I didn't have proper attachment in childhood. Ironically, his exists because I've parented well and he's securely attached. Where, then, is the purported security and independence that all the books say will result? This is rare for him .... happens maybe once every two or three weeks at the most.

My sentences are disjointed now, choppy, out of harmony. Already the voices I've internalized from loved ones come flooding in .... "it's just one day, he'll forget all about it" .... "it's necessary for him to learn to detach, and you're not doing him any favors by keeping him from learning to deal with pain" .... "you're a good mother, you didn't do anything wrong, we're all human" ....

I'm staring up at the pictures he's drawn for me that I have taped up on the wall behind my desk. "Dear Mommy, For Chrismas Im going to give you four pairs of skats." "Don't kill this cetupeade its freindly and not psn." "Dear Santa, For Chrismas Im going to get a camra, a computer, a clone trooper costum a clone trooper blaster toy." "Dear Mommy, thank you for playing with me."

Cool music

Music is in my blood. My parents were in a band that played night clubs on the weekends and practiced in our house on Wednesdays. There was always a van full of microphones and amps and other band equipment parked in our driveway, off to the side. It seemed natural to me that my father should know how to play an electric guitar, my mother a bass and a keyboard, and that they should both sing, and both have the capability to listen to a 45 record a few times and then turn around and perform the song "by ear". The band played country music and what my father termed "top-40". My response during their rehearsals was almost always putting my hands over my ears. Ironically, I went on to sing back-up a few times on some rather country-sounding songs written by my favorite Americana/folk singer-songwriter, during her concerts. I suppose this counts as repentance. But my true passion turned out to be classical music.

Fastforward 25 years.

When I picked up my son from his dad's house last night, he climbed into the car and immediately said, "Aw, man, this is Beethoven again," and put his hands over his ears. I had the fourth movement of the 9th playing in the car -- we're performing it with the symphony here this weekend, and it's all that's in my head from dawn till dusk. My son has decided that he doesn't like this particular piece. I finally yielded and turned it off. My son asked if the symphony ever did any "cool" music, and it was all I could do to keep from turning around and shouting, "What do you MEAN, cool music? This is cool music! It's all cool music!"

My son is spoiled in this regard; the symphony performed a tribute to John Williams a few years ago, and with it, hosted a cast of Star Wars characters in costume. Poor Beethoven just doesn't measure up, in light of that. He's old hat.

I suggested that maybe, just maybe, someday, they'd work up a performance around the Lord of the Rings score in a well-deserved tribute to Howard Shore. My son liked that idea, but said, "Mommy, if they do that, you won't sing in it, because it doesn't have any singing parts." "Are you kidding?" I put on my best choir-boy voice and sang the part that accompanies Gollum's final acquisition of the One Ring inside Mount Doom. His jaw nearly hit the floorboard. "That would be cool," he said, in awe.

I am going to make a music fan of him yet.

I told him that his grandfather taught me to read music when I was his age, five-but-almost-six. And I hinted strongly that it was time for him to learn, too. He said, "But I already know how, because we learned it at school. I know about the one where you put a line and then a flag at the top, and half notes, and whole notes." "Yes," I said, "there are two parts to it, and that's one of the parts, so it's great that you know that. The other part is learning where the notes hang on those lines, because that tells you how high or low the sound is that you need to make when you're singing or playing an instrument." He seemed interested, so I intend to seize on that acquiescence immediately.

Reading music has been such a gift .... it's the one part of my church-borne childhood that I do not resent now. My father sat me down at a piano when I was 5 and taught me to play a few church hymns, and I took to it immediately. I had piano lessons when I was 7, and again at 14. I didn't fare too well in lessons, though, because I wanted to memorize "great works" (i.e. anything over the John Thompson's third grade level) instead of practicing the little ditties that were presented to me. I joined the church's adult choir when I was 12, and sat beside my grandmother, a proud alto. The easy reading I learned there helped me survive in a college course five years later, when we studied Handel's Messiah, which I found more difficult but rich. And that experience enabled me to sing in community chorales and such for years, until I found the symphony chorale here. Having experienced the intense joy of singing with a live orchestra, I can honestly say that I have never had, and never will have, a greater "high".

Freude!

It was quiet. Too quiet.

It's May 3rd. The count to date is 9.

We ordered Talstar© and my partner has deployed it around the perimeter of the house and, by tomorrow afternoon, will have sprayed every inch of room perimeter and wall indoors. This stuff is supposed to be "all that" where these little fuckers are concerned. She is my heroine.

Me? Oh, I'm fine. I'm writing from my bed, which I have turned into an island of safety by pulling the bed away from the wall and spraying the four feet so that nothing can crawl up. I've spent a good deal of time up here today; each time a centipede would spring out at me from under or behind something, I would experience exponentially increased trauma and run for the bed, for higher ground. The 9th one found me sobbing and clutching at the covers, hyperventilating and then falling asleep for an hour.

Heavily drugged now, to sleep, perchance to avoid all dreams and instead sleep the sleep of victory.

Two sides of the spring coin

It's late March; May is looming.

Today, we have every door and window flung wide, creating a cross-ventilated house full of spring air (sans pollen and insects) and the sense that Nature has meekly come to apologize for the harshness of winter, and bowed its head, and nuzzled, and we've made amends and invited it in. We're taking advantage of the forecast of days of sun to clean out the garage, which requires dragging a good many things out into the driveway, in the way that one works one of those cheap plastic puzzles where there is exactly one missing square and you have to shift the other squares around to put the numbers in order.

A breeze occasionally drifts in, toys with papers on the kitchen counter, exits and goes off to some other place.

Turn over the coin, and you see the mild but very real bit of PTSD that my partner and I share, viscerally written into our brain stems, that the arrival of spring triggers. It was difficult to be complacent throughout the winter; one cannot feel fully safe when one knows that the reprieve one clings to is, alas, destined to be temporary. Spring would come; spring has come. And soon, they'll be here: the centipedes and the woods roaches.

If, a year ago, you had told me that there were flying roaches, I would have assumed that you had either visited an island spotted in the Indian Ocean, or had been reading just a little too much Stephen King of late. And then, there they were: flitting about our porch lights like hyper moths, crawling on our screens, attracted to light, trying to find a way into our house, thinking that this was the place where they really, really wanted to mate with the female woods roaches that surely must be hiding in every crack of light. Our house is in the woods, in a moderate climate; my previous home was in the downtown of a city. I simply did not know what to expect. I didn't realize that there were swarms of these in forests, that sometimes people drive cars through those forests and find themselves in a cloud of brown.

Of course, the one thing that eats roaches (and most other crawling things) is the house centipede. They're like the goats of the Myriapod kingdom. There are people (if they deserve the title, let alone the implication of sanity by absence of mention) in this world who actually advocate keeping centipedes around for just this reason. They would expect us to run out and get one, give it a tiny leash made of the finest silken threads and a little bowl with its name written in gold cursive laminate on the side, into which we would place the occasional squashed bug, and rejoice.

Have you ever seen one of these things move? I'm not talking about the considerable speed; that's a side issue, as I usually feel that they cannot run away fast enough for my taste and therefore applaud the rapidity of their hoped-for disappearance. I'm talking about the creepy-nasty-horror-film motion of their legs, legs which seem to sprout in a radius from every part of their elongated little torsos, so that they resemble rogue paramecia, magnified 40,000X.

My partner had one wake her up by crawling on her head last summer. Yes, that's right, that little tickle that just brushed the tender bit of your face near your eyes was not a stray hair, dear. It was a tiny alien body that happens to be poisonous.

We didn't go back to sleep after that. It was 2 a.m., and we lay wide-eyed for the rest of the night, lights on, jumping at every tiny noise, watching, twitching, waiting. Phobias are not rational, and we were not rational beings that night. We were traumatized beings.

The roaches come in May and go away sometime in early July. The centipedes seem to hang around forever, although the cold months seem to have eradicated them, save the one that sprang out of the bathroom trash can and surprised me one evening in January. My son saw me in war mode that night, with a shoe in one hand and a can of poison spray in the other, standing with one foot on the toilet and one foot on the side of the bathtub, wide-eyed, pupils dilated, nostrils flared, breathing hard, shouting things like "COME ON, YOU LITTLE BASTARD, BRING IT ON!" (In no way am I proud of this.)

And so, in the moments when we have surfaced from mutual denial and faced the fact of spring and its imminence, we have planned, and executed some of those plans. We had screens put on the windows of the house, and caulked thoroughly around them and rendered them impenetrable. We finished the basement and sprayed all kinds of foam and what-not in spaces, sealed off this and that, and caulked like mad-women.

The breeze today is invigorating; the congeniality of early spring is more precious to me than you know. It is the calm before the storm, and, because I must, I welcome it.

Grammatical pedantry

I just finished reading exactly one page of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, and already I feel that I have a long-lost compatriot in the faith, a friend significant enough to shore up the few of us stragglers here and give us a voice stronger than our daily mumbling meekness and socially conditioned self-despise for being grammatically superior -- and knowing it.

How to plunge into 2009

If it's not the "century of peace," then I'm determined to at least make 2009 the "year of peace." I've had enough divorce, moving and upheaval to tide me over for a while, thanks very much for asking.

Now, then, to engage in the silly act of using an arbitrarily set date to elicit a sense of the momentous, whereby one may decide one has a chance to use the perceived new beginning to evoke coincidental personal beginnings .... in other words, here's my list o' resolutions for 2009:

1. The obvious one: lose the 30 pounds I gained in 2008. For the very simple reasons that a) I'm tired of having acid reflux, backaches and insulin resistance issues and b) none of my clothes fit now and I don't have the money or patience to go out and buy new ones. This is going to have to be accomplished slowly (since I have no intention of giving up chocolate or Jeff's lasagna) by way of

2. The gym. I'm paying monthly and haven't been in ages. I'm going to go twice a week now. There's just something about paying money and not using it that drives me batshit.

3. Speech impedimentia. I'm going to look people in the eye when I pass them on the sidewalk instead of seizing up and panicking, and mumbling whatever words are appropriate ("good afternoon," "excuse me," or "how are you?") I'm also going to work on not talking so fast that no one can understand me. Snowball's chance in the flames of Hell, but it needs work.

4. Finish reading Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. I got a few chapters in when I realized that I was already so angry at this country because of the whole W thing that I couldn't take on more layers of outrage. With Obama safely in office, I can finally finish this book, I think.

5. Finally get going on a book, which will only be accomplished when I

6. Finally admit that I am not, nor will I ever be, Anne Lamott.

7. Meet all of my neighbors on my street. There are five or six houses I haven't hit yet.


With the exception of #4, I couldn't really tell you which of these is going to be the most difficult for me to undertake.