Hello, Failure

Failure of the Day: Escrow: The 30-Day Christmas Eve—Welcome to Day 35

2009-07-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

The appraisal guy, hereafter known as the Fucking Fuckity Fucker, just sat on the appraisal for a full seven calendar days, making it impossible to get everything done even for a June 30 closing. So, so much for moving on July 2. We re-booked the movers, and rescheduled the furniture delivery and the HOA move-in appointment for a week later. Which worked out fine for all those people; they all had the spots available in their schedules, but we still didn’t even know if the Fucking Fuckity Fucker would hold us up even longer to make even THAT moving date unworkable. Oh, and did I mention we were also waiting for biopsy results? So yeah, a nice stress-free week.

But finally, the Fucking Fuckity Fucker delivered the report, and the Best Mortgage Broker in the World hauled ass and got the loan approved and finalized the very same day. And she got a mobile notary to come to our house last night at 8 PM, and we signed every piece of paper in the universe, essentially sealing the deal, if not closing escrow quite yet. Which yes, means all this happened on the exact same day we got the biopsy result. So you think YOU had a big day? Ha Ha. It is to laugh.

We wired the money for closing this morning and now we wait for the process to play itself out. We should be owners on Tuesday. And NOW it feels close. And NOW it feels real.

Failure of the Day: Not Even About Escrow

2009-07-01T13:06:00.000-07:00

The surgery went well and easy: no pain and less memory—I recall maybe a total of four minutes of all of Friday. That Ativan is serious business.

The doctor was good to his word and showed me the mass he removed—that part I remember. It was the size and shape of a button on a very fancy little girl’s winter coat. More importantly, it is not malignant; the doc called the following Wednesday to tell me about PASH (pseudoangiomatous stromal hyperplasia), which is a lot of syllables to say fibrous lump that grows for reason we don’t understand. So yay! Another weird and rare disease that is NOT cancer, and 2 more inches of surgical scar to add to my collection. That’s 31 inches total on my torso, for those of you playing at home.

It was an interesting intellectual exercise for me, though. I would not have been sad to see my breasts ectomied clean off, and that’s a complicated thought process: is wishing for breastlessness the same as wishing for a cancer diagnosis? It took me several long days to sift out my serious desire to NOT have cancer from how tired I am of having boobs. But once I had found the distinction, I was surprised by how strong my desire for it not to be cancer was, and then I was surprised by my surprise. So I suppose we’re right back where we started: a weird girl, a weird body, and way too much thinking about both. But a happy ending, at least.

Failure of the Day: Escrow: The 30-Day Christmas Eve—Week 4

2009-06-24T10:14:00.000-07:00

There came to be some doubt over the closing date—our lender suddenly demanded a THIRD appraisal, and after some doing, it wound up happening on the 23rd, too late to make it for a closing on the 26th. We’ll now close on the 30th if all goes well. A woman I work with started her escrow a week before us and she’s now a week past her original closing date with no papers to sign yet, because her lender is making additional appraisal demands as well—it seems to be in lending zeitgeist.

But there’s a bit of lucky planning: we allowed almost a full week between the original scheduled closing date and moving day, so we can absorb some delay. Not a lot, but some. Chris did an astonishing job packing this weekend—we’re more than half packed a full 9 days until the movers are scheduled to arrive. Honestly, the amount of work he’s capable of is a little staggering.

The upcoming surgery has given me a nice bit of perspective—I don’t feel particularly nervous about the condo at all any more. We’ve received approval for literally every single other aspect of our application, and we have every single other form and piece of paperwork filed and approved and ready. It seems, I think, knock wood, that we can be delayed—but I don’t think we can be stopped from actually purchasing this condo. I think.

Failure of the Day: Escrow, Interrupted

2009-06-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

Because if you’re going to one huge life thing, you might as well do EVERY huge life thing at the exact same time. Welcome back to the tit monster, scourge of the xray, enemy to the needle. The 6-month follow-up mammogram was suspicious: Shifty eyes, bulging pockets, loitering outside of 7-11.

So even though the Christmas biopsy was negative, the mass in my left breast is larger and more defined now, and the doctors are not happy. So next up is a surgical biopsy, a minor procedure in which they will remove most if not all of the mass. They are doing the procedure on the day that escrow is scheduled to close. Because why not? It’s not like we have to plan a whole move and the largest financial transaction of our life right then or anything.

But the tit monster waits for no mortgage. So I am back to practicing my flat chest cancer routines, settling on a suitably disrespectful demeanor, and absently looking at wigs online. Never mind that no one seems particularly convinced that it’s cancer, only concerned that they don’t know what it is at all, and so, abundance of caution, etc.

Chris is a brave little toaster, glued to my side at the surgical consult and creating for us a charming visual narrative of the stalwart and extravagantly devoted husband with his caustic and loudmouth wife, all the better to win over the surgeon, who will hopefully now be less inclined to come to work drunk or suddenly dyslexic on operation day. I liked the surgeon, oddly; he winced when he crossed his legs and it reminded me of Dr House. Also he spent an HOUR with us—can you imagine? Just going over our general and local anesthesia options.

I suppose I’m as comfortable with the whole thing as possible—I’m not thrilled with the idea of the surgery, sure, but that didn’t stop me from choosing the local anesthesia because the doctor promised to show me the mass after he digs it out. And with some luck, that will be the last we hear of the tit monster.

Failure of the Day: Escrow: The 30-Day Christmas Eve—Week 3

2009-06-15T09:56:00.000-07:00

We’ve booked the movers and given notice to our now very sad landlord. We’re good, tidy tenants and no doubt in this economy he’s not going to get the rent we were paying. He’s a great landlord and it’s a great place; email me if you’re apartment hunting. I watch the Home and Garden network obsessively now because the Blooomberg channel gives me a really bad stomachache. But an otherwise very quiet week.

Failure of the Day: Escrow: The 30-Day Christmas Eve—Week 2

2009-06-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

This is the week we learned that we had missed out on the low, low interest rates that we had heard so much about. Six days before Erin submitted all our info to the lender, mortgage rates jumped by one-half to one full percentage point in a single day. Erin advised us not to lock in a rate and float a rate, betting that the markets would correct in the next several weeks.

And would you listen to me spouting off about the rates market like Michael freaking Bloomberg! And that’s because I’ve been watching the Bloomberg financial channel obsessively. I’ve never watched financial news shows before (duh) and I barely understand half of the vocabulary, but even I can tell that not a soul on the TV has any idea what’s happening or what any of us should do. They should all totally be wearing silk scarves around their heads, and we should have to slip a quarter in a slot to get them to print out their advice on little cards they spit out.

My problem is there’s nothing to DO anymore. When we got 35 emails a day keeping us appraised of our various in-progress documents, I felt busy and engaged and actively participating. Now it’s all out of hands and we can only wait. And there are a LOT of shows on the Bloomberg channel. Our condo-to-be passed both appraisals, and the loan application was submitted and we should get our approval in 7 days knock wood.

Failure of the Day: Escrow: The 30-Day Christmas Eve—Week 1

2009-06-01T09:48:00.000-07:00

So, we found a place. It’s spectacular and affordable and in the exact neighborhood where we want to be. We made an offer on Sunday and it was accepted on Monday and we opened escrow on Tuesday. That brief transaction involved more paperwork that you can possibly imagine. And it was but a small fraction of what was to come.

We spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday getting and sending emails about all manner of legal and financial minutia, and then we met with our realtor on Thursday night to sign even more documents. Later that night, we got the good faith estimate of our closing costs. Which prompted an immediate sobbing, teeth-gnashing freakout. Did you know that the line on the estimate that is called “Cash the Buyer MUST Have to Close” has absolutely nothing to do with the actual amount of cash the buyer must have to close? Yeah, me neither. Luckily, Erin, the world’s nicest mortgage broker, called us back at 9 PM (!) to talk us (me) down. All better now.

On Saturday we had a more-detailed visual inspection of the property with our realtor and the seller’s realtor. That’s when I noticed the window treatments. They are moiré silk taffeta in a dark olive green with a thin stripe of iridescent burgundy along one edge. Hanging in both the bedroom and the living room, they are exquisite. The seller’s agent told us they were custom made in Italy, and the contract we signed specified that they are included with the condo. And that’s when all the enthusiasm I’d been tempering with caution just burst right through. It’s essentially over for me. I can hold myself back quite a bit, I really can, but at this point I’m done. I am a helpless puddle in this condo’s palm. I am a gape of my own want.

On Monday we emailed and faxed one thousand financial documents to Erin, who now knows more about me than any person to whom I am related by blood. I understand that there are plenty of things that can still trip us up—the FHA is stern mistress—but everything that we can do, we have done. It’s out of our hands. It’s June 1; we are scheduled to close on June 26.

Failure of the Day: Too Much Brain on My Hands

2009-05-13T15:24:00.000-07:00

Thank god for benadryl—I’m finally getting something like enough sleep, chemically induced though it may be. And it occurs to me: I don’t handle stress well. I mean, I handle it—I don’t fall apart or go on a tri-state killing spree or eat four whole chickens at every meal. I get my work done and I continue to groom myself properly, but my emotions are not gentle really under any circumstances, any of them, and stress is a bit of an accelerant to my already emphatic predisposition.

And you know how people really need to take a vacation from their same old thoughts because distraction is the cure for obsession and depression and worry and kind of everything? Yeah, that’s not going so well for me. For example, I might actually, oddly, be on the David Letterman show at some point in the coming months. (It’s a long story; I’ll explain more if it pans out.) Ordinarily, that would be a world-class distraction, wouldn’t you think? What will I wear? How will I keep from making more of a buffoon of myself than is strictly necessary? How will I keep Chris from weeping with joy the whole time, etc. Just worrying about how fat I’ll look on TV should be enough to distract me clear through July.

But it’s not. Instead I spend all my time worried that the economic downturn isn’t affecting SOMA real estate prices as much as we need it to, and they won’t accept our lowball offers. We don’t have the answer to any of our questions yet, mostly because we haven’t found just the right realtor yet, so instead of fixating on how to make sure my hair is perfect for Dave, I obsess over new home sales data by zip code. And it’s just me, asking the same question over and over into the sacred space between my face and the monitor screen, and I don’t have any new information since the last time I asked. There’s no new answer. There’s no answer at all yet, because I have to wait. I. Have. To. Wait.

This is the second week.

Failure of the Day: Enter Sandman

2009-05-08T11:30:00.000-07:00

I have seriously never had this many people interested in discussing my needs in my entire life. People are appearing out of thin air and asking if we can discuss my needs. I get emails and phone calls daily now from people who want only to know what my needs are. I have a neurologist, a dermatologist, a gynecologist, a dentist, and an internist, and not a single one of them is 1% as interested in my needs as any given real estate agent in San Francisco.

Let me tell you what I need: Sleep.

I haven’t slept through the night since last Saturday. I thought I saw a big black bird swooping through my office two times yesterday. This is the condition in which I am supposed to make a decision that will affect the next 30 years of my life.

Thing is, I don’t feel stressed. I’m exhausted and I have what I’m pretty sure is hysterical diarrhea, but I don’t feel scared or on edge or tense. I feel like I’m thinking clearly, making fine decisions, and performing perfectly fine acts of deductive reasoning. So yeah, real estate agents, I would like to discuss my needs in more detail with the whole lot of you. But I’m not hiring any of you yet, not until I know I have to, and not until one of you strikes me in just the right way.

But seriously, did no one else see that bird? It’s gone now but it was just there.

Failure of the Day: High-Stakes Education

2009-05-07T10:15:00.000-07:00

I learned what a mortgage broker was when the lady on the phone identified herself as one. Which was just before she pre-approved us for a sum roughly 50% more than our budget. It was a science fiction sum. Isaac Asimov wrote that sum.

That was when my stomach stopped hurting for the first time in 2 days. Approval is nice. We had the stamp of productive and responsible adulthood on our foreheads. Our income and credit scores are acceptable. Now we get to shop for real.

Now I need to learn what a realtor is, and if we need one. And if it’s different than a buyer’s agent. And what short sales are and why people seem wary of TICs. On the plus side, I know what a TIC is.

I’m also having my own personal episode of Spock’s Brain—all of a sudden I forget everything the Money Grown-Up explained to us and I can’t figure out how we can afford this. My understanding just wears off and I need to get re-hooked up to the Teacher helmet. It’s something about taxes I know, but after that? Pfffft.

It wasn’t long before my stomach started hurting again. That’s the second day.

Failure of the Day: We’re Sorry, My Nerves Are Experiencing Unexpectedly High Call Volume; Please Hold

2009-05-05T09:54:00.000-07:00

After putting it off for literally years, Chris and I saw a financial advisor on Saturday. We call him the Money Grown-Up. He told us that in fact we could afford to buy a condo, pretty much now. He explained all the various details and tax implications and mortgage options and millions of other details about numbers that hopefully Chris paid attention to because really, I was mostly spending all my energy trying to keep a reasonable expression on my face. Owning our own place is kind of a big deal to me, is the thing. On Sunday we started shopping.

The first thing you learn is that you are unforgivable wealthy. A half million dollars! That’s what these things cost, and you just bat the concept around like a kitten with a yarn ball. A half million dollars. To start.

The second thing you learn is that you are a deadbeat. You look at places that are priced higher than you can afford and know that you’re going to haggle them down to what you want. But in the early stages, the whole time you’re talking to the agents, you’re keeping the terrible secret that you can’t pay the asking price. Because you’re a deadbeat. Your shoes cost $11 from a store that was going out of business, and they can totally tell.

Meanwhile you’re a lost little lamb. The nice Money Grown-Up says you don’t need a realtor to buy a condo, any moron can negotiate a good deal in this market, so you walk into the places alone with your pants around your ankles and your wallet open, and the people showing the properties start talking REALLY FAST.

On Sunday night I sit straight up in bed covered in sweat just like they do in movies. “We have to get rid of all our books!” I shout to Chris, who is happily killing digital zombies. “We’ll never get enough square footage for all our bookcases!” Chris lets the zombies run free for a while and comes to soothe my frantic head. “It’s just shopping,” he says. “It’s fun. It exciting. And we like our books.”

I take a fistful of benadryl and manage to get to sleep. That’s the first day.

Failure of the Day: The Unbearable Light(ness) of Tanning

2009-01-22T20:26:00.000-08:00

My skin? Still hates me. The psoriasis is throwing the mother of all tantrums (which really should be the toddler of all tantrums but whatever) and let’s call it flaring. And I’ve had it. I’ve been rubbing goop on it for 25 years and none of it works for shit. What works is UV radiation, particularly UVB, but I don’t have the time to go all the way to Kaiser to use their light boxes three times a week. But I do have time to go to the tanning salon on 4th and King on my way home from work.

Tanning beds mostly deliver UVA light, so it doesn’t work quite as well, but I have it on good authority that it does work some, and that’s more than I can say for the goop. That’s the plus side. On the minus side, I’ve spent my entire adult life scrupulously avoiding ever getting even a hint of a tan. There’s a reason I don’t have any wrinkles into my 40s.

Tonight, in the tanning salon, I had what in truth was a very pleasant conversation with the 20-year-old receptionist’s hard candy shell. I had to stop myself from knocking on it—the gloss was so high I could almost see myself in it. But I found it oddly endearing, too, the effort he put into the show of being so nice and helpful. When I was a 20 year old receptionist, you couldn’t have gotten me to fake 10% of that friendliness with a gun to my head. What is it with kids today? No irony, no disdain, and not a loner in the whole fucking generation. I tell you, it’s eerie.

But in the end, what do I care that he started every sentence with an enthusiastic “Absolutely!”? Because, really, a simulation of friendliness and helpfulness is still friendly and helpful, and I needed someone to tell me how to get in the weird machine without setting myself on fire. I toasted for a brief 5 minutes (my whole face swaddled in towels) and none of my marshmallow bits seem to be burnt, so you can bet I’ll be back to continue the great Fuck the Goop experiment of 09. But first I need to moisturize. Seriously.

NON-Failure of the Day: Black Sabbath's Master of Reality by John Darnielle

2009-01-02T22:40:00.000-08:00

I absolutely cop to being heavily biased in favor of Darnielle long before starting this book, and I further acknowledge that my opinions tend to the extreme and dramatic. However, even given all that, I have to say that to my eyes, this book marks the invention of a new kind of music journalism.

Instead of the studied music expert deconstructing the minutiae of the songsmithing and performance from a lofty and removed perspective, what Darnielle gives us is the idealized audience for the material at hand, expertly rendered with autobiographical precision. Who else but a 16-year-old kid thrown into a lockdown psych ward to explain the greatness of Black Sabbath? And who else but arguably the finest songwriter working in America today, not coincidentally also an RN who worked in a psychiatric lockdown facility for adolescent boys, to merge the story of the record with the story of the boy?

This new journalistic genre—criticism literature, let’s call it—provides not just an opinion of the music, but context, an experiential framework in which to hear it as it was intended by the audience it was intended for. It does what you want literature to do, that is, transport you into another person’s existence, and once you’re there, it plays the songs for you such that you hear them through the character’s ears, and through his or her lifetime of experience.

I don’t know; maybe other people are doing this and it is old news but this is the first I’ve seen of it, and I found it to be exhilarating and wrenching and ultimately transformative way of communicating in the single-dimensional world of words what it feels like to hear the multi-dimensional world of music. I’m awestruck by the achievement.

Failure of the Day: The Most Time-Consuming Clock

2008-12-17T14:59:00.000-08:00

Time passes however it damn well chooses. There are weeks that are over before you can finish your Coke, and weeks that you don’t notice and that don’t notice you—time is a stranger; not even eye contact as you pass each other on the sidewalk.

Then there are weeks like this, Wednesday to Wednesday, Chris working long hours, and no on else knows what I’m waiting for. You don’t invite other people into this kind of time—at least I don’t. Maybe that’s a social misunderstanding on my part but it seems discourteous at best to drag people into your drama before you even know for sure if it exists. I limit the causalities.

One thing I’ve decided: if it’s cancer, I have to re-write my book as a memoir—the story wouldn’t be believable as fiction anymore. It’s too much. And I find myself getting comfortable with cancer—I’m warming right up to it. In a way it’s relaxing; to return to being the sick girl is just so easy, so familiar. It’s alluring. I still haven’t quite figured out who I am if I’m not the sick girl, so being her again would solve that problem at least.

But a week is a long time to spend on an identity cusp. I don’t actually expect it to be cancer; the odds as I understand them are in my favor. In my 20s of course, no matter how the odds were split, it was inevitable that I would find myself in the smaller wedge of pie. I was pretty unlikely. But a decade of outright healthfulness like the one I’ve just had makes one feel a good bit more insulated. “Anything can happen—but it probably won’t” sums up the uneasy peace I made with my catastrophic history and what it means for my remarkably still not catastrophic present.

Still, though, a long week. And a long day; they are supposed to call today but it’s 3 PM and so far, nothing.

6 PM UPDATE: *AH-OOOO-GAH* Doctor just called and sounded the all-clear. Looks like I'm still more likely than not.

Failure of the Day: Meet the New Boss

2008-12-10T21:30:00.000-08:00

I had to have my left breast biopsied today. The doctor emphasized that the dense area of tissue they see on my mammogram and ultrasound is not the kind of thing that usually turns out to be cancer, which I appreciated and am forcing myself to stay focused on.

I watched them do the biopsy on the monitor; I saw the needle clip off each of the six tissue samples they took from the sort of white-ish blobby thing on the digital screen, which of course was not on the digital screen at all but very near my left armpit. And I thought: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I know about white blobby things on high-tech x-ray; I first saw the one in my brain coming up on 18 years ago--now it's almost old enough to vote. And it sure as shit was the boss of me for most of those 18 years, though much less so lately.

It was an emotional day; I was more worked up than I thought was warranted but there wasn't anything I could do about that. I called in sick to work and waited to call Chris until I could say the word "biopsy" out loud without choking up. And it's frustrating because I'm not frightened and I wasn't frightened for a moment during the procedure or after it, but I was behaving as though I were, and I don't really know why. I recognized the feeling of dread in the fist of my stomach, it came and went as I wandered around downtown for five straight hours, trying to make myself exhausted and distracted. But I never did get around to feeling afraid.

It was also a bit liberating; I'm pretty responsible these days what with the big corporate job, husband, nice apartment, low cholesterol counts, and such. Today I didn't have to do anything at all; my only task was to keep myself entertained. That really was the best and right thing for me to do, so I dawdled in Macy's, bought tights at Forever 21, looked in vain for a palatable movie to see, and ate a very salty and wonderful soft pretzel. Not a bad day, considering.

I'm 42; 10 years younger than my grandmother was when she got breast cancer. I'm still not scared, or really even worried right now. I have a big white blob in the middle of my field of vision though, and it might turn out to be a long road of bullshit medical ordeals, or it might just be pretzel dough. I know what to do with both. I get the results in 7 days.

Failure of the Day: Futbal? I Hardly Know Her!

2008-10-27T13:50:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time I considered everyone who watched football a cretin. I was young and judgmental and as annoying as we all are at 23. And 33. Mostly I just didn’t know anything about it and hadn’t watched even a single game, so I had no idea how it was played, or what the rules are, or anything. That changed when Chris got sucked into fantasy football league during our last year in Seattle, and suddenly the living room TV was all booked up on Sundays with that strange white noise of crowd sounds and instantly orgasmic announcers.

I like sitting on the couch with Chris (he’s toasty!), so eventually, I picked up on the basics and could watch a game with something approaching appreciation, if not pleasure. It’s something to see 300-pound men hurl themselves at the ground with no regard for their own physical well-being. Bodily fearlessness is as anti-Nancy as it gets, and anti-Nancy is my favorite, of course, so the next thing you know, I have my own fantasy team and am having perfectly reasonable conversations about Peyton Manning.

Yesterday we watched in person as Chris’s beloved Seahawks eviscerated the poor, defenseless (no, really) 49ers. I was again impressed by how easy and convenient MUNI makes it to get to the ballpark. I was likewise impressed by how many Italian sausages and ice cream bars I can eat in a single afternoon. But what really struck me was how many of the fans were absolute cretins. Rude, sunflower seed–spitting, homophobic epithet–shouting, drunk morons.

But it’s not football’s fault. Any crowd will bring out the worst in those with a predisposition to assholery. There was no shortage of drunk morons at the various Litquake events we went to earlier this month, too. And really, I’ll take a drunk football fan over a drunk poet any day—the drunk football fan won’t get all sad at the end and make you read some godawful thing they wrote. So, you know, go Hawks.

Failure of the Day: High

2008-10-24T12:30:00.000-07:00

Having now successfully completed about 30 percent of my year end dental extravaganza, I am now chin deep in love with nitrous oxide. Even though I just heard from a friend who managed to use so much of it that she permanently damaged her liver (and really, how do people get ahold of black market gasses? And in large enough doses to cause irreparable organ damage? Jesus, I need to get out more.) and now requires monthly B-12 shots.

But in the happy and controlled doses offered by the dental girls, I am free to meditate on the nature of whatever it is that got stuck in my head that afternoon without fear of Hep C or any of the other low-impulse-control crowd’s bugaboos. For this week’s appointment, I was focused on the word pulp. The crisis on tooth 15 involved removing some old fillings that were, I was told, perilously close to the tooth’s pulp, whatever fucking horrifying thing that is, and if they got too close, I would need a full-blown root canal.

So pulp it was as they strapped the nosegear on me. But as my arm and legs dissolved into that fantastic electric throb, it seemed to me that books get turned to pulp too, and that I was writing a book about pulp: the soft, vulnerable mush that acts as the stuffing for our bodies, and before too long it was all really cosmic and profound. I was sure I had uncovered a Larger Theme in my novel that I need to remember and incorporate into my writing.

It wasn’t, and I hadn’t, and I didn’t, of course; I was just high. But it was nice way to pass an afternoon, which is pretty impressive considering how many fingers and pointed sticks were in my mouth. I ended up not needing the root canal, and can go back and get another regular old crown in couple of weeks. I’ll get the nitrous for that appointment too.

Failure of the Day: Mouth

2008-10-17T20:08:00.000-07:00

You know the 22 Fillmore? That crazy people mobility machine, that homeless guy motel, that bad smell factory?

On the 22 Fillmore this afternoon, it was all I could do to manage my straight-up euphoria. It spouted in plumes from my head; the Okkervil River songs on my new birthday iPod that I have heard a million times sounded so triumphant I nearly wept. On the 22 Fillmore.

What I know for sure is that whatever medical, physical doom is still flying around out there for me is headed right for my mouth. In my jaw are planted the seeds of my ultimate destruction. I can feel it. I feel airplanes crashing into it; I feel exploding shards of bone every time the train takes a fast corner. Death is a missile aimed at the base of my tongue.

So when the dentist told me that I needed two crowns and not the NINE plus a root canal that my last dentist tried to sell me, and also that I had no new cavities and that my gums are healthy, and that yes, she understands completely that I have an obligation to act as my own pain management advocate and that I am not drug-seeking but on the day after she’s been rooting around in my mouth with pointed sticks I get to have a vicodin or two, I thought yes. Yes, this is how we run a perfectly serviceable adulthood.

I am keeping my distance from doom. My mouth is closed to it and I feel invincible.

Failure of the Day: Easy. Ass.

2008-10-14T15:21:00.000-07:00

And it’s just that easy. I remember now why I blogged… for those times when it’s slow during the day and both my novel and my current poem smell like ass, it’s nice to do something EASY.

Some of my thoughts for the day:

The free maxi-thins at work are neither maxi nor thin, but they are free, and as such, totally sufficient.

Kaiser are persistent buggers: After establishing care with the new internist and getting my annual check-up taken care of last week (during which the Doctor congratulated me on my weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol—that’s how healthy I am) the dermatology, neurology, and mammography people have been calling me more than daily to get me in for my referrals.

Now, except for the mammogram, which I submit to begrudgingly because I recognize the necessity of that uncomfortable glass and boob sandwich, I have no use for these specialists. Neurologists have never been more than the notetakers of my disease, dutifully marking up my chart and then sending me home empty handed 100% of the time for oh, the last 17 years.

Dermatologists, on the other hand, are another class of villain entirely. Over the years, they’ve cured my psoriasis a few times now, albeit temporarily, either with anonymous drugs in clinical trials that I’ve never been able to get ahold of again, with delivery systems of common drugs that have “fallen out of favor” and so are not available any longer, or with UV light treatments that they wont prescribe anymore because some dumbass once burned themselves with the home light wand and sued over it.

Oh, but they call. Wont I please make an appointment? Sure. You bet. At my earliest convenience. I’m thinking early 2009.

Failure of the Day: Four Hours

2007-07-17T12:10:00.000-07:00

Sweet and slender tendrils of vacation smell are wafting up from… you know I don’t know if that's what that smell actually is, but let’s just for the sake of argument say it’s sweet and vacation-y and of somewhat mysterious origin, and O, I want it.

The last day of work before 12 uninterrupted days off. Chris is running around like a crazy person tying up loose ends and making sure everything at his job is taken care of, whereas I am watching time just full-on cease to advance at all, at all. Time hates me. Time is the little old lady I will eventually be trying to cross the street and giving me the finger for honking at her to speed it the fuck up already, granny!

Not. Even. Lunch. Time. Yet.

Failure of the Day: Week, Interrupted

2007-07-02T13:26:00.000-07:00

I’m in full vacation mode. Our trip isn’t until later this month but it’s a holiday week and most everyone at work took the whole week off, so it’s slow and hot no one is in the mood to do much of anything. I’m also just completely relieved to be done with the DeLillo novel. I don’t mean to dismiss it as heavy, but I literally weighed more while I was reading it. I’ve lost 2 pounds since I finished it, no lie. And OK, it’s very good and it reads like what trauma actually feels like, the sense of disconnectedness, the repetition, the deadening boredom of feeling the same terrible thing every minute of the day for weeks on end, and that’s no small accomplishment of literature. But holy shit is it a drag to read.

San Jose is doing a thing for the holiday—who knows how they pulled it off but They Might Be Giants and Fountains of Wayne are playing in Discovery Meadows on Tuesday night. Which, in true sort-of-crap-town spirit, is technically the third and not the fourth, but I’m not complaining because it’s walking distance from our apartment and tickets are a whopping $10. It couldn’t be easier for us to see this concert if the drum kit were on my lap.

To rev up I’ve been re-listening to the new Fountains of Wayne CD, which sort of rubbed me the wrong way the first couple of times through. I’m warming up to it though. The music is at times nakedly exuberant even as the words bop along in their self-conscious pop cultural name dropping. I read a review that called them the best bet for impeccably produced, beach-ready power-pop, and you know, I’m so in the mood!

Failure of the Day: Sold!

2007-06-14T20:00:00.000-07:00

If I had to pick a word to describe the concert the Police put on last night, it would be “enterprise-class.” (That’s what comes from a year and a half in software marketing.) The show was sleek and big and impersonal, and to my blunt ears, musically flawless. If the guitar was out of tune for two bars during Walking on the Moon or whatever; Chris would have noticed, but me, I’m all ohh, shiny!

Now, the 60-something suburban divorcées who sat in front of us rocking out and toking up were a whole other matter. It was disturbing on a very deep level—sort of like being at the stoner park across the street from school and having your teachers show up with the bong. On the other hand, it left me feeling nicely optimistic about the future of marijuana laws.

I am also currently in the thick of planning our summer vacation trip to Chicago. It’ll be the biggest trip Chris and I have taken together, and I’m having a superfun time navigating through and developing some expertise with the various online travel sites. I’ve always been good at getting good prices on our trips, but I lately I’ve been deep into the arcane rules and strategies of using Priceline and Hotwire and have, I think, seriously outdone myself.

So by now the trip is ~~almost~~ completely booked! and I am moving on to the activities research. I discovered that Milwaukee is a mere 90-minute drive from Chicago, and I thought: SOLD! Milwaukee! I can’t imagine there will be anything there to see but I don’t care. In my mind, Milwaukee is as different as a thing can be from a Jewish poet who hates both beer and nature. It’s the geographic equivalent of the polar opposite of me! I love it already. Chris is always up for weird "roadside America" adventure, but even if he weren't, he's putty in my hands since I told him about the Bob Newhart statue on Navy pier.

Failure of the Day: Rung

2007-06-03T06:28:00.000-07:00

In his new book (which is just supernaturally good), Michael Chabon says doom is a thick ribbon that marbles all Jewish life. Which goes a fair distance toward explaining why, when I finished the third draft of my own novel week before last, adding more than 30,000 much-needed words and 70 fleshed-out pages to the second draft, I was overcome with one of the most profound feelings of disappointment I’ve ever felt in my life.

It’s not just that it’s not very good—hell, it’s never been very good; it’s a first novel by a confessional poet for chrissakes—it’s that it’s poorly written. Of all things to be wrong with it, that really was the last thing I expected. I spent the whole week in pitiful mourning; weeping for the thing as though I had buried rather than written it.

When I land on my ass in a big stinky pile of doom, it usually only takes me a minute to look up and find the Home Sweet Home sign I nailed there round about 1992. Doom is my natural habitat—all this dreadful suburban luxury and emotional comfort and financial well-offedness that surround me 15 years later is a temporary ruse, a tablecloth that will be yanked out from under the placesettings not by a skilled magician but by a dog who gets startled and makes a run for it with a corner of the linen caught in his teeth.

I have been presented with a fair number of Last Place certificates in my life—they are all from the children’s bowling league I was marched off to on Saturday mornings, and all have a picture of a ladder and the slogan Watch Us Climb Up Next Year going up the rungs on them. I think a lot of my life has been based on those certificates, that cheerful spin on bottoming out. Truth is, I don’t mind it here. There’s safety in doom, and a sense of perspective. Two weeks in, for example, I figured out that the work that remains on my novel is actually the fun part, the making beautiful now that the mundane and grueling storytelling part is so much more defined. I also figured out that the lump in the center of my thoughts a big glut of neglected poetry that needs badly to be let out. So this homey doom, it is not so bad. There's plenty to muck around with down here, and as ever, nowhere to go but up.

Failure of the Day: There and Back

2007-05-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

We spent a good chunk of last week in Seattle. It was my first actual business trip: Big Software Co. sent me to an all-day copyediting workshop. Chris came up with me and when I wasn’t happily discussing the finer points of punctuating adverbial clauses, we visited our old neighborhood and saw friends and enjoyed the city. It was a really great trip. Chris took a lot of photos, but most of them are of the R2D2 mailboxes.

And then we came back. To San Jose. Which we really have made our peace with; it’s not a bad little city, it just needs a little love, as Linus says. But comparison does it no favors, and a two hour flight is nowhere near enough time to recalibrate my sufficiency meters. It was a difficult re-entry.

As a result, I spent much of this week looking at SF condo listings on Craigslist. And I couldn’t help it, I got sucked in. For a brief period, $550,000 actually started seeming like a reasonable price for 900 square feet, and I even convinced myself that we could swing it on our income. I was able to do that because I don’t know a single thing about mortgages or down payments or closing costs or homeowners insurance or property taxes or HOA dues or really, anything.

Suffice to say, after some fairly simple long division, it’s clear we’ll have to make due with the ridiculous level of luxury in our rented south bay townhouse. I don’t guess we’re going anywhere any time soon. It’s an interesting excursion, though, into that most grown-up of financial leaps. Like every thing else, I’m ten years late, but I’ve finally internalized the idea that it’s time to keep one eye on interest rates and housing stats and our down payment savings. For now, we’re content to just line our toes up against the edge of the ravine that must be spanned and wait a spell before we’re ready to cross it.

Failure of the Day: Putting Things in Cans

2007-04-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Chris’s Great Big Brain, we spent the weekend in Monterey. Our hotel was swank—we could lie in bed and watch the ocean lap the shore, and so we did, we did. The Nature, she is nice, especially when confined to the other side of the glass. And especially especially when the hotel people bring bagels and hard-boiled eggs and tea right to your bed. Thanks big brain!

We went to the aquarium and saw the otters and the fish and a bunch of totally dud penguins that just stood there with their backs to us. I may have convinced two 8-year-old boys that one of the most spectacularly odd-looking fish, which was the approximate size and shape of a twin mattress, was actually made of paper-maché. I would have believed me at 8.

I also fully embraced the cliché, thanks to our friend Katrina who, the night before we left, read the first paragraph of Cannery Row into our answering machine. Being the Western canon imbecile that I am, I had no idea how good that first paragraph is. And how embarrassing, considering that it is everywhere in Monterey. That paragraph is inescapable—it is quoted on cocktail napkins and big street sign flags and on the sides of buildings, and yet I had, up till now, escaped it.

Chris brought along his copy for me to read in the hotel, and I’ll tell you what, it’s a damn sight better than The Raw Shark Texts, which is terrible but I was sticking with it because I thought it would be a good thematic match for the weekend. But then I went and got all literal, and why not? Really, why not?