Counting and Koala Bears

Odessa seems to be confused about numbers. This isn't all that surprising because a. she's two, and b. I'm her mom and I don't even know my 6, 7 and 8 times tables.

But Dessa is moved to count things. We'll be sitting on the couch with a book, looking at a page full of ducks, and she'll want to count them over and over again. This is her method: she starts with her finger on the first duck and moves across the page: "uhn, too...fie, ix, Mun, Daddy, bikikle, munty." If you didn't get that, she said, "One, Two, Five, Six, Mom, Daddy, Bicycle, Monkey." Which is obviously wrong.

Sometimes when we're reading together and she starts counting ducks, I'm like "Child, what kind of bullshit is this? It's One, Two, THREE...." And she repeats after me, "uhn, too, TEEEE." But then she goes back to the page and counts them again: "uhn, too, fie, ix, Mun, Daddy, Mun, Daddy, keeker." And last time I checked, kiefer wasn't a number. But whatever: she's small and confused, and I can relate to that.

When I was about 4, I had a real problem figuring out the deal with koala bears. I regularly grilled my mom on the subject:

"Mama?" I asked her. "Girls can't marry other girls, right?"

Nope. Girls couldn't marry other girls, especially in West Virginia in 1982.

"And boys can't marry other boys?"

No.

"So, who can koala bears marry?"

The answer was always the same: koala bears marry other koala bears.

This dissatisfied me like you wouldn't believe.

I had somehow come to the conclusion that there were three sexes: men, women and koala bears. And HOW was my Mom supposed to know that? So I kept asking her about the conjugal habits of koala bears and I think she just figured I was really into koala bears. Maybe too into them--but I was four and would probably grow out of it.

I don't remember how all this was cleared up, but eventually it was. And Odessa will probably learn to count to ten someday. It's possible, however, that she'll never learn her 6, 7 and 8 times tables. But that's okay--you don't have to use those very often anyway.

A Story About a Song

Part 1

I was recently at Little Kings Shuffle Club on Music Trivia night. I think Music Trivia night in Athens, Georgia is probably more challenging than it is in other places. This is what it's like: there's this bespectacled balding guy who stands by the door of the bar with a mic and he asks these impossible questions like, "What year did R. Stevie Moore release Delicate Tension?" and all these tattooed guys wearing Eddie Vedder shorts are flapping their hands in the air yelling, "ooooh! ooh! oooohh!" like they've been waiting their whole entire lives for someone to ask them that question. It's intense.

Anyway, the night I was at Little Kings for music trivia, I was half watching the proceedings and after it was all over, the trivia dudes were standing around arguing about whether Les Paul was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 or 1989, when this song came on:

After about 15 seconds I looked over at the crowd of music aficionados because they had all gone quiet. I scanned the furrowed brows, took in the subtly played air guitars, and I'm here to tell you: that song was taking those guys places. I was being taken someplace myself, actually.

Part 2

I spent the summer of 1997 in Wyoming, cleaning rooms at a hotel in the Grand Tetons. I was 19 and a terrible maid. Probably the worst maid that ever lived.

In May, my friend Kristin and I drove my 1988 Honda Accord out to Wyoming from Georgia, and you better believe we had a Plan: we were going to spend the whole summer practicing folk songs from the Rise Up Singing songbook on our guitar and banjo, and we'd most likely get a record deal by September. November at the latest.

So, we got to the hotel and settled into our dorm room which was cramped, dark and had a wide, naked view of the staff parking lot. We trudged through the snow to the staff cafeteria for dinner, and the first thing I noticed as I sat down with my plastic tray was this amazing looking man staring at me like he wanted to floss his teeth with my face.

(Excuse me while I pause for a bit of narrative housekeeping:

When I was a teenager and didn't know how to deal with a situation, this look right here was my default strategy:

I call this look the "I Knew That." For those of you who happen to be a teenage girl at the moment, a word:

When you're in a new situation and feeling insecure, the benefit of this low-effort approach is that you never have to say anything interesting: other insecure people leave you alone out of the assumption that you're either thinking something real good or judging them because you're better than they are. However, in certain cases the "I Knew That" can be misconstrued as the "Let's Make Out in The Corner," and can instigate more of a response than you bargained for. Please feel free to email me with questions.)

Anyway, this man: he appeared to be some sort of viking king, which isn't generally the sort of thing I go for, but whatever--when you're 19 and getting amorous eyes from Thor, you have like zero recourse. But while I'm divulging all sorts of personal information, let it be known that back at school I had just had my life ruined by a guy who always wore cowboy boots and who told me about a month too late that he thought he was probably in love with this girl he met in Montana at welding school. Which was such weak sauce. So in light of my fresh heartbreak, I decided to eschew the Norseman with a firm hand: I put on my best IGNORING YOU face, ate my dinner and left.

Later that night while Kristin and I were playing some sad Gillian Welch ballad on the aforementioned banjo and guitar, there was a knock on our uncurtained window. It was the viking king, grinning.

"Hey," he said. "I'm Beau. Come on over and play some tunes with me and my friend."

Some things you should know about Beau:

1. He was 27 and from Omaha, Nebraska, which didn't really explain why he talked like English wasn't his first language. Kristin thought he was probably a little mentally handicapped, but I think he just didn't give a shit and couldn't be bothered to communicate like a civilized person.

2. He was the sluttiest person I've ever even heard of. During the three months I knew him, he whored his way up one side of our dorm and down the other, skipping all the Mormon girls, of course. And Kristin and me.

3. He loved music, and he was utterly, hilariously tone deaf. But that didn't keep him from singing most of the time.

4. That summer we knew him, Beau successfully ran off every single boy who tried to talk to me or Kristin. He all but peed on us in his territorial fervor. Once he even marched me out of a social situation by the elbow and gave me 15 minute lecture on why I shouldn't talk to the room service guys (i.e. "they're cock-suckers.").

Beau, Kristin, Beau's friend Marie and I got together three times a week to "play some tunes." We always played in Beau's room, which was a one-room log cabin that smelled like dust and pine trees and dude. Marie was a middle aged woman who spent winters on the Apache reservation in Arizona and summers working in the kitchen at Jenny Lake Lodge. Marie loved Gram Parsons and taught Kristin and me to sing "Love Hurts" so good that one time we made her cry. Beau was an adequate guitar player and a lot of nights he made us sing along with him for hours and hours, until we were hoarse. When we'd say we were too tired to sing any more, he'd grin and make us listen to his 20 minute arrangement of "Rockin' in the Free World." It was awful. But we learned a whole lot of songs that summer.

You know how everybody has a special little diddling riff that they play when they're futzing around on the guitar? Everybody's is different, but once you know what someone's guitar futzing sounds like, you can walk into a room blindfolded and know who's playing guitar just by the sound. Anyway, Beau used to always play this little "doodle-oo-doo-doo-doo-doooo, strummy-strummy-strum-strum...." One time I asked him what the hell song he was always playing, and he sang it for me, all the way through. Of course it just sounded like the bellowing of a bull walrus, so that was no help. But I probably heard him play that riff 3,000 times that summer. If I was on my deathbed with Alzheimer's, I would know that little riff that Beau always played.

The last time I ever saw Beau I stopped by his cabin right before I left to drive back to Georgia. I knocked on his door and there was some scrambling and a protracted wait before he appeared wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a t-shirt he had pulled on backwards. Behind him on his bed was a dark haired, tattooed pixie girl--maybe the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. Beau introduced her as his girlfriend who had just arrived from Nebraska. I'd never heard of her before. She sat on the edge of the bed, her black t-shirt hanging off one shoulder, and looked right through me, expressionless.

Part 3

A couple months later, I was riding through eastern Montana in Matt Thomas' old green Suburban. There were about 12 people in the car, and I was sitting in the front seat between the open window and this girl named Erin who was from San Francisco and knew everything. It was a really pretty fall day--warm but not hot, and it was one of those afternoons when everything on the prairie is either yellow or blue. I saw a little red fox catch a mouse on the side of the highway and I tried to tell everyone, but most people were asleep in the back and Erin was too busy digging around in her backpack for a tape of this band she had been talking about, elbowing both me and Matt (who was driving) in the process. Finally she hollered and pulled out a clear gray tape with SON VOLT written on it in black Sharpie. She jammed it into the tape deck and it started playing.

And there he was: "doodle-oo-doo-doo-doo-doooo, strummy-strummy-strum-strum...." I started laughing.

"What are you laughing at?" Erin asked me. She was annoyed.

"Nothing," I said. " This song... it just reminded me of something."

And for a while I just looked out the window and listened, kind of grinning into the wind. I really had kind of loved that guy.

But not too much. Just enough.

Phenomenon

So, in celebration of Odessa becoming mostly entirely potty trained (omg!), I'm going to encourage you watch this 3 minute video of her letting the old freak flag fly:



I know. She's incorrigible.

I Can Smell Ants

Something you don't know about me is that I can smell ants. No seriously--I can smell them. There is a little colony of them living in my computer, so clickety-claxing on my 5-year-old MacBook means I have to kind of suffer through ant stench. Like right now I'm suffering.

When I was a kid we lived in central California where there were all these oaks that were great for climbing. Unfortunately, they were covered in these big, shiny black ants which absolutely reeked. Sometimes I would climb the trees anyway until my nostrils started burning. Those were good times.

I didn't know not everybody smelled ants until recently. Bryan's always been pretty quiet on the subject. Usually when I walk into the kitchen and ask, "Do you smell ants?" he responds with a carefully considered, "umm, no." It never occurred to me that he didn't know what I was talking about.

However, this evening we were eating dinner out on the porch and I said something like "Yurch, it smells like ants out here," and Bryan closed his eyes, put down his fork very slowly and said, "Whatthehellareyoutalkingabout." It only took like eight years to get around to asking me that. So I found an ant, caught it and held it up to his nose. "It smells like your finger," he said.

Anyway, you're not really missing anything if you don't happen to have my superhuman ant-smelling power. It's gross. Like being able to smell all the farts in a mile radius or something.

The World According to Casey

One person very dear to my heart is my ex-husband Casey. Casey lives on the Oregon coast and recently started a coffee roasting company. When I told Jane this, she wrote some exciting new text for his website:

I carefully roast my coffee one bean at a time so that I'll never, ever have nothing to do. I'll bring each coffee bean to your house on my bike, hand delivered each hour on the hour. I don't care where you live.

And that pretty much sums up Casey: if you're doing something the normal, efficient, time-tested way, you're doing it wrong.

Case in point: I was his first wife. We got married when I was 24 and he was 25. A year later, the lawyer who handled our divorce asked us very earnestly whether we were sure we wanted to break the sacred bonds of marriage when we couldn't stop giggling over the task of signing the divorce papers. A year after that, Casey got married again (he doesn't want to talk about it). And then a few years after that he married Renee, whom he no longer lives with, but refers to as his "Best Friend-Wife." Now he's dating a really nice lady named Melissa who seems genuinely unconcerned by the fact that he's been married three times at the tender age of 34. I can imagine that's easy to do with Casey--he's just so charming and stubbornly optimistic and pleased by nearly everything. The other day on the phone, Casey started giving nicknames to his ex-wives, and I asked him which wife I was. "Oh, you're my Most Special Little Guy, Jess!" he said. He was being completely serious.

Anyway, thanks to the wonder and majesty of THE INTERNET, today I accidentally stumbled upon a photo of Casey that I had totally forgotten about:

That's him tenderly nuzzling that riot policeman's bosom. It was taken at the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, and was eventually turned into a Microsoft spoof ad for Adbusters that said, "Where do you want to go today?" (By the way, is Adbusters even a thing anymore? Evidently it is, because I just Googled it and Google says it's still a thing).

So, the story behind this photo goes like this: Casey got arrested protesting globalization and corporate capitalism, which are two things that really chap his hide. And so he got tear-gassed and had to spend four days in the King County jail wearing an extra large pair of dingy underpants that weren't his, eating Beanie Weenies and sharing a cell with a dude named Gravity's Sunbeam or some crap. I didn't know what had happened to him--he just sort of stopped calling--and Jiminy Christmas, was I pissed when he got home in a hot-boxed minibus driven by a homeless person. On the other hand, Casey couldn't have been more delighted with himself.

And that, Little Ones, is the story of Casey. He could make some lucky biographer rich one of these days.

The Neil Young Conundrum

One of my favorite things to do with a morning is go to The Grit and eat breakfast by myself while taking notes for the novel I’m writing that will hopefully be finished by 2034. The Grit is always pretty empty first thing in the morning and it has big, bright windows that face the street and some hipster waiters who are too cool to pay much attention to you. It’s basically like a giant, cool, dimly-lit Cave that Time Forgot.

So, I was in there on Wednesday, and it was great: I ignored the two ladies with insomnia and lactose intolerance and Celiac disease who, in an otherwise empty restaurant, chose to sit in the booth right behind mine. There was some sort of synthesizer something playing somewhere in the background, and that was fine. The waiter kept filling my coffee until I realized I had effectively consumed twice as much coffee than my adrenal system was built for—but hey, I’m an adult and that was my choice.

What ended up running me out of there was Neil Young.

Let me be clear: I really like Neil Young, and After the Gold Rush (the album the waiter put on after the synthesizer fuzz) is one of my favorites. But there’s something about Neil Young that I cannot abide except during the brief temporal window between Labor Day and Thanksgiving. I am strictly a crisp weather Neil Young fan.

Picky, picky, you say. Well, yeah—maybe. But some music is like Christmas music to me--I love Silent Night, but who wants to listen to Silent Night in April? And Neil Young is great, but it makes me feel weird to hear him in June. Actually, not just weird—I have an actual aversion to it. It’s literally the same feeling I get when I’m in a restaurant and there are people making out—like seriously going at it--at the table next to mine. It makes me uncomfortable.

Why, friends, do you think this would be? Everybody else seems okay listening to Neil Young just any old time. Please analyze in the comments.

In Which I Gain 5 Pounds

I have recently and inexplicably gained 5 pounds. I've realized this on the very day the new swimsuit I ordered off The Internets arrived on my doorstep. This, of course, has provided me an excellent opportunity to build a ton character in the past 4 hours.

Anyway, I own a scale. I didn't for a long time and then after I had Odessa, I decided I didn't want dumpy, middle-aged matronhood to sneak up on me, so I was like, "Fine, I'll weigh myself every day and that way I'll see it coming and can do something about it if I feel it breathing down my neck, fixin' to pounce."

So, I bought a scale at Target, and I did weigh myself every day for a long time--probably about a year. And the thing is, I always weighed exactly the same, no matter what I did. So about a month ago, I stopped because I was bored of it. And then today I came home from a 4 day conference and saw my scale sitting on the bathroom floor and was like "Oh, what the hell," and then I stepped on it and was like "What the whuuuuh?" And then you know what I did? I picked the scale up and shook it and set it back down on the ground and weighed myself again. And hoooooo-law, ya'll--I nearly had a coronary infarction because that time it read a mere ten pounds lighter than I was when I gave birth to Odessa, and I actually screamed a little bit in the bathroom. And then I realized I had jiggled something loose when I shook it and had to re-calibrate the scale. After I did that, I weighted myself again, and sure enough, I discovered I've gained 5 pounds in a month. Yep.

And then the bathing suit arrived and I was all, "well, let's just do this." And, you know, the top fit great, but the bottoms? Mmmmmmm. Let's just say, I showed it to Bryan, and he gave me a look not unlike this one:

Except a little more nervous because telling one's wife how a bathing suit looks has to be one of the most horrible things a man will ever have to do. Anyway, Bryan looked like that for a full 30 seconds while I blithered about how I didn't like it, and then he asked me, "Well, what do you want it to look like?"

Which is an excellent question.

So, here's the thing: I just look the way I look. In my adult life, I have weighed much more than I do now (while pregnant) and much less (during some tragic breakups), but I think I was probably the only person besides my obstetrician and/or Virginia (whose hobby is monitoring family members' weight loss/gain) who actually cared.

Nobody cares how I look. Nobody cares or even notices how I look. Except me, I guess.

So, my point is, since nobody even knows how much I weigh, it doesn't really matter. I mean, for health reasons, I wouldn't want to go on a ham sandwich spree or anything, but I'm fairly certain I'm just as good a person as I was 5 pounds ago. Anyone reading this who doesn't happen to be a lady might consider it ridiculous that I would even have to struggle to convince myself of this. But anyone who does happen to be a lady knows that there's part of my brain that's screaming at me right now from the second story of a burning house: "OF COURSE IT FUCKING MATTERS, YOU GREAT BLUBBERY COW! FEEL BAD BECAUSE IF YOU DON'T START NOW YOU'LL BE 200 POUNDS BY WEDNESDAY! FEEL IT! FEEL IT NOW!" This is because all of us grew up reading Cathy comics and the backs of Special K cereal boxes. And we continue to, you know...look at everything. Really, just everything.

So, I feel a lot of compassion for the part of me who's freaking the hell out right now because I gained 5 pounds. But I just don't want to lose my shit over this. So I'm not going to.

Wish me luck.