I just thought I should tell you all that, as fate would have it, my computer went down in flames on Sunday. The substitute that I currently have is a poor one (about 7 years old). Internet Explorer strobes every five seconds, and I feel as if I'm on psychadelics when I try to maneuver the internet. A very concerned friend has given me some insider information on a possible solution. Say a prayer.

Namaste

Sometimes I think about what it would be like to be a bartender. Bartenders are so serious. They don't take crap and they don't joke around with the customers. It would seem to me that they would certainly get more tips if they participated a little more. Don't they care about making more money? Or maybe they should tell jokes. Maybe that would do it. How perfect would that be? A bartender who doubled as a comedian. I for one would pay big money to sit at a bar like that, but it's fruitless to even dream about.

Last night, I met some friends at a local restaurant. We weren't sure who all was showing up for dinner, so we sat at the bar for a few minutes before taking our table. It seemed rude to be within such close proximity (two feet) to someone and not include them in the conversation, so we tried engaging the bartender. When one of us would speak directly to her, she would answer. Otherwise, she just pretended not to hear us. (They must teach you that in bartender school - how to artfully ignore a conversation that's close enough for you to breathe on.) No matter how many funny and clever things we said to her (and we're pretty funny people), the bartender never cracked a smile. She would simply look at us with that Prozac face, make a controlled comment and then wipe down the bar for the seventh time. I've met Wal-mart checkers that were more animated.

I guess bartenders are pretty important. A lot of them know it. I guess they're so high on the restaurant business food chain that they know they don't really have to bend over backwards for the customer like the poor servers do. Talk about your crap job. Servers are the lowest on the totem pole - lower than busboys. They are the Marines of the service industry - meeting customers head-on in the Battle of Wills. They have the torturous job of listening to customers bitch all day and all night as they turn on the Doris Day. They have to know the menu inside and out and give calculated advice on what to order. If the food doesn't live up to the customer's expectation, it's their neck. I feel particularly bad when I order something extra after they've already brought all the food and refilled all the drinks. "Sure, sure! No problem! Be right back with that!" in that strained, happy voice. That sad little cheeful voice always makes me want to cash out and go somewhere else.

I wonder if there's a restaurant workers' secret society - a place where they all meet up after hours or before hours as the case may be and talk about the stuff they see. Somewhere they can all go to talk about who was with who last night, who's a drunk, who's a cheapskate, who's stepping out on their spouse. They have to be chock full of insider information. How great it would be to get inside that secret society even for just a day.

Namaste

AOS

I have intermittent Adult-Onset Stuttering (AOS). It's not the normal little kid kind, as in "I-I-I wi-wi-wish I had an ice cream cone." My stuttering is more like a revving engine, i.e. "I wish I had a...I wish I had a double martini." I quite literally talk myself into [in this case, 'saying'] something. What I can't quite decide is if it is more akin to a co-pilot or to a dress rehearsal.

Strangely, the magic number is two. I tend to say certain phrases twice ("Hand me that...hand me that Tom Jones CD.") It happens more often when my left brain is hard at work installing a shower head or figuring out which button I touched on the remote that made all of the others quit working ("Why can't I...why can't I turn it back to Star Trek?") It's always the beginning of a sentence or phrase, and it happens more often when someone, usually one of my unsuspecting daughters, asks me a question while I'm in The Mode.

While attempting to hook up the DVD player to my bedroom TV, my daughter struggles to have a conversation...

Daughter: "What are you doing?"

Me: "Trying to get...trying to get this freaking DVD player to work. What is the DEAL with this thing?"

Daughter: "Well, I think I'm going to go over to Taylor's to do some chemistry homework."

Me: "Why won't this...why won't this WORK? %$&#!!!"

Daughter: "OK. Well, I'll see ya later. Be home about 9:30."

[Pause]

Me: "Where did you...where did you say you were going?"

My main brain is focused on this freaking DVD player (that I never did get to work, incidentally), but the co-pilot is still attempting to carry on a conversation unbeknownst to everyone else.

The second type of AOS is what I call my dress rehearsals. I tend to spend a great deal of time with a limited number of people. At work, it's about three. At home, it's two (that's including myself). To make matters worse, I'm a person that tends to live inside my head. I think in words instead of visually, so I'm constantly thinking things out in sentences, paragraphs, novellas. My mind is so bogged down with words sometimes that I can't even think. Just imagine what it's like for someone like me in a disagreement or, God forbid, a heated argument. ("Ernie Fletcher...Ernie Fletcher is a slimeball.! I can't believe you voted for him.") It's pure torture. ("Don't even...don't even get me started on Bill O'Reilly. Fair and balanced, my ass!") I have very strong opinions but by the time they come out I've rehearsed them so many times that the rehearsals crowd into my actual words. When it happens, people tend to get dismissive, tend not to listen, to talk over me. In short, I sound like a dimwit ding dong. So, instead of chiming in with my broken record, a lot of times I'll just listen.

So now you know...so now you know the rest of the story.

Namaste

I awoke with a start this morning at 5 a.m. and a slightly sick feeling in my stomach. Vacation anxiety. It's only my second day and already I'm experiencing something akin to buyer's remorse: nagging guilt for fear of not spending my vacation days wisely. Why, why, why must I torture myself? How do I stop it? It's not even that I have been unproductive. Yesterday I washed (and wonder of wonders - put away) so many clothes that it came down to the unspeakable drudgery of sorting stray socks.

I am worried that I have missed the trash man. Every holiday week is the same. I wake up and look down the street to survey the numbers to make my decision. Only one lonely trash can sets at the curb. I have learned to trust only the retired neighbors for knowing the trash man's schedule, yet today there is dissension. My most trustworthy and least mobile retiree neighbor is the only one with her garbage at the ready. Do I blindly join her, dragging my already overflowing bin out to rest beside the bags of leaves that the trash man did not retrieve on designated Yard Waste Monday? There have been days when the potential embarrassment factor of dragging a sadly overstuffed bin back up the drive has outweighed the hope of an empty can by the end of the day...way too many days than an adult should have to admit.

Last night after yoga class, I went to eat with Eva and Suzanne at Tokyo Sushi. I was slightly self-conscious when I entered since I was still wearing my yoga garb and my face had that mushy makeup-mixed-with-sweat quality. No one cared.

Every time I order sushi, I forget what I ordered before it arrives and end up spending my entire dinner trying to decide what's in it. All of the sushi rolls have dumb sounding names most of which have no association with their contents. When I look at the sushi menu, I expect to see an exclamation point beside the name. I am not sure why. I guess I just think it would fit the name to have it followed by an !, i.e. Dragon Roll!, California Roll!, Fire Roll!. Italics really work sushi names, too.

I guess I should get off the computer. I have much anxiety to experience today while I hold onto Vacation Day Two like so much running water.

Namaste

Things I Learned This Weekend

Things I learned this weekend:

1. The cost of living in Malibu, CA is astronomical.
2. Some dogs actually prefer Charmin.
3. It takes roughly two weeks for an eligible bachelor in this town to procure a new girlfriend.
4. Dolly Partin's ride is a macked out Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows.
5. If Survivorman planned even a little, he probably wouldn't have to eat grass soup every episode.
6. Nicholas Cage is highly overrated.
7. The perfect temperature to cook a pizza is 600 degrees farenheit.
8. It is physically possible for a person to take out seven gallbladders in one day and entertain guests later that evening.
9. Man vs. Wild is a sitcom.
10. A jet-setter can get to any place in the world from Amsterdam (but as one person aptly questioned, "Once in Amsterdam, why leave?").
11. There are rumblings of a pro-am Bake-Off next spring in Paducah.
12. Cakebread Cellars cabernet tastes better than your generic $12 bottle of sale wine.
13. It's almost impossible to find a way to get someone to guess the word "chiffon" if you can't say the words fabric, dress or lemon. Thankfully, one person did.
14. Snow Prom does, in fact, exist.
15. It's impossible to karaoke a rap song after 3/4 bottle of wine.
16. Paducah wants a Coen Brothers film marathon at the Maiden Alley Cinema.
17. Bar soap works wonders on dreadlocks.
18. A person can interminably look like "the best friend."
19. France is sexy.
20. The mayor believes that Target is Paducah's own personal Jesus.

My daughter left for a week-long trip to Washington, D.C. Saturday afternoon. All I could think to do about that was to rearrange cabinets and thoroughly clean my kitchen. It was residual guilt from an episode of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America. Gordon Ramsay is my interim obsession post-Top Chef, pre-Project Runway. Like: he bleeps incessantly. Dislike: too much hair gel.

I turned on the self-clean feature on the oven, and the house filled with the smell of burnt popcorn. There's evidently no way to stop a self-cleaning oven once its mind is made up. This oven was on a three hour tour. Burnt popcorn morphed into level 20 flat iron and then finally to broiled nothing smell. When the oven beeped its end, there was no more black caked-on goop, just ghostly remnants of white dust.

There is a new miracle sponge on the market called The Magic Eraser. I'm positive it's straight from Roswell. It erases anything: Sharpie, soap scum, Kool-aid stains. I have even used it to erase paint streaks on a wall. While I was wiping the weird paste of grease-dust off the blades of the ceiling fan, I thought about using it on those rough spots on my feet. Then I moved on to my cellulite. Then I thought how great it would be if it came in Q-tip size, so I could reach into my brain through my ear and erase my first marriage. The possibilities are endless.

I scrubbed the kitchen floor. I had to do it in one foot increments on my hands and knees. It had been awhile. There remains a no-man's land of errant potato peel, chunks of cookie, chopped onion in that one inch wide space between the cabinet and stove. It's like looking down into a cistern. I can barely make it out. From what I can tell, it resembles the caked on goop from my oven topped with the salad of lost chunks. Maybe after a few more years I won't have to worry about going through all the trouble to bring someone over to help me move the stove so that I can get in there and shovel it out. It will just grow and grow until it's the same height as my kitchen cabinet. I would paint it white, of course, so that it matches.

I would love to tell you more about the excitement of moving casserole dishes to their own cabinet space, arranging skillets and mixing bowls, but I suppose I'd better get ready for work. If I could only use the Magic Eraser on my bills...

Namaste

The Storm Cellar

I am a little out of sorts today. The time change combined with the breezy, unseasonably warm evening brings memories of my grandparents' home. It's odd how clear those memories are, how I can recall the view from the small concrete and brick front stoop, the placement of the gigantic cottonwood on one side of the yard and the wide drooping apple tree on the other. Of all the place I have lived in my lifetime, memories of my grandparents' house are as distinct as those of my own childhood home and much more distinct than any place I've lived as an adult.

Now as my own house creeks against the force of the breeze and the windchimes sing, I think about my grandparents home and have that same slight feeling of anxiety that blows into a soul as a thunderstorm approaches. I can almost smell it, that air, heavy with the threat of rain at the same time faintly sweet, like freshly turned soil. Nights spent observing my grandfather as he paced from front yard to back watching the rolling, angry skies. His mood would grow dark and his gaze would sharpen, and for a time he would cease to speak. Birds would stop singing and the air would be silent except for the pound of an occasional distant thunderclap. He would stand immoble for several minutes in a sort of environmental trance surveying, absorbing the clues, totally silent.

Then just as suddenly as he'd stopped, he would snap into action. He would quickly move inside the house and brief my grandmother. Things would begin to happen. The house would begin to take a frantic pace: crackers and bologna packed in paper bags, nightgowns tossed in on top, lines to the restroom would immediately form. Strangely, I never actually heard the orders directly from my grandfather. It was always my grandmother's voice that announced, "We're going to The Storm Cellar." While Granddaddy made trips back and forth, readying the Storm Cellar for a night's stay, Grandmama would be calling the names of each child, gathering us all on the back porch, soothing us as we grew more and more agitated.

We would all traipse out together amidst the light falling rain, and descend into the cellar with mixed feelings of dread and relief. The cellar was dank and musty. Cobwebs filled the hard to reach corners. Old jars filled with water lined up in odd places. Dust settled throughout. Usually, by the time we arrived there was at least one oil lamp burning thanks to my grandfather. The Storm Cellar was designed and built by my him as a bomb shelter during the Cold War, but it served the family best and most as a refuge from tornadoes.

Inside it was like an army bunker, many beds and very little rambling space. There was always a fight for the top bunk which usually resulted in my two cousins and I sharing it. We would complain of being hungry and incessantly ask when we could go back to the house. Sometimes there were card games to play. Other times, we simply laid in bed listening to the rain pound the tin room of the cellar, trying our hardest to be quiet.

When dawn would finally break, we would ascend to the yard, our nostrils black from the oil lamps. The grass would glisten, the sun would shine and the air would smell like hope. We would all eat breakfast and think but rarely talk about the Storm Cellar. The same is true today.

Namaste