i’m nice! gosh i’m nice. perhaps you haven’t noticed how nice i am, so
let me tell you. no, wait: first i’ll tell you, and then i want you to
repeat it back to me, just so i know we’re on the same page. ready?
NICE. we will also accept sweet. kind. helpful. pleasant. agreeable. no? can i get an
adequate? hello? is this thing on?

gar. it’s unbearable with me lately. i am not to be borne. i cannot do
the laundry without pointing out that i am doing the laundry. cannot
cook a meal without pointing out that i cooked it. dishes, you don’t
even want to know. if i god forbid should do something that i think
someone else might not notice, fix something that nobody other than me
knew was broken, clean something that nobody other than me knew was
dirty, find something that nobody else knew was lost? nobody needs to worry about
missing a thing. steven tyler would be so grateful. see how i washed
your socks?
and folded them into tidy little snails? and then organized your sock
drawer by sock length and color? aren’t i wonderful? simply marvelous?
nice?

blech. fortunately i am blessed to live with a boy who enthusiastically
plays along (yes! i did see how you cooked that meal using three whole
pots! hey, did you like how i noticed? wasn’t that nice of me to
notice!) and a man who absolutely
doesn’t (oh, anne. oh my.). luckily we all know that we’re on
anne’s crazy train, that this is a transition and not a destination,
and i am confident that we will presently be disembarking at a much
more
pleasant station; one in which i will again simply function instead of
pointing
out that i do.

i went to the hospital yesterday. i had to make an appointment for a
Procedure and the telephonary was just too overwhelming to face, so i
grabbed a book and went in person. three hours, my friends, just me and
mr.
obama and terribly hardbacked plastic benches (and some people who made
me look the picture of health, which is always a blast). the doctor was
devastatingly cute and laughed at my jokes, and i instantly fell in
love which is always a good thing when you’re about to take your
clothes off.

about the book i’m reading (dreams from my father): i really like
barack obama. i have no idea what i think of him as presidential
material but i am all weak in the knees for anybody who can write a
grammatical, powerful sentence. he’s no jefferson but he is maybe,
like, sam seaborn. the book is interesting to me in terms of my current
preoccupation with the degree to which we are defined by our culture,
and his approach to it is an interesting combination of wide-eyed and
even-handed that i’m ready to hear.

pretty much that’s it, i think. there’s a parent/teacher meeting to
which i am not remotely looking forward, but i didn’t eat uncooked
chicken in the hopes i would get salmonella, so in a way we’re making
process. i may even be nice, although i don’t think my capabilities stretch quite that far.

I don’t remember the last time I wasn’t in some measure of physical pain. A month? Maybe almost two. I know some people are in pain all the time, real serious pain that is worse than a toothache or a crunkledy back, and I’m not comparing myself to them at all. It’s just: I don’t think about myself this way. I think of myself as fairly impervious. I am the person who will get three hours of sleep and get up the next day and wash windows and wax the floor. I am the woman who will smash her hand through the window and go out dancing after she gets home from the hospital. I am not one to be held back by a boo-boo, and it is almost never more serious than a boo-boo. So it troubles me to realize that I cannot remember the last day that I did not wake and stretch and wince, the last day I did not take something for pain, the last day that I did not consider, before starting a task, whether it was going to hurt. It troubles me first because it makes me feel like a physical wuss and second because I think a certain lack of self-reliance indicates a weakness in mental focus that doesn’t bode well.

It’s spring. I think it’s probably time for a change. I can get up the hill to the cottage without stopping but I think somehow I need to be kicked back into shape anyway. I do not like feeling weak, feeling incapable, feeling powerless. I think I need my body to remember that it is a valuable member of team anne, and I think I need to get it off the bench, where it is sulking. I’m not sure how yet but I am determined.

This weekend we went to the cottage, where we finally have a real roof. A roof is very good and now we are planning to think towards real walls, woot. We spent the weekend shredding branches from the pruned apple trees into manageable piles of fragrant woodchips, and jumping up and down on the compost pile. Good times, y’all. It was cold and windy and frustrating in parts but mostly it was all snails climbing Mt. Fuji. Oh, and Easter was awesome. I got thwacked a little harder than usual (uhm, ow) and also a sunburn (again, and louder: ow) but the sun was shining and my friends are lovely and the pickled eggs turned out great and altogether I feel fairly cheery, just not entirely right.

1. eat a lot of beets
2. forget that you ate a lot of beets

happy easter, my peeps. i’ll probably have something to say about pickled beets and purple eggs later.

dear DVD that i didn’t even watch,

where are you? i went to the store yesterday to get a light romantic
comedy because watching back to back episodes of heroes on top of the
internal unpleasantness is starting to mess with me. i feel
sufficiently craptastic these days without adding to it the fact that i
have not saved a cheerleader and i am so totally not on the list,
unless bursting into tears over stupid things is a superpower. if i
were around someone who bursts into flames, they could say, "the jiggly
handle of the frying pan; remember that old christmas commercial;
sharing different heartbeats" and i would totally quench
them with my salty salty self so there’s that.

so that’s where you come in, my dearest DVD, my DVD for which (whom?) i
actually Put On Pants and Left The House, smiling lumpishly at the
lovely girl who works behind the counter there and hoping that i do not
smell, as i suspect i do, like rotting old man mouth. i probably do,
and she’s probably just too nice to even wince. she probably had to do
some heavy bulimic gasping once i left, but she held it together while
i selected a movie and we were all very proud of me, with the pants and
all.

i felt so proud i even went to get cat litter because some portion of
the weeping may be the ammonia stinging my eyes, what do i know. and
then that propelled me to open the mailbox, which i sort of haven’t
done in a while, because i thought Look At Me Out And Functioning Woot
Go Me except there was nothing in the mailbox except a WATCHTOWER which
i briefly noted was in english so that must be who was ringing the
doorbell earlier today. i feel a sudden need to switch to second person
here, like "you briefly note that the watchtower is in english" because
implying to you in a first person narrative that i’m losing my mind is
maybe frightening you, my DVD. my mind is perfectly intact, DVD, as
evidenced by the fact that i am able to write complete sentences. it’s
just a little edgy. like the world, like hic sunt dracones.

anyway, so i threw out the watchtower and came home ready to watch some
kissing, some wacky misunderstanding, some hijinks, and then some more
kissing. dear DVD, where are you? i’m sorry i frightened you but really
it’s not my way to lose things <cough>wallet</cough>, okay,
not my way to lose things often and i can’t understand how i managed to
lose a DVD i didn’t even watch. i blame society. society made me the
loser of DVDs that i am. society also found me barehandedly sifting
through the bag of recently discarded cat litter looking for a lost DVD
that may have accidentally gotten entangled in the previously discarded
watchtower, but this story arc will never reach the correct target.

sigh. the dentist didn’t answer the phone today. i brushed my teeth and
put on my pants again and went to the DVD store and filled out a
missing person’s report for you. i’m ready to love you baby if you’ll
just come back. come back before monday and they won’t charge me for
you, kay? in the meantime i got kiss kiss bang bang. not a replacement,
a distraction. murdering the time until you come back.

yrs &c,
anne tuckova

what we did: i played boutros at my sister's on my very first night back. allow me please to interrupt myself to highly recommend modafinal, which enables pilots to fly remarkably well for forty hours without sleep, and also makes it possible for me to get out the periodic coherent sentence even very late at night and with jet lag, although it is not such an artificial enhancer that i actually won boutros or successfully argued the virtues of america or anything. sigh. i know that many people take sleeping pills to help overcome jet lag but the provigil rocked my world. i didn't exactly cry when my father asked me to give him back the bottle, but i thought about it.
what we ate: extraordinary mexican food, although i can't remember what specifically.
around that time, Squire Tuck said: fernando was the captain of a starship, and ellen was the first officer. us: why isn't ellen the captain? Squire Tuck: because she's younger. when fer was learning to pilot the ship, ellen was still in starfleet academy destroying records. us: destroying records? Squire Tuck: she was like, totally breaking all of them.

what we did: we hung out at my parents' house, where we did useful things like Discuss the State of the Cotthut and Shop For Clothes In My Size and File My Taxes. once again, what is with the tax unhappiness from people? i'm happy to make enough that i'm finally paying something back; i'm happy to be sensible enough to have budgeted for it. when the government starts asking for more than i would automatically pay a reasonably good server, i may squack a bit, but seriously. in my dream world, at least some portion of our tax paperwork would go to asserting where we want the money to go, because certainly voting doesn't seem to get me the people who make the decisions i want, and it seems like surely this could be an individual decision, where the money goes, but i know it's a dream. my dreams are entertaining to me, what do you want? i was told "but then we'd have this incredibly well-funded public television and no military" and i feel like: yeah. my point exactly.
what we ate: so much goodness! my father seared ahi tuna for me which is his way of saying he likes me even though he suspects me of democratic inclinations; my mother bought my beloved bagels and masses of raw vegetables and dip, which i think is her way of being a little pleased that i follow library scandals such as the newbery scrotum, because it means i was paying attention at least some of the time. plus they took us out a bunch. you know what Squire Tuck had? queserasadilla. over and over again.
around that time, Squire Tuck said: gar, i forgot. something that andrea told me to write down.

what we did: we saw ste3ve and david, who apparently live on daylight saving time, at least on fridays, but compensate by being delightful.
what we ate: some kind of "rainforesty" chicken (?) thing and invisible bruschetta; a caesar salad the size of my skull and a martini the size of my eardrum, which is the opposite of how i usually like things but it worked out fine.
around that time, Squire Tuck said: mom you are not supposed to look at other people anymore when you are married. me: look, if we're in cabos, and i get that shrimp thing, and you get yet another quesadilla, and i go, "hey, that looks yummy!" does that mean i'm going to eat your whole meal? Squire Tuck: of course not, because you know you want the shrimp. me: … Squire Tuck: okay, but you should only look at the young ones.

what we did: spent a few days in sonora with our former housemates, which was remarkable in the way that finding your old comfy shoes and putting them on and realizing your feet still fit in them pretty much perfectly. which is to say: not surprising, but still delightful.
what we ate: the most delicious pancakes ever. some grilled fish that Squire Tuck still can't stop talking about. kale, which was so cleverly disguised that i could taste the love and not the bitter green at all.
around that time, Squire Tuck said: look, i have a pistol and a lightsaber. i'm captain jack vader!

what we did: we went to vegas. i do not have the bandwidth to tell you how much fun i had.
what we ate: among many other fabulous and bizarre things, we came upon an all-you-can-eat japanese buffet thing, which was so so so good. i ate my body weight in sushi.
around that time, Squire Tuck said:  when you die i think i will have special marble poured over you like a statue, but it will be really you instead of a statue, and then your grandchildren, even your great-great-greatest grandchildren will know how you looked, right now and always.

any of you who haven't already guessed that i came home to three-week old food rotting in the fridge and laundry draped all over the furniture as if it had gotten itself dried but just didn't have the energy to walk itself into the drawers have not been playing along these past years. also, Squire Tuck is totally behind in school. those of you who think i was in any way surprised or even particularly angry about either of these things are new to the game. 

i promise to be more reflective and stuff presently, but i had to get this out before a week passed and i was all, "was i gone? or did i just have an exceptionally nice dream?"

i had maybe four layered and totally interesting conversations with my brother-in-law today.

my mother worked on measurements and proportions with Squire Tuck by baking cookies in metric. they were quite tasty. and my dad built little rockets with him and they shot them over the house. my parents are going all science on my boy, and it’s adorable beyond words.

we watched a documentary on mr. rogers and i wept as hard as i did the day he died. normally i like my heroes complex and human and fallible; for example i love jim henson because he understood children and because he sampled swedish porn. but i love mr. rogers like some people love jesus.

it was my father’s birthday today, and we went to see "ansel adams and georgia o’keeffe" which turned out to be "photos ansel adams took when georgia o’keeffe and a bunch of other people went on a trip with him" and was kind of disappointed because i thought it would be more muse-ish, but was still neat because ansel adams photographs a human face like it’s a big magnificient rock with a juniper tree in the middle, and that’s kind of cool.

also we saw bridge to terabithia. i cried even before the movie started because there were all these kids in booster seats around us, plus two busloads of schoolchildren, and i thought, nobody knows what these kids are in for because who would do that if they knew. "do they not know?" i kept asking my mother, who was as baffled as i was. but mostly people were quiet, which anymore i don’t expect people to understand what i understand, but i want them to shut up so i can get that understanding. so that was good. word to the wise: expect to be disappointed, and perhaps you will not be. for example, the special effects, which i had thought would be my deal breaker, were actually okay.

we leave for vegas tomorrow. what happens in vegas will most probably be reported on later, so ha.

i’m in yr time zone, eating yr fudz. spicy chicken drive through was my only mediocre call. other than that, high quality mexican after being seated by a woman with more bust showing than i do when i am naked, bagels bagels bagels i love you the best, more mexican, indian, japanese more than i could eat, ever so many nut-bearing pastries, ever ever so many salads. i am going to start dabbing newman’s salad dressings behind my ears and you will want to make out with me even more than you already do.

other than food i will observe that my parents’ house, although still iceboxingly cold, is a lot more comfortable than i remember it being, and i’ve spent some quality time lounging. its mostly digestive lounging but still involved being more supine than i usually get here. it’s good.

also noticing that people seem to correct each other’s grammar and usage more when i’m around. it is funny, because i fix stuff all day and have less desire to do so when i am off duty. this is why we are all happy i have the job i have, because otherwise i would be a non-stop pedantic bore. ANYWAY. there’s my dad, whose spelling is so admittedly creative that even bill gates doesn’t know what he’s trying to say, going after my sister for "john and me were there." so i bring out the pedant in others. nice.

Squire Tuck is celebrating Squire Tuckukah, in which every day we celebrate the miracle of Squire Tuck with gifts and fancy desserts. he’s taking it gracefully, as befits a little prince. we’ve only had a couple conversations in czech, which is like our twinspeak here, our secret lost language, and i think that’s a good sign. proc ona to dela, kdyz to neni zdravy? nevim, ale nic nerikej! nerikam, jezis. dobre.

i’m having a good time so far. i’ve got the disconnected sorrow that comes with jet lag, but i am generally doing fine. i just wanted to let you know.

this is your brain. this is your brain on monday.

a fun conversation to have with yourself when walking alone is the one
that starts, "remember when we were in paris together and we ate the
croissants?" it is more fun if you do it in a french accent. today i
nearly moved myself to tears with the "and you said you would always
love me, and that you had never loved me," and decided that perhaps
street performance is too much at 7:30, even if it is just for an
audience of one.

i finally submitted the formal request to let Squire Tuck out of school for
three weeks. STARTING FRIDAY. it is a whirlwind life we lead, tuckovans.

noticing how much of my time is spent wishing i were small,
really small. i’d like to fit inside your pocket. you could carry me
around like christopher robin carried piglet. i sometimes feel so rank
with my own obsessions that i doubt my ability to be of much use to
anyone, even small comfort, but i would like to be. and i would like to
get a good look at an inkpot, like piglet did.

today in czech class i misplaced the words for anesthesia, virus, and
museums. the mind simply would not produce them in czech, so i did the
thing you aren’t supposed to do and went looking for them in english,
hoping to trigger the czech word. interestingly, i had also lost the
english words. brain the size of a planet, it’s no wonder things go
missing, but still.

i went to buy the bus tickets to the airport. this is maybe the most unprepared i’ve
been for an epic journey. (all my journeys are epic). usually i’m packed by now (because i used to
take days to pack, and now i can do it in an hour, but i still do it
days before the departure, because i am not very clever about doing
things). the bus i planned for is sold out (see? see how i should have
planned ahead), so i had to flip out and wander around downtown trying
to think of how to make it right. a man was looking at the lacy underwear in
a shop window while holding a newspaper over his head to ward off the
freezing rain, and he walked right into me.

i have a headache that is slightly larger than my head and a small furry knife in the back of my throat. perhaps i should pack just in case things get worse.

on the weekend nobody felt exactly lively. Squire Tuck and i decorated for christmas
finally on sunday, but mostly i sat around in my jammies putting together a puzzle and reviewing my
appreciation of the underrated art of NOTH. whatcha doing? nothing.

on monday Squire Tuck stayed home because he was "sick" and because i’m a
parent who believes that if a kid really really doesn’t want to go to
school, their ability to learn is as hampered as if they were ill, so:
stay home. spare the teacher and yourself. by monday afternoon he had
upgraded to sick (without scare quotes) and by monday evening he was
screaming in pure frustration at Friar Tuck for correcting his pronunciation
of some word or another, and i tried to rub his back and he burst into
tears from the pain of being touched. ah, genuine sickness, i haven’t seen you in a while.

yesterday Squire Tuck felt the christmas spirit of giving and decided to share
his illness with me; by 5 p.m. i was weeping on the couch while we
passed the tissues back and forth and reminded each other to drink more
tea. we watched a bunch of PBS tapes ("in search of myths and heroes"),
which was just so supercool. we talked about shangri-la and how
although religious wars
strike me as ridiculous, it’s not like atheists are above it all: the
cultural revolution wreaked as much destruction as a holy war. we
talked about zeus getting out athena by splitting his skull open, and
whether or not a drill would be a good way to drain the sinuses. Squire Tuck
thinks not but it’s still an option on my table. i cannot go much
longer with the mouth breathing, three more days of this and i’ll be
unable to explain the difference between "it’s" and "its" and then how
will we buy bread.

Friar Tuck came home at about seven with a full bag of fruit and wine and
rum and vegetables. he made this giant vat of vegetable soup and played chess with Squire Tuck and poured
rum punches into me until everything, including the mouth breathing, was
very very funny, and very sleepy, and i went to bed. and slept! and
feel better today, although still unable to breath through my nose.

Squire Tuck’s already back in school.

last night i sat in a pile of tissues (one of my 2 disgusting habits)
and thought how lucky i am. lucky that i have a kid with whom i can
talk about cultural revolutions and splitting headaches. lucky
that i have a guy who knows so precisely how to take care of me that i
barely need to explain anything. it’s the difference between falling off the highwire and bouncing on a trampoline.

i am troubled that i am not getting a rush of emails along the lines of "WHEN in february, oh my darling anne, can i crush you in my arms and look deep into your pretty blue eyes and confess that for the eleven months you are not here my life is entirely devoid of meaning?" i know you’re lying, but seriously, if you want to hang out in february you best book it early and often. i’m saying. i have vegas to attend to, you know.

on saturday i saw a woman on the bus whose hair was shellacked about five inches off her skull and her makeup was so heavy i could see not merely the line of makeup along the jaw, but the thickness of the line. it facial braille by mary kay. she was wearing jeans and a puffy coat; i waited for her head to detach and go wherever it was going, which was certainly someplace different from the rest of her body, but she was all still in one piece when i got off at my stop.

and saturday continued to be weird. saturday night we were in this nearly-deserted restaurant playing scrabble and the waiter told us (over the hum of the television) that this was a classy establishment in which one could not play games, as it disturbs the other customers. pointing out that the other customers totalled about 10 in a room that seats 100+ was not persuasive, and so we had to leave. it was like getting kicked out of denny’s for studying, i was like, "whaa–?" the next place we went to we asked permission, just in case the earth had reversed polarities or something, and the waitress looked at us as if we had lost our entire minds. "yes, of COURSE you can play games here!" thank goodness. conversation is all well and good but i won’t rest until i’ve spelled CRAZIEST instead of just lived through it.

things are generally good. i got back to sleeping through the night after nearly a month of frantic insomnia, and we’re all much happier for it. a freakishly clean house, a dozen ambitious projects (started, rarely completed), and an insane ability to work without even stopping for cigarettes is all quite entertaining for me, but i gather it is not much fun to live with.
also, i never seem to get done the stuff that NEEDS to get done. it’s like, "you know what? i haven’t cleaned the tiles with a toothbrush in a really long time! i should get on that! what, pay the bills? oh, yeah, plenty of time for that later!! now… where’s that toothbrush?"

it is a good thing i am very very pretty because sometimes i am also very very stupid. but charming! and charm always carries us through the dumb stuff, right? even if we don’t think it will. charm is a total SuperPower. people think they want, like, the ability to fly or something, and those traditional superpowers may be useful, like with invisibility one could rob banks and look at naked people without getting caught, but charm has useful everyday applications. for example, i will probably need it to sort out that bill i missed last month. awhoops.