Perhaps you should avert your eyes.

Tomorrow I intend to flash my stash. I'm working on the pictures now, and am employing good old Microsoft Paint for clarification. In the meantime, I leave you with this picture of a scarf I started a couple days ago in order to remove the first h.t. wool I ever bought from stash status. Enjoy.

They pelted us with rocks and garbage.

The poison whatever seems to be receding. On Friday, my dad gave me the details of the hot water cure, wherein you douse the poison whatever with water as hot as you can stand, and it tingles with a deeply unholy sensation until it goes numb, and stays numb (though tender to the touch) for 4-6 hours.

I follow this procedure up with an assortment of Benadryl, hydrocortisone, and/or Aveeno calamine + painkiller. Different active ingredients, and I figure they can duke it out in a winner-take-all battle for soothing supremacy.

It's like a god damn Monty Python sketch in here.

Um, I was busy and out of town for a while, so if anybody out there has any idea what the hell went down over here, could you drop me an e-mail and explain?

Today at work at the pharmacy, I had an exchange that went like this:

Customer: I need a refill on my husband's Z-Pack*. I don't know if you need the prescription number or what...
Me: Okay, what was his name?
Customer: His name is Rex Willickerson.**
Me: Okay, and you said a Z-Pack?
Customer: Yes, it is prednisone.^^
Me: Um, okay, well a Z-Pack comes in a green (here I remember that the generic has just come on the market, and that it comes in a white pack with some green on it) or white pack - is there any green on it?
Customer: Yes, I think so.
Me: Well, prednisone is different than the Z-pack - does the box say prednisone on it?
Customer: Yes, I need the Z-pack.

Ho-kay then.

*A Z-Pack is a card with six doses of zithromax, or azythromycin, an antibiotic.

**Not his real name.

^^Prednisone is a steroid, not an antibiotic. It also comes in a small white card.


Other is downstairs, experiencing the British _Office_ for the first time. There has been some screaming.

Everybody knows there's no dirt in a snowstorm.

The worst thing about having poison whatever is not the itching, or the burning, or the waking up in wee hours with itching/burning, or the red splotching that you feel you need to hide from people (but at least then if they catch a glimpse, you can say don't look at me - I'm hideous!). The worst part about having poison whatever is that every damn person around you thinks they're an expert on poison whatever. Here is a list of things I've been told:

1) That looks bad - that means it's systemic.
2) You need oral drugs. Cream won't do anything.
3) Put some bleach on it.
4) My uncle swears by vinegar.
5) Put some hydrocortisone on it.
6) Hydrocortisone and diphenhydramine are the same thing.
7) You shouldn't wrap it.
8) Wrap it anyway.
9) You need to call your doctor.
10) Well, it's spreading because the oil stays on your skin. (This was 12 days after initial exposure. Apparently I will have poison whatever for the rest of my life.)
11) Ew.

I'll let you guess which of these comments came from the doctor's office.

The poison plant and me.

I went home last weekend, and mom and I embarked on the major project of making the fence Bailey-proof. Bailey likes to get out underneath it and rile up the neighborhood dogs, so we got plastic fencing and other stuff to seal off the space between the fence and ground. We did two sections, digging a trench in which to bury the bottom of the fencing and staking it and then filling it in and nailing it to the wooden fence itself, but then we got distracted by the project of ripping this fence-eating vine/bush thing out of a different section.

We used a saw, the back of a hammer, and our wits to detangle it; when we got the first 6-foot section done, I said do you want to keep going? and mom said no, it looks like the rest will take a while, and then we worked until it was done. The thing had grown back and forth between the boards, some branches actually pushing the planks away from the frame with their growing. There were rotten bits of vine left from the last great detangling, which I pushed out with the hammer. We would saw it up close to the fence where it went through, then pull from the other side until it popped out.

It was satisfying, like working the knots out of a ball of yarn or finally getting something out from between your teeth.

Then mom came down with a wicked case of poison something, whatever that vine was. Sumac? Oak? It can't be poison ivy, because it wasn't ivy*. She gets poison something at least five or six times a year - eventually I'm sure we'll have to rush her to the hospital, but until that point she'll keep buying Zanfel by the gallon.

I myself had a few little red bumps on my wrist and arm, but nothing like mom's outbreak, which I have thought of the words to describe, but will not, because you do not want to hear it. Yar. But then at 5:30 this morning, I woke up to the fiery itching of this poison something, with the patches from before swollen and throbbing. I staggered into the bathroom to slather hydrocortisone on it, resisting the urge to apply it with sandpaper or maybe a fork (... just thinking about that makes my knees go a little weak). I laid in bed for an hour thinking about sandpaper, then the alarm went off ten minutes later.

When I came across the Benadryl Extra Strength Cream this morning, I realized that this case of poison something is not, in fact, a random incident or a metaphor for my grandmother's death; it is actually the universe's way of presenting me with the opportunity to use up the Benadryl before it expires in 04/06, just like it let me try out the new skin and that time I'd been complaining about how damned expensive health insurance was and how I'd never get the value out of it that I was putting in and then had the lupus scare.


*I learned what poison ivy looked like when I was a 10-year-old girl scout and this shit is NOT POISON IVY.

Swing your partner round and round, throw em in and flush em down!

Finally, I am asking myself clearly, why do I not have an aesthetic? So many people have aesthetics.

Above is my homage to Stephanie, the quilt enjoying the view from the plane.

Do.

If I had some time off this week, I'd drive to Texas and solve the droughts and fires. Every time I get behind the wheel of a car these days, nature has given me storms of some kind or another. Rain so hard like to break the windshield, and one she made up just for me, with snow, sleet, lightening and thunder, and finally a type of rain that won't let you see but will not wet the glass enough to keep the wipers from making that horrible rubber-on-glass wrooop sound.

My grandma died on Monday. Even though I didn't live in Columbus when either of my grandparents died, I happened to be there both times. The first time I went to the east side as soon as I could to console my now-alone grandmother, and the second time I sat outside the theater and then ate cheese at Don Pablo's with my dad, even though I wasn't hungry. It was almost six years ago that I went out to her, and started this deeper relationship - which I've described elsewhere. She was not a happy woman, and never became happy, and I will mourn for that.

The other thing that was stressing my shit out this week was the ultimate deadline of the Saturday wedding that we flew to Vermont to attend, the deadline for the quilt being done. Everybody said, "can you work on the plane?" and I said "maybe, but I definitely want to have it finished before then," and then I not only worked on the plane, I worked, on the morning of the wedding, in the house of the gracious strangers we were staying with. And I could work on it for about another week and then maybe it would be done, or maybe it would never be done and so I'm just glad it's out of my hands, having been given.

Maybe there will be a picture someday.

Standing next to your mom in Eddie Bauer holding a shirt is the great leveler.

Dear Universe,

Please no more blasts from the past. I don't know how much more I can take.

I drove home (home-home) today after work at the pharmacy and went shopping for pants with my mom. (The current pants situation is grievous, by the way. I have three pairs of pants that I like (well, and are work-appropriate), and there are five days in the work week.) We ran into the co-valedictorian of my high school class, a driven and talented and miserable girl in high school, who, based on a five-minute conversation during which we both tried to put our lives into some sort of coherent and impressive context, seems a lot happier now.

I always got the impression during high school that she felt herself to be out of my league, and going on facts it was probably true; she had above a 4.5 GPA on a 4.0 scale, she played on the boys' soccer team, she went to the University of Chicago. I have no distinct memories of her being mean to me, though, which either means that she wasn't or that it didn't cut very deep if she did. I have an awful memory.

But a friend told me, after becoming my friend late in high school, that I was generally thought of as hating the place and everyone in it. Which is a relief, if also kind of sad, because at least I wasn't being picked on. This might explain why it wasn't my pants getting pulled down during soccer practice, or why I was able to haughtily decline hazing, while a lineup of girls got smeared with condiments and flour.

The valedictorian stayed out of that stuff as well. I kind of got the feeling today that she wanted me to think highly of what she's doing now, and I can definitely cop to feeling that way too. I'd like to think that if our moms hadn't been standing there watching us like a tennis match, I'd have said, "let's be cool, so-and-so. We're not really that anymore, so we can relax."

Mit Funktionsfaser Polycolon

I went to New York City with different bits of the family last month, and we did touristy things like see Spamalot, which was surprisingly great, and take pictures in tiny cafes, and go to Rockefeller Center. We did uninhibited touristy things as well, like take digital camera footage of Other and my dad running down the steps of the New York Metropolitan Library, screaming and waving their arms as if they were being chased by ghosts. (Other checked a lot off of his list.)

We also went to the Lou Reed's New York photography exhibit in a tiny gallery downtown, which I'd heard about on NPR months before. This was entirely due to Other getting a library card and figuring out where the place was and how to get there while we were at the play. I don't know why, but it just didn't seem possible to me to actually look it up and then go there. When he called from 40 blocks away, having found the place and gone there, my first response was to tell him that I couldn't come because I had to see the part of the family I basically hadn't seen at all.

But I did end up going and seeing the exhibit, which was great, and eating at 10th Avenue Pizza, which was great, and when I thanked him for making it all happen, he replied, "Doin' stuff!" which was my motto during the time when my friendships with the high school people were going to hell. We had all these great ideas - well, ideas. We talked about having a band, and travelling, and writing things to submit for publication, and we did nothing but sit at Denny's or Friday's (or Denny's then Friday's) drinking coffee and pissing away the meager paychecks we hated working for. The switch from talking about stuff to actually doing it was pretty much hopeless.

Even though I am really doin stuff now - making stuff, writing, purchasing plane tickets and renting cars like an actual adult, all that - I still seem to feel like there's some kind of membrane between me and the world. The Lou Reed exhibit was the beginning of poking my fingers through it, but it's not gone. I am working on it.

My phone number hasn't changed, but I have

Today I got an e-mail - at the account so old that it has been my spam account for more than several years - from a friend from high school. It was a meme with questions about high school - who were your friends (the answer to which relegates me to "& co." -- funny how everything is still the same), did you go to prom, were you a party animal.

It has been over a year since I communicated with the leader, the one whose name came in front of the & co ( and always has). She signed my marriage certificate, and I may never speak to her again. We went to a Modest Mouse concert together in July 2004. I paid for her ticket. I took my Master's exam two weeks later, and she did not call me to see how it went, even though she knew I was nervous about it. I thought to myself, fine - I'm not calling her. I'll wait until she calls. And here we are.^

We always joked in high school that we were the group of leftovers, the people who didn't claim a clique immediately. Two of us went through all 12 grades together, though we didn't become friends until about junior year. One moved there in 6th grade, one freshman year, one sophomore year. Basically, we became friends because we needed lab partners.

I don't know why it surprises me that this isn't a good basis for a lasting friendship. When I got the e-mail, though, it rocked me back. For half an hour my mind was completely elsewhere. Why did she refer to us as "the crew," the popular* crowd's name for themselves? What is everybody doing with themselves? Did anybody ever do anything with themselves? The last time I talked to them, it didn't seem to be headed in that direction.

We had a really good time together. I still haven't figured out if that was because we liked each other or if we just liked having a good time. Since then, I've made a couple really good friends who are positive sorts of friends - we have similar interests and values - rather than default ones. I'm glad to have them, but it kind of sucks to have lost contact with most of the people who remember who I was seven years ago.



^Actually, though, one time the phone rang once and her number came up on the caller i.d. She clearly had called me by mistake. So I said to Other, "well, at least I know I'm still in her phone." And he said, "yeah, but probably not anymore." Right.

*I don't know if it was this way in other schools, but I was always mystified by the fact that everyone really seemed to dislike the popular crowd, but would certainly have agreed that they were popular.

..............................................

"This can't be a dream," I thought, as I hauled myself up into the driver's seat of the fire engine.

It's about goddamn time.

Hey, everyone -- wanna sue Ann Coulter? Go here: http://www.tedrall.com/rants.html.