Feng Sh**

Hot Pink Chocolate Birthday Queen

I love Feng Shui.  It's added some challenge, spiritual significance, brain-food and fun to my FAVORITE chore of all time: housekeeping. I like to try to figure out logical explanations for chi and the rules. Like, it makes sense to me that if the corner of the room you first see upon entering is clutter free, it will make the sensation of walking in to that room lighter. Keep mirrors away from your bed; I sometimes awake in the middle of the night to see an unknown figure standing near me, imagine if that was doubled by a mirror! I would scream twice as loud! And if your stairways, hallways, and entryways are cluttered and difficult to enter, it's going to make it hard to move around your house and you'll get lethargic and overwhelmed. And if the photos of people in your house are always turned towards each other, I can see how subconsciously that might give you a sense of co-operation.

Ione, WA Train Ride

As a woowoo-leaning Libra who has noticed she is deeply affected by her surroundings (as Libra's are wont to be), it was only a matter of time before Feng Shui and I met and started dating. It was destiny. And being in the analytical triad of Libra, I like to suss out what causes these feelings. Take good luck charms. Are they really full of magic? Or are they as full of magic as we imbue them by believing it so. And, as the psychological "sciences" point out, the luckier you think you are, the luckier you actually are because you are open to finding and receiving positive experiences. If you aren't convinced that nothing good ever happens to you, you'll be able to see the ocean of cool experiences we're actually swimming in.  And if you want a charm to convince you of it, then take it, and believe in it whole heartedly and it will be truer than not.

So in my weekly thrill through the library, I picked up another book on Feng Shui, to inspire more decluttering and to find out what else I could do to feel awesome in my home and to create awesomeness for everyone who enters it, to allow the flow of awesome to come and go and radiate from my little Shinto shrine of awesomenity. And there were some good new ideas in the book.  If you feel ugly, clean out your wardrobe.  Certainly, clothes that don't fit and yet you feel obligated to wear because they are perfectly good isn't a way to waltz into the world with your head held high.  And torn unders can't do much for you either.  I purged chipped dishes (that could still be used for small snacks!) and noticed my purse was old and stained (the toll of time creeps in on these daily implements) and gleefully upgraded to shiny and new and 50% off.

Then.  Enter the woowoo-ness.  The "put an amythist under your bed to protect your marriage" part of the book.  I'm paraphrasing here because I flung the thing back to the library, but apparently there's this Five Fingers of Yellow Death that rotates clockwise around your house, taking up 30 degrees for a whole year and if you touch anything in that area, you subject your home, your wealth (such at it is today), your health and that of everyone you come in contact with to grave danger (ooo-ooo-oooo).  And then there's the Sergeant of Deadly Arrows who occupies a full 1/2 of your house every year.  No remodeling there.  The author admits it's a pain in the rear, but she doesn't mess with it.  In fact, in order to avoid the Five Ochre Fingers, she removes ALL objects from the 30 active degrees of Jaundiced Death Digits for the entire year and closes it entirely off.  Well, I'm sorry, but at that point we'd officially crossed a line from curious brain-food in to total horse-sh**.

Moving on, I decided to shine up our entry, touch up the paint, refresh the front door, etc.  In non-woowoo terms, this is so that when we come home, we do not feel we are entering a depressing pit of dilapidation where entropy is out of control.  But in order to do that, I would have to sort through a daunting basement closet where the previous owners left veritable pyramids of paint cans. So there, I'd identified a place of clutter that was gumming up the works.  So I cleared it out, toted a load of cans to the dump. Unfortunately, I accidentally took the empty can of dining room paint,  throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and now I have no idea what that color is. In order to do "touch up" I'll now just have to buy a whole new color and paint the whole damn thing. And that, my friends, is where F*** Shui began.

homestead grave yard- ooooh-oooh

I swept out the closet, put in a shelf, reorganized and now I have an easy to access, easy to understand home repair center.  And within minutes a most promising cow buyer fell through.  I broke about 5 dishes in one extraordinarily clutzy evening.  I charred dinner.  I failed to take care of several key paper-work type things. I got a bill for my duck egg fiasco which included two doctor visit charges (one of which my insurance rejected as absurd; that's what they told me) because, the office said, I had to be held for observation for so long and they said I should just be thankful I'm alive because it was clear I was close to not being so and a funeral OR ER visit would have been 5x as much, never mind I was the ONLY patient they had and my occupation of the room did not constitute any extra expense or lost revenue opportunity. This and that and then Huck came home and that's when he tore his calf muscle, with it's attendant ER bill (yet to be recieved), plus his inability to lift all the heavy things (chicken coops that need to go into the barn now) or that might have been acquired, like free ovens.  The Sh*ticane Feng had made land fall on our farm.

Curious about what Feng Shui might say about it, I discovered that the closet I cleaned out was the ONLY space in our house that was in the Five Fingers of Mustard Morbidity this year.  According to this book, it was the only place in the house I should not have decluttered, not this year anyhoo. Had the page about these fingers somehow influenced my subconscious?  And yet how could my subconscious tear Huck's calf muscle and double charge me for a doctor's visit? Especially since I hadn't really read the whole page or done the math to figure out what segment of my house was under siege?  Or was this woowoo-iest version of Feng Shui the real one?  Was there really a Colonel of Destruction residing, even now, in chi-form in half my house?  Could these Six Fingers really take down our whole family?  Could the power of positive thinking, could the LAW OF ATTRACTION counter Feng Shui?  Do the five fingers play paper-scissors-rock with Learned Optimism and Abraham and the Hicks? What trumps what? 

Popeye and kids

I found that my only possible Feng Shui prayer would be a Hail-Mary bowl of dirt.  And since my subconscious had already read that, I figured that if I put a bowl of dirt in the closet, my subconscious could rest easy and stop harassing my life.  But if I used positive thinking to combat fear of Five Fingers by say, denying Five Fingers exists or that it has power, by insisting the Five Fingers are a peasant-Chinese, non-scientific grab for explanation, ie: superstition, then if Five Fingers really exist, will I totally piss it off and a nuclear bomb will drop on Lucky Farm's East by SE corner? Note: we haven't specified what kind of luck this farm has! Or will the Force of the Fingers diminish it's imaginary power that resides solely in my head?

You know that discussion about "If I didn't know about Jesus, would I still go to hell?" And the missionary, compassionate and kind, says, "No."  And the proverbial Eskimo says, "They why did you tell me?"  So that's why I brought the book back.My thoughts are powerful. My imagination more so. And my subconscious supremely so. I need a sign above my door: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here," perhaps?  Nah. How about something like "Don't Feed Inhabitants Superstition?"

Gun safety lessons (plus can shooting) with Opa

But things are improving.  Huck's leg is slowly healing as healing is the natural state of life, until it isn't. And I forgot we have this new, posh health care debit card, so the bills will get taken care of before the next millennium.  The front door is refreshed. The rotten board in the front porch is replaced (no thanks to me! Demo looks so fun when Huck and his dad do it; how hard can it be? A crow bar and some elbow grease, I'm loaded with that! And then I destroyed every board around the board I was trying to remove. Huck was able to fix most of my damage and replace the correct board, LAYING down!), and stained. The bills are all paid.  The pantry is full.  My birthday was an awesome cabin-stay in Ione with a train ride, thanks to my adventure-planning mother.  My vote for most magical human invention?  Trains...in autumn.  The kids are great.I mean, listen to this, my daughter gets to go to a school where the term "Geeky" is synonymous with ye ol' "Rad" and "Da Bomb." The marriage is currently cozy and affectionate. The house, sturdy.  My health, superb.  My creative endeavors rockin' on.  All the animals are well-fed and fine. And the sunrises are sublime, as always. And I think the crystals in the Southeast corner are finally working!

 

 

Non-Consensual Farming

Little Chocolatey Claire

Did I tell you our oven went kaput.  Well, not kaput; it went out in a blaze of glory.  A ball of fire proceeded along the element, leaving a molten puddle of metal as it traversed, shooting lighting to the sides. A new oven wasn't in the budget, so we've been without.  What's the big deal? It was summer and who turns on an oven in the summer time?  I'd just use the dutch oven if necessary, like camping.

Then, in the early hours, early in September a frozen finger of death descended upon our garden and took out 20 pepper plants, 10 tomato plants, 3 watermelon vines, 5 cucumber vines, a row of beans and 7 summer squash bushes. There were reports throughout the region of a few select households, like ours, hit by random acts of Jack Frost. For a light frost, it would have been early, for a hard freeze it was a full month ahead.  And what was the likelihood of this happening again? Zero. Zero, I tell you. Feeling slightly ill about a year's worth of loss (I'd also lost my carrots, most of my potatoes and ALL of my garlic to ravenous gophers. I did get a haul on onions, peas, kale, favas, and corn, however), I fell in to a fitful sleep that night. I awoke at 4am, sure the frost had returned. At six, I finally ventured out and witnesses all of my winter squash frost damaged.  ALL of it.

This would not have been a problem in other years.  Annoying, yes.  But I would have pulled them all in and spent a day or two cooking them up to freeze.  But alas, no oven. I would sell my cow and we would buy an oven.

Hendrika, the big red cow (with cute tiny Yoda!)

My big Hendrika girl was possibly the worst cow known to human kind.  She was ornery with a bottomless appetite. I hadn't milked her since her latest calving, another bull we named Yoda.  I have some things to say about cows: the first is that they're a hell of a lot of work.  99.9% of the population knows this, but I needed actual experience to realize that, yes, as soon as able, humanity ditched the family milk cow and her accompanying winters chipping shit-ice and filling troughs with frozen hoses.

The second thing I noticed was that cow-husbandry involves quite a bit of heart ache.  There was the shooting debacle, of course.  But every year I had to sell a cow, a cute one, a nice one.  And I had to decide who to sell and when to sell it. And it broke my heart annually.

Third: expense. Like most hobbies, it's more expensive than not doing the hobby.  Take knitting: you could buy a sweater on clearance from Target for $15, or you could buy $100 in yarn and spend a couple months making it yourself. Or para-sailing: you could jump off the high dive at your local pool.  But the stress  expense of amassing the chunk of change for a winter's worth of delivered hay was feeling tiresome.

I felt a little guilt.  Bonds had been made and they felt like commitments.  But cows aren't pets.  And I didn't marry Hendrika and I didn't give birth to her.  I have struggled with the boredom inherent in providing a stable home for children and in maintaining a monotonous marriage.  But I realized that I this level of commitment is not required of absolutely every endeavor.  In fact, in order to maintain the commitments I have, I will need to make sure the rest of my life is constantly fresh and moving and flowing with new things coming in.  That's not flaky, that's taking responsibility for my needs for adventure and novelty before it explodes in my face.

It took a few weeks to sell Hendrika. We had a vacation in there and one buyer had his truck break down. But eventually she (and her bull calf) went to a beef farm as a nurse maid.  I was somewhat relieved no one was going to try to work with her by hand. But the look she gave me as the trailer pulled out shriveled my soul: betrayal, disgust, fear, shock.

a neighbor's beet, organic?

And all I had left was the hard-to-find miniature Jersey, Chocolatey Claire, lover of onions and valuable because miniatures (old world size, the size they were when they arrived here from the isle of Jersey) eat so little yet can produce so much milk. This was the cow I'd wanted from the beginning when the closest one was Montana for $2000, ha!  So I figured I'd breed her from what I could get.  And then, once I had her, I felt done with the cattle adventure. Ironic. And now five deals have fallen through. This last one even PayPal'd me a down payment.  Saturday morning they texted me with their plan to ship her to Montana: the vet inspection would be Wednesday, the branding inspection, Thursday.  They'd buy my winters worth of hay (because she was hungry and I was starting to wonder, so with Hendrika's money, I bought hay for her instead of an oven.  Then about five minutes after the delivery left the hay ranch for my place, I'd gotten a call from this latest buyer, but it was too late to back out of the hay deal.so I have hay now and because of a math glitch -- despite the fact that I took several years of college math, not because I enjoyed it, but because I was good at it and there was this really hot math professor -- I miscalculated how much hay I would need and I now have 1 1/2 years worth) and I'd have my new oven.  And then an hour later, they called to say that the rules for getting her into Montana had added up to over $500 worth of inspections, plus vaccine issues.  It would actually be easier to bring a motor home full of cats with rabies into Montana that a little hobby-cow.

Images of that stainless steel glass top oven vanished.  And now I have a cow I don't particularly want and I am done with this selling roller coaster. Perhaps I will try in the spring, but by then we'll have bonded. My friend says, "Seems like the universe really wants you to keep that cow."  "Well it seems a little non-consensual of the universe," I pouted. Ah, but Sarajoy, darling, that IS life.  The whole thing's been fairly non-consensual from the get go.  No one here asked to be born, not even the cows.

While trying to sell her, I figured I'd try again to get her bred because anyone would want that in a heifer, plus we need her to shut up. The neighbors were commenting about her noise, and when I explained she was in heat, the lady said, "Oh I get that! I understand where she's coming from now!" So the breeder came out on Friday, in the middle of the daily morning mayhem. And we head out to the barn only to find the stanchion destroyed, strewn all over the field. I have no idea how petite and demure Claire pulled that off.  But after discussing our options, the main one being roping Claire and having me use my body to pin her against the barn wall while he inseminated her with his arm, I decided to pass this time.

I asked him if I was asking too much for her.  My price had started at $2500, because the closest available cow of this rare sort was now Virginia, for the same price, same level of "purity" of breed.  After the buyers at that price dropped off.  I lowered it, got a buyer, she lost her job, lowered it, lowered it, got a buyer who emailed me daily for a week with silly questions then dropped off, got this latest buyer and here I am at $800.  It makes me sick. And the breeder said I could get more than that if I just had the slaughter house pick her up! Being a miniature, she's cheaper to keep than cats, and now that I think of it, cheaper than getting the field mowed. And if I do ever get her bred, once she calves, she'll more than pay for herself milk-wise. But then there I'll be with another calf to hurt my heart as I sell it.

As Artificial Insemination Fred left, I collected the pieces of the stanchion from the field.  As I collected them, I noticed that it would only need a few screws and ten minutes to put back together.  As I noticed this, the AI guy I found on Craigslist disappeared around the corner.  And the whole hobby farming fiasco reached shitti-cane status and I got the giggles.

Chase of butternuts

In the meantime, I started looking on Craigslist for a cheaper oven.  I need to deal with this room full of winter squash before it all goes bad where the frost permeated the skin.  And suddenly, there are all these ovens up there, for free!  And they work and they're newer and nicer than mine.  Brushed nickel? no.  But white and newer and cleaner (I spent all last Sunday scrubbing that thing. I even used toxic cleaner and gloves and finally, a brillo pad and still, there's these black archipelagos across the stove) for free.  But, alas, Huck's calf muscle is torn and my Hercules, or should we say Achilles, is laid up for now.  He won't be lifting ovens any time soon.  So we "opted" to repair and spruce up the one we have, uber-eco re-users that we are. Huck ordered an element for our 40 year old oven. I bought new spill dishes. And in the process of cleaning it, wiped all the numbers off the dials, so I bought new dials. Unfortunately the new dials have a totally different number system, so where once a 5 was medium, it's now high.  And every dinner has been burned since. Lucky me, the element arrived and we found we need more parts to install it.  Still waiting for those.

Let's recap: this year I grew a garden and got little for my efforts.
I have a cow I don't want and
an oven I hate that still doesn't work.

But what am I, some conditional lover of life? If it's conditional, it isn't love. If I have the right conditions, I'll "love" it? So if anything isn't precisely as I ordered, I'm sending it back to the kitchen?  Ah, no.  I'll call this all an (mis)adventure, and I'll say I'm happy on this bull-ride o'life.  Who the hell knows what's coming down the pike?  Today, unplanned cow-husbandry and a garden robbed by weather.  And tomorrow?  Get ready, could be your wildest dream, hard times, frustration, thrills, spills.  It's wild out here in unpredictable life.  And maybe that's all I want really, maybe that's what keeps me happy and rocking along, all this unpredictability even in the midst of what seems like boring old stability.

Love is a Rebellious Frisbee

Carmen is not my favorite opera, it turns out.

Wallace, ID "Center O'Universe"

I didn't realize that I liked opera until recently.  We were out to dinner with another family and the dad and I got blabbing about opera.  He is a thick-spectacled man with an opera vocabulary to match.  He used some technical term and I said, "I don't know what that means.  I'm not really an opera expert. It's not really my thing."  And my friend says, "Yeah, it's not really your thing, Sarajoy.  You two have just been holding forth for half an hour on opera.  You even have favorites, which is more than I can say, even though I've been dragged to more operas than I can count."

I stand by what I said: I am not an opera expert.  But her words got me thinking: I kind of do like opera.  I've been going since I was 15 and my mom got me tickets to see The Magic Flute, and I took my boyfriend and although I've seen many since, that's still my favorite opera, so much so that I bought the CD for my kids. And yet I HATE musicals and sound tracks to musicals and operas.  A long time ago, heading out on a little road trip, my friend asked what kind of music I like: "Good," I stupidly opined.  So she grabs some CDs and the ENTIRE road trip we were listening to Rent, while she narrated the plot. It was pure hell.  Now I always specify: no Christian rock or musical/opera sound tracks.  Everything else can at least get past the gag reflex.

So for our anniversary, I suggested Huck and I go to an opera.  Huck: "Pppffft, opera? I don't think so."

Wallace, ID

Oh, that's right.  Since we've been together I have attended operas.  Alone. We don't have to be the same person.  Although some overlap in interests would help sometimes.  And far be it for him to spend an evening humoring me, and certainly not on our anniversary.

I wasn't done, though.  If I've learned anything from my kids, it's that persistent begging can pay off, or at worst, dock you the evening's dessert.  It was a gamble I was willing to take.  Tactic #1) disparage and humiliate for being different.

"I can't believe you're a musician and you don't want to see Carmen.  That surprises me.  Can you grow as a musician without exposing yourself to new sources?"  Actually, that's what I was planning to say, in a very unusual instance of me 1) planning what I was going to say before I said it and 2) manipulatively and 3) to get my own way.  But he interrupted me at "Carmen."

"Carmen!!!  Carmen!! Why didn't you say so!"  And with that he whipped out his laptop and bought us tickets.

On Saturday we trotted the kids off to the birthday party and the over-nighter (thanks J and T!! A well-baby-sittered friend (who felt sorry for our baby-sitter-less existence) and I planned this over-nighter a while ago and I told Huck who said, "September 22?  Do you know what day that is?"  Um...no... let's see... birthdays? Band Gig? oh wait... maybe... it's our anniversary?")

Well, we didn't trot to their house so much as differently gait.  I, striding forward in a timely manner and Huck carefully swinging forward on his crutches because Thursday night he leapt to catch a Frisbee ("that Coyote was throwing" the bonus phrase Huck never omits because it gives him dad brownie points and basically points out that "(grunt) yes (grunt) I was injured in the act of being an awesome father".  And who's going to begrudge the crippled man his glory?) and tore his calf muscle.  And I seem to think it's important that it was the calf muscle on the leg that is reconstructed.  And Huck does not seem to think that is important because the tear is no where near the titanium knee. But that knee does wear on his body, does it not?  And why not get extra brownie points for being a mixed martial arts moron in New Orleans when you were 18?  But I digress, the point is we spent most of Friday in the ER, listening to "Wait! Wait! Don't tell me!" podcasts.  And we got expert care and no surgery is needed, just crutches and ice and they offered pain killers, but Huck refused because he's an awesome father.

The Family that Mines together, stays together

This crutching has brought up some issues, such as his refusal to allow me to help.
"Do you WANT to eat that burrito standing up in the kitchen?"
"Well, what else am I going to do? I can't exactly use crutches and hold a plate."
"Um, I could carry the plate.  I'm standing right here.  My hands are empty."
"I want to eat here. Grrrr."

And later:
"If I was hurt and hobbling around and you kept asking to help and I kept refusing, how would you feel?"
"Surprised. It's you we're talking about, you know?"

Take 2:
"Why are you not asking for help, even though you clearly need it?"
"I don't want you to resent me."
'Cuz that's me, the resentful grudge hoarder: "Well, it's backfiring, honey."


Just so you know, we both found these exchanges to be hilarious.  Let these repartee's be like a badge of honor: we have arrived, people. We are a bickering old couple.

Dinner was incredible, at 315 Martinis and Tapas in Coeur d'Alene where the entire staff was gay.  I don't want to let out some secret or endanger any North Idaho lives, but my gaydar was screaming. Idaho has never even considered any legislation to limit discrimination of gays in housing or employment because they are so very very weary of creating 'special' groups to protect from discrimination so it's always surprising to see gays braving the neo-nazi discrimination-riddle waters of Idaho, especially when civil-union-Washington is just miles away.

And then we were off to Carmen. Actually "Carmen."  It was partial Carmen.  It was North Idaho, not New York, "Carmen."  No set.  Voice-over summaries instead of some songs.   I almost cried when the curtains initially parted and I saw on stage, not fake-Basque representations, but the orchestra and a choir on risers.  But soon, the main characters came forth and danced and libretto-ed around a few pieces of furniture. Once I accepted the situation as it was, not as I wanted it to be, I was able to find myself enjoying the singing of the classic songs.  It was hard to believe, three hours in to it, that anything was cut as I dozed off in the last act, opening my eyes just as Carmen is killed, and rightfully so.  No, that would be uncharitably unfeminist of me to think she deserved it. But I have never seen a heroine so unlikable.  In fact, I didn't like Any of the characters.  Carmen is the most moron-rich drama I've seen since experimenting with the dumb-ass nerve-grating show Weeds.  The entire cast of characters should should ... should... I don't know. I am at a loss for words. Which means that Huck loved it, of course.

Of course, what I love about any experience is the moron-factor and the human drama, but apparently I need it to be real instead of staged.  The women behind me: "Is that the director of such-n-such?"  "I sure hope so, because it looks like she finally updated her hair."  And the woman in front of us turned around during a half-time and said, "Crutches, eh? I'll be on those in two weeks. I'm having a hip replaced."  And also: her husband had two shoulder's replaced, her aunt had a knee replaced, her cousin - a hip also, and she'd already had a head replacement, all in great detail. Huck interjected, "I have a coworker with a hip replacement.  She gets whatever oil or goop is in chicken wattles injected as a lubricant into her hip every few months."
And Mrs. Personal-Medical-History-of-her-Entire-Extended-Family says, "THAT is TMI, sir. TMI, you understand? Too Much Information."  And she whirled around, plopped down, and fumed in her seat.
Too bad we didn't get chatting with the man next to Huck sooner, a veteran Carmen performer who did not standingly ovate at the end. Surprisingly, he didn't sing along either.

And then the next thing we knew, the house lights were up.  And I awoke wondering how all the old people around us pull off these late nights.  We slowly made our way out, careful to not tip over the women teetering on absurd vericose-vein-causing uber-heels, clutching their men like they were crutches.  We stepped into the warm night, in to another year with our mis-matched paces and preferences and hobbies.  It was the best anniversary two people with nothing in common (except a marriage ...and kids, and a thing for sensible footwear... and also there's the "values" thinga-ma-bob too) could have had.

The Art of Picking Up ... cat food

Gorgeous! c. 1985

I'm buying cat food.

And this guy asks me, "So, do you have cats?"


"Yes,"  I decide to humor him.  I'm grocery shopping and what I want to say is, "Why the f*** are you talking to me?"  But then I think, in theory, I really like a conversational, personal society where we interact like humans should, even flirt a little, from time to time, if called upon to do so.  
"I have 152 cats."


He stares then says, "No you don't."

I laugh, "You're right.  I actually don't have cats at all, but I have this really great coupon for cat food."

And he stares at me. 

And so I say, "Well, now that I look at the coupon, it's not that great.  It's a cheap coupon, one of those, 'spend $100, get 50cents off' deals.  Makes me feel cheap, you know?"

And he stares.  So I say, "I have two. Cats."

And this fits his expectations and he asks, "What kinds?"
 "Kinds that don't get along." 
 THE END.

Sena and Lewis Stremler c. 1950 BC

I was being silly and I thought I was being funny.  And although it probably wasn't something you'd buy tickets to at a comedy club, they were passable jokes. Right? But this man reacted like a squirrel in Prius head-lights. And I wanted to take him by the hand, sit him down, and warn him about the facts of life:
1) when you strike up a conversation with a random woman at the grocery store, you kind of need to be ready for anything.
2)  If you are trying to hit on me, or some such non-sense, you should be so nervous that whatever comes out of my mouth with a lilt, should have you exploding with nervous laughter.  The quickest way into a gal's pants is to laugh at her jokes, even nervously. This is why Huck and I are still together, because he laughs so hard he cries at the drop of one of my mid-quality one-liners.  Listen, random dude, I am talking to you out of the sweetness of my open soul to humor you and you are such an A**hat, you really can't humor me in return?
3) This might have worked out if I'd been a "dog"-woman, but I'm a "cat" woman; we don't do as we're told, we don't fulfill expectations, and we don't dumb it down.

And lesson #4) Don't try to pick me up. 
A) I don't like it. I am grocery shopping, not sitting on a bar stool looking forlorn and bored. I am usually wearing barn pants, crap-covered barn shoes, and frequently, a baseball cap pulled low over my eyes so I don't have to look you guys in the eyes. This outfit is not a subtle cue that I am desperate, it is a clear indication that I don't care what you think.  
B) It's pointless, unless it's funny. I am mostly happily married, although realistically some days I am annoyedly married and some days I might even be boredly married, but it's mostly happy. I'm not jumping ship for some unlabeled can-o-man I found at the corner store.
C) It confuses me.  I can't figure out what is going on half the time. For one, I don't perceive myself as being all that pretty.  I still have the ugly little kid I grew up as inside, so I'm always surprised and suspicious when hit on.  Huck has me because he had the clarity and boldness I needed to hear.  And also, he threatened to beat up a guy horning in on us on the dance floor.  (I know!  I know! screaming red warning lights of a jealous, violent type! But he clearly wasn't and the thing is, I'd never had a date willing to risk personal safety in order to keep hanging out with me, and in this very primitive way I found it irresistibly attractive.  That is how I knew he really meant it.)

Freda and Ed Roosma Dec 6, 1946

Of the many examples of my confusion in the face of overtures, a few stand out as striking: The mixed U2 love songs tape: "Thanks!  I love U2!  How thoughtful!"  I don't want to sound arrogant, but I've since concluded that the boy probably liked me. 
A gazebo in the middle of the lake, which was, Surprise!  set with all my favorite foods when we arrived.  What a kind friend! 
"Have you seen the new Batman movie?"
"No."
"Are you going to see it?"
"I don't know."
My coworker asked later, "Has he asked you out yet?"
"No, but he was asking about that Batman movie a lot." Turns out she'd done some very bad coaching with him on how to ask me out.
Lets fix that right now.
How to Ask a Girl Out 101: "Would you like to see the new Batman movie with me this weekend?"  But honestly, I probably still wouldn't get it.

In Mexico, they were really clear and really not serious about any of it.  As I would walk to work along the boardwalk, the line of taxi drivers would say things like, "Nice Mango!"  because I'd usually be eating a mango on my way to work, and at first I might say something like, "Thanks! I got it at the market on 5th," but as I gained experience I might say, "Thanks! I got it at the market on 5th" AND wink. Mexico taught me to enjoy a little fun enhanced by the fact that it obviously wasn't going anywhere.

But when someone whistled, it would annoy the hell out of me because I'd be waltzing along, fully engrossed in my own mind, and someone would jolt me out of it with this shrillness, and suddenly I would be plunged in to self-consciousness: what am I wearing? why are they whistling? Am I in danger? Suck in your gut, girl, all the world's a stage!  And I resented it.  I am not here to entertain, or please or amuse. I am just being alive for the glorious sake of being alive. It doesn't really have anything to do with you guys and my sense of purpose and meaning is in no way buttressed by the fact that you have seen yet another female (me) who's mango you like.

Men are not all that picky.  Their appreciative glances are about has hard to earn and highly prized as french fries, not the gold medals they seem to think they are bestowing.  Having seen Pretty Woman at an impressionable age, I thought that if a man thought you were hot, that meant you were as gorgeous as Julia Roberts.  But then, I saw a real working woman and although she was a full fledged human with a beautiful soul somewhere inside, she was no Julia Roberts.  And then I realized how picky men aren't.  Huck being attracted to me did not impress, but Huck willing to risk something to be with me, now that was something worth looking in to.

Huck and I marrying ourselves Sept 22, 2001

I consulted with an astute friend (who wishes to remain anonymous) who noted that the random grocery guy was  "looking to for some pussy!"  Cat food, indeed.  But she also noticed that it is difficult for guys to hit that happy medium between being clear about their interest and being a lecherous ass.  The thing is, though, that much of it is in the eye of the girl.  If she likes you, stalking is romantic.  If she doesn't, you could get sued.  Arrested?  Maybe, it depends on how seriously your local police take your safety and how the local prosecutor interprets the laws.  (Said unmentionable friend also noted, as we puzzled over the rioting of Muslims, "What do you expect of a religion that promises every man 72 virgins in heaven.  Not 72 women who know what they're doing, but 72 inexperienced virgins." It's clearly not about pleasure, but ownership. And where do these virgins come from?  Is this their hell?) 

Puzzling it out with Huck later, after the first cat joke (which Huck rightly and wisely found side-splitting hilarious), Huck says, "Oh shit, you are so out of that guy's league, baby!"  And that, good citizens of the world, is why I don't need to be hit on.  It will be 11 legal years on Saturday.