She's Writing a Novel

I killed the rice cooker, which is as close as I've come to comitting an Unforgivable Sin in my relationship with the Russian lover.

I poured the rice into the cooker before putting the pot into the cooker, which meant that hundreds of grains of rice immediately scattered throughout the appliance's innards. I might as well have taken a cup of dry sand and poured it into his hard drive. Clearing out the rice cooker was an impossibility, and we had to lay it to rest.

The upside of the situation was that I wasn't dead. If I'd proceeded to pour in the water and turn the thing on, I'd probably have electrocuted myself but good. Most likely, I would have caught on before that point. But maybe not, and it was the Russian lover who, holding the rice pot in his hand, asked me where in the hell exactly had I just dumped the two cups of rice. Uh, into the cooker. Without the pot. Oops.

There is something about almost getting yourself killed that makes the people who love you very angry. You would think that almost getting yourself killed, but managing to avoid that scenario, would cause the people who love you to feel such relief and joy that the only thing they want to do is cuddle you. But in fact, almost getting yourself killed makes the people who love you want to kill you. Mothers and lovers, especially. They are so offended at the mere possibility of you being dead that you get no sympathy from them when you manage to dodge that bullet. Instead, it's all how could you! As if you had done it on purpose just to upset them.

Anyway, it took the Russian lover a bit of time to calm down from the dual shock of both losing his rice cooker and not losing his girlfriend. And then he was just Very Angry about the loss of what is, quite probably, the best kitchen appliance ever. Understandably so, and I was no less distraught because the rice cooker does half my cooking every night. The Russian lover had to consider whether he could continue with a rice-cooker-killer as his other half. I felt the full shame of my trangression.

We were able to work through the tragedy. We have not yet replaced the rice cooker; not because they are expensive or difficult to find, but because not having one has suddenly pushed me to discover new, non rice-reliant recipes. For the most part, all kinds of deliciousness has been the result, and the Russian lover, though still in mourning, has found this to be nearly sufficient compensation.

So, the trajectory of my culinary devlopment has survived both the death of our oven and the death of our rice cooker - two previous indispensible partners. Yet, in both cases I've just sucked it up, kept going, and become a better cook as the result.

I am almost waiting for the stove to give out, just so we can see what kind of awesomeness I can produce on a skewer over a lit match.

I fell asleep around 11:30am on December 31, 2008 and woke up at 12:40 am January 1, 2009. I nudged the Russian lover beside me: "Happy New Year, Happy Birthday. I love you." And then I fell back to sleep.

It was a good way to ring in the new year. In my life, there have been years where I felt like I wanted to be awake at midnight, surrounded with people and sound, drunk on cheap champagne and excitement. Those years were few, and the years where that actually happened were fewer. I spent my lonely teenage years longing to feel the buzz of a crowd, the cheer of a party, the warmth of friends or lovers - anything on New Year's Eve except the feeling of being an outsider, an observer, the one watching others experiencing fun and happiness while wondering what it must be like.

I'm old enough now that I no longer feel like the one on the wrong side of the fence of high school cliques. And while I have the choice to spend the New Year's eve any way I want, I've found that I enjoy a simple, gentle evening. I am perfectly happy to sit at home on the couch near the Christmas tree, slowly sipping on a glass of wine.

The years seem to get harder as they go by, feel heavier as they approach. Maybe that's simply what is means to grow up, grow old. And we deal with the time's relentless passage in our own ways, whether that means screaming at it drunkenly or accepting it quietly.

Although I do appreciate that New Year's Eve is my one legitimate opportunity to wear sequins -- awesome gaudy sequins in abundence. Unless you can make it to Mardi Gras, Halloween and New Year's Eve are a girl's two annual opportunities to get away with throwing out the social dress code of good taste and reasonable modesty and outfit herself like an unabashed classless whore. And there is a little bit of a classless whore in all of us.

I wonder how many relationships are ruined over a misunderstanding. One side thinks they are fighting about X, the other thinks they are fighting about Y, and so of course they can only talk past each other until they give up or part ways. As much as I hate the thought of relationships ending for any reason, the thought that a relationship could end because nobody happened upon the truth is unbearable.

The Russian lover and I had an argument this morning; it was birthed mostly out of stress, tiredness, and ugly weather. Also, the just-coming-off-my-period sex drought didn't help. In any relationship, there is a fucking to fighting ratio that must always be at equilibrium. If you aren't fucking, you're fighting. And vice versa. Of course, it's better to be fucking.

I usually try in vain to initiate sex in the middle of an argument, typically at the worst possible moment and in a manner that resembles not so much a demanding angry lust as a desperate repentant whoring. The Russian lover, having had his share of angry sex in his life, is never impressed, much less aroused, by my efforts. Mennonites are raised never to express either their anger or their sexuality, which would explain why my efforts to intertwine the expression of both are laughable.

In any event, after we had reasonably worked things out (no thanks to my sad, sad attempt to have us fuck it out), it came out that the Russian lover had interpreted my earlier, to him offensive, actions as something completely other than what they were. This distressed me to no end; not just because the attitude he perceived was so awful, but because it was completely untrue.

There are many, many advantages to dating a man who has been around the block, then around the block again, then decided to just go ahead and buy the block. He's got a full bag of tricks in the bedroom and a near limitless amount of patience with and understanding of the female condition. He has accumulated a giant matrix of women's behavior through his experience, and to understand the way a woman is acting he simply plugs the inputs into the matrix and voila, mystery solved.

Except when he gets it completely wrong. Except when he's dating a recovering Mennonite who was raised in the back woods, who didn't have a boyfriend until she was almost 20, whose behavior on some counts is still strangely random because she's at least five years developmentally behind her peers while trying to live like she's five years ahead. Then, sometimes, his evaluation of her actions is wildly off the mark and, depending on the balance of the fuck-to-fight ratio at the time, a heated argument ensues.

Even so...we try. I try to be less random, he tries not to read the worst into my randomness. Because the only thing worse than not understanding each other is not even trying to understand each other, and believing you always know everything the other one is about. I think love is the openness to let another continue to surprise you in good ways, even when they sometimes disappoint you.

I've been having very strong dreams lately. They are completely nonsensical, as usual, but instead of floating idly through my dreamworld I feel as though I'm being dragged through mud like a plow hitched to a tractor.

Last night hit new levels of weird, as I started talking to people in my dream about the subject of lucid dreaming, and in my dream I was recalling another dream I'd had a few weeks ago. In particular, I was defending the real-ness factor of dreams. In the other dream I had a few weeks ago, I walked into an old, run-down farmhouse. I was touching things on broken shelves, and it absolutely felt like I was touching those things. It did not feel like a dream at all, and this startled me.

The best explanation for this is that I was probably groping the Russian lover, or something else within reach, in my sleep. Nevertheless, my dream self defended the experience to the dream audience. Which is right about the time this really butchy lesbian of exaggerated proportions came up from behind me, wrapped her arms around me, and started whispering raunchy things in my ear. My dream self shuddered and looked for a way out - I woke up.

Many people, apparently, often have hot sex dreams. This does not happen for me. However, on a few occasions, my dreams will turn lucid and I'll recognize that hey, I'm in a dream. And I remember that dreams have no limits and I can do whatever I want, and so the first thing I do is try to find some stranger to have dream sex with (must be working on all those years of teenage repression). I will spend a few minutes then running around my dream in horny circles, rejecting all the people I encounter in my dreams as not attractive enough for my fantasy romp.

Recently, however, my lucid dream self remembered that in a dream, I don't have to find things that are already there with me. I can actually conjure things up. So my horny dream self really concentrated on creating a sexy stranger out of thin air. But it was like watching Harry Potter trying to work magic at school on year number 1. Instead of sexy, anonymous-elevator-make-out-session-worthy stranger, I got...well, icky bad-touch mustache stranger. Who had no otherwise discernable redeeming qualities that might make my dream self reconsider having a go. So I was veritably furrowing my brow in this dream, putting all of my energy into creating a suitable dream sex partner, only to find that the second I made something yummy materialize for a moment, my excitement to jump his bones caused him to turn back into sketchy mustache guy. The effort was so exhausting that I gave up, and slipped out of the lucidity altogether, unsatiated.

Good thing I can wake up to the Russian lover.

Would this bitch just die already.

Every year it's: "Yeah! I'm healthy and fit and sexy!"

Then it's: "Waaa, I'm fat!"

I feel like this is just a circuitous orchestrated stunt in an effort to prove that billionaire women have problems too. She gets skinny - how inspiring for her overweight, middle-aged, mid-Western viewers! They can do it too! Then she gets fat - just like her overweight, middle-aged, mid-Western viewers. She understands their struggles!

I don't think billionaires should be allowed to pretend they have problems. If you can't figure out how to have a damn near perfect life with a billion dollars, your ass deserves to be permanantly broke.

For the past day or so, the Russian lover has been consumed occupied with building a home-made HDTV antenna out of a 2x4 and wire coathangers. The mere concept is not as disconcerting as the fact that the damn thing actually appears to work. He is now polishing up his handiwork and traipsing around the apartment with it, thirty foot cable in tow, hunting for optimum reception.

When he's done with this, I'm going to hand him an empty soda can and a rubber band and ask him to build me a iPhone.

Which reminds me to look into whether McGyver episodes are available on DVD yet.

If any of these Green Peace hacks with clipboards try to stop me on the the long walk home tonight to talk about global warming, so help me god I will punch them in the face with my stone-cold fist.

There's a new show on network TV called Vice Squad. Basically, it's COPS, but all the criminals are dealers, pimps, or prostitutes.

I was half-watching an episode last night while I was getting dinner ready; in the first part of the show, police officers busted a hooker holding court in an Orlando hotel room. They gave her a riot act about condoms (she had plenty of them shoved in the bedside table's Gideon Bible) and harassed her about what appeared to be her appointment book. Although her profession was obvious, she denied any such behavior. The cops kept giving her shit, and all I could think was Why do we care?

What do we care if a woman wants to charge a guy 100 bucks for a screw? What do we care if some guy is willing to pay it?

People who condemn prostitution typically use arguments like "it's very dangerous and degrading for women."

It's dangerous, you puritans, because it's illegal. So if a pimp, or some john with rage issues, flies at her with his fists or coldcocks her, she's got nowhere to go. If she's runs to the police, she'll be arrested for prostitution before she's even stopped bleeding from the head. We've labeled these women criminals, and that's why they wind up beaten or dead at the hands of brutes.

And women with few options who are willing to consider prostitution are past the point where the illegality of something is going to deter them. And those that aren't destitute but do it just to make better money than they could elsewhere...well, they consider themselves successful entrepeneurs, not degraded women.

It seems to me that a regulated industry would be the best solution for everyone. Hell, even the IRS would win in that scenario. It would take the teeth out of the pimps, and it would give a woman's industry back to the women. I don't know why the feminists aren't all over this one. (Actually, I do - but that's for another rant).

Look, all women are prostitutes. The socially acceptable mating dance of civilized society is nothing more than a calculated exchange of goods and services. A woman lets a man buy her drinks, or a dinner, or several dinners, or a big f*cking diamond. Eventually, depending on what the woman considers her price point, a man's payout of money + time will get him sex.

So why do we consider it so awful if a woman just coldly charges a stranger cash and cuts out the pageantry? Does it offend our inner romantics? Is it an uncomfortable reflection and reminder of the socio-economic undercurrents that influence our own idealized relationships?

I have not met many intelligent, attractive young women who were willing to date a homeless bum. But what if I told you the homeless bum was bright, kind, and sufficiently healthy? And, women always say they love this, had a GREAT sense of humor? And was honest? He just couldn't, you know, invite you over to his place (unless you felt like sitting on a bench all night), take you out, or buy you anything, ever. Maybe a cup of coffee once and a while. What about that guy? Would you ever have sex with that guy? Your answer? No....or...sure...you know, as long as he got a job and got his life together and stuff.

Exactly. No matter how naive and idealistic our inner romantic, we still need to be taken out to the Olive Garden, or something, before we're going to take a lover. And as I watch the faces of some guys on dates at restaurants, listening to a woman talk and talk and talk about nothing, I can imagine how much better of an evening they would probably both have if he just got up, slid her a twenty, and took her to the backseat of his car.

Some people are good storytellers, and some people have good stories. Rarely is one person a good storyteller with good stories.

I've always been a pretty good storyteller. But I realized that all my stories are unexceptional recollections of an ordinary life, embellished in such a way that the telling becomes interesting. But the stories themselves? Pretty boring.

The Russian lover, on the other hand, is a decent storyteller - he's never harbored any desire to be a writer, or even a cocktail party sensation. But his stories are absolutely incredible. And it's not just the cultural differences; he's had some truly extraordinary life experiences. Four years later, and he's still surprising me by recounting events that don't so much sound like something my boyfriend did at 19 as a scene from an upcoming 007 flick.

The differences in our life stories can be illustrated by the following distillations:

Me: Eventually, he was so drunk he just leaned over and threw up in my lap.

Him: And on this particular jump, we were instructed to land directly on the surfaced submarine. It's harder than it sounds; I missed by a good meter.

See what I mean? He could just tell the narrative of his existence in a dull monotone, leave out all the adjectives, adverbs, and exclamations, and he'd still have an audience enthralled. I understood early on that if I ever wanted anyone's attention at a party for more than a minute, I had two options: Flash them my boobs, or learn to embellish the mundane for effect.

Those who become the best storytellers, I think, are often those who have the least to say. Good stories work like magic, because they are: They are something literally pulled from nothing-- a rabbit out of a hat, a shiny quarter from behind the listener's ear.

How will this cult of personality turn out? Stay tuned.

"The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector."
-Plato

"The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."
-Plutarch

"So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable."
-Aldous Huxley

"Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority."
-James A. C. Brown

"The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State."
-Bertrand de Jouvenel

"Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else."
-P. J. O'Rourke

"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is "not done"... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
-George Orwell

Until very recently, I didn't have any kind of tolerance for spicy hot foods. I shunned salsa, feared curry, would not go anywhere near a jalepeno, and had never even heard of a habenero.

Shortly after we started dating, the Russian lover made a lamb curry for dinner. It was delicious...and painful. Tears and sweat poured down my cheeks; the Russian lover felt like a jerk, and told me I should stop eating and let him order out. But...it was delicious. I willed myself to endure the agony of the burning.

And after that, any time he made curry it was significantly toned down. And most of our cooking has stayed on the mild side of things.

But.

Something happened in the past few months, and suddenly I am craving spicy foods. Pregnancy is definitively ruled out, and I am at a loss to explain why the girl who winced at too many cracked black peppercorns is now suddenly looking for excuses to add jalepenos to every recipe. Hot sauce, hot peppers, chili powder. I want to feel the burn, and I want to feel it just at the limit where the agony is exquisite.

I did a google search to see if this portended anything other than being knocked up. Possibilities include:

-My body thinks I might be pregnant; I'm harboring a phantom pregnancy (!?!)
-I'm addicted to the endorphin release; I'm getting high.
-I have bad circulation
-I'm cold
-My taste buds are starting to die off with age

In any event, the internet tells me that I am not the only un-pregnant woman to go through a phase where all I want to consume is fire. I'm assured that this will probably pass before I reach the point where I have to buy hot peppers in bulk.

Or I start bringing the jalepenos into the bedroom...those pricey KY "tingling" lotions? Got nothing on a 25 cent chili pepper.

My palate isn't the only masochist.

Living in a small urban apartment makes it impossible to acquire "stuff." Even if you wanted more "stuff," there is simply nowhere to put it. In any event, the rent on small urban apartments is such that there isn't all that much cash left over, after wining and dining and amusing yourself going out, to spend on bringing "stuff" back home.

This might be why urbanites are credited with aquiring good taste. When you only have the closet space for two pairs of jeans instead of twenty, you're going to make sure you find the best damn jeans you can. There simply isn't any room for things you don't or can't use, and instead of filling a home with the cast-offs of trial and error, or tolerating the proliferation of mediocrity, you learn to come up with the best because you haven't got extra space for hanging on to the rest.

The urban space crunch is most apparent when it comes to closets and kitchens. Ask any formerly co-habitating couple of young urban professionals why their relationship ended, and I guaruntee that whatever else contributed, the fighting over closet space was the final coffin nail.

And the kitchen? Well, there is a reason most city-dwellers don't bother to cook if they can help it. To help suburbanites understand, picture yourselves in your home's half-bathroom. Now imagine whipping up dinner in a room that size. If that makes you feel a little cramped, imagine trying to store all of your kitchen equipment, appliances, and pantry goods in there with you. Uh-huh.

Which is to say that you learn just what is actually necessary for cooking, and just how much you can do without. Those kitchen supply stores? Turns out they are not so much selling people helpful kitchen gadgets as they are selling people gadgets with which to fill up the excess of kitchen drawers and cabinets plaguing suburban McMansions.

While we have no expendable storage in our apartment, the Russian lover and I still took the opportunity to stock up on Lennox wine glasses when the price was right. We prefer very over-sized wine glasses; perhaps because we prefer to put back a good amount of wine without feeling guilty about it, perhaps because in a small apartment you've got to super-size where you can. If you can't presently enjoy a sectional sofa or a king size bed, you can at least have extra-large bath towels and grandiose stemware.

The largesse of our wine glasses does make them more vulnerable to destruction. However, we prided ourselves on not having broken a glass in over a year, between ourselves and several curious and clumsy cats, this was quite an accomplishment. But then, in the space of a week, we managed to break three of them.

I broke the first, and managed to do so after an argument which left the Russian lover fuming in the other room. I was doing dishes (my preferred method of coping with a domestic disturbance) when my overzealous towel-drying resulted in the top of the glass breaking off the stem and falling on the floor to shatter spectacularly. This was unfortunate not only because I had broken a nice glass and sent sharp miniscule shards of it everywhere, I had also timed it in such a way that the Russian lover was bound to take it as a passive aggressive gesture for effect. He was nice enough not to mention if he thought so as he helped me sweep up the mess.

The next two incidents were all the Russian lover's doing. Both times it was his flailing or reaching limb that sent a glass sailing off the table and splintering into a million bits on the floor. I simply helped him clean them up; it was inevitable that a few pieces of our holy-grail-sized stemware would meet an untimely end at our oft-distracted hands. And as we do with most things, we simply shrugged it off and noted the silver linings: We'd bought them on sale, and now we had that many more square inches of space on a shelf somewhere.

I've been a slacker again when it comes to taking care of my hair...I must have been a bald man in a previous life because I just cannot figure out what to do with this substance that insists on growing out of my scalp. And it's been this way my entire life.

I remember as a little girl, seeing all the other little girls with their french braids. Not only did they have french braids, they had braided it themselves. A few of my friends volunteered to try to teach me; I might as well have been a monkey groping around the back of my head for lice. Later, I had just as much success with blow dryers, curling irons, flat irons, velcro rollers, and bobby pins. And just recently, my hair dresser's assistant even commented that I was washing my hair incorrectly and creating a build-up of residue. Apparently, the only thing I can do right with my hair is brush it. And I'm too lazy to do that.

Maybe I have a gene missing. The one that allows women to contort themseves in all manner of ways with all manner of tools to successfully assemble a hairstyle. This wouldn't be the only presumed gender-wide gene I've got missing, either. I also have never successfully completed a cartwheel. I know. Even today if I confess that to other women, they're all like "Seriously?" and then, if we're outside, they'll do one just to rub it in. "That? You can't do that? Even when you were a kid?"

No. And you know what else? I never got past level one of Super Mario Brothers, either. Why, it's a miracle I survived to adulthood.

Anyway, I feel bad about being a hair-do slacker and the un-made hair appointment I keep reminding myself to make and not making. I even feel guilty when I run into my hair dresser, knowing that I rolled out of bed that morning and walked out the door with my hair in the same ponytail that I slept in and my too-long bangs shoved back with a pair of sunglasses as a pathetic homage to a headband. At least I have not tried to cut my bangs myself; I think if I did she would file for divorce.