Guide Us, O Thou Great Felicity

Do you remember that episode of Felicity, when she was at graduation and Ben wrote that thing in her yearbook which caused her to abandon pre med at Stanford to follow him to New York? And then it turned out that Ben wasn't really interested in getting to know her at all, but that he liked the Pink Ranger instead, who also happened to be Felicity's first and only friend in the city, and then Felicity almost decided to just quit, but when her dad came to get her and give her the key to her new car, she had this really intense moment and put her thumb on the panic button and decided to stay?

So, that was about the time that I decided I was going to have to go to NYU for college. Because all my life I have maintained that I am basically Felicity without all that curly hair.  I have my reasons.

The punch line of this story is the part where I applied to four schools--NYU, two should-be-easy state schools, and one religious "for my mother because she forced me to" school that my GPA was too low for--and only got into one.

And do you know which one?

Of course you do.

(Go Cougars!)

(This is the reason I begged The Holbs not to apply to University of Idaho for law school, because given my rotten luck it would be the only one to accept us, and what do you know? Do you know what I know? Everything. It's like I'm smarter than the Universe or something.)

So I hardened my heart and decided I was "too good" for that "stinky old NYU anyway," because when you are seventeen these are just the sorts of things that are easy to believe, and it's nicer that way.

Seventeen is never a particularly bright time in anyone's life, in case you've ever noticed.

Also, I really wanted Felicity to end up with Noel. But didn't you, though?

How this pertains to anything at all is, you see, these days I am at incredible odds with myself, on the inside, you see.

On the one hand, how proud of your husband could one be, considering he got into the Number One LLM Program In The Country (tm) and has the glorious and distinct pleasure of taking out a whopping $70,000 in student loans for a ten-month period of time?

Pretty stinking proud, am I right?

But on the other hand, it is not entirely in my constitution to allow for my husband to be smarter than me, or more attractive than me to certain institutions, if you follow.

Do you follow?

I am discussing pride here friends.

You should know I am swallowing it, and it tastes like a huckleberry shake. (Thank you, Arctic Circle. Love your fry sauce.)

But anyway, that Felicity, matron saint of doing really stupid things. Am I right? Like that hair cut? And dating that wussy guy from the health clinic? And then the Noel/Ben/Noel/Ben/Noel thing but then there was some apartment fire? So back to Ben but in an alternate reality, and then she also goes back to med school anyway? Or something? But she did work at Dean and Deluca for a few seasons, and I really did love that Javier.

All I am really saying here is that I am about to finally have my Felicity experience, ten years later. Moving across the country on a whim at the last minute because I am following a boy? Not knowing where I'll be living until I am there? Saying "hey" a lot and wearing baggy sweaters? (I am pregnant you know, and only the baggy sweaters fit, but don't feel bad, it's all good.)

Come to think of it, my hair is looking pretty puffy lately.

Anyway, this was my favorite episode.



You can watch the clip, or if you're like me and your computer refuses to play YouTubes (my computer wants me to throw it away, and I am this close), you can pretend I didn't post it and answer me the following question instead (or also, do you see these nice options I give you?):

Is my Holbs a Ben, or a Noel? 

Discuss.

The Night Before

I was six and we were moving across the globe like a band of nomads. That night we slept on the floor of my childhood living room; a room full of boxes, sleeping bags and pillows, and the awful tangible feeling of imminent change. I fell asleep that night in a pink sleeping bag among the browns and mauves of the living room, and in the morning we flew across the seas to a land of spice and a distinct smell of plastic.

Since that night there have been many nights-before, all as strange and exciting and dreadful as the first. Nights spent in cramped hotel rooms before cross-country moves, nights of navigating through box mazes in hauntingly empty houses, and last supper barbecues with family on summer nights, facing the first move with a new husband, choking down the fear of the homesick and trying desperately to be a big girl. 

And here we are again. But this time the boxes are mine, and the hauntingly empty house, too. My Holbs takes the dogs for one last walk through the neighborhood and the house is empty but for the sound of my quiet thoughts.

I pass through echoing bedrooms, sweeping up the last traces of evidence that we were here; bits of fabric in the studio, a few of my stray hairs in the bedroom, a couple escapee earring backs in the closet. 

I stop for a minute in my room of dreams, my broom suspended in mid air. As I look around the room I am aware that it’s not really my room of dreams anymore. Now it belongs to someone else, and suddenly I can see the chipped paint on the window sill, the dents in the floor boards, the scuffs on the hardwoods. It is just a room. My dreams don’t live here anymore.

I haul the air mattress into the living room and bunker down to await a freshly walked husband and dogs. In the quiet of a house that’s not mine I welcome these strange and familiar sensations of a night before a move. That feeling of imminent change, so tangible and awful, right there on my tongue. The desire to hold on to every passing moment, to memorize it and bury it deep somewhere i can never lose it. Trying to remember what the rooms looked like when we once belonged here, before they became haunted by our ghosts. Letting these four years sink deep into my bones through my skin, as the night gently cools the summer heat from the pavement, and the heat of our ghosts from the walls of this house.

the problem with dogs as babies...

is that dogs can't be babies
not really, anyway

babies can fly inside airplanes
and be pushed inside strollers
and taken to nice restaurants
and worried and stressed over
and nobody looks at you funny

as long as your baby
isn't a dog baby
that is

it's just not easy
when your babies
happen to be dogs
is what i'm saying



the problem with dogs as babies
is that dogs can't be babies
because that is just silly talk

babies are people
and dogs just aren't people
even if you love them
just like people
which is confusing
but that's just the way
it is



the problem with dogs as babies
is that you can't be a mama bear
when your baby bear is a dog

people will look at you strange
and question your priorities
and obviously
you are wrong

real babies
clearly take precedence
over dog babies



the problem with dogs as babies
is that dogs don't last very long

ten, fifteen years at most
and people find all sorts of reasons
to give them away
when they don't work out



the problem with dogs as babies
is that sacrificing for dogs
like your comfort
or ease
or space
is just ridiculousness

babies are worth sacrificing for
of course
but not when your babies are dogs



i guess i have lots to learn
about dog babies
and real babies

because if you asked me today
i'd tell you

that these dogs
are my babies



and i don't want to hear anything more about it

Holbs Week: Won't You Be My Neighbor?

This is possibly an exaggeration, but it seems that every time The Holbs sets foot out our front door he is absolutely accosted with love by our neighbors!

The Holbs is world famous in Moscow for being the heart and soul behind The Fence. Ohh, The Fence! That bastion of manly craftsmanship! That gorgeous delight of pre-treated wood! Ladies in their late forties from our neighborhood love to fawn all over The Holbs and his rippling forearms of lumber-wielding might and courage. One glimpse at his glorious red visage and they go faint, clamoring over themselves to ask about his day, remark on the weather, and compliment his various shrubberies.

When The Holbs was building his fencely masterpiece it seemed he could not go twenty minutes while outside without having to discuss such-and-such with so-and so from down the street. Can you imagine? I used to watch all this happen and thank my lucky stars it was he holding down the fort of conversation and not I, for it is a known fact around my house that I tend to get surly easily when cornered into small-talk type situations.

(Which leads me to this mystery: When I go outside, nothing! Nobody talks to me! It is the strangest thing!  I suppose I am kind of mean looking sometimes? Five feet and two inches of straight up intimidation!  ??  It is just as well.)

As magestically righteous an accomplishment as that Fence was in the eyes of every inhabitant of the ghettoer end of B Street, it was nothing--I'm talking, peanuts!--compared to the glory and honor that went down on our driveway on Saturday. I am talking glory and honor people! I am talking a moving sale of epic, gargantuan proportions!  Such proportions that my limited vocabulary doth fail me! Oh, it doth!

Our items for sale filled up the entirety of my living room the night before as we assigned prices on brightly colored sticky dots until the wee hours, and then Holbs The Famous arose at 4:30 to begin hauling pieces of our Moscow lives to the curb, to be rifled through, haggled over, and taken home at 8:00 on the dot.

At 7:00 I stretched my toes, congratulated myself for waking up a whole hour early, and then headed to the kitchen in my undies for a bowl of cereal. And that is when I saw it. That is when I saw the entire bloody town of Moscow, in my driveway. In my undies. Do you think I am fooling you? After all, Moscow is not very big, and we happen to have a giant concrete driveway, and it is mighty hot in a house with no air conditioning. These things are highly plausible!

I shrieked and I ducked and I retreated to my closet for clothing. And then, armed with modesty and a belly full of Kix, I ventured outside and began the necessary business of helping my Holbshero accept other people's money.

Our couch? Sold. Our table? Sold. Four years worth of my clothing? Sold. My bronze planter stand that is so ugly it is cool? Not sold, and just in the nick of time! (Husbands never listen to their wives, there is just something primal and guttural to that particular law of the Universe, I suppose.)

The Holbs was a hit. People were tossing money at him willy-nilly, smacking him on the back, and shaking his hands, and congratulating him on his dramatic way of being so darn Holbserly. Old ladies brought him lemonades to keep him refreshed, strapping young men offered to hoist heavy furniture into other people's vehicles for him, distinguished gentlemen complimented his organizational skills and admonished him to "put on a hat, it's sunny out!" while I stood there, pregnant and sweaty, like chopped liver.

Things began to die down around noon, and then randomly at 2:00 I went outside to find a man in his seventies serenading The Holbseller on my guitar with old songs he used to perform "while touring Europe in my twenties."

I am telling you. Our house was the center of the Universe that day. We sold everything. All thanks to my Holbs and his never-ending fount of Holbsiness.

Now that the Moving Sale of the Century has ended, The Holbs's status in the neighborhood has predictably gone up ten-fold. His stock is hot! Women blush in his presence and men bow to his masculine superiority! "That sure was some yard sale!" is what they say in reverent tones.

And then I say, "Who was that?"

And The Holbs says,

"Oh, so-and-so from the down the street. Did you know his wife is French?"

And I say,

"Oh."

and go back to thinking about whether I want an orange popsicle or a cherry popsicle when our walk is over, 'cause that's about all I'm good for these days.


Want some super awesome, Holbs-approved yard sale tips?
RIGHT HERE baby.

Holbs Week: Caulk-And-Bull

I would have posted this yesterday, except that yesterday I was so beyond frustrated with my Holbsmover that the idea of saying anything nice about him at all actually hurt me deeply in my soul. All you Marrieds, I know you understand.

There are a certain things that come along with a ginger stud of a Holbshusband like mine, in case you were wondering. They are acid indigestion, allergies to most anything that grows under a yellow sun, and the tendency to caulk a tub at the very worst possible moment.

The Holbs has been engaged in a long-time battle with our bathtub caulk job. I'm not sure what it is about that bathtub that so irks my Holbslover in his soul, but time and time again I will come home sweaty from a run, or feel the need deep in my bones for a long, hot shower, only to find out that the tub area has been declared off-limits for another 48 hours. And I say, But Holbsy baby! but he shakes his head firmly. And I wonder aghast at what 1964 had against the idea of having two showers?

This is how he likes to do it. First he takes a scraper and scrapes every last bit of the previous, perfectly acceptable caulk-job off the tub. Ideally he will leave the caulk scrapings, little curls of rubbery confetti, all over the tub floor.

Then he meticulously dries every last droplet of moisture from the plastic tub. This involves sticking rolls and rolls of toilet paper in every leaky joint and deep down into the drain, and also leaving wet towels crumpled on the floor, and then smearing dirt everywhere? (Do I need to mention that he prefers to do this part this fully shoed?)

Finally he hops in the tub, caulks that sucker to within an inch of its life, and emerges declaring,

"This time, it will be perfect!"

Forty-eight hours later I get to shower. Until then, I get to read handmade Holbsigns every time I brush my teeth, signs saying things like, "Do Not Use Me Until Thursday!" and signed with a squiggly smiley face.

Inevitably, two weeks later The Holbs is screwing up his face in the bathroom in his birthday suit, wondering if that seam is really as water-tight as it could be, and how much caulk is left in that caulk gun do you suppose?

Wisely, I choose blame it all on his B.S. in Accounting. Sometimes I say to him, Holbsy baby, why can't you be more like your wife? Honestly. I mean, I consider my lack of attention to detail to be one of my most appealing characteristics, I truly do.  And it's like I've always said, religious exactitude is not something they should teach lightly at those Business programs. But don't you agree?

Anyway, attention to detail gives you heartburn. Not that I'd know anything about that.