Frog in the Throat

It was bound to happen, when you stop and think about it. Over the last six months or so, I've noticed some unsettling signs - sudden shortness of breath, wheezing, the feeling of something being stuck in my throat, nasty hacking - all of these are bad signs for anybody, but when you make your living teaching people effective means of communication, well . . . it's really not fun.

I had a pretty good idea of what was going on and I didn't like it much. See, somewhere long ago and far away, I was diagnosed with a "idiopathic subglottic stenosis." (This was after a year of being misdiagnosed as having adult onset asthma, but that's another tale.) In short, I have scar tissue in my windpipe, cause unknown. (Aside: Doesn't "idiopathic" sound so much better and more elevated than "darned if we know"? I keep wanting to use that in class - "Dr. Mockingbird, why are we all here? I mean, what's the meaning of life? So many philosophers and religious leaders have wrestled with those questions - tell me, what's it all mean?" "It's idiopathic." Maybe one day . . .)

Treatment requires check-ups and those involve a medical device that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the proboscis of an anteater being inserted in the nose and down the throat. Said device is equipped with (oh, joy!) a camera, so we can then watch my larynx in action (or inaction, as the case may be). Anyway, I had a scheduled check up with my surgeon today and - let's just say I hit the trifecta. Narrowing in the trachea, allergies kicking up the symptoms, and a nasal polyp. Well, at least it's not all in my head. My head has been scanned, I have an appointment with a "sinus surgeon" about the polyp and surgery has been tentatively scheduled for July. (It's only mid-April now so clearly, it's nothing urgent, but seriously - this coughing and hacking and feeling stressed about coughing and hacking is very old by now.)

On the plus side, my doctors are top-notch. I was diagnosed when I was in school in Winston-Salem, which houses one of the top ear, nose, and throat research departments in the country, so I trust these guys. (Given a choice, always pick surgeons who write the books, instead of the the ones who read them.) Even so, not being able to quite catch my breath has noticeably increased my overall stress level which is already red-lining here at the end of the semester.

Then again, the marquee outside a gas station reminded me today that "Stressed spelled backwards is desserts" and that's knowledge that makes me feel better.

Take It Down a Notch

Back in January, I began a year-long course of self-evaluation in the area of body image. There were a few reasons for this - one, I had some weight I wanted to lose and two, I became curious about why numbers on a scale mattered so much to me. America is a looks-obsessed society - that comes as no shock to just about anyone. No one wants to age, except for the very young and Abercrombie & Fitch just got in hot water for marketing a push-up bikini top to seven-year-olds. We spend billions of dollars a year on goop in a jar to moisturize, exfoliate, firm, conceal, and/or color. Mind you, I like make-up - I think it's a hoot and I wish I'd had the gumption just once to put a purple streak in my hair. (And maybe some day I will.)

But we've just gotten out of control here.

Beauty standards change, of course. High heels have been used as a way to show off the male leg. And men preened like peacocks over the proper placement of wig curls. But overall, it's been the fairer (and less politically powerful) sex who have behaved like mooncalves over the use of cosmetics. Truly, for us, it's often been better to look good than to feel good. Women have been willing over the years to put any fool sort of poisonous concoction on their faces, provided it promised "youth in a jar." We'll strap ourselves into fiendish devices to accentuate certain body parts while downplaying others. We'll live on cabbage soup, take pills of dubious usefulness and avoid carbohydrates as if the Devil himself was in the kitchen. We've even been willing to break our daughters' feet to make them tiny and thereby adorable. (Bound feet also hampered natural movement, so good luck working and earning your own money to secure your independence. Don't tell me beauty isn't political.) Americans are "more civilized" than that, of course. We don't bind our daughters' feet, but we constantly hammer them with words and pictures that tell them what is desirable - and it's not realistic. Heck, it's not even reality.

Dove Evolution by Masterfill

Yet we buy into this nonsense. We starve, push, pluck, tweeze, and paint. Then we go further. We inject toxins into our faces, we undergo general anesthesia to "resculpt" ourselves - risking disfigurement and death - and we don't even ask "Are you Board-certified?" We celebrate the outside and ignore the development of the inside. There's a lack of balance and that's never good.

So I will continue to drink lots and lots of water. To eat more fresh fruits and vegetables. To exercise and increase my stamina and flexibility. These are all good things and I will take time (and make time) to do these things. And yes, I'll continue to wear lipstick and mascara and (just maybe) schedule a time to have that purple streak put in my hair. But I'll also keep reading and thinking and working on the inside. After all, you can always jam on a ball cap to hide bad hair, but it's a lot harder to cover up ignorance.

Throwing in the Towel

As anyone who has read Douglas Adams knows, it's of the utmost importance to always know the exact location of your towel. While I do, in fact, know the location of my towels, pretty much the rest of the house is in a state of disarray that is generally the result of having a half-dozen frat boys in residence, with perhaps a goat.

Sigh.

I like to think that I have many good qualities and I certainly appreciate beauty and order; I just don't seem to have the gift of creating that in my own surroundings all that often.

For the last month, I've fought this. I had plans, by which I mean I Had Plans. Over spring break, I was going to work on my presentation for this month's conference in San Antonio* and I was going to scrub, polish, and clean. Heck, I'd probably have time to learn Italian while I was at it!

It's good to have plans, isn't it?

So things didn't work out as I had planned and I was beginning to despair. Seriously - at some point the lines were crossed from "tolerable" to "messy" to "yike!" I felt like a sloven and I felt downtrodden about that. I mean, I can juggle the planning and grading of six college classes, maintain a healthy and loving relationship with my shiny-cyborg husband, eat decently healthy food (most of the time), research and write my independent work for presentation and publication, yet I can't manage to keep a clean house? Why is that?

Oh, right. It might be because of the work that goes into the planning and grading of six college classes, maintaining a healthy and loving relationship with my shiny-cyborg husband, eating decently healthy food (most of the time), as well as researching and writing my independent work for presentation and publication.

There are times where the sensible thing to do is to call in the professionals. It goes against my somewhat-Calvinist upbringing, but I'm having a very nice lady come in tomorrow and scrub, polish, and clean. I have a counter brimming with cleaning products ranging from white vinegar to Ka-Boom! and a trifecta of mops. I have been reassured that the remnants of Spooky-hair will vanish, my ceiling fan blades will gleam and my bathroom tile will sparkle.

And that, Dear Readers, is so very worth paying for, at least occasionally.

* By the way, do you think the defenders of the Alamo in what is now San Antonio worried about the cleanliness of the baseboards in the fort? Exactly. It's all about priorities. (Although they were fighting in large part for the right to keep their slaves, since Mexico had abolished slavery, so maybe that's not the best role model I could pick. Yeah - that part gets left out of the movies.)

The Cat Scale

The events of the last ten days have led me to face some realities about myself, specifically about how I mishandle stress. Now, you'd think that life at the Nest would have settled down after FryDaddy came home to recover from his not-exactly-planned-but-not-quite-emergency surgery. And you'd be right, if you were limiting your observations to how FryDaddy was handling things. However, if you were expanding your observations to include how I was handling things, well, let's just say that the term "basket case" would not have been inappropriate. Face it, I was flat-out crispy.

So much so, that mid-week FryDaddy (who was not yet cleared by the doctors to drive) called a mutual friend of ours, Victorian Marxist, and had him drive FryDaddy to the local dollar store where he went on a little spree of silly gifts to cheer me up. Cheer me up. Sheesh. Yet it's amazing how a sand pail full of bubbles, pinwheels, and cheap candy can make me smile. Oh, sure, Tiffany is great, but even they don't sell a miniature Zen sand garden, much less arrange it on the counter so it appears that little plastic dinosaurs are raking the sand and arranging the rocks.

That made me move to the left on the Cat Scale. What's the "Cat Scale," you ask? Think of it this way. On a continuum of cool, relaxed and contented cats of the cartoon persuasion, over on the far left would be Garfield, a plump, pasta-eating (see, carbs are our friend!) feline. Moving from contentment to "failed experiments in stress management" would be cats such as Chubby Huggs of "Get Fuzzy" fame and Sylvester, especially after mistaking a baby kangaroo ("Hippety Hopper," by the way) for a mouse. At the far extreme, where I was hyperventilating this past week, would be the epitome of burnout, Bloom County's own Bill the Cat. (I'm not sure about the placement of more literary cats, such as the Cheshire, Macavity, or Shere Khan. Perhaps you have suggestions on this matter.)

What I can say with authority, Dear Readers is this - don't spend much time in Bill-Land. It's not a healthy place.

Enough for now. FryDaddy is ready to go back to school. I must go play with my plastic dinosaurs and consult a feng shui manual for optimum pebble placement.

Heart of Steel

It's been an interesting week here in the Nest. While the calendar said it was spring break, Real Life had other, more pressing ideas in store. Sure, there were a few errand-y things - worked one full day, had some tech issues, had a plumber come in (who looked under the sink and said, "Well - that's just wrong.") But more was in store.

You see, FryDaddy is a cyborg. Yep, sort of like Tony Stark, he has a device implanted in his chest. (That's pretty much where the similarities end, though and a good thing. Stark can be a first-class ass and having tons of money doesn't change that.) FryDaddy's device is a combo pacemaker-defibrillator that collects data from a lead that runs from the device in the chest wall to the chambers of the heart. Long story short, the lead fractured. (Get this - this was not an unexpected event. The lead had been recalled, but it's a tad more difficult to take out a wire held in place by human scar tissue than it is to trundle a toaster oven back to Best Buy, so it was left in, hoping there'd never be a problem. Great plan, until there was one.) When this happened on Thursday, the lead was unable to collect information and the device "alarmed" to inform FryDaddy to get thee to a hospital. To put it mildly, it's disconcerting to hear the sound of a British ambulance issuing from your beloved's chest.

Hospital, waiting room, technicians, heart clinic, cardiac unit. Philly cheesesteak for dinner, which doesn't seem quite right, but I wasn't about to argue for rabbit food under the circumstances.

On Friday, the boys in white coats took away his Kindle long enough to dope him up, reopen the incision, attempt to remove the old lead, decide it was less intrusive to "cap it off," inserted a new, shiny, super-sophisticated lead (more on that later), replace the old device with a new, fully charged one (yep, they checked the battery life!), stapled him up and sent him back. All in about four hours, only a little over one of which was the actual "procedure."

How I love modern medical technology!

While not on bed rest, he has to be a bit careful for the next two weeks while the new lead "scars into place" - odd words to bring comfort, but it's a strange world in which we live. No driving, no lifting anything heavier than a gallon of milk with that arm, no raising the arm above the shoulder (which makes putting on a shirt somewhat interesting), and a few other restrictions. The incision is neatly bandaged and seems quite small for what it is. The new device is much more advanced than the old one - its sensors are constantly scanning the electrical workings of FryDaddy's heart and it will even page the doctor if certain levels begin to rise and it'll page the doctor long before the device alarms. (Although this requires a landline. Seriously. We're going to add a plan to avoid roaming charges!) And the old lead will now be a "backup" that can be turned on remotely, should that be necessary.

As you can see, humor is my defense. But it's wearing thin. You see, give me a crisis and I'm fine. Come into the house after the table saw goes "crunch" clutching something scarlet and dripping and I'm perfectly okay. But once the shock wears off, I'm a bit of a mess. As Dorothy Parker once said, "It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes." Case in point: last time FryDaddy had an issue with the heart device, I'm told I was a rock. Until about a week later, when I burst into tears when getting a parking pass.

So spring break wasn't the lazy, sun-drenched week it might have been when I was much younger. It wasn't even the "gotta write the paper" week I thought it was going to be. But FryDaddy is home and safe and healthy and sane.

I'll take that.

Sometimes You Have to Play

For the last two months, I've been on a diet. I know that's not a pretty word anymore - "diet" is "die" with a "t" at the end - but it's true. I'd put on enough weight that my clothes didn't fit properly and I decided, after about a dozen failed attempts, to Get Serious. So I've been trying to eat proper amounts of healthy food and exercise appropriately. (That's been hard, as my ankle just finally healed enough to get out of the walking boot I've been in for five-plus months.) I've adjusted (mostly) and seen the needle on the scale begin to settle in more friendly territory. Still a little ways to go, though.

But a day doesn't always go into the "win" column based on the overall calorie count.

Let me make this clear - this post isn't any more about a refined-sugar binge than Buffy was about vampires. There is a time in everyone's life when it is appropriate to Get Serious, but (and equally important) there are also times when it's crucial to test the boundaries to the point of finding yourself on the other side of them. I set rules for my "diet plan" that were realistic, but I'm a sugar fiend (Red Hots, you are my downfall). Further, past life lessons have taught me that there is absolutely no sense whatsoever in acquiring good habits only to become miserable.

Add to the mix that FryDaddy is home for his spring break and he spent most of the week working on a conference paper and I spent the week teaching. It was the week before my school's spring break, so the students were a little crispy, I was a little battered-fried and - oh yeah - the school was putting the finishing touches on the documentation that must be provided for our accreditation review, so everyone involved in that was stressed. (Such a high stress level among so many people is another reason ["ammunition," if you will] why weapons should not be allowed on campuses in my opinion, but I digress.) So yesterday, I ate sensibly until about noon, then I finished my work for the day and firmly shut my door. FryDaddy and I loaded up on dollar store candy, bought a bucket of popcorn and hied ourselves to a matinee showing of Rango, followed by dinner out and a decadent evening of cheap chocolate and Cowboy Bebop.

I didn't just marry him for his stunning good looks and devilish smile, you know.

Yeah, the diet is in tatters that I have to stitch back together. But my husband and I had a "play date" that we both sorely needed and, for a few hours, I didn't have to think about work, the toxic environment of American politics, or the devastation of Japan and points east (which are points west for me - it gets confusing). There is still work to do - I have stacks of papers to grade, lessons to prep, and I have a conference presentation that needs to be transformed from piles of highlighted, sticky-noted research into a coherent paper - but yesterday needed to be for play.

I joked that I have given up self-restraint for Lent but I don't think that's it, exactly. I'll Get Serious again later today (or maybe tomorrow, after FryDaddy must leave to return to his school). It's just that here on Earth, we're traveling through space so fast we don't even feel the motion and I don't want to look up amazed one day and say, "How did I get here?" Moreover, at my funeral, I sincerely hope there are other things to say than, "She always got her papers back on time."

It was a very, very good day.

Side note: Rango is a sly, charming film with some wonderful things to say about how we decide who we are, the nature and craft of acting, the myth of the American West, and how natural resources determine the life of entire regions. And you thought it was just Johnny Depp as a talking lizard! And Bebop is - well - gorgeous and heartbreaking and funny and has a soundtrack you want to download into ringtones so you always have it close by. Trust me on that one.

Local Boy Makes Good!

I always love to see headlines like that, don't you? Well, gather 'round, children, and hear the tale. 'Tis an epic story of a starry-eyed young man who fell in love with the moving pitchers and decided that you shouldn't have to go all the way yonder to Hollywood to make movies that people wanted to go to drive-ins to see.

A local venue started doing a monthly Classic Film series this year - January was Jimmy Stewart Month, February was John Wayne Month ('cause nothing says "LUV" like the Duke!), and this month is Earl Owensby Month.

And the crickets begin to chirp, which is a flat-out shame.

Oh, Ed Wood may be better known, but among those who know films, the name Earl Owensby is justly famous. While no one sane person will take a bet on the chances of any of the Owensby stable of films overtaking Citizen Kane on any list of "Great Films That Everyone Ought to Know by Name," Owensby carved out a place for himself in film history and it's one that ought to be celebrated.

See, young Earl loved movies. A lot. And by hook, crook, hard work, a little luck, and a touch of sharp dealing, he created the largest independent film studio outside of Hollywood (at least for a little while). The linked article nicely outlines his career. It's true, the films he churned out were mostly drive-in fare that were thin on frou-frou conventions such as plot and character development, but these movies are valentines to, well, to movies. To the sheer magic of them.

For example, his 1978 Buckstone County Prison, which is a improbable (and possibly unholy) cross between Cool Hand Luke and Walking Tall. Here's the trailer, with Owensby as the hero "Seabo."

Or Rottweiler (later re-named Dogs of Hell, which I think might be catchier), which cashed in on an earlier 3-D craze - and slightly predated the film version of Cujo. Owensby and James Cameron have more than the 3-D notion in common - Cameron's 1989 underwater thriller The Abyss was partially filmed in an Owensby lot - he had the biggest underwater tank in the world, thanks to a not-completed nuclear plant. The sets were eventually demolished in 2007, when Duke Power decided to move ahead with the project. (Yep, this means Owensby bought the site for cheap from Duke then sold it back to them! How can you not love someone who manages that? It's like Malcolm Reynolds, if he had been successful!)

My point is this - by golly, Owensby didn't just whine about how great he'd be if only someone gave him a break. He made it happen! Maybe the movies aren't that great (in fact, it's shocking to me that the MST3K boys never got a hold of these. Then again, Owensby is nothing if not shrewd and he may have wanted more scratch than the Midwestern Magpies could afford), but you know what?

He made them. And he made money on them, too.

Visit the studio, would you? Here's the link. And you can see all sorts of trailers there, too. Even buy a movie or two while you're at it. Or browse this filmography.

All sorts of people blaze the trail for us, if we'll just take the time to notice. And they don't all have to be Harold Bloom or Orson Welles to offer valuable road tips and examples. (That being said, I'm still not naming my kids "Rhett" and/or "Elvis." Seriously. Check that out here.)

Sometimes it's not about waiting until you're convinced that you know enough to be great at what you want to do. Sometimes it's about deciding that you'll figure it out on the way - and then getting going.