Paul: Have you ever heard of putting HONEY on PIZZA?
Swistle: Ug, no.
Paul: It says here people put it on Hawaiian pizza…
Swistle: Oh…well, actually I can picture it with pineapple—a sweet-and-sour thing.
Paul: Apparently it’s this whole THING. It’s called hot honey.
Swistle: Oh so like hot honey mustard, that’s different.
Paul: No, no mustard, just honey. Chili-infused honey.
Swistle: Well. Hm.
Paul: It’s Mike’s Hot Honey. It says you can also put it on fried chicken, in cocktails, and on ICE CREAM??
Swistle: WELL PUT IT ON THE LIST
Paul: I’M DOING IT

This is how we went from “GROSS” to “BUY IT” in about one minute flat, and ended up spending TEN DOLLARS on a thing of honey at the grocery store. To be fair, honey is already expensive, but STILL! We looked for it first with salsa and bbq sauces, but it was with honey and maple syrup.

We have not yet tried it. I will let you know.

There are two literal vultures in our yard, partaking of a dead skunk. The skunk has been there, visually intact, for ten days as best as we can figure. We have been less-than-half-wondering why nothing had eaten it, but more-than-half-NOT-wondering why nothing had eaten it. More than that, we have been wondering why it still looked so intact: little feet stiffly out in front of it, little face turned upward as if to sniff the lovely spring air, fur all fluffy and normal, really very sweet, like a stuffed animal. Also wondering: what HAPPENED? Did it have a heart attack? Did it fall from a just-short-of-splatting height? Did someone tip it over like a cow, and it perished of shock? Did it freeze to death in a standing position, and then the wind blew it onto its side? Why is it absolutely intact, yet dead, in our yard?

Anyway, now the vultures are taking care of it. When I came home from grocery shopping they were there, and the air was absolutely RICH with skunk. Luckily the breeze was in our favor: driving past the vultures, the car immediately filled with richness; at the end of the driveway nearer the house, opening the door of the car with dread (after, I don’t mind telling you, a several-minutes’ pause to process the situation and prepare for the scents), I found the air blessedly fresh and clear. As I unloaded the groceries, two separate cars pulled over to gape at the vultures.

Paul suggested we should take a photo of the scene, to include in the real estate listing at whatever future time we sell the house. A little something to go viral. It’s happening near the foot of the driveway, so we could get a real Curb Appeal shot. Imagine it: a wide view, the end of the driveway with nice little homey mailbox, part of the grassy yard and part of the road, and The House, looking lovely if a little spare in early spring. And, not immediately apparent but, once seen, impossible to ignore: in the bottom left corner, the vultures eating the skunk.

Resolution completed! I have my first tattoo! I am feeling dazed and amazed. I was trying to pin down the feeling, and at first I thought joy and also…pride?—but pride isn’t quite right. TRIUMPH. It’s triumph. To FINALLY have stopped dithering after DECADES; to FINALLY have DONE IT. I felt similarly when I got my cartilage piercing. Like “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!” plus the huge satisfaction of having overcome a number of hurdles to make something happen.

I didn’t want to post a picture right away, because pretty much every time I see a picture of someone’s brand-new still-fresh-and-bleeding-and-covered-in-Saniderm tattoo I think of something I read in a pregnancy book about how you may want to wait a couple days to take a picture of your newborn for the birth announcements; it tactfully suggested that the baby would then be, er, EVEN MORE BEAUTIFUL than it was on the day of its birth. My tattoo is now three days old, so it still has some pinkness around the edges but it has settled down considerably and, while not ready for studio portraits, is ready for its birth announcement:

(Another thing I have learned from other people’s tattoo photos is to include BODY CONTEXT: it can be surprisingly disturbing to see a tattoo and not know WHAT PART OF THE BODY AM I LOOKING AT.)

The first picture is prettier, but the angle makes it seem as if the tulip is tilted. The second picture loses a bit of the leaf and is not as flattering to my skin and has part of the exercise bike in it, but shows the placement, which I LOVE: it was not what I had in mind, but I’d decided ahead of time to defer to the artist’s judgement whenever possible and I think she was exactly right. She did it so that the back leaf traces the calf muscle. I would not have thought to do that, and would have just centered the whole thing on the side of the calf like a big sticker—which would have been FINE, but not anywhere near as good as what the artist chose.

If I seem to be getting ahead of myself, it’s because when it’s me reading this kind of post, I can’t really CONCENTRATE until I’ve seen the finished tattoo/cake/artwork/remodel/whatever. I would be kind of skimming, thinking yes yes yes uh huh when do we see it. Now that we’ve seen it, I will start where we left off: with the making of the appointment. I’d chosen “tulip on the calf” because even though I felt MORE enthusiastic about getting something on my upper arm, I couldn’t commit to anything, neither placement (shoulder cap? upper arm? back of shoulder? more like front of shoulder?) nor flower (peony? peony plus bud? rose? cluster of roses? mixed bouquet?); whereas I COULD commit to a tulip on the calf.

It was nice to then have well over a month to make sure I continued to feel content with that decision, and I did. My main concern was that I might have told her too SMALL a tulip, but several of you assured me that that would be easy and normal to fix at the appointment, which I already knew included built-in time for adjustments and so forth, so I trusted that it would be okay, which is to say that I wrung my hands for weeks and worried it would not be okay. I was particularly worried that she would say “Oh! Well, we can change the size, but I haven’t booked enough time for that larger tattoo.” That turned out to be a non-issue, at least with this particular tattoo: the artist commented that tulips and pansies in particular are quicker-than-usual tattoos to apply (if you’re interested, she said peonies and roses are slower than usual), so even making it a fair amount larger didn’t matter much for the time allotment.

I wore to the appointment the shorts/socks/shoes I normally wear in the summer, so that she could see the exact display area I had in mind, and we ended up with a tulip that was just under 8 inches—and I think I would have gone for more like 9 inches, except we were getting pretty close to a veiny area of my calf, and I didn’t want a big magenta tulip calling attention to it or running up against it.

She’d asked for a reference photo, and I’d sent one that gave the basic idea of what I wanted; she then asked for more information about the color of the tulip, so I sent a word description (magenta), and included another reference photo of what I considered magenta tulips, in case the word magenta wasn’t as precise as I’d hoped. Then I didn’t look at those photos again: I didn’t want to accidentally memorize the reference photos and then notice all the ways in which the tattoo was different. I looked afterward, and she did make a satisfying number of changes, and I’d say she significantly improved it.

You may remember I’d considered adding my birth surname to the tattoo, but I let that simmer for awhile and realized I DIDN’T feel settled about that decision for an assortment of reasons, so I left it for now; it seemed like something I could have her add later.

My remaining worries, in no particular order:

• That it would hurt more than I could tolerate, and I’d have to have her stop

• That I would twitch or move, and cause her to make a mistake

• That I wouldn’t be able to find parking

I didn’t find myself worrying much about the decision to get a tattoo, or that I wouldn’t like the tattoo; I felt as if those were worries I’d already bypassed by making the resolution to GO FOR IT AND SEE, BECAUSE THERE IS NO KNOWING THESE ANSWERS AHEAD OF TIME. And I didn’t worry A LOT a lot about the pain, even though I consider my personal pain tolerance levels fairly low, because so many people get tattoos, and many of them go on to get MORE tattoos, and I didn’t know of a single story of someone having the artist stop and leave the tattoo unfinished. (Not that there AREN’T such stories, and at this point if you know of one it would be fun to hear it. But more like I was thinking if it happened OFTEN, then statistically I would expect to have heard a few stories already.)

It did make me nervous that no one seems to have an easy time describing the pain. And that sometimes when you ask people to try to describe it, they start to say things like, “Well, you’ve been through childbirth, right? so I think you’ll be fine,” and they say it in an evaluative, hedging-their-bets kind of way, not in a jolly reassuring way.

So while I was getting the tattoo done, I took notes on my phone to try to describe the pain. I will START by saying that overall, I felt well-prepared for the pain levels, so that OVERALL, the pain was not as bad as I’d expected; but you see how I would not want to keep saying the pain was less than I’d expected, and therefore warp YOUR preparation, so that you would end up feeling that the pain was MORE than you’d expected.

I’d thought I would want to play phone games while getting the tattoo, but actually I felt dreamily inclined to zone out and listen to the music and look at things in the studio: the interesting ceiling, the partial view out the window, the art on the walls, the decorated desk. I am not usually a live-in-the-moment kind of person, but in this particular situation I found that I wanted to Experience the Tattoo. Plus, I wanted to think about the kind of pain it was so that I could try to describe it to you. Here are the things I wrote down:

Buzzing hot scratching
Scrubby sensation, like scribbling, hot scratchy pen
Scratching with a vibrating pin
Outline hurt more, sketching back and forth over a line
Feels like scratching through layers of skin but not like cutting
Pain was all surface, unlike labor or tooth
Little chills to the scalp/face

The most helpful thing I remember someone telling me ahead of time was that it was the burn of a sunburn, and that it was like having a sunburn applied slowly to your skin. I would say yes, it was like that, but it was like having a sunburn applied slowly to my skin with A HOT SCRATCHING VIBRATING PIN.

I found it completely manageable; I didn’t wish I’d taken a sedative or a painkiller ahead of time; I didn’t need her to take a break; my eyes didn’t even water. Every so often (like when she was sketch-scratching in a way that felt like line-work rather than coloring-in), I would think “oh: ow. ow. ow.” for a few seconds, but then it would taper back to “huh! that hurts in an interesting way!” A long time ago I got a deep-gums dental cleaning, and I thought back to that: it HURT, it DID, but in a warm itching kind of way that lived very close to the line of being pleasant. …Do not go for a tattoo thinking it will feel pleasant. I just mean, it was the KIND of pain that did not, for me, feel terrible or miserable; it just felt like pain/sensation/heat/scratching. I didn’t feel like I was SUFFERING. (However, afterward I noticed I was pretty sweaty under the arms.)

Also, I kept noticing that the pain was SURFACE pain. I have had other kinds of pain I found not particularly tolerable: labor pain, for example, and bad gas pain, and dental pain. Those pains came FROM WITHIN, and in addition to being extremely and miserably painful, they made me feel PANICKY. The pain of a tattoo all felt completely on the surface, and did not make me feel panicky at all, not even a little: it was like the pain of a skinned knee, or a sunburn—NOT the pain of a deep cut, or something wrong in your organs/intestines, or a broken bone, where it feels like something is deeply WRONG WRONG WRONG and the body is setting off emergency alarms. I felt light in my mind, and a little dazed, but mostly INTERESTED and in the mood to THINK ABOUT the pain, and not at all miserable or unhappy.

Plus, I felt ELATED that the pain was PRODUCING SOMETHING I WANTED. I wondered idly if we would value tattoos as much if they didn’t hurt, and immediately concluded we would NOT. I think if it were as quick and painless as having a permanent sticker put on us, hardly anyone would do it. I think the time and pain is NECESSARY to the experience. I think it’s an essential part of what makes a tattoo feel transformative and badass. I can imagine getting a tattoo to commemorate something, and having the experience/pain of the tattoo accomplish some actual psychological work.

The ONLY time I felt a TWINGE of anything different was when she was very near the ankle and I felt what I think must have been a little taste of what it feels like to get a tattoo over a bone; that BRIEF MOMENT felt more like INTERNAL pain, and I would not want to experience too much of that.

Some notes from the artist, when I said it didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected:

• She mentioned something I already knew, which is that the area where I was getting a tattoo was not a particularly painful area for getting a tattoo

• She mentioned that she was known for having a light touch, and that it might hurt more if I were getting it done elsewhere. This made me a little nervous: do I remember reading something somewhere about some artists causing more pain but their tattoos last longer because they’re placed deeper, or am I making that up from an anxiety dream?

I see I have skipped ahead again. I’d intended to be thorough but also orderly. Let’s hop back to the arrival at the studio: I DID find parking. I went in. I met the tattoo artist. There was no one else in the studio; I wondered if it might be fun to be in a studio along with other people getting tattoos from other artists, or if it was nicer to have quiet/privacy; I think I could be happy either way. She showed me the first work-up, which was a color print-out, and she’d cut around it so I could hold it up to my calf and get the idea. We agreed on larger; she made it larger and printed it out; I held it up and said yes. She verified the colors with me, and said the greens would be a little darker than shown, and the blossom would be a little more purpley than shown.

She had me fill out a consent form that was very similar to the one I filled out when I got a cartilage piercing: my name, my age, my address; was I intoxicated? did I have any contagious/transmissible diseases? did I have allergies? And things like had I eaten in the last two hours, what medications was I taking. Also a pretty long list of things I had to say I understood: that tattoos were permanent and so were tattoo mistakes; that the tattoo artist couldn’t know if there were things in the tattoo inks that I might be allergic to; that a tattoo might get infected, might heal wrong, would fade with time, might need touching up. It was an electronic form, and I also had to take a photo of my driver’s license and upload it.

In the meantime, the tattoo artist had made a purple-outline version of the tattoo design that she could apply to my leg so we could agree on the exact placement, and so that she’d have a guideline to work with. She had me stand, and she sat on the floor next to my calf and took some time squinting, before smucking the design decisively onto my leg. She said she could wipe it off and reapply as many times as I wanted, and that she could put it higher, lower, forward, back, tilted, whatever. As mentioned, it was not where I had pictured it, but I’d decided ahead of time to go with her judgement unless I disliked something; I took a minute to make sure I didn’t dislike it, and I didn’t, and in fact I found I almost immediately VERY MUCH liked it. In the days since, I’ve felt almost appalled at the idea that I could have gone with my own original little-thought/no-experience idea instead! She does this for a living; I chose her because I liked her work; she has a lot of experience with what looks nice in this exact medium; trusting her judgement was the way to go.

She said the purple outline needed to dry for a bit, so she had me go sit in the waiting area while she got her tattooing stuff ready. I was trying not to make her nervous by watching her intently, so I mostly noticed from my casual peeks that she was getting out a lot of different colors of ink and putting small quantities into little containers. There was also a tray with equipment, like at the dentist’s office, and a cloth and a bottle of what I assumed was a disinfectant or other cleaning solution. Several times during the tattoo she wiped down my calf with a nice cool wet cloth, so that was probably the cool wetness.

Then she had me get up onto the table, and I’d forgotten to be nervous ahead of time about getting up onto the table. I am always nervous about such things. I think I don’t have a very strong sense of where my body is and, combined with excessive self-consciousness, this makes things like “positioning my human body on a table” disproportionately embarrassing and difficult—and especially if it’s a narrowish table, as it was, and if it’s covered with slidey paper, which it was, and if I have to lie in any particular position or scoot myself into a different position, which I did. I do better if I can think it through a little ahead of time. In this case, I just sort of went for it, figuring I was not the only person who did not have lots of experience climbing onto a tattooing table. She then had me move my legs back, toward her. I then spent the rest of the session worried that I had crept them forward again, and that she was having to lean over uncomfortably; at some point I realized that would be HER problem to fix if so, and that she has PLENTY of experience asking people to move.

Before she started, I told her that I was worried I might twitch or wiggle, and she said not to worry, that she is very good at keeping people still. And indeed: throughout the entire tattoo, I was intermittently aware of the firm pressure of her hand right near where she was working, keeping my calf, and specifically the inch or so of it she was currently working on, immobile. I felt pretty able to shift my head or arms a little, or pick up my phone, without worrying that I might move my leg.

She did surprisingly little pre-talk. She said “Ready?,” and I said “Ready,” and she began. I noticed she would put a little friction right where she was about to work on the tattoo—not just the pressure of the hand holding my leg still, but like the little rub-rub-rub a nurse might do right before giving a shot. This was helpful: the pain never came from an unexpected place.

There was a lot of WIPING during the tattoo: bzz bzz bzz, wipe, bzz bzz bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, wipe. I’m just going to assume wiping up blood, but maybe also ink? I don’t really know how it works. There were also several more extensive wipe-downs, where she wiped the whole calf with a cool fluid; that felt very nice against the heat of the process. I’d have been interested to see if there was a lot of blood on the cloths, but she’d whisked them away and it seemed too weird to ask. In retrospect, I should have just asked: tattoo artists as a group do not seem easily off-put by weird stuff.

The tattooing itself (excluding consultation, revisions, set-up, me wanting to pee one last time before she got started) took almost exactly one hour, which surprised me: when I’d estimated a six-inch tattoo, she’d said she could do that in an hour or two, which already surprised me; when we made the tattoo bigger, I’d expected something more like two or three hours. This is when she told me that tulips (and pansies) go surprisingly quickly. I think I could easily have endured at least another hour without a break, but it’s hard to say. I was talking to a co-worker who has had a fair amount of tattoo work done, and she said even with a break for a snack/drink in the middle, her own limit is about three hours; after that she starts to feel icky/woozy.

When she was done, I half-sat up so I could see the tattoo, while leaving my calf sideways up on the table; the tattoo artist was putting away her supplies and also periodically wiping the blood that was seeping out of the tattoo. The tattooed skin was noticeably raised/puffy, with pink all around it. (It had flattened by the next day; the pink is still there three days later, but much narrower, and less bright.) She took a few photos, and then asked me about adhesive. I do get pink marks from bandaids, and sometimes they’re itchy/raised marks, but it’s not enough of a problem to make me stop using bandaids. She said in that case she would go ahead and put on Saniderm, but that I should only leave it on until the next morning, instead of for several days as usual; she said I would get almost all of the benefit of it, but without as much exposure to adhesive. And she said if it itched or bothered me before then, I should just take it off early, no big deal; and in that case I would follow the no-Saniderm section of the aftercare instructions.

The Saniderm was like…a piece of very thin and not very shiny cling-wrap, and sticky. She cut a sheet of it to fit around the whole tattoo plus a nice wide border, and then she applied it, and it was not very visible. She said it was normal for the tattoo to seep blood and fluid, and for that blood/fluid to build up under the Saniderm; but she said if fluid started leaking out, that meant the sterile seal was broken, and I should remove the Saniderm and follow the no-Saniderm healing instructions. The Saniderm DID leak, just a couple hours later, so I wore it even less than the original smaller amount of time she’d prescribed.

Aftercare instructions vary WIDELY. So widely, it makes me very nervous: one place says do THIS, avoid THAT; another place says, do THAT, definitely not THIS. The aftercare instructions my tattoo artist gives for non-Saniderm healing: wash three times per day with unscented antibacterial soap (just using your hand, no washcloth), for as long as the tattoo is still seeping/damp; when the tattoo stops seeping and starts to feel dry/tight, apply a little bit of unscented sensitive skin lotion after washing, and drop down to washing once or twice a day. Keep up the washing/moisturizing routine for 2-3 weeks. DON’T SCRATCH OR PICK OR EXFOLIATE.

I was worried about the discomfort of sleeping, wearing pants, etc., but it’s been okay. I am very AWARE OF my pants where they brush against the tattoo, which continues to feel like a sunburn. I am CAREFUL when getting into / out of bed, and I don’t SLIDE my leg across the sheets, I only pick my leg up and put it back down in the new position; but it’s fine to sleep on it. When I first get up in the morning and swing my legs into a standing position, there is a sudden increase in the burning feeling. I keep the shower temperature lower, and try to keep the tattoo away from the shower spray as much as I can; hot water hurts more, as it does with a sunburn, and the spray is unpleasant.

I am extremely, extremely pleased with the tattoo, and am looking forward to getting more. A part of me wishes I’d started sooner; a much larger part of me feels pleased with the idea of starting NOW, in mid-life, as a treat.

Are you ever doing a task in the evening, an unromantic and unpartyish task such as descaling a coffee pot with vinegar, and you’re using a paper towel to dab up excess hot vinegar condensation and use it to really GET AT the little details of the inside of the coffee-pot lid, and you think to yourself that you could have lived so many other lives that were not this one, for example you could have stayed single and lived in Paris, etc.? I don’t know if it makes it better or worse, but this evening it occurred to me I would still need to descale my coffee pot if I were single and living in Paris.

Paul and I just had an odd exchange, and neither of us can figure out how to make it sound as MIND-BLOWING to others as it was to us. Here is what happened. He began on a good foot, conversationally-speaking: “I have just learned a new fact.” I was attentive, as expected. He said, “GUESS WHO I just found out played a PIVOTAL ROLE in [some silly getting-kids-to-brush-their-teeth song Paul liked as a child]?” And, like, obviously I have no idea, this song is not from my childhood, I find it kind of annoying after nearly three decades of hearing Paul sing snippets of it, and it sounds like it’s from the 1950s as most of his childhood favorites do; and so I did what we do in our relationship in these situations, which is that I YELLED OUT the very first DUMB/FUNNY GUESS that came into my mind. I yelled as follows: “PENN OF PENN AND TELLER.” Then I realized I meant the one who doesn’t talk, which would be a funnier guess, so I immediately corrected it and yelled “I MEAN TELLER OF PENN AND TELLER.” And Paul went completely silent, and he said, in a voice as if he had seen the water turn into wine right in front of him and as if I had been the one to turn it: “It was Penn Jillette. How did you. How did you know that.”

Well, I didn’t. I didn’t AT ALL. I was making a joke, and not even a good joke, and in fact even my joke was wrong, since I changed it to Teller. If I had been trying to guess for real, I would not have guessed Penn Jillette, because I would have assumed the song in question was from Penn Jillette’s early childhood or before. So my hands flew to my mouth, and my face went hot with the weirdness of me accidentally saying the right answer as a joke and with the earnestness with which I was attempting to assure an astounded-to-the-point-of-shock Paul that I HAD NOT AT ALL KNOWN. (You might be tempted to wonder why, or even be a little offended on my behalf that Paul would be SO SHOCKED that I’d gotten it right: how should he know what interesting facts I might or might not know? But in this case he was right to be shocked: this song, and also Penn and Teller, are in HIS realm; I am ALSO a fan, but no one would consider me a good source of Penn and Teller trivia. This is as if I’d said to Paul, “I have just learned a new fact. GUESS WHAT [obscure baby name thing from the 1950s]?,” and he had YELLED OUT (in our familiar “I do not know so I am yelling out a dumb/funny guess” way”) the EXACT ANSWER, JUST BY CHANCE.

Anyway, William’s immediate and certainly accurate theory is that this is the wonder of two aging minds combined: that Paul has discovered this fact before; that he has told me; that I have forgotten it; and that when Paul asked the question, and the mice in my brain went looking into the filing cabinets for a quick joke, they instead accurately accessed the file with the answer. William further theorizes that in fact we have this amazing conversation about every five years, and will continue to do so until our deaths.

Then Elizabeth came home from work, and we told her the story, and she said almost word-for-word the same thing William had said, including the part about every five years, so Paul says he thinks ALL of us need to get out more.

Until I think five years ago, I did our taxes myself; it was about five years ago that I gave up in tears and frustration. I was making my best guesses at what things meant, even after reading the instructions and searching on the IRS site and using tax software and so forth, and after a certain number of years of that, we started paying a professional. What an absolute SCHEME capitalism is, that we need to pay people tons of money to tell us how much money we need to pay our own government, because our government makes the forms too difficult for its citizens to figure out.

It seems like using a tax preparer would be so much less stressful! And it kind of is. But there is still the part where I have to get all the paperwork in order, and some of our forms aren’t ready until March, and there’s the part where I worry that I am forgetting something, and the part where it costs a fair chunk of money; and now there is also the part where I worry that our tax preparer is judging us and/or thinks we’re pretty dumb about money.

I know to ignore that last thought as much as possible. I know the sensible thing to think is that our tax preparer deals with a lot of people’s taxes and does not have the time, the mental energy, or the connection to us that she would need in order to care, let alone judge. But…I am a human being in this world, and I know I have found time and mental energy to care about MANY, MANY THINGS I should not care about, including what a tax preparer thinks of me, so this is not a compelling argument. Plus: I am on Twitter, so I have SEEN tax professionals talking about the ways in which they judge people.

Well. There is nothing I can do about any of that. But I have noticed over the years that whenever I am putting off a stressful task, ESPECIALLY if it is the kind of stressful task where it needs to be done sooner or later so it might as well be sooner, and yet I am still putting it off as if I wish to draw out the enjoyment of the stress as long as possible—in those cases, telling you about it tends to have a strongly motivating effect. I am hoping that this post will cause me to load all my tax stuff up and drop it off at the preparer’s office tomorrow.

I don’t know if you already know this, but it turns out that if you do an unfamiliar thing more often, it becomes more familiar and less stressful. Just a little tip from me to you.

We have been visiting a lot of colleges, and also I went away for a Girls’ Weekend, and my packing/traveling stress has absolutely plummeted. I am now SUGGESTING trips, browsing vacation rentals, wondering aloud if there are any other colleges we should visit or perhaps re-visit, etc.

Paul’s birthday is coming up, and he has said he doesn’t want Crazy Cake. I have over the years tried to find the balance between “Explaining why the cake is not coming out right, despite my genuine attempt to make it right” and “Not making him feel bad that the cake is a huge source of stress and frustration each year.” Maybe ten years ago, he started making sounds about not wanting me to have to make the cake, so I dialed the frustration talk alllllll the way back; each time he made some sort of noise on the topic, I reiterated that it is his birthday and he should get the cake he wants to eat and not the cake I want to make, and that I certainly expect the same when it is MY birthday, and that is no big deal at all to make it once a year. I even threw in some talk about how the kids should grow up familiar with his special family recipe. I became outright cheerful about making the cake, whistling and singing happy little songs to show how unstressful it was.

But he has kept acting as if he doesn’t want to trouble me, and it has finally occurred to me that maybe he doesn’t really LIKE that cake anymore. There can definitely be a point where the Cherished Family Recipe of one’s childhood starts tasting like the salt-and-pepper-seasoned-sausage-wrapped-in-white-bread-and-dipped-in-ketchup (my own Cherished Family Recipe) that it deep-down IS, and maybe that has happened to his childhood Making-Do-With-Shortages Depression-Era Chocolate-Colored cake.

Anyway, I will be making the Hershey’s boiling-water cake, with a chocolate buttercream frosting that does not have any flour in it.

Today I bought cardamom for the first time in my life. I don’t know what it is, but now I own some. I bought it because I got suckered once again into buying one of those Skinny Fool coffee add-ins that sounds good and turns out to be a syrup of artificial sweetener and almost nothing else; the one that caught me this time was a Chai Spice flavor. And I DID like the chai spice part! But that was like 1% of it, and the other 99% of it was Artificial Sweetener; I couldn’t add as much chai spice flavor as I wanted without having about 99 more times artificial sweetener than I wanted. I wondered: could I just add the chai spices to my coffee, without the Skinny or the Fool? Hey, maybe it would work to brew my coffee using one of my many, many chai spice tea bags? But then I thought WAIT: I could do this in a way that expends more money and effort! Anyway now I have cardamom.

Right after buying the cardamom, I remembered why it sounded so familiar: my boss was telling us the other day about a recipe she made that she was never going to make again. She mentioned that she spent eight dollars on cardamom and used a teaspoon of it, and that if any of us ever needed cardamom we should let her know and she would be happy to bring us some.

Recently I have been revisiting a technique I remember using when the kids were little: I am timing how long it takes me to do a task, especially a task that needs to be done frequently but that I tend to put off. The kids empty the dishwasher now, but when the kids were little and it was my job, I hated to do it and used to procrastinate, which just made things worse because now the dishwasher was getting half-emptied as I took things directly out of it, so it was hard to tell if it was clean or dirty, and dirty dishes were piling up on the counter. I remember timing it and finding it took a lot less time than I thought it did, and then finding I could use that information to motivate myself to do the task when it seemed overwhelming: “It only takes x minutes! In x minutes it will be done!”

One of my sillier examples is that I will sit around for hours and hours with freezing feet because it feels like too much trouble to go put on warmer socks/shoes. Yesterday I timed it, and it took 1 minute and 15 seconds to take off my shoes, add a pair of wool-blend socks, and put on warmer shoes. I will try to remember to tell myself that, the next time I have chilly feet: “It would take only 1 minute and 15 seconds to fix this problem.”

Speaking of motivation, I have recently found another little surge of motivation to attack the moving boxes still in the barn. You may remember that when we moved over four years ago, we first put everything in the barn, because the house floors were being refinished. I thought at the time that this would make a nice natural sorting system: I’d already gotten rid of a lot of things while packing, but I thought an additional filter could be something like “A year after we move, anything still in the barn can be considered a contender for discard.”

At some point, I started doing a thing where if I were bored and chilly, I would go fetch one box and deal with it. I made some considerable progress with that, but then stalled out.

Two nights ago, I got another little surge of motivation. It started because of that pipe leak, when in moving things out of the way of the water I found the box of miscellaneous stuff we removed from the minivan when we got rid of in 2020. My eye fell upon the box again two nights ago when I was apparently in just the right mood, and I brought it to the garage and started transferring things directly into the trash: pencils; combs that I used on the kids when they were little but we no longer have the daily frantic search for a comb that led me to tuck them into multiple locations; napkins from the glove compartment that were now dusty; a bottle of hand sanitizer that was weird and crusty; not one but TWO partially-full disposable water bottles. I took the baggie of change and emptied into a change jar. I took the ice scraper/brush and put it into the trunk of another car. I put a pair of work gloves onto the stairs to go up to Paul’s workshop. I put several single gloves into the laundry; all of them are the kinds we have multiple interchangeable pairs of. I handed Paul several things that looked like he would know what they were. I took the GPS and hooked it up to my computer to update it.

It was pretty satisfying, and I was still feeling energetic, so I went up to the barn and started poking around. I found a box of snowpants, and some of them were too small for anyone at our house, so I put those in a bag for Goodwill. I found a box of snowboots, and all but one pair was too small for anyone at our house, so I put those in another bag for Goodwill, and put the usable pair with the other boots. I found several Target bags of deeply-clearanced and EXTREMELY cute (bear/bunny-eared, pink and ultra-soft and fluffy with little pom-pom ears, etc.) children’s hats/mittens, purchased for a charity collection event that would have happened in the fall of 2020 but was canceled; I put those aside either for Goodwill or possibly for bringing to the original charity in question.

Last night, I was still a little high from that success, so I went up and searched for more boxes I could deal with. We’re into the really tricky-for-me stuff now: boxes of art and decor that worked well in the old house but not necessarily in this house. I brought down one box marked just “fragile/decor,” and started sifting items: if I could find a place to display it in this house, terrific; otherwise, it went either into the Goodwill pile OR into the box I will pack away in case these things work in the NEXT house. That box will need further curating, because I am not saving box after box of things I MIGHT want, but for now I don’t want to get distracted by that level of consideration: bulk sorting for now, with an emphasis on “unpacking and seeing what I even HAVE here”; further sub-dividing later. And there are an encouraging number of things that although I liked them a lot in the old house, I just don’t like them as much after a four-year break, so they were not very difficult to get rid of.

This task led to me taking a lot of “I’ll just put this here for right now” stuff (old calendars; a several-page receipt for Henry’s glasses, in case we needed it when we picked them up; some canning jars I need to return to whatever friends gave me food in them) out of a corner display cabinet in our kitchen, and instead filling it with lots of pretty little things that have been packed away for four years. The corner cabinet display isn’t DONE, but it’s MORE DONE than it was, and the cabinet looks MUCH better, and now I am enjoying those items, and also thinking “Ooo, I need something TALLER in the back there, I wonder what would work…” and so on. I think tonight I will try to tackle the boxes of wall art, which I expect to be more difficult.

We had an upsetting incident at the library yesterday: there was a loud, lengthy transphobic rant by a patron. After the patron left, my co-workers and I were talking it over. The co-worker at the desk who’d interacted with him, and in my opinion went too far and gave him the impression that she agreed with him, said that we’re not allowed to argue or share our opinions with patrons, and we’re supposed to be neutral; therefore there is nothing we can do when someone is ranting like that. Another co-worker and I were of the mind that being neutral doesn’t mean we have to let someone loudly say terrible things, and doesn’t mean that we have to be so polite that we give the impression that we agree.

I’m going to need pseudonyms: the co-worker who dealt with the transphobic patron is my age and she will be Amy; the co-worker who agreed with me is significantly younger than Amy and me, more like early 20s, and she will be Sophie.

Sophie told us that, the other day, a patron started to try a similar rant with her, and what Sophie said to her was “I don’t agree with you, but there’s no reason we need to have this discussion”; she said it with a friendly tone and face, like “Isn’t it nice it doesn’t matter that we don’t agree on this and can just skip over the unpleasantness?” Sophie said the patron had a pleasant and cooperative reaction to that approach, but Amy thought that would not be allowed by our boss: that it counted as arguing with the patron and giving opinions. My feeling is that I don’t know if I would be able to say it with the right tone and face, but that I think Sophie’s approach was better than Amy’s, which was NOT neutral but instead gave the patron support and encouragement.

I think part of the issue here is that Amy DOES agree in part with the patron (she has in the past put sarcastic air-quotes around “they/them”), though she still found the ranting and the patron unpleasant; Sophie and I were in severe disagreement with the views of the patron, to the extent that both of us had to leave the area to avoid doing something that would get us fired, and afterward it took us a fairly long time to recover and cool down, while Amy was more like “This is just what it’s like working in customer service, you just tune out and let it roll over you.”

And I absolutely understand that Customer Service mindset when, for example, a patron is going on at great length about the ingratitude/troubles of their children/grandchildren, or wants to talk about how prices are out of control and in their day you could get a loaf of bread for 15 cents, or wants to vent about how publishers don’t make enough books in large-print. But DO we allow loud lengthy discriminatory rants in our library, in the name of politeness and neutrality? What if his rant had been racist rather than transphobic, would that have been clearer to Amy that we can’t allow someone to be saying those things in a public community space? My feeling is that if someone were loudly ranting on a racist topic, we would be getting a supervisor to escort them out.

Anyway, I’m going to need to talk about this with my supervisor. She was on the fringes of the interaction, aware of it but not able to hear it, and seemed to be seeing it more as an issue of did Amy need to be rescued (a co-worker can call from another extension, which would make Amy’s phone ring, and then Amy can keep “helping the patron on the phone” until the in-person patron gives up and leaves) or was Amy all set to deal with it. I think it needs to be addressed more as an issue of do we allow people to say these things in a space where other people can hear them.

I want to tell you about my trip with Elizabeth to visit the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD, pronounced MY-add), but I just wrote a huge long email to my parents about it, and I don’t feel like typing it out again; so I am going to cut-and-paste (and I will try to shorten it) and edit it a little so it makes sense as a post. Which I don’t usually do, so you may notice my tone seems Off; it’s because I was talking to my parents rather than to you!—but also to you, because as I was writing the email I started thinking I would probably use it as a blog post.

It was, overall, a very good trip.

I will start with the very worst thing, to get it out of the way, and then I will talk about everything else as a palate cleanser. The worst thing was that Elizabeth left her backpack, which contained her laptop, her driver’s license, her debit card, a fair chunk of cash she estimates at $35 so I’m guessing it was at least double that (i.e., I think she would want to downplay how much it was), her earbuds, etc., plus the backpack itself which was a relatively recent (this school year) expensive ($50, and that was on a good sale) purchase, on a bus; and, even though we discovered the loss within an hour, and even though it is HIGHLY UNLIKELY that the “leaving behind of backpack” would combine in a single hour on a particular bus with a representative of “the tiny percentage of the population who would steal a backpack rather than turn it in,” we did in fact hit those odds, and her backpack and her possessions are gone. When we arrived at our motel on Friday afternoon, instead of being able to relax into it after a day well spent on successfully figuring out the buses and a successful visit to an art museum and successfully figuring out more buses and successfully figuring out how to get our motel so we could relax and eat candy and watch TV, we instead had JUST discovered the loss of the backpack, and so spent a big chunk of time in high distress, making phone calls and freezing the debit card and making lists of what she could remember was in the backpack and trying to figure out for the bus company which bus we’d been on (we got a time-stamp off a photo we’d taken right before boarding the bus). We still had hope that we would find the backpack the next day, even though that involved a complicated maneuver (the administrative offices were closed for the weekend, so the only way to check was to go in person, by bus, to a particular central administrative bus location) but we felt we could figure that out in heroic necessity—but we did accomplish that complicated figuring-out, and we were not rewarded for our efforts, and the station attendant agreed with us in a VERY Wisconsin/midwestern way that we could count on this meaning the backpack had been stolen.

We are using a lot of Coping Thoughts. My primary Coping Thought is the one about how if a problem can be solved affordably with money, it is not a real problem. That is: no one was hurt, no one died, nothing permanent has happened; and by throwing money in various directions, we can fix most of this. The money is painful, but it is doable. If during our trip to Milwaukee, Elizabeth or I had been hit by a bus and permanently injured, THAT would be a real problem. Instead, we just need to send money and time and effort in the directions of a bank and a backpack company and a laptop company and the DMV and etc., and then it will be basically Fixed. But so far I am still waking up in the wee hours of each morning and thinking “WHY!! didn’t I check around us when we left the bus???” and “WHY!!! didn’t SHE remember her backpack???” and “HOW!!! did we manage to encounter the tiny-percentage-chance of a thief??” and so forth. And I keep thinking “BUT MAYBE we will still find it???” and then realizing no: if it were going to be found unstolen, it would have happened at the end of the bus day when the bus was being cleaned; and that was what we were checking when we went in person to the central bus station the next day. The clerk even went out to the cleaning station for us, just to make sure it hadn’t been put aside by a driver who then forgot to bring it to lost-and-found, and it had not been. The backpack and its contents are GONE. And the lucky, lucky, lucky thing is that Elizabeth had the presence of mind to cancel her debit card immediately, before anything happened with that.

Let’s move on.

We were stymied by the bus system. I had thought it would not be too difficult, but I had not realized we would need either exact change or a bus card or an app, so there was some scrambling. Partly we managed the situation because of the famous midwest attitude: each bus driver we encountered seemed fully prepared to delay the bus for as long as it took to explain to us what we should do. I was reminded of an inexplicable-yet-somehow-still-relatable meme I once saw, which said something along the lines of how people in the northeast/south/whatever were nice but not kind, and people in the midwest were kind but not nice. Each bus driver was non-smiling, direct, kind of short/barky with us—and yet, each one looked at us directly as people, assessed our situation, and genuinely tried to help us to the best of their abilities. One driver told us not to pay her, because she couldn’t give us a transfer if we were paying cash; she then drew our attention to the stop at which we should get off, and tried her best to explain to us how to achieve the next bus (we were unable to manage it, but that was not her fault). Another driver told us we should acquire a certain app on our phones; we had strong doubts, but it turned out that was the absolute best way to do everything. Another driver, when Elizabeth could not get her phone to pull up the ticket we’d paid for, just waved her onto the bus. This level of competence and care is the main of many reasons why, when the relevant bus drivers said the backpack was not on their buses, and when the station attendant left for more than ten minutes to check to make sure the backpack was not in the wash-house, we believed that the backpack was Truly Gone. Each time I am lying awake wondering if we should call back AGAIN, I think of this: if it were on the bus, it would have ended up with a driver, or at the wash-house; it did not end up with a driver or at the wash house; therefore it is GONE. I see I am talking about it again, rather than palate-cleansing. But my assumption is that your minds too will be spinning with possibilities where the backpack might yet be found, or where maybe if we just call one more time….

We really did feel TRIUMPHANT, figuring out the buses on this trip. At first it felt insurmountable—and it was SO COLD there, and WINDY, and we were STRANDED right off the bat, dropped off in the middle of Milwaukee by one bus and unable to figure out how to find our next bus. But we used Google Maps and we DID find the Milwaukee Art Museum, and it was about half a mile away from where we were, so we just walked. We were nearly numb by the time we go there, but we DID get there. And then we got to the point of Emergency Hunger/Thirst while there, and so we spent I am not kidding $35 on two servings of mac-and-cheese and a coffee at the museum cafe we had trouble finding and had to ask TWICE in order to find it, but we DID do that and it WAS the only right thing to do, because then we had to retrace our steps more than half a mile in the freezing cold and find our bus stop to the motel, which we DID DO, and which we COULD NOT HAVE DONE if not fortified. I consider the $35 to have been a co-pay for a medical treatment. (We don’t travel much, and I have made a mental note: we need to eat BEFORE we are hungry, because once we are hungry we can’t figure it out and can’t cope. I can Coping Thought one “medical co-pay” meal, but not more than that.)

It was when we got back to our motel that we realized we were missing the backpack, and I will just skip over those hours of stress and phone calls and so on.

The next day was by all measures a resounding success. We started at the wrong bus stop; we eventually realized that, and used the app to find the correct bus stop. We then realized we were half an hour early, and would die of exposure before the bus arrived. We went back to our motel room and warmed up. We set out again, for the correct bus stop at the correct time. We felt grateful for my anxiously over-abundant time-padding: we got on the correct bus at the correct time, and even with our false-start delays we still got to MIAD with plenty of time to spare. We browsed around the college neighborhood until our extremities were in danger. We went in, and signed in at a table with multiple sign-in people—and, when Elizabeth said her name, someone at the other end of the table overheard and called out “Elizabeth!! Hi!!! I’m your admissions counselor!! Come talk to me afterward if you have any questions!”

After checking in, we went downstairs and there was a nice muffins-and-coffee breakfast, which we consumed gratefully: being cold and figuring out buses apparently burns a lot of energy. Then there was the session, and we learned a lot about the school, and it all sounded good to me: there was lots of emphasis on preparing art students for Actual Paying Jobs, and I felt I was becoming sold on the idea of an art school, or at least THIS art school. Then there was a tour that turned out to be self-guided, which was disappointing to hear, since we have learned from experience that self-guided tours are almost worthless. But this one turned out to be fine, because the entire college (exclusive of dorms) is in one large building, and we were allowed to go pretty much everywhere—unlike other self-guided tours where we have looked at the outsides of buildings. I let Elizabeth lead the way through the place, and she seemed to me to be rather intense/researchy about it. We spent HOURS there. I played a lot of Pokemon Go, caught so many pokemon, spun so many pokestops.

The college is small, and it is art-only. Those are two things Elizabeth said she did not want. After the info session and tour, and then our afternoon intensive bus tour of Milwaukee (not yet described), I thought she must be reconsidering. But no: this visit confirmed for her that she wants a university-that-includes-an-art-college, NOT just-an-art-college. She says if she later changes her mind and wants an only-art school, she would want MIAD, and she can definitely see living in Milwaukee.

Happily, MIAD fed us lunch before we left, because then we had to figure out how to get a bus from MIAD to the bus station that had the weekend lost-and-found, and then figure out how to get from there back to our motel. We accomplished both of those things. The bus station attendant was the same non-smiling, kind-of-abrupt type, who then turned out to be someone who went allllll the extra miles to try to find the backpack, and seemed genuinely and still-not-smiling-ly invested in finding it, and genuinely sorry not to have found it. She also looked basically exactly like the entire Wisconsin branch of my family: stout and shortish, fair and rosy, short hair, glasses, no make-up. When I asked if in her experience there was any hope after this point of the backpack turning up, she made exactly the face that means no it was stolen, with exactly the words that don’t say no but mean no, which I can’t exactly remember, but were clear at the time, accompanied by an obvious display of sympathy and regret and wishing the world were not the way that it is.

From there we managed to get back to our motel, and by this time we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves for ticking every task off our list, and also on the verge of utter collapse. We sat in our motel, eating candy and watching TV and recharging. After a couple of hours, at about 4:00, Elizabeth said she wished we had something else to do. I said yes but that there was nothing I could think of, especially with the sun going down soon. Then I said well…we still had our day-passes for the bus, and we could…just ride the bus. She said yes and stood up and got her coat. So we rode the bus, continuing to feel pretty pleased with ourselves for learning even as much as we had learned. Elizabeth was looking intently out the window at Milwaukee, really seeming to evaluate it, as she had on previous bus rides.

Milwaukee made a very good impression on both of us. It was similar to the big city near us, sort of, but all the manageable/good parts, none of the bad/oppressive parts. During the MIAD info session, they mentioned something about Milwaukee having the DENSITY of Chicago, but SMALLER, and that seems just about right. We heard ONE siren the entire time we were there, as opposed to our nearby city’s constant wails. There was no barf on the sidewalks, unlike our nearby city. There was a drunk guy at a bus stop, but he was benevolent. There were a lot of charming buildings. There was public transportation that seemed like it would be really good if you lived there instead of just being a dim visitor who didn’t know east from west. It felt like a city, but a MANAGEABLE/LIVABLE city. And there was a LOT of art: murals and sculptures and studios and etc.

At some point the bus was feeling kind of crowded and the sun was going down, and Elizabeth said we should get off and head back the other way, so we did—except first, right at the place we got off was a Penzeys Spices store, the spices of the revolution, which I started ordering online from in, oh, 2016 or 2017. So we went in and I bought a bunch of spices. THEN we headed back. We got back after dark, which I’d said I wanted to avoid—except the bus stop was right at our motel’s parking lot, so that was okay; and meanwhile we got to see Milwaukee At Night, and a very pretty sunset.

Back comfy and safe in our motel, we ordered delivery pizza/dessert and watched soothing programs on TV: the one where the guy deals with dog problems that are always owner problems; the one where a realtor and a designer compete to get a couple to either stay in their existing home or move to a new home; the one where some guy? is just inexplicably living on a big property? with a bunch of rescue animals? and, like, taking off his shirt pretty often?

Anyway, good trip. We are still waiting for the backpack stress to fade, but I feel that it will, and already it is less.