I received this in email from the woman who was my Cadette and Senior Girl Scout troop leader back when I was in high school. As per her (and her father’s) request, I’m distributing this outward, posting this in lieu of an entry, just because it’s something to think about. I too have read the book of which he speaks, and found it disturbing, not for the plot itself, but for how truly plausible it could be.

The email read as follows:

The fallout from Tuesday’s elections has frustrated and depressed me terribly as it is so evident that few people understand why we even have the system we do. It has bothered my father, also. He was motivated to write the following which I think is awfully good and contains information which should be in the hearts of all in the country. He has given me permission to distribute it widely, knowing (as I hope) you will do the same. It’s important!
– Robin Pulliam

Are we adrift?

Carl Pulliam
November 10, 2000

More than sixty years ago when I was growing up, I read a science fiction novel about a huge spaceship that set out to colonize another world. It was large enough to house a complete eco-system capable of providing everything necessary for the survival of the colonists on their long journey to their new world. However, before they reached their destination the captain and his crew died.

The story begins generations later as the colony drifts aimlessly through space. The memory of the pilot remains only in legend and the purpose of the journey forgotten. The descendants of the original colonist now worship the “pilot” as a god and entry into the now sacred cockpit of the space craft is taboo. The technical and scientific books and manuals the original crew brought aboard are no longer understood and are now considered sacred texts in this society in their worship of the “pilot” and a secondary god, “the navigator”. Memory of this society that had forgotten its roots came back to me this week as I listened to discussions about the Electoral College. Much of our population today seems to have forgotten why we have the system we do, and they show little understanding of how the system functions. The founders of our country were leery of government power and went about designing a system in which it would be difficult for one person, group, or faction to gain an inordinate amount power — the result was the three branches of government with their checks and balances.

The founders were also fearful of mob rule as developed in France in the same decade. Therefore, they devised a representative type of government rather than a democracy in its fullest sense. And they designed the government to be essentially a union of sovereign states. If they had intended a national government to be supreme, they might have named the country Columbia instead of the United States of America. And they wouldn’t have called it a federal system. To avoid the tyranny of the majority, representation by population was limited to one house of the legislature. The Senate consists of two senators from each state, and for more than a century senators were selected by the legislatures of their respective states — not by direct vote of the people. Even with direct election, the senate represents states, big and small, on an equal basis.

As an additional measure to avoid the large states from dominating smaller one, the electoral college system was devised. But even after adopting the Constitution, the founders still did not believe they had done enough to limit the powers of the federal government, so the Bill of Rights was passed by the first congress and submitted to the states for ratification. Contrary to their name, these first ten amendments were designed primarily to limit the power of the central government. They did this by using often the phrase “Congress shall pass no law”, and lastly reserving all duties not specifically given to the federal government to the states or to the people thereof.

The federal government has expanded its role far beyond what the founders envisioned. And the courts have found “rights” in the Constitution that cannot literally be found there. One frequently in the news is abortion. While I favor abortion rights (at least in the early term), I can see nothing in the Constitution that either grants the right or denies it. Even in the absence of Roe v. Wade, I suspect abortion would be legal in most states. The Roe v. Wade decision does damage to the constitution and the rule of law. The Supreme Court justices overreached their authority in interpreting the constitution according to their own personal opinions — in effect legislating on a matter that should have been left to the states. Not only did the court act on this matter that should have been left to the states, it blurred the separation of power between it and the legislative branch of government.

And the biggest danger of all is interpreting the constitution to fit the mood of the day. This in effect would mean having no Constitution, and no guaranteed rights at all. Like the people in the drifting space ship, I fear much of our population has also lost the knowledge of what our government was intended to be and how it functions. Majority rule without protection for minorities, regions and individuals can lead to tyranny and persecution. Our government is designed to protect individuals and their property and to avoid the concentration of power in any one of the three branches. This separation is what makes it difficult to get things done. And this can be a blessing. It’s been said that the best government is the government that governs least.

Mussolini made the trains run on time in Italy, but stifled by fascism and communism in countries with central planning was the freedom and ingenuity of the people. Freedom, the rule of law, and the security of the individual in his person and property are what have released the ingenuity of the American people and made our country great, giving us the highest standard of living the world has ever seen. We may jeopardize all this by not knowing or remembering how and why we got here. Let’s not drift aimlessly through time and space.

I feel as if I’m poised on a cliff again. I’m standing at the very beginning of things. There is a knot in my stomach and my hands are shaking. I’m more nervous than I can remember being in a very long time. You wouldn’t think a simple phone call would do this to me, but well…it is. This afternoon I have an informal interview for this management position I’ve applied for. It’s hard to concentrate on the work I should be doing when my brain is turning round and round, trying to come up with any questions that this woman might end up asking me. And all the while praying to whatever deity may be listening that just once, this will be the afternoon that I don’t get a line of people at my desk with urgent questions; that I do not end up having to continually put this woman on hold because work gets in the way. And most important of all, that no one overhears and begins to suspect that I am actively trying to leave. There is a layer of guilt at the bottom of all of this about that – that I’m trying to leave a project in which I play too high-profile a role.

It’s just an interview. I’m not going anywhere, and chances are that nothing will come of this and then no one need ever know what I was trying to do. If I keep telling myself that, maybe I’ll be able to calm down.

I try to keep my mind on other things. Like the fact that despite the promised design freeze, and the development end date looming in less than two weeks, we are still being hit with requests to do more work. Like that fact that I’m now the proud owner of new, improved house plans, and a handful of city permits, and this time the start date is official. Monday they’ll mark it out. Tuesday they’ll begin trenching. I can only assume that involves digging. I’m hesitant to get too excited until they actually start, as rain is predicted for next week, and it would be just my luck for the house to be postponed yet again.

They’ve sent me another replacement for my laptop, so perhaps this one will work perfectly and I will not have to rely on the hardware support people at my company any more to figure out how to get around the lack of network connection, and refusal of my computer to recognize server names. I don’t know yet if it does – it’s still sitting in its box on my dining room table, waiting for me to have enough time to take it out and do a hard drive swap again. At least they helped me figure out how to get my email – a good thing too, since, just as I suspected, the woman with whom I’ll be interviewing replied to my work email, despite the plea to contact me elsewhere. But no matter. Such a slight needs no forgiveness – I saw the email the evening she sent it, and the important thing is that she wants to interview me.

The election, of course, is the best distraction of all. Since Tuesday afternoon, I’ve been hitting refresh on my browser every few hours to see what the vote count is now. I never paid so much attention to an election before. But the thought of another Republican in the White House sends chills down my spine. Oh, it won’t be so bad…if you’re white, male, and straight, but that man’s father tried and nearly succeeded in getting Roe vs. Wade appealed, and Bush himself is strongly against many of the issues that are near and dear to my heart. We are teetering on the edge of a leadership that could potentially result in setbacks for rights fought so hard for. Granted, Bush may have more of a personality than, but one should never elect a president based on personality. It’s the issues that matter…and those issues are currently hanging in the balance as the nation waits for the final tally. If I let myself, I can get all worked up about the situation, so I watch the gap between the two contenders dwindle more and more, and, like most of the rest of this country, just wish that it would finally be over.

Just a bit more time. In less than an hour she will call and I will have to do my best to not get nervous and giggle, to answer intelligently, to field questions from coworkers without letting them interrupt. And then all there is left to do is wait.

A few months ago, a small horde of us descended upon San Francisco, and after a rather fattening and laugh-saturated lunch at The Cheesecake Factory, we went to see Stomp. I loved it. A bunch of folks dancing and slapping and stomping and banging and making music on all sorts of bizarre things like kitchen sinks and newspapers, trash bags and license plates. It was marvelous. Kinda fun to try to imagine what sort of things might have inspired the creator to come up with some of his or her compositions.

I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep in the past few days. Ended up staying up way past midnight every night this weekend. Last night’s jaunt into wee-hours-of-the-night territory taught me that those folks from Stomp have left out one incredible site of inspiration. Perhaps they should incorporate it into their next tour. Really. There’s nothing quite so inspiring as sitting in a hospital, listening to the melodic harmony of the buzz of the portable x-ray machine intermingled with the occasional cough or snort from one of the other residents of the emergency room, the incessant beep of the whatever-they-were-monitoring boxes, and through it all, the underlying and steady hiss of the device they’d hooked Richard up to so he could breathe normally again. In between trying to figure out exactly on which part of the body they were operating on the woman in the bed across the room from us (she had blue nail polish on her toes. At least I hope it was nail polish. I do not even want to begin contemplating why else her toes were that color), and shortly before I started to doze off on the edge of his bed, I started bopping along to the rhythm til we were both giggling. Anything to make the time pass quicker.

Earlier yesterday evening, he came up to me as we were cleaning house and asked me if I was ready to try something new. He’d been short of breath for most of the day, and it was getting worse. I knew this was going to happen eventually but I guess I still wasn’t quite prepared for it. I drove him to the hospital and managed to muddle through about half the questions they asked in order to fill out their paperwork before I had to break down and go snag his Palm Pilot so I could get the rest of the info. At least now I know what sort of little spiffy facts I need to keep in a memo in my Palm, so I’m all set for next time. It was an odd little introduction to the darker side of asthma. There was someone else there with a bad asthma attack – a little boy carried in by his mother, the rest of the family in tow. I overheard his mom asking the nurse if they could remove the nasal tube because he’s much more used to the mask. I peeked in as we walked out. He seemed far too young to be ‘used’ to anything quite like that. I can’t imagine being that little boy’s mother.

At least the other two reasons why I didn’t get much sleep this weekend were a little more sedate. We went to see Pay It Forward Saturday night, after spending the day at the mall, getting an early start on Christmas shopping. Don’t worry – I’m not really all this with it; it’s just that my little sis is coming down for Thanksgiving, but not for Christmas, so we’re doing the exchanges between the whole family and her family then. That means I’ve got one month less to get their presents than I do anyone else….and it also means that of course we didn’t actually get anything for *them* while we were out. But it was a start. And the movie was good – a little bit of a tear-jerker at the end. Yes occasionally I’m just a sentimental sap. Give me an emotional movie – oh heck, even one of those sappy commercials they like to show around the holidays – and I’m sniffling into a Kleenex by the end.

Friday night’s reason was another one of those hours and hours sort of affairs, but at least this one was a bit more on the good side of excitement instead of the ‘let’s go see what the inside of the emergency room looks like’ type. We traded in Richard’s Geo Metro (the beer can on wheels, as he once so affectionately termed it) for a much nicer car. By the time we were filling out the financial paperwork, it was after 11pm, and both of us and the financial guy were trying desperately to pretend that we weren’t yawning our faces in two. But in the end, it was all good – Richard’s car has a new green coat, with four doors, all of which can be opened from the inside as well as the outside; air conditioning; windows that roll down; and best of all, it all comes without the miffed mouse sound that’s been singing merrily in his old Metro these past few months. And I’ll have to admit to being pleasantly surprised by the entire evening. We went to three different car dealerships and not one of the salesmen we talked to tried to push us into buying a car. I’m not sure if we were just incredibly lucky, or if this is a sign that perchance car salespeople are starting to catch a clue, but whatever the reason, it made what ended up a much longer evening than expected a little nicer than expected too.

And now, a bit of ER-inspired music as you go.

Beep beep snork sssssss creak. Wheeze hack. achoo!

Can’t you just see the crowd going wild when they dance to *that*?

My family names things. The microwave has a name. My mom’s stone goose has a name. The computer has a name, as does the vacuum cleaner, and of course all cars in our family have names. The name itself is important, since once the appliance / vehicle gets the name, that’s the way it stays. Replacing the item in question does not garner new naming status – it merely means that the item itself has gotten a ‘new coat’. My sisters and I, not one to flaunt such a tradition (I come from an eccentric family, in case you hadn’t already figured that out), have carried on the practice by naming not only our own stone geese, but our cars as well. My older sister drives Stuart. My younger sister has Gwendolyn. My parents have Agamemnon and Russell, and I have Lucy – named after a caramel colored tabby kitten I once fostered. It was as good a name as any, and considering that the kitten was, despite her small stature, afraid of nothing and no one (she was adopted by a family with a golden retriever, whom she very quickly trained to be afraid of her), it seemed an apt name for a car as well.

Lucy started white – ten years old, hatchback, with a rear-view mirror that stretched across the entire front window. I can’t remember now why it was that I thought this was a good idea, but back then I decided that I really should learn to drive a manual transmission, and going on the assumption that the best way to learn is to do, I figured that meant I ought to *buy* a five-speed as well. I bought her first coat from a young couple owned by two ferrets who found my shoes infinitely fascinating as I sat on their couch and signed the paperwork. That coat didn’t last long – one month later, having never gotten entirely comfortable with the whole clutch and gear-shifting thing, I rear-ended a woman who slammed on her brakes in front of me to make a turn. I couldn’t stop in time, and Lucy went crunch. So much for the car.

Next, Lucy became red – and this time an automatic. After the experience with the little hatchback, it was clear to me that I really wasn’t meant to drive a stick shift. The little Nissan Sentra was exactly what I was looking for – basic model with air conditioning (sort of mandatory in the California summer heat). I replaced the factory radio with one with a tape deck and my habit of cranking up the volume and singing along at the top of my lungs started with that car. I also got my first speeding ticket in that coat. I watched in my rear view mirror as the police car who’d passed me going the opposite way as I drove much too fast down the back country road, suddenly lurched into a u-turn and came back toward me. Heart pounding, I prayed he wasn’t coming after me, no he wasn’t, and then the lights started to flash and I was sunk. There are a lot of idiots on the road, you know. All you have to do to learn that is go to traffic school. These are not hard questions they ask, folks. This is your basic, common sense stuff. I left with a cleared record, the knowledge that back country roads are not a good place to speed, and a healthy fear of my fellow driver, because it seems that on the freeway, brains are apparently a luxury, and not a requirement.

When I got the Sentra, I decided that I needed to learn how to take care of it. I signed up for a basic auto maintenance class at the local adult school and spent one night a week for the next eight weeks in grubby coveralls, poking around inside engines, snarling at wheel bolts and impossible-to-reach oil filters, learning all about spark plugs and alternators and transmissions. Okay, so I’ve never actually broken down and changed the oil filter or any hoses or fluids since that class, but I figure at least I know *how*, just in case. Although I regret that I’ve forgotten far more than I remember from that class. The terms are familiar, but if you asked me to discuss how the engine works, I’d end up staring blankly at you in response.

Last year about this time, still reeling from a suddenly much-higher salary and the knowledge that I could actually afford to buy what I wanted instead of just something to get by, I sold the little Sentra and upgraded. This time, it’s no basic model. This time Lucy has all the bells and whistles – power everything, cruise control, keyless entry (I looooove keyless entry!). I also upgraded away from compact car status – although in crowded parking lots I do sometimes try to pretend that she’s still small enough to wedge into the spaces. I bought the Maxima based solely on color. Well, alright, that wasn’t the only factor, but I’d initially intended to purchase an Altima (okay, so in case you didn’t figure it out, I’m sort of biased to Nissans), and when I saw the dismal color selection (why the car manufacturers think that six different shades of white and beige are a choice is a mystery to me), I said what the heck, and went up a level in order to get a color I’d actually want to drive around in.

Through it all, there’s been one consistent factor. The color changed, as has the make, model, accessories, and transmission type, but I have always adored Lucy because she’s mine, all mine. I can forget to bring stuff in from the backseat. I can put different Fish on the back window (Darwin-fish and cat-fish….and I’m still searching for the alien-fish). I can program all the radio channels to stations that I like and crank them up when I’m driving. Back when I was in college, living in a college town, I didn’t need a car – I had a bike, and that plus the rather extensive bus system meant I could pretty much get anywhere I needed. Of course, I didn’t have a car back then – probably a good thing, in retrospect. Better to not know what I was missing.

I feel like I’m on a roller coaster. One moment I’m restless, fidgeting, unable to sit still, too full of energy and wanting desperately for something, anything to happen. The next moment it is as if I have run into a solid wall of exhaustion and I can barely think, let alone focus on anything. It flip-flops back and forth these days and I’m never quite sure when I’ll be wired, or when I’ll be tired. The only constant is that I feel a bit like a hamster on a wheel except there is no way to get off this darn thing. My tightrope is stretched far too tight and I’ve never been all that good at balancing on one foot.

The house is postponed. It was supposed to start this week, and our builder has everything waiting. He had the foundation guy all lined up, the lumber orders all set, but now he and I are basically sitting on our hands waiting for the engineer to get back to us. Something about a beam that apparently no one makes anymore. I should probably know more, but I’m not exactly sure that I would care too much right now, not with everything else going on. All I know is that he can’t start building and so we have to keep waiting and waiting. I hate waiting.

Work has reached a crisis level as well, but that and the house are not the main reasons why I am teetering on the edge of decision lately. I have made no secret of the fact that I want out of consulting, desperately, passionately want. The hours are killing me. It makes no difference that I enjoy the work and I like this project. All I know is that I’ve been itching to leave. This time last year I was actively working on switching to another department within my company when they dangled this project in front of me. I worked on the demo for this customer, and it’s within driving distance. I was weak. I snapped up the bait.

Another carrot is dangling before me now. There is the possibility of advancement, of leaving this position I hold, of finally getting a job where I’d have a real office much closer to home. There’d be travel, but it’d be minimal, maybe one or two days per week, and only to corporate offices, not flitting around the country or the globe on a moments’ notice like now. And it would be, in a way, an extension of what I’ve begun in this project.

Of course it comes at the worst possible time and I really don’t think I have a chance in hell of getting it because there are others out there who are far more qualified, but I’ve been encouraged by a number of people in my company – managers who insist that I would be good at this position and that I would be a fool not to at least try.

I agonized over a resume these past few days. How do I stretch my varied experiences into something resembling what the woman said they were looking for – how to wordsmith and wiggle and make myself sound far better than perhaps I honestly think I am. I was never cut out to be a salesperson, and yet here I am, trying to sell myself. It has been years since I wrote a resume. I barely remember how.

To add a wrinkle to the whole situation, my replacement laptop – the one for which I need yet another replacement now – will not only not connect to any network, but will also not allow me to access my email. In all my wildest worst case scenarios, the woman to whom my resume was sent will blithely ignore my small PS at the bottom of the letter indicating that my email access was nil and void, and send replies back to that account, then dismiss me because I cannot respond. If I think rationally, I realize that that isn’t likely the case – that she probably is taking time to read through all the resumes she has received, that she might have even dismissed mine outright and perhaps I’ll never hear another word, but that’s small comfort when I haven’t any way to actually verify whether this is true or not.

The ironic thing is that I’m still trying to figure out if I really want this position that I’m applying for. I would never have considered myself management material, yet here I am managing one of the biggest implementations for my company’s software and doing not a half-bad job at it either. Of course, I never would have imagined myself working with computers, period, since my degree (much good it has done me) was in Nutrition. I had lofty dreams at one time of becoming a professor, of teaching in a university and publishing research articles, of writing freelance for public companies. I floundered in graduate school once I realized – too early in the game – that I didn’t really want what I thought I had wanted and yet still felt as if I was stuck. When the chance to take that radical shift in careers came up, I was at a point in my life where I felt I had no other option but to take it. Leaving graduate school turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, but it could just have easily been a disaster.

My fear is that I’m looking at this new position in the same light; merely as a means to an end. I’d be a manager, having proven my worth in that position in a number of ways, although none in quite the same sense as this job would entail. But is the job appealing to me because of actuality, or simply, once again, as a way out? I am not harboring any hope of getting it. There was a part of me that thought perhaps I shouldn’t even mention the job here, because I fully expect that weeks later, I shall be posting an entry about how I didn’t get it. But sometimes there is this need to get it all out – to not just vent to someone in voice, but vent in writing, to somehow make it all clearer what I’m trying to work through, and so perhaps writing about all of this is simply more cathartic for me.

The main thing about this job is that I have to try. Those who’ve been encouraging me are right – I’d be a fool not to, no matter how slim the chances. So I’m spinning madly, standing before two doors, waiting to see if one will open, not quite sure what is behind it, only knowing that whatever it is, it might be better than what I’ve got now, it might be exactly what I’m looking for.

And then again. It might not.

Computers and I don’t seem to play nicely together. I’m not sure why it is that I’m so blessed with this tidbit of good fortune, but I seem to encounter computer-related woes more often than most people I know.

There was the incident of the missing operating system. There was the incident involving my second favorite error message: “Hard drive failure iminent” (“Missing Operating System” is, of course, my favorite). There was the Saturday I spent at the office with both my laptop, a replacement laptop, and a very understanding coworker. After a week of fighting with tech support on the phone about why it was that I could not connect my machine to *anything* and them insisting that it was irretrievably broken, and me insisting that couldn’t we just check the drivers and did I really have to migrate every stinking file I ever owned to a new machine, we ended up completely uninstalling and deleting the old network drivers, and reinstalling them. I may know next to nothing about this sort of setup thing, but that was one time when I felt satisfyingly vindicated.

It’s been far too long between computer catastrophes, so I suppose it should have been no surprise when, after flying up for my latest stint north of Seattle, I pulled the laptop out of its bag and discovered that the screen looked remarkably like someone had taken that little knob you quite often find on desktop monitors labeled ‘bright’ and moved it all the way to the darkest setting. Only problem is, on this type of laptop, there *is* no ‘bright’ knob, which meant that, basically, my laptop was hosed. The only possible way to use it was to hook it up to a projector – something I wasn’t willing to do because having the entire development team of over 100 people be able to see my email and project reports just wasn’t a good thing. The tech support person I finally managed to contact suggested that I try hooking it to a monitor. I pointed out, rather nicely I might add, that while that was a lovely suggestion, I didn’t make it a habit of carrying a monitor with me on projects (They don’t come in bags that would classify as carry-on luggage, you see). Then he wanted to know when I’d next be down in the main office. Considering that the only time I’ve ever been to that main office is for the orientation (and that was *so* exihilerating that I couldn’t possibly want to top it, so haven’t been back since), and that the office where I’m technically stationed (although I’m never there because I’m always at the project site) is several hours away, I noted that the chances of that were fairly slim too.

The end result was that he scrounged up a replacement laptop and tossed into the overnight mail. It arrived Friday. I came home from work, dragged out a screwdriver, and got to learn how to replace a hard drive in a laptop. Piece of cake. I turned it on, I could actually see the screen, and I was happy.

Happy, that is, until I tried to log in on Sunday to do my timesheet, and discovered that this new laptop refuses to recognize the network. Not just my DSL, but any network, as I discovered this morning at the project site. I switched network cards with my old ones, thinking perhaps that might be the issue. No such luck.

The guy on the phone from tech support today was very helpful and nice. The end result is that he’s going to have to send me a replacement for my replacement (which means I’ll get more practice on this hard drive swapping thing). Luckily he was either tired enough, or simply flexible enough to find the humor in the situation with me. Too often they just don’t seem to appreciate when I subside into laughter upon diagnoses of the computer’s problem. This time it was a dead port. Who knows what the next one will have? I’m almost looking forward to the replacement replacement coming, just to see what potential fatal flaw the next one might hold.

I figure if this keeps up though, they might want to hire me as a trainer for tech support. All this experience with recalcitrant computers has to pay off at some point, right?

Friday night when Richard and I went to Old Sacramento, costume-part shopping, we ended up going to dinner at a restaurant there that turned out to be much fancier than either of us was expecting. It was the sort of place where I usually end up feeling like I’m still pretending to be a grown-up. The sort with waiters who speak in soft tones and where you feel the disapproving frown of the maitre’d when you accidentally put your elbows on the table. The food was excellent though – we decided we would come back for the creme brule alone.

The reason we ended up there is because it’s the restaurant at which my senior ball was held, over a decade ago. Actually, the dance was held outside in the courtyard out back. I’ve passed by the front door any number of times since then and wondered what it was like in there, when it wasn’t cold and dark and filled with hundreds of nervous teenagers in every shade of pastel gown and rented tuxedo.

It was my 18th birthday that night, and I had asked a good friend to go with me, having learned from my Junior Prom fiasco that going to one of these things with an actual ‘date’ was one sure way to not end up having any fun at all. We double-dated with my best friend, and went to a restaurant more expensive than any of us had ever been to. The restaurant didn’t have anything special for birthdays (much to my friends’ dismay) but the waiter stuck a match in a dinner roll, lit it, and hastily sang ‘Happy Birthday’ with the others at my table. The guy I was with stole a fork for me, slipping it into my purse as we left. I tried several times to ditch it, but it still came home with me, somehow.

The pictures were taken up a flight of stairs and down a narrow hall. We stood in a long line of antsy teenagers in formal wear, in a stuffy, crowded hallway. We were laughing so hard that my picture looks as if I’m slightly tipsy, holding onto his shirt for support. In reality, I was trying too hard to keep from laughing long enough so the harried photographer could take the shot.

Downstairs, out in the courtyard where the dance was to be, it was dark and a bit windy. The DJ showed up two hours late and falling-down drunk. After they rather hastily dismissed him, someone, somewhere, scrounged up a band from one of the clubs in the neighborhood. They started their set with the absolute worst rendition of ‘Louie, Louie’ we’d ever heard, then went rapidly downhill from there. Their saving grace was at least they were sober, but that’s not saying much.

We ended up collecting our souvenior wineglasses and a small crowd, and heading up to the top of a parking garage where someone turned on the radio in their car and opened all the doors and windows so we’d at least have music. We tried to dance, but no one was really in the mood by then. Even then, though, we knew that at least our Senior Ball would be more than most, and something to laugh about later. It was a night to remember. We were seniors, staring graduation in the face, trying very hard to act as if we were old enough to be considered adults.

I don’t often think of high school anymore because while it was certainly a learning experience, I have never regarded those as the best years of my life; they were merely a stepping stone from which I leapt (albeit a bit ungracefully) into college, and then into real life. I still have the wineglass. It gathers dust on a shelf in the kitchen, only taken down on the rare occasions that a woman who does not drink alcohol would have a need for such a thing. The fork, and the boy who stole it for me, have both long since slipped away. But I’m still in touch with that best friend from high school. And occasionally, there are fleeting moments like Friday night when it comes rushing back to me.

At some point a few weeks ago, Richard and I were joking around and I think it was me who said that I was just a delicate flower. After we both recovered from sniggering about that comment, we tried it out on both sets of parents, and all available siblings. My older sister’s response was ‘Richard, we have to talk’. Both my mom and his mom raised eyebrows and gave us a look. Delicate flower I’m not, but it gave me a great Halloween costume idea.

We went to Old Sacramento last night, primarily to search for costume parts, since Richard had remembered seeing a hat in one shop that might work if he was to be a leprechaun, and I was still floundering for ideas because even though I had that whole flower thing going, I still wasn’t sure, and where the heck was I going to find green tights anyway. We ended up wandering through all three floors of this marvelous store that’s got all the tacky and bizarre stuff you can ever want (including a small but nevertheless impressive selection of gargoyles).

Today we ran around getting all the rest of the things we needed for the Halloween party we were throwing this evening. We slept in as late as the cats would let us – although I have to grumble about the fact that I’m still the one the cats prefer. Don’t get me wrong. I find it endearing when they’re looking for a lap to sit on, but when I’m huddled on one side of the bed, mummified by at least three cats and sometimes twice as many, and he’s got an entire half of the bed that’s cat-free, I’m not finding it quite so charming. I have faith though that one of these days he’ll be the one to wake up unable to move because he’s feline-pinned, and I’ll be the one giggling sleepily into my pillow. (I can dream, can’t I?)

It was pouring down rain, so by the time we’d found all the rest of the costume pieces, and purchased all the food items, including all the ingredients for the jello mold we bought last night (it was a brain. How could we pass it up?), and rooted around in a huge box of little pumpkins without any umbrellas, we were both more than a bit soggy. So much for the plans of outside games for the party, or for making the tombstones to put on the yard. Then we scurried around the house, tidying up with no regard for cat comfort this time, putting costumes together, making the punch (I love dry ice!), dragging out chairs. And then we sat and waited. And waited. An hour passed and I started to get annoyed, no matter how hard I tried not to be. I don’t expect people to be exactly on time, but I get antsy when people are really late. We even went so far as to start talking about going to see a movie if no one had shown by a certain time. But finally people started to trickle in.

The brain mold came out beautifully gray and disgusting (and yet quite tasty). I managed to figure out not only how to pin construction paper flower petals to my head so that they stayed, but also how to keep the flower pot on my foot so that when I stood still with both feet together, I was actually inside it. The game that Richard and I came up with a few weeks ago, and didn’t have a chance to actually finalize til this morning, went over extremely well (although I do now have to wonder about my older sister and another of our friends, who came up with a plot to take over the world with genetically mutated, flesh-eating, yodeling cows). We never did end up carving pumpkins, but as I recall, we didn’t get around to doing that last year either, so perhaps I should have learned by now.

Everyone is gone now, leaving behind a plastic bag of cookies that look like fingers, half a grey jiggly jello brain, and the remainder of the punch, dry ice all melted and no longer capable of producing fog when stirred. The party didn’t go quite as I expected it to, but then perhaps it never does, and despite everything, it was fun.

Really good excuses why I couldn’t clean my house this morning:

I couldn’t make the bed because Tangerine was curled up on the comforter.

I couldn’t pick up the pile of blankets that had fallen onto the floor because Rosemary had made them into a nest.

I couldn’t throw away the empty box because Sebastian was inside,and purring.

I couldn’t clean up the newspapers because Azrael was wrestling with them.

I couldn’t pick up the stuffed animals because Rebecca knocked them off when she jumped up to the shelf and she was still there.

I couldn’t put the towels back in the linen closet because Zuchinni was in there and he would have been scared if I opened the door.

I couldn’t put the chairs back because Allegra was lying in the sunbeams right where they would have had to go.

Okay, so I was also really really tired because the cats were so glad to see me last night that they didn’t think I should be allowed to sleep and instead should be forced to pet them until the wee hours. And after the week I’ve had with design sessions and being dragged back and forth between meetings and having to go stomp on ideas of new development before they got any bigger than just an idea, and working too long hours, well, I was completely drained.

But still. I really did have the best of intentions this morning. I really did think I could make a quick zip through the house and at least pick up a few things so that it wasn’t quite so bad.

(I *knew* there were good reasons for having so many cats!)

Richard and I have had a joke for nearly the entire time we’ve been together about how we share a server brain. He and I have a tendency to blurt out exactly the same thing, even if it’s completely out of the blue and has nothing to do with the conversation we were having. At one point, he found one of those little toys that you put into water and they grow, shaped like a brain. We had fun with that. When he went to Boston last week, he came home with a pile of all the little doodads and free gadgets that you can pick up at conventions – pens, pads, etc. Since this was a neurology convention, he also came home with brains. They’re made of the same squishy material that stress balls are constructed from. But now we each have a spare brain.

Cat hair is insidious and has this unique tendency to weave itself permanently into things. If you own a cat, you will soon find that you can never completely remove the cat hair from clothes, furniture, or curtains. It has a life of its own. I’ve often joked that it’s one reason why I’m a bit odd – when I die and they do the autopsy, they’ll find cat hair woven into my brain. It’ll have worked its way that far in.

Despite the joke though, I expect that my brain is fairly normal – gray and lumpy just like anyone else’s. And despite how much we may tease, I expect that Richard’s brain is just as normal and wrinkly as anyone else. I never really gave the whole brain thing that much thought however, until tonight.

We were both out of town this week – he in Portland for his last week there, and me back in Washington for the second week of design sessions for this project. We were both scheduled to fly back to Sacramento at just about the same time, so we figured we would just meet in the airport and head home together. That is, until he called to tell me he might miss his flight because he was going to the hospital. He had blind spots in his vision, he said.

I’m not one to worry too much – I never have been. I have often found it amusing that my mom is so capable of imagining the worst-case scenarios for her children. Me – I can usually be fairly practical about things. I look at every angle, rationalize the situation, and then go from there. I don’t tend to dive into the truly nasty ‘what ifs’. Famous last words, I suppose. I know that these things can be just related to something minor. Stress. Certain types of headaches. Staring at the computer screen too long maybe – who knows. But I also know that there are some really ugly things that can cause vision problems. And so despite my practical nature, those nasty ‘what ifs’ starting crowding around in my brain. I stood in line for my flight, chatting with the coworkers who were on the same plane, cheerfully joking about the week’s events, and all the while pretending that I wasn’t worried, no, not me, not a bit.

It’s just migraines. He’s never been officially diagnosed before, but I guess this was a really good way to start. I got my official diagnosis of migraines back when I was still in elementary school, after going through a whole host of doctors who put me through a whole host of different labels – dust allergy, needs bifocals, sinusitis – before one doctor finally figured it out. (Of course, he also was certain that I’d grow out of them at puberty. Boy was *he* wrong.)

But I’m digressing. All Richard has is migraines. His brain is perfectly normal (although what an opportunity for teasing *that’s* going to be!). It’s not any of the other possibilities that were spinning through my (possibly cat-hair-infested) brain this evening as I waited to board my plane. All that worrying was for nothing…or maybe as my mom says, it was the worrying that made it all right.