Higher Education

Author's Note: I struggled with whether or not to post this essay, because I have a child who might someday read this and a mother-in-law who will probably read it tonight (Hi Mary!). But the Ducks are playing in the BCS Championship tonight, and this is kind of like a love letter to the University of Oregon. So here it is. GO DUCKS!

Higher Education

I come from a long line of eye-rollers. Rather than say what we’re thinking, we Bolts prefer to roll our eyes and walk out of the room. Announcements big and small all got the same response in my house. “I can’t find my retainer.” “I don’t want to watch Hee Haw.” “I’ve been arrested for hitchhiking.” Eye roll. Exit. Silence. I even got the Eye Roll when I told my parents I wanted to go to college. While other kids my age were getting pressured to apply, I was being actively discouraged by my father, the king of the Eye Rollers. College, he believed, was a waste of time and money. He was the president of a local steel manufacturing company and he’d gotten there without the benefit of a college degree, or a high school diploma, for that matter. And if he could do it, so could I. Eye Roll. Exit. Silence. I was determined to go, even if I had to pay for it myself. Partly because going to college was something that had the potential to irritate my father, which was always fun. I spent an entire decade worshipping the Dallas Cowboys simply because doing so made his face turn purple. But mostly, I wanted to go to college because college was somewhere else. And after spending 18 years amidst the strip malls and chain restaurants of Salem, Oregon, I was ready.

Somewhere Else turned out to be exactly 61 miles south of Salem in Eugene. The University of Oregon was an affordable state school with a good writing program and a handful of high school friends to cling to. More importantly, Eugene was to Salem what San Francisco is to Salt Lake City. I traded the BradyBunchoisie of my suburban home for a campus where the local color included a guy who wore nothing but tighty whities and a fur coat with Barbie dolls glued all over it. Eventually, I even managed to get a bachelor’s degree. The words ‘eventually’ and ‘managed’ are important here. Most people get their degree in four years. Some very driven people get it in three. For me, it took six years. Because, as I was about to discover, everything takes longer when you’re stoned.

I wasn’t much of a partier in high school. I’d copped a buzz off peach wine coolers and taken some puffs from clove cigarettes. I once sat on a friend’s waterbed and tried to smoke a joint, but I coughed so hard I ended up getting seasick. The desire was there, I just lacked the proper skill set. But that didn’t matter, because I was headed to the University of Oregon — the Hogwarts of pot smoking. Under the tutelage of the dorm-dwelling BongMasters, I became a marijuana maven. If smoking pot had been offered as a class — and I think one could make a solid argument that it should be — I would have definitely gotten an A. By the end of my sophomore year, my GPA could have used it.

That was the year I decided to rent a house with some friends. Two of us were named Stacy and two were named Michelle. The other Stacy and I were both dating guys named Steve. (This made taking phone messages difficult under normal circumstances. Throw in a few bong hits and it became a Cheech & Chong movie.) We spent Fall and Winter terms of that year without the benefit of heat thanks to Michelle One, who cranked it up on the first chilly night and never bothered to turn it back down, resulting in a $600 heating bill. We threw a fundraising party which made about $35, which we promptly spent on weed and let the gas company turn off the heat. Once a week, we’d make a huge bonfire out of empty pizza boxes and other combustible trash, and then gather around the fireplace for 4 to 7 minutes of intense, glorious heat. It was on one of those nights, as we shared a bong and basked in the glow of our burning garbage, that we saw the police lights outside our house. As the pulses of red and blue streaked across the water-stained ceiling, we looked at each other and understood: They’ve come for us. Without any of us saying a word, we scattered like 5 year-olds in a game of hide and seek. In the grips of pot-induced paranoia, we were utterly convinced that the Eugene Police Department had the budget, manpower and will to take four college girls to jail for a fistful of stems. In reality, it was just a guy getting a ticket in front of our house. Two hours later, as we slowly emerged from our hiding places, we looked for our stash. Michelle Two said she’d hidden it and we congratulated her for being proactive, no small feat when you’re that stoned. But she couldn’t remember where she’d put it. Because she was that stoned. We didn’t find it until the following Spring, when the four of us were on the verge of flunking out.

The University of Oregon is not an Ivy League school. It’s not that hard to get in and once you’re there, the administration is perfectly happy to keep cashing your tuition checks for as long as you, your parents or the bank issuing your student loans wants to keep writing them. It takes a special kind of dedication to get kicked out of a school like that. You have to really apply yourself.

While we were living together, The Other Stacy, First Michelle and I were all taking the same 200-level economics course. Because all three of us were on financial aid and textbooks were expensive, we had the somewhat clever idea to buy one economics book and share it. That led to the much less clever idea to also share attendance to the class itself. Economics was 3 days a week. We were three students. So each of us was assigned a day to attend class and take notes, which would be shared among the three of us just like the book. You can probably see where this is going. In addition to making you fat, paranoid and a bad decision-maker, repeated use of marijuana can damage your short term memory. So simple pieces of information like Stacy: Monday, The Other Stacy: Wednesday, First Michelle: Friday, might as well be quantum string theory to the pot-addled brain. No one went to class. No notes were taken. We lost the book.

That was the first F I’d ever received in my life. It wouldn’t be long before it had company, this time for J250, an intensive grammar course that was a requirement for admission into the School of Journalism. The entire grade for this class was based on one test, so I figured that as long as I studied the book and aced the test, I didn’t really have to go to class. As it turned out, going to class was the only way to pick up important pieces of information that weren’t in the book, like the fact that the date of the test upon which your entire grade is based has been changed.

As I careened closer and closer to flunking out of a party school, my one consolation was the fact that my parents were clueless. After all the eye rolls my dad and I had exchanged, I really didn’t want to have to admit failure. So when the notice from the dean’s office finally came, I covered it up with a crazy quilt of lies, half-truths and movie-of-the-week plotlines. College, I told my parents, was really hard (lie). And I found that the social and emotional pressures of attending a big university were just too much for my fragile psyche to handle (Lifetime movie starring Tiffani-Amber Thiessen). So I had decided to take a step back and attend community college for a year (half-truth—that was my only option for getting reinstated).

So I did my time at the community college and brought my grades back up. This was easy to do because A) I had nowhere to go but up, B) I moved out of Miss Mary Jane’s Home for Wayward Girls and C) I moved in with a bulimic theater major. This girl was so deeply unhinged that I was more than happy to lock myself in my room and study for days if it meant not having to hold her hair back while she yakked up celery. By the time they let me back into U of O, everyone I knew had either graduated or dropped out. And that was a good thing, because the absence of a social life translated into something that looked suspiciously like a work ethic. Once I started actually going to class, I got mostly A’s and B’s and eventually managed to graduate with a major in Journalism. And a minor in Art History. You know, so I’d have something to fall back on.

Despite the amount of time I wasted in college, I still don’t believe college was a waste of my time. I accomplished what I set out to do: I got the hell out of Salem, Oregon. And I really do think there’s some value in spending at least a small part of your life acting like a complete moron. If nothing else, it prepared me well for a career in advertising. I never told my parents the truth about my college years, and if my father were here to listen to this story, the resulting eye roll would probably be violent enough to cause a seizure. But back then, when I finally walked across the stage and got my diploma, he was kind of proud. I know because he wrote it in the card: “I’m kind of proud. P.S. Never move back home.” I never did.

And Farewell to the Girl With the Sun in Her Eyes.

My friend Melissa died last week. A nicer way of saying it would be that she “passed away.” But I’ve always believed that passing away is what old people do. There’s an implication of inevitability, of appropriateness. My grandmother passed away. She was 95 and had great-great grandchildren. She decided she was done and so she went. Melissa was 42. She had a 7 year old daughter and a husband who loved her more than anything. She wasn’t done and she didn’t pass away. She died.

I’ve spent the days since then trying to find a reason for it. I’m one of those people who believes things happen for a reason. But Melissa’s death is sorely testing that belief. What possible reason could there be for this person — kind, smart, loving and loved — to die?

I used to work with Melissa in the late ‘90s at an advertising agency called Elvis & Bonaparte. Melissa was an account executive, which means she was the person who deals with the client so people like me (the copywriter) don’t have to. There aren’t a lot of really good account executives out there because there aren’t a lot of people who are willing to stand up to a client and tell them they’re wrong. But Melissa could do it in a way that made the client feel listened to and respected. That almost always worked. And when it didn’t, she just wore them down. Melissa never gave up, and that made her one of the good ones. She was also exceedingly pleasant to be around (another rarity in the ad industry). Melissa would hate me for saying this, but she was perky. Bubbly, even. But not in the kind of way that made you want to smack her. She was just a happy person, and being around her made you want to be happy, too. If you were having a bad day and you went into Melissa’s office, you usually left wearing the same huge smile that was her signature.

If Melissa had been nothing beyond cheerful and good at her job, we probably wouldn’t have become close. But she was other things, too. Important things. She was funny. And sarcastic. And she could hold her liquor. On a trip to New York to attend some focus groups, Melissa and I crossed over from co-workers to friends. Our office manager Sallie had finagled the reservations so we would have the maximum amount of play time in the big city. On our first night we met Melissa’s friend Pam at a bar on the Bowery called Marion’s. It was early December and snow was just starting to fall as we stepped out of our cab. Inside, the bar was dark and kitschy with spinning aluminum Christmas trees and plastic light-up Santas. Tom Waits’ Closing Time played on the stereo while the three of us sat in a corner booth drinking Cream Sodas, which were not cream sodas at all, but vanilla vodka and ginger ale. They went down like candy and we drank them accordingly. I don’t remember much of what we talked about that night, but I remember very clearly the feeling of being in my favorite city with my new friend Melissa, the snow dusting the streets and the vodka warming my blood. We closed the place down and charged our bar bill to the agency.

The next morning, as our wake up call bounced off the walls of our Times Square hotel room, Melissa groaned in the next bed.

“Bacon,” she said. “Need bacon.”

Did I mention that she was wise, too? After ordering a greasy room service breakfast with extra bacon, we struggled through our focus groups and then went out and did it all over again. We were young, and our livers were mighty.

A few months later, in the Spring of 2000, the agency went under. This was mostly due to an overabundance of deadbeat dotcom clients, but our New York boondoggle probably didn’t help. Neither did the bachelorette party I organized for Melissa and conned the agency into funding. Again, the details are hazy. I remember there were drag queens, and karaoke, and a stretch limo that dropped me off just as the sun was coming up. But mostly I remember Melissa, smiling her big, open, joyful smile. She might just be one of the happiest people I’ve ever known. And that night, as she was counting down the days until she married her beloved Matt, she was radiant despite the idiotic bride-to-be veil we made her wear.

After they got married, Melissa and Matt moved to Seattle. We kept in touch via email and saw each other every once in a while. She had a baby. Then I did. Life and time and distance took over and before I knew it, a couple of years had gone by since I’d spoken to her. And then, on a July afternoon in 2008, my husband looked up from his computer where he’d been checking email.

“Melissa Peterson has lung cancer,” he said.

If he had told me my mother had decided to go to clown college, it would have made just as much sense. Lung cancer? That was an old person’s disease. Melissa was young. And she didn’t smoke. Then I heard a ping and looked down at my own computer screen. There it was, an email saying that Melissa had Stage 4 lung cancer, a death sentence.

Naturally she had a blog, and as I read over the entries, I smiled when I saw that she wasn’t wasting any time feeling sorry for herself. She was fired up and attacking cancer with the same tirelessness she applied to every project she’d ever worked on. “Female never-smokers are consistently more likely to develop lung cancer than men,” she wrote, schooling her many readers on the realities of the disease that was taking over her body and her life. And she kept going, joining advocacy groups, recording educational radio ads, organizing fundraisers. It was like cancer was the client and she was very patiently and logically trying to tell it that it was wrong, it was not going to kill her. In the comments section of her blog, one of her friends had written, “Does cancer know what a BITCH it’s dealing with?”

I followed her progress through radiation and chemotherapy, hair loss and bad wigs. We traded emails and Facebook posts, and she took the time to send me a note of encouragement when my son was having surgery. My husband and I talked about driving up to Seattle to see her, but we never did. We thought we had more time. We thought she did. Because even though I knew Melissa had a terminal disease, I also believed that if anyone could beat it, it would be her. And for just a little while, she did. For just a little while, she felt good and happy and alive. She got to spend time with her daughter and her husband and the gigantic cheering section that was her family and friends. She lived for two years beyond her diagnosis. And then last Saturday evening, as the last amber-colored streaks of a beautiful summer day passed away, she died.

Any reason that I’m likely to come up with to explain Melissa’s death isn’t going to be good enough. I can’t think of any lesson important enough to justify leaving a 7 year old without her mother. So if anything, I’m just going to have to change my mind about things happening for a reason. Some things just happen. And they’re horrible. And all you can do is hope like hell that it doesn’t happen to anyone else you love. Life is temporary. Death is indiscriminate. And it’s all just so fucking unfair.

“We’re going to feel like shit tomorrow,” Melissa said to me as we left Marion’s that night, tilting her head up and smiling at the snow landing on her face. “So let’s try to remember how much fun we had tonight, okay?”

Okay. I’ll try.



Melissa Peterson
April 26, 1968 – July 31, 2010

So goodbye, so long, the road calls me dear
And your tears cannot bind me anymore
And farewell to the girl with the sun in her eyes
And I kiss you and then I’ll be gone.

“Old Shoes (& Picture Postcards)”, Tom Waits

Black Velvet

This is the essay I read on Live Wire December 19th. Thanks to everyone who came out!

Depending on who you ask, Christmas is a Season of Giving, a Season of Magic, or even a Season of Eating. But if you ask me, Christmas is a season of just one thing: lying. From the virgin birth to flying reindeer, Christmas is all about telling it like it isn’t. We lie to ourselves about the money we spend. We lie to our families about how much we like our gifts. (“A rayon novelty sweater depicting the stations of the cross? How did you know?”) And, of course, we lie to our children about where their gifts come from. No one knows how to celebrate the Season of Lies better than parents. And why not? Santa Claus is the single greatest behavior modification experiment ever created.

The biggest Christmas lie my parents ever told me concerned a doll named Velvet. She was tall and thin, with long blonde hair, denim blue eyes and prissy pink lips. This was 1974, long before the Cabbage Patch Kids launched their reign of holiday terror, and Velvet was the doll every little girl wanted for Christmas. But I wasn’t sure I was going to get one. I’d put in my request kind of late and when I did, my mother rolled her eyes and said something to the effect of “Gah!” I was 7 years old and recently divested of my belief in Santa Claus. My brother Eric was the one who told me. Not because I’d been questioning it, but because I turned the channel when he left the room. I probably had a good year or two of childlike wonder left, but because I wanted to watch Sanford and Son and he didn’t, the magic was dead. Now I had to appeal to my constantly exasperated mother if I had any chance at all. So I raised my suck-up level to DefCon 5. I kept my room clean. I avoided fighting with Eric. I even offered to rake the stairs. My mother had insisted on installing dirt brown shag carpeting on stairs that were regularly trafficked by seven people, two cats and a dog. By the end of a typical day in our house, those stairs looked like a Muppet made out of poop. And raking them was one of the most hateful chores in the house. But I did it every day in December of 1974, because I wanted that damn doll.

On Christmas Eve, Eric pulled me aside. Experience had taught me that when he initiated physical closeness, it usually left a mark so I braced for impact. But this time he wanted to talk. “You’re getting a Velvet doll,” he whispered, looking shiftily from side to side as if the KGB might be listening. “But what would you say if I told you that she was…black?”

I grew up in Salem, Oregon, which is not exactly a rainbow of diversity. But my parents were classic guilty liberals, so I was raised to believe that color didn’t matter. Of course, I never had an opportunity to put that belief to the test until that night. And I pretty much failed. When Eric told me the truth about Velvet, I was crushed. I wanted the same doll all my friends were going to have — the white one. And this put me in a terrible position, because I wanted more than anything to be good; to be the kind of kid my parents could brag about; the kind of kid who gets a black doll for Christmas and loves it. But I also wanted more than anything to fit in. To paraphrase Lisa Simpson, “Boys resolve their problems by hitting each other. Girls play mind games until someone develops an eating disorder.” I didn’t want to give those girls a reason to turn on me. So I spent the night fretting about it and as the sun came up, the lesser angels of my nature had won. I would pretend to love the doll for my parents’ sake. I’d pretend to be the good kid they’d raised me to be. And then I’d take the doll up to my room and hide it so none of my friends would ever see.

On Christmas morning, after slowly opening all my other presents and robotically registering gladness for each one, it was go time. As I peeled back the foil paper, I saw her: long ebony hair, dark brown saucer eyes and skin the color of plastic cocoa. Dammit. I’d held onto a slim thread of hope that Eric had been lying. But he hadn’t. Of course he hadn’t. Why would he lie about something that had the potential to cause me pain? So I closed my eyes, drew a deep breath and put on a show. “Wow!” I shrieked, holding the box up next to my face like the kids in commercials did. “It’s Velvet! And she’s BLACK!! It’s Black Velvet! Thanks you guys!!!” My father turned to Eric and gave him an open handed smack on the back of the head. “You told her didn’t you?” he demanded. Bursting into tears, I ran up the matted brown stairs and headed for my room. My father was right behind me, stopping the door in mid-slam and holding Black Velvet under his arm.

“I’m sorry I know I’m a terrible person but I just don’t want a black doll!” I sobbed into my pillow.

“That’s okay,” he said calmly.

“No! It’s not! I’m a racist!”

“You’re not a racist.”

“But I don’t want a black doll! That makes me a racist!”

“But you feel bad about not wanting a black doll. A racist wouldn’t feel bad about it. You’re just a spoiled white kid who doesn’t know any better. That’s why I wanted to get her for you,” he said, poking his finger against Black Velvet’s cellophane window.

I peeled my face away from my tear-soaked pillow and faced him.

“We live in a place where everyone is the same,” he said in a tone that told me he’d rehearsed this speech a few times. “I wanted you to know that there are people in the world who are different from you, and that different isn’t bad. If I’d gotten you the white doll, you wouldn’t be thinking about race today. But now you are, and that’s good.”

There’s a moment in every girl’s life where she falls in love with her father, and this was mine. Well into adulthood, I told the Black Velvet story as an example of what a great man he was. And he was. Because of what he told me that day, I took Black Velvet to my friends’ houses with my head held high. And when one of them snickered, I got on my soapbox. “You weren’t thinking about race before I came over here today, were you Jennifer?”

It wasn’t until a few years ago that the legend of Black Velvet was thrown into question. I was telling the story to some friends when one of them casually asked, “Did it ever occur to you that they were just out of the white ones?” And I can say with absolute honesty that it never had. Not for a second. Not until that moment. And then it made perfect sense.

That night I called my mom. “Did you guys buy me Black Velvet because you wanted to teach me a lesson about race or because you couldn’t find a white one?” I demanded.

She had no idea what I was talking about. This was 35 years ago, after all. When I refreshed her memory, she took a long time to answer. She was choosing her words carefully, like the time I asked her whether or not I was an accident.

“Well,” she finally answered, “did you learn a lesson about race?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then that’s all you need to know.”

Son of a bitch.

They lied to me. Even worse, they lied to me and then twisted the lie around to make themselves look good. And for a while, I was furious. It wasn’t until I became a parent myself that I finally let it go. I had to. I lie to my child every single day. Yes, I’d love to watch Dora with you. No, that’s ‘mommy’s juice.’ Etcetera, etcetera. So when I look at Black Velvet through the lens of motherhood, I can see it for what it really was: my parents doing the best they could with what they had. I can picture them frantically scouring the aisles, trying to find just the right gifts for five kids. Trying to make sure that each one of us got something special. And when they got to the last item on the last kid’s list and realized that they’d waited too long and that the only thing left wasn’t quite what I’d asked for, they opted for what parents today call a “teachable moment” but what my football loving father would have referred to as a Hail Mary. They wove a story out of spit and glue, and like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and all the other white lies we tell our kids, it held together as long as it needed to before it went up in a puff of black smoke.

Nerd Husbandry

(I'm so sorry to have left this blog lying dormant for so long. There's been a lot going on, including getting ready for the Live Wire gig that happened on Saturday. Here's the piece I read. Let me know if you like it! --SB)

If one were to use reality TV as a bellwether, one would have to assume that the dating scene in America right now is bleak. Tune in to an episode of Rock of Love, Dating in the Dark or, my personal favorite, Tool Academy and it seems obvious that any woman with a brain in her head and the boobs she was born with wouldn’t have a chance at finding anything but a prescription for antibiotics were she to wade into the dating pool. But I’m here to tell you that there’s a better way. If you’re looking for someone to share the rest of your life with, someone who’s smart and funny and doesn’t list ‘abs’ as a life goal, you need to forget everything you think you know about men. That’s what I did and I’ve never been happier. My secret? I married a nerd.

And you can, too.

When I was in high school, the absolute worst social classification you could receive was Nerd. Of course, this makes perfect sense, because what is a nerd but a person who is incapable of being anything other than exactly who they are? Nerds are nonconformists and nonconformists are to high school what wood is to a wood chipper. But that’s okay. Because if I’ve learned anything during my 15-plus years of nerd husbandry, it’s that high school is where the good nerds are made. It’s where they learn the important lessons that will shape the men they will become, lessons like “If you’re funny you’re less likely to get the crap kicked out of you.” And “Take Theater because girls will let their guards down if they think you’re gay.” These are the pivotal years in which the nerd develops the key characteristics that will eventually win you over. These aren’t easy years by any means, but they’re important. So whether he bravely carried a Spider Man lunchbox in the eleventh grade or endured a bi-weekly pantsing by someone named Chad, a nerd always leaves high school with his best years still ahead of him.

But the popular boys? Let’s just say that anyone who experienced the best years of his life between the ages of 15 and 18 is not a good long term prospect. That’s something we girls always told ourselves after Chad so coldly passed us over for the prom: Just wait, someday he’ll end up fat and working at a car dealership. And now, thanks to the miracle of Facebook, we can actually confirm that it’s true. So while the former head cheerleader comes home to find that Chad has cleared out their savings to pay for hair plugs and ManSpanx, you can come home to a smart, thoughtful husband who treats you like the goddess you are.

Now, before you rush out to find a nerd of your own, there are a few things you should look for and a few things you should watch out for. We’ll start with the good stuff. First and foremost, nerds are smart. Unencumbered by a social life, a love life or an aptitude for team sports, adolescent nerds spend their free time studying. And then they go on to college, where they continue to not play sports, not join fraternities and not blow all but a dozen brain cells on recreational drugs. As a result, nerds enter the adult world armed with college degrees, functioning brains and even more insight on how not to treat women.

Which brings me to my next point: nerds are successful. Armed with their superior intellect and a burning desire to bitch-slap Chad with a Porsche key at their 20 year reunion, nerds go out and make something of themselves. But be warned, nerd success isn’t always the mainstream kind of corner-office-name-on-your-parking-spot success we’ve all been programmed to want. Nerd success can often be, well, nerdy. When my nerd isn’t working as a successful freelance illustrator, he runs one of the biggest haunted houses on the west coast. In other words, he dresses up like a vampire and scares people. But he does it really, really well. So well, in fact, that he has an army of nerd underlings who look to him as their ruler, which officially classifies him as a Power Nerd. Again, this might not be considered mainstream success, but who cares? He’s smart, he’s successful and most importantly, he’s funny, which just so happens to be the third and final criteria for a potential nerd mate.

There are those who would argue with me, but I firmly believe that all the best nerds are funny. Conversely, all the funniest people are nerds. Think about it. Woody Allen? Nerd. The cast of Monty Python? Nerds. David Letterman? Jon Stewart? Stephen Colbert? Nerd. Nerd. Nerd. Dane Cook? Not a nerd. Not funny. Comedy is pain plus time. And who knows pain better than someone who spent the better part of his freshman year with his underpants around his neck? Magazines might tell you otherwise, but I’m here to tell you that funny matters, especially if you’re in it for the long haul. If you’re looking to spend the rest of your life with a man, you want someone who can make you laugh until you pee. If not, you might end up looking like Laura Bush, who has never laughed or peed in her entire life.

At this point some of you are no doubt thinking, “I’ve met plenty of nerds who aren’t smart, aren’t funny and wouldn’t know success if it walked up to them and smashed their Ultimate LEGOS Millennium Falcon.” Those are not nerds. Those are sub-nerds, also known as dweebs, dorks or losers. Although these sad creatures have similar origin stories to nerds, they differ in that they are far more likely to live with their mothers and have imaginary food allergies. Success eludes these basement-dwellers, as does dental hygiene and the sweet, sweet touch of a woman. How do you know if you’re dealing with a sub-nerd? Look for the three warning signs. 1) Does he play Dungeons & Dragons? Then he’s a dweeb. It’s OK if he has some D&D in his past. All nerds do. But if he’s over 30 and still actively playing? Run. 2) Does he regularly attend Renaissance Faires? Then he’s a dork. Check his closet for velvet tights and elf shoes. If you find them, retreat. 3) How many hours a week does he spend playing World of Warcraft? More than one? That’s a loser. You know what to do.

Of course, nerds aren’t perfect. No man is. But I happen to think they’re better than the average guy. Sure, you’ll have to put up with comic books and action figures. But in my experience, the biggest problem with those things isn’t the endless clutter they create, it’s the unrealistic expectations they tend to foster with regard to female breast-to-waist ratio. Chances are, you’re going to have to divest your nerd of the belief that human women look like that. I recommend a people-watching tour of Wal-Mart followed by a Golden Girls marathon. But once you’ve got them successfully deprogrammed, nerds make excellent husbands. They’re loyal, attentive, appreciative and loving. Even after you’ve been together for more than a decade, they’ll still open your car door, kiss your hand in public and declare you to be their queen to anyone who’ll listen. And sporting a Princess Leia wig once in a while is a pretty small price to pay for all that.

Someone linked to me. Guess I'd better update.

OK, so it's been a while. In my defense, I have the bulletproof "my kid had brain surgery" excuse. So there.

But now I'm back to blogging just in time to pimp the next installment of True Stories! Thursday July 30 at Mississippi Studios. We have Chelsea Cain, Courtenay Hameister, Scott Poole, Greg Robillard and yours truly, plus kickass musical guests Chris Robley and Thao Nguyen of Thao with the Get Down Stay Down.

I'm particularly excited about this show because Scott and I are debuting our new collaboration, Literary Thunder. It's a tag-team poetry/essay smackdown that dares to tackle one of the most important questions of our time: Which is better, ghosts or zombies?

Be there if you can! It's gonna be a hoot.

No Medicine Bum-Bum

Hey guess what? Bob Marley was totally right. Every little thing IS alright. The surgery went very well and The Pickle is doing great. The whole thing happened on April 17th and he came home on the 20th. He is now almost completely back to normal (if you consider singing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ 800 times a day normal). But man, did it ever suck for a while.

I’m not going to go into every little detail, but let’s just say that handing over your bright, happy and otherwise healthy 2 year-old and having him returned to you full of tubes and completely unable to comprehend what’s happened is right up there with having a simultaneous root canal/pap smear/colonoscopy while being forced to listen to Kathie Lee Gifford sing the complete Gilbert and Sullivan songbook. Or, as a wise vampire slayer once said, it sucked beyond the telling of it. Because, here’s the thing: 2 year-olds don’t like to have needles and tubes sticking out of them; they don’t like being forced to lie down; they don’t like having their arms restrained; they don’t like having a catheter in their pee-pee; and they most certainly do not like being poked and prodded every two hours by total strangers. (They do, however, like having an unlimited supply of orange Jell-O. Go figure.) And when you try to explain to them what’s happening and why, they don’t get it. They can’t. All they can do is look at you with sad blue eyes and say “Home” over and over again until you have to go take another Valium so you don’t cry in front of them.

When we finally did get to take him home, we thought everything was going to be great. Because we’re idiots. Within six hours, we were packed up and ready to go back. Poor little guy started barfing in the car on the way home and continued to do so every time we put anything in his mouth. Including his pain medication. After many calls to the neurosurgeon, our pediatrician and our friend who’s a pediatrician, we figured out that the vomiting was due to two things. First, the massive fluid shift that was still taking place in his brain was making him dizzy and nauseous. Second, he was detoxing from all the evil but necessary shit that had been in his system for the past four days: anesthesia, morphine and oxycodone. It didn’t help that he hadn’t kept any pain meds down in over 6 hours. And he was constipated. Really, really constipated. Thus we entered a new realm of parenthood, one from which no one emerges quite the same. I’m talking about suppositories, people. Up. The. Butt. Unpleasant but, in this case, absolutely necessary. And effective! The laxative might have set some kind of land speed record for causing large amounts of impacted poop to evacuate my son’s chute. And about half an hour after receiving a Tylenol suppository, The Pickle was literally screaming for mac & cheese. Things started to turn around after that, and even though he was keeping everything down, I continued to give him the Tylenol suppositories because, believe it or not, it was easier. By the time he even knew something was happening down there, I was already done. On the other hand, trying to get him to swallow it still took a combination of bribery, physical restraint and the invoking of Santa Claus. But I finally had to stop after the following exchange took place:

[OPEN on a sunny backyard. A toddler, his parents and his grandmother are soaking up the rare Oregon sun. The toddler, in the middle of gathering rocks for a Super Secret Project, shows signs of embarking on a project of a more personal nature. He stops moving, stares off into space and begins grunting. This will be the first time the boy has pooped on his own since returning from the hospital.]

MOTHER: Are you pooping, buddy?

BOY: Nope.

MOTHER: Are you pooping now?

BOY: (pauses) Yeah.

MOTHER: Should we go change your diaper?

BOY: (long pause) No medicine bum-bum.

And that, as they say, was that. We’ll get MRIs in August and November, which should tell us if the surgery was a total success or if we have to do it all over again. Just for the record, I’m hoping for the former.

Oh, and before I go, I want to give props to my homies at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. It’s without a doubt the best place you never want to be. The nurses there are simply awesome, especially the ones in the PICU. I have no idea how they do what they do. The few times I actually left the room (usually to get more Jell-O) I had to concentrate on looking at my feet because I couldn’t stand to look in any of the other patient rooms. It was hard enough seeing my own child lying in a hospital crib. I couldn’t stand to look at someone else’s tiny baby and worry about what had happened to him. But those nurses? They do it every day. And they do it so, so well. Lisa, Lori, Kathleen, Katie, Carmen and Wendy: thank you for helping my son and me get through the worst days and nights of our lives.

And at the risk of sounding like a long-winded Oscar speech, I also want to thank everyone who commented and emailed and gave me 20 pounds of cheesy casseroles so I wouldn’t have to cook when my son came home from the hospital after brain surgery. Y’all rock. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Happy Mother’s Day!

--Stacy

A Letter to My Son on His Birthday 2: Blood and Fury

Dear Pickle,

It’s tempting when doing these little retrospectives to focus entirely on the things I did wrong over the course of the year. And then I think, “That’s wrong! I should focus on the good things I did.” And then I realize that thinking that thought was something I did wrong. And then I go make myself a gin and tonic and start all over again. Because sometimes, it really seems like motherhood is just one long, embarrassing slideshow of missteps and questionable judgment calls. Like, should I have started referring to ‘Blues Clues’ as ‘Booze Cruise’? No, I shouldn’t have. I should have had the foresight to know that even though you weren’t talking when I started doing that, one day you WOULD start talking and that little joke would bite me in the ass. In fact, that’s probably how I’d characterize my overall performance in the past year: Lack of Foresight. For example, I considered myself pretty well prepared for your infancy. There’s a lot of books out there about babies and I had plenty of time to read all of them while I was waiting for you. And really, babies are easy, all things considered. Or at least, you were. Once your father and I got over our slack-jawed terror at your very abrupt arrival, we began to realize that your needs were few and very specific: food, sleep, diapers, human contact. All we had to do was figure out what they were and meet them. But just when I thought I had you all figured out, I came face-to-haggard-face with the quintessential lesson of parenthood: just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, everything changes.

You’ve always been a fairly advanced child, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you started your “Terrible Two’s” on the day you turned one. After a relatively docile first year, you began your second by launching into a spectacular anti-diaper tantrum that caught me completely off guard. And so it’s been with your entire second year of life — a year that seemed to be filled with nothing but maddening curveballs and gasp-worthy moments of wonder, none of which I had the foresight to prepare myself for. Because, while you might have been a ridiculously easy baby, you weren’t always the most fascinating one. I remember sitting on the floor with you when you were about six months old, watching you drool on a teething ring for the third straight hour and thinking, “I am going to die. Right now. Of boredom.” In retrospect, I can see what you were doing. You were lulling me into a false sense of security. If I could go back in time, I’d go back to the day you first rolled over on your own and I’d smack myself on the head and say, “Batten down the hatches, woman! Hurricane Pickle is about to hit!” Because once you started rolling/crawling/walking/climbing/torturing the cats, things got really interesting, really fast.

First, there was the blood. There were days when it seemed like you woke up determined to injure yourself and usually, by the time you were ready for bed, you had exceeded your goal despite my exhaustive efforts to stop you. You launched yourself off the couch and raged at the world and its stupid gravitational pull. You fell in the bathtub as if to demonstrate that head wounds really do bleed more than other kinds. You fell down the front steps like Scarlett O’Hara in an Elmo shirt. And every time one of these things happened, I was convinced I was The. Most. Horrible. Mother. Ever. The only thing that could make me feel better was three glasses of wine and a couple of episodes of Supernanny.

Then, there was the fury. Mine, not yours. I’ve worked in advertising for 17 years, and yet I don’t think I ever really understood the true meaning of the word frustration until this year. I had no idea how many times the word NO could come out of my mouth in one day (current record: 8,562), or that I was even capable of sounding like a banshee. But now I know that if a World Banshee Competition were to be held, I wouldn’t just represent. I would dominate. That’s what being the mother of a toddler can do to an otherwise intelligent, accomplished human being: it can reduce her to a shrill, shrieking she-beast with adult acne and two-inch gray roots faster than you can dump a bowl of oatmeal down a heating vent. One day, your dad was asking you about animal noises. “What does a dog say? What does a cow say?” I was in the other room listening to you getting all the answers right when he threw in a trick question: “What does Mommy say?” I closed my eyes and braced for the inevitable: “Mommy says NO! Nononononno!!!” But you didn’t say that. When he asked “What does Mommy say?” you said, “I love you.”

If this year was about nothing more than me losing my shit every time you colored on the walls, then this letter would be the kind of thing you’d submit as evidence at your emancipation hearing. Fortunately, even my battle-axiest moments from this year were far outnumbered by moments like that one, ones in which I was utterly dumbfounded at my good fortune. When I used to think about motherhood in the abstract, I assumed there would be times when I would love my child more than I could possibly comprehend. But what I didn’t know was what that would feel like. I had no idea how breathtaking, how satisfying it would be the first time you said ‘Mama’ (Fun fact: Mama was not your first word. Nor was it Dada. It was Baba Booey. What’s a Baba Booey? Go ask Dada.). And I didn’t — couldn’t possibly — understand what it would feel like to get one of your rare but highly effective bear hugs. Screw time. I’m pretty sure a toddler’s hug heals all wounds. And if that’s the case, we’re going to need our fair share of them in the weeks ahead.

The biggest curveball this year threw at me happened at your 12-month check up. In general, I really like your pediatrician. She’s smart and funny and she spends a lot of time talking with us, even when she doesn’t have time to spend. But on that day I wanted nothing more than for her to shut the hell up, because that was the day the words “It’s probably not a brain tumor” came out of her mouth. She said it as she was looking over your growth chart and noting that the size of your head no longer fit on it. We used to laugh and joke about how big your head was. Right up until the brain tumor comment. That was the beginning of what has been a decidedly un-fun journey involving MRIs, pediatric neurosurgeons and lots of ill-gotten Xanax for Mommy. Over the last twelve months, my carefully constructed wall of denial has been dismantled, brick by brick, as we found out that 1) you have an arachnoid cyst on the frontal lobe of your brain, 2) it’s getting bigger, 3) it’s going to keep getting bigger and 4) it needs to be surgically removed. With brain surgery. The kind they do on your brain. In case you were wondering, this is why Mommy sometimes has to leave the room and when she comes back all her makeup is gone.

The surgery is in a couple of weeks and there are exactly two good things about it. The first is that once it’s over, we’ll probably never have to worry about that cyst again. The second is that you won’t remember any of it. And hopefully, by this summer you’ll just be a normal, happy kid who drives his mother bonkers. But until then, things might be a little shaky around here. I’ll do my best to hold it together, but I won’t make any promises. I will, however, tell you two things that might help both of us get through this: I don’t like to attach meaning to strange, random occurrences and I don’t like reggae. Why do you need to know this? Because for many years, a strange, random thing has been happening to me: Whenever I’ve been facing a difficult situation and have been low on optimism, I’ll hear the Bob Marley song “Three Little Birds.” It might be in the car, or in a store, or on an elevator. But it always happens, and it’s always right when I most need to hear these words: “Baby don’t worry about a thing, because every little thing is gonna be alright.” What does it mean? Who knows. But it’s happened so many times that I’ve started to expect it. And ever since your neurosurgeon called and said he wanted to operate, I keep waiting to hear it on the radio or somewhere. Anywhere. But it didn’t happen. And I was honestly starting to freak out about it. Then the other night as I was getting you ready for bed, I realized that your bedtime playlist has a lullaby version of “Three Little Birds” on it. So we’ve actually been hearing that song every single night and I didn’t even realize it. So baby, don’t worry about a thing. Because every little thing really is gonna be alright.

Happy birthday, buddy. I love you.