Batty easily pushed the dirt out of the bottoms of her stiletto sandals. People hovered around her, handing her tissues, giving words of advice. Helping. As she removed her curvaceous arm from an equally luscious leg, the thin silk of her dress brushed pleasantly against her face. The party wouldn’t be over for hours. She had almost forgotten where they were, and had to remind herself that she was on a boat. Planting her feet firmly, she stretched until her posture reached impeccable status. The temperature had certainly risen, not surprising given the number of people filling the low, fairly cramped quarters of the green room. She removed her matching brocade jacket; shook her hair loose as it came off. It would be cooler out on deck, but in order to get there she would have to fend of innumerable greetings from the women and obvious stares from the men. She hated knowing that people were staring at her. Loosening the sash around her waist, she contemplated for a minute before swaying slowly out of the congested room.

Giant potted trees stood indifferently outside, the obvious natural sheen of their green leaves contrasting to the garish colors on many of the party’s attendees. They were added to the boat as soon as its spring season began, emerging from a contained hothouse below deck. The boat’s owner had an impressive skill for timing, never exposing the plants to cold air too quickly or causing them to meet premature deaths. If it remained cold during more that half of the spring, they would refrain from using them at all, in the interest of fairness to all customers. Once fall arrived they quickly shed their leaves and died, unable to withstand the colder ocean climates. Batty did not pause to watch their shadows dancing on the white plains of the deck. She remained indifferent to the trees, contented enough by the coolness of the night air.

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Reasons people over the course of my life have said I’m a monster: An incomplete list.

(or, alternatively, why I’m “always the worst”)

1. I did not want to go halvesies on the purchase of a bidet for the bathroom.
2. I never use dryer sheets.
3. I refused to stay for the encore because I was tired.
4. If I open the mailbox and there’s only one piece of mail in there, and it isn’t for me, I just close it as if nothing has happened.
5. I thought you were done with the cookie so I ate the rest of it.

“Monster Culture” is an essay I used to teach to college freshmen. I recently reread it with a student and found it unnecessarily dense and stilted, but the content is still excellent.

Final (ha! As Cohen says, “they always return”) thought on monsters: When will we as a culture settle on ONE monstrous explanation for electronics using up electricity even when not turned on/chargers that are plugged in but with no machines attached to them/devices that are turned on but not charging? We have “vampire power,” “ghost energy,” and “phantom load” dueling for the title role…and though all make sense metaphorically–sucking the energy/draining the life vs. invisible forces–I would like to propose, given that this phenomenon generally involves many tangled cords, throwing a monster with tentacles into the competition.

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Last year I was talking with a friend about what monster categories we and our friends/relatives/significant others would fit into. We ended up talking less about who was a vampire, who was a werewolf, etc., than we did about what the categories should be in the first place. Vampire, Ghost, Werewolf, Zombie, and Mummy seemed like the big five, but is there some overlap between Zombie and Mummy? Are they the same idea/metaphor/creature, just in different places in the world and times in history? What about Witches/Warlocks–should they constitute their own phylum among the monsters, or be nested in some sort of other domain?

Then we remembered Aliens, which were both different enough, humanoid enough, and prevalent enough culturally to fit into our concept map of major monsters. But Frankenstein’s monster, in part due to being singular, would be shuttled off to some small branch under the heading Trolls or Ogres; Sirens might be some subform of Witch; Poltergeists surely fit into the greater Ghost category, et cetera. Do we consider fairies? No, we’ll keep it to “evil” monsters, or at least those that are generally cast as evil though sometimes good (Witches/Warlocks, Ghosts) rather than those who are generally cast as good though sometimes evil (Sprites and so forth).

I think dragons were ruled out by virtue of being animals, whereas Vampires and Werewolves retain human form part-time. Animal-esque monsters, perhaps, are the other Kingdom. And since we had started by trying to fit everyone we know into the supernatural creature of best fit, we stuck to the Humanoid Kingdom.

For a second it amazed me that everyone seemed to fit so neatly into one of the categories we’d settled on. Then I remembered that humans love categorization, and that you can find cause to cleave the population into groups as sensical as “Which Ninja Turtle are you?” or as random as “Everyone is a bird, horse, or muffin.”

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I have a really difficult time suspending disbelief enough to buy into the idea–on The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead–of a Romero-less universe, where not only the term “zombie” but the concept of the dead returning is totally foreign. At the least, I thought when I watched the first mini-season of FTWD, wouldn’t you figure that you should run from or incapacitate someone who was ill and trying to attack/bite you? …I appreciate the impulse to try to help someone who’s sick, but I can say for certain that even in a world without zombies prominent in the zeitgeist, I would stay away from anyone who tried to bite me.

Also, why don’t they assume it’s rabies? Or does rabies not exist in this universe either?

That said, I thought about what would happen if things were inverted–if people in our world, so heavily saturated with zombie TV, movies, and books, started to get sick and become violent. In all likelihood, we would say, “Aha! This is the zombie apocalypse. We must shoot these people in the head!”

…and then it would turn out that they were not zombies at all, just sick with some kind of violence-inducing virus (or on bath salts) that might not even be communicable.

So that thought experiment helped me suspend my disbelief slightly more. Though with Fear the Walking Dead, it’s difficult. Those characters are making ludicrous decisions even for people walking around in a zombie-free collective consciousness.

I assume there’s someone whose job it is to determine what monster will be starring in popular culture next–like someone predicting trends in fashion. We’ve been through wizards (no, not a monster, but anyway), aliens, and vampires recently, and now zombies, so–back to ghosts? Time for werewolves to shine again?

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What happens to something you told someone in confidence once you no longer care if anyone knows? Especially if, to their mind, you still want it locked away.

I’m thinking of secrets I’ve told people in the past (high school, college) that I wouldn’t care at all, now, if people knew them. Or things that people told me that I doubt they care about keeping private anymore (not that I would chance it…I’m no monster). If you’re the keeper of secrets for people you’re no longer close with–i.e. people who you conjecture, but don’t know/can’t confirm, no longer consider those things “secrets”–then the information is orphaned.

Maybe it’s just that it’s not in common parlance anymore, but the term “orphaned” only makes me think of Microsoft Word with its widowed paragraphs and orphaned sentences. First of all–what grim terminology! (though I kind of appreciate that aspect of it). Second: the analogy doesn’t hold up. A woman becoming a widow (and where, yes, are the widower paragraphs?) has nothing to do with a child becoming an orphan (unless there’s an alternate definition of orphan that derives from losing one parent?)

In word processing, they are similarly only related in theme (the death of your full paragraph!):

“Pic­ture a para­graph that starts at the bot­tom of one page and con­tin­ues at the top of the next page. When only the last line of the para­graph ap­pears at the top of the next page, that line is called a widow. When only the first line of the para­graph ap­pears at the bot­tom of the first page, that line is called an or­phan.”

This would seem to counteract my complaint that widows and orphans, though related, don’t happen at the same time…because a widowed paragraph and an orphaned paragraph can’t happen at the same time (unless you are verbose enough to have paragraphs that take up just over one page). Still, what’s the justification for designating one widow and the other orphan? And why isn’t there a term for the blank line (which is anathema to me; I would much rather have a single line of a paragraph at either top or bottom, though to be honest I would ultimately prefer to go back and add or delete so that this can all be avoided completely) that Word puts in when it acts to prevent widows and orphans?

This website cautions,

“Be aware that if you use widow and or­phan con­trol, you will fre­quently see blank lines at the bot­tom of your pages. This is nor­mal, since lines must be trans­planted to cure the problem.”

Though the author didn’t create the widow/orphan function in Word, the language he uses–“transplanted,” “cure”–settles neatly into the governing analogy.

At some point, surely, this issue of blank space at the bottom of a page will be obsolete (or hang on only tenuously, the way the convention of using two spaces after a period has sustained). In the sense that the internet exists and a “page” is a continuous scroll, it already has.

Where do my old secrets live–bottom of someone’s consciousness, about to be pushed out? At the top, barely visible, away from the main narrative? I don’t care whether the whispered thoughts I’ve collected from people over the years are the widows and my former secrets are the orphans, or if it’s the other way around. What I think about is that blank line at the bottom of the page (because unlike widowed or orphaned text, the blank line only ever occurs at the bottom), the space that reminds me of people I no longer know, whose confidences I still hold, but who are no longer present enough in my life to tell me whether they still treasure them as secrets. Time and distance: the real causes of blank space.

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Overheard in living rooms, mine and others’:

“I’ve got to be honest…and honestly, I don’t think that the orcs will punish them for that.”

“Don’t I have that portable exsanguinator handy?”

“Well, what are your thoughts? …On what? On the infinite blood coming out of this snake.”

“Use it. Make us look like snake people.”

“Also, we’re going to be holding up a giant eyeball.”

“I like to ingest small businesses”

(It took me a moment to realize that he had, sadly, said “invest in”)

On waiting rooms:

More people try to talk to me in waiting rooms than in bars. Or, at least, the ratio of people in waiting rooms deciding that it’s the time to strike up a conversation is higher than that of people in bars. I get it: waiting rooms are boring. Maybe you’re waiting for a doctor, dentist, or other entity you would really prefer not to see. You may have been waiting a long time. But when I’m in the waiting room at the doctor’s office (and I’m there frequently, because I’m a hypochondriac who lives a block away from the doctor), I’m not at my most relaxed; I’m trapped; I’m trying to keep one ear attuned to the door, where someone will soon appear and call my name; probably, I am wearing pajamas.

I prefer to spend my waiting room time either with my Kindle or texting my parents form texts based on the kind that women get when they’re pregnant and receiving weekly updates about the baby’s size and development:

“Your baby…is now the size of a record-setting prize-winning squash! Her blood pressure is 104/69 and so far cholesterol is still low. “

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We didn’t have any potatoes. The rain had fallen in patches that year, pressing its fingertips into rows of beans, fields of corn, the tomato plants and the peppers. The layer of soil over the potatoes stayed dry and pale as we stared and waited; little holes appeared in the dirt where the plants tried to suck the moisture out of the ground. In the evening we threaded fistfuls of beans through our fingers to boil on the stove for dinner. Our hands closed around tomatoes in the perfect rounded shape, and the ears of yellow corn folded neatly into our baskets. But late at night my palms began to itch, missing the rough skin of the potatoes. I tiptoed out of the house and around the barn to the spigot, where I filled my bucket until it was almost too heavy to lift. Back and forth from the spigot to the plot I went, dumping water on the soil and turning back for more until my legs stiffened with exhaustion and I stumbled back to bed. The next morning we found the potatoes risen from the ground, floating shriveled and small in their skins, having drowned in the night.

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As soon as I posted about my current and past stitches, I got messages from my relatives across a variety of media. My cousin commented on Facebook in response to my blog post, “Maybe you should not have dove into the shallow end of the pool…. Just saying” (thanks for the support!) while my mom texted me to say “Did you also have stitches for wisdom teeth…? I’ll never tell” (thanks for the…subterfuge?).

I don’t remember much about having my wisdom teeth out–no, that’s a lie. I remember pretty much everything, from the cowboy boots the oral surgeon was wearing to the last thing I said before the laughing gas pulled me under (something like “Take me with you!” when the doctor mentioned Florida) to the disappointment when, waking from the anesthesia, I felt “normal” (in contrast to my friend–of toothpick-in-the-arm fame–who said the most hilarious things when she emerged drooling and puffy from her wisdom tooth removal). (I couldn’t talk, so on the drive home I tried to mmmphhh mmppphhh  mmmphh to my mom all about how I didn’t feel weird at all, and finally she handed me my dad’s atlas and a pen…and when I looked back later, I had drawn a bunch of random lines.)

A little Google research shows that oral surgeons sometimes put in dissolvable stitches and other times they don’t need to…just as some doctors (like mine) prescribe Vicodin (I only took it for the first couple of days, but the main effect I remember is that when I woke up on my couch, I felt like my hands and feet were in all different corners of the room) and others prescribe Tylenol. I probably had stitches when my wisdom teeth were taken out, which would make them my third set of stitches and ruin my attempt at a fibonacci-esque pattern of stitch getting…or we could just say that since I don’t remember and there’s no way to know, I can still claim 1, 2, and 3 stitches on a technicality.

Technicalities are also what allow me to say I’ve never had a broken bone. I most likely broke my big toe on a trampoline when I was eleven, but I never went to the doctor so I can’t say for sure. I can only say that my toe swelled up right before our family vacation to Gatlinburg and it made donning my water socks VERY difficult, so I was the most grumpy creek-explorer of the 10 or so kids on that vacation (which was not actually my family vacation, but my friend’s family’s (yes, toothpick friend)). In college, I possibly broke my middle finger playing flag football, which resulted in me playing an orchestra concert as the harpist flipping everyone the bird with her silver finger splint. That time I *did* go to the doctor and had an x-ray…which turned out to be inconclusive because the radiologist couldn’t tell if the dark line she saw was a hairline fracture or a vein. (My roommate broke her middle finger–on the opposite hand–two days later, by dropping her bed frame on it–it was not a good time to be a hand in our household).

In conclusion: inconclusive.

But my tongue is starting to look like a regular tongue again.

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I currently have stitches in my tongue, due to a minor procedure to remove a fibroma from biting the side of my tongue/scar tissue forming (I think of all of the times I’ve bitten my tongue without this happening…and then I think about how counterintuitive it is that cutting my tongue intentionally would not just create more scar tissue–I guess it’s like resetting a broken bone so that it’s done right). The stitches are the dissolvable kind (I’m not totally clear on whether they’re even still in there–there’s a lot going on in that sector of my tongue at present), though I don’t know if they actually *dissolve* or just fall out.  

Thinking about my stitches (which are, by the way, the third–I think–time I’ve had stitches; the first two were 1) When I needed one stitch after being grazed with the c-section knife during birth; 2) When I needed two stitches after cutting my philtrum just above my upper lip on the bottom of a swimming pool (don’t ask; it was the great shame of my eleven years and frankly my greatest shame for a while longer); now I have three stitches in my tongue, or I did at one point) makes me think about the other medical devices that live, impermanently or permanently, in people’s bodies. A stent in the heart. A metal rod in the leg. The silver retainer backing my bottom teeth. Ashes to ashes.

My friend has a piece of toothpick petrified in her arm. When we were seven or eight, the two of us and another friend were being babysat while our three sets of parents were out to dinner. (This babysitter, who was my mom’s preschool student and whose mom was my preschool teacher, introduced me to Metallica and Nintendo–and not that my parents ever blamed him for what happened, but even if they had, he already had tremendous goodwill built up from Enter Sandman and Kid Icarus.) Our other friend was showing us something with a bunch of toothpicks–I don’t know, one of those kid party tricks like “How do you make nine out of ten?” but when we couldn’t figure it out, my other friend got bored and started sticking the toothpicks upright in the carpet like little stalagmites. When we heard the door signaling that our parents were back, she jumped up to go greet them, tripped, and landed on one of the toothpicks. 

I remember a lot of screeching that night back at her house when her mom tried to remove it with scissors. She got half of it. The doctor said the other half would dissolve and be reabsorbed (what’s this RE? The toothpick wasn’t part of her body initially) by her body. Nope! It’s still in there, and if you catch it at the right moment, it stands at attention, a little landmark on her forearm.

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There’s a pharmacy in my neighborhood that I would describe as either an old-school drug store or a magical font of whatever I happen to need at a given moment. I’m sure I could tempt things by going there looking for something really outlandish, but to date I’ve gone there–sometimes on the same day–looking for compression tights, an international outlet converter, face oil, a specific and uncommon hair dye, a zebra hat, and a computer case, and have found ALL of them.

Recently, I discovered that this pharmacy is now a UPS Delivery Point, which means that if UPS can’t deliver my package because I’m not home and I have no stoop to compensate for a tiny mailbox, I’m not faced with the option of a) letting the package get returned to sender; b) trekking to the UPS facility many trains away from me in Brooklyn. Instead I go to the pharmacy, make my way to the back where there are shelves full of braces and splints for every body part, and show them my UPS notice. They are, generally, more consistent than the local post office.

In contrast, I present the Electronics Store at the Amsterdam airport (I went there looking for a macbook cover…because although I’d found one at my pharmacy in addition to the necessary international outlet converter and compression tights). At the Electronics Store (that was its title), you could buy a MacBook itself, numerous renditions of iPad covers, a vibrator, or A SEGWAY…but not a MacBook cover.

Now I’m thinking about things that we cover in order to protect them–even if that sometimes means covering up the thing we want to see, such that it can never be taken from us even if we never get to enjoy looking at it–and things we cover so that we don’t have to be in contact with them. In column A: tables, couches, MacBooks, hair. In column B: mattresses, toilet lids, cold tile floors. It seems like there probably isn’t any overlap, since the two categories are at direct odds, but if I can ever think of something that fits in both I’ll make a Venn Diagram for it. And by “for it,” I mean in its honor.

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