theology&geometry

I promise there will be less pee-related posts going forward.

I think.

1. Both take their coffee black with an ice cube.

2. She spent some time in Alamogordo, New Mexico, while my grandfather was stationed at Holloman back in the ’50s; he was born in Alamogordo back in the ’70s.

3. She scolds me if my hair gets in my eyes or if my sleeve hems cover my hands; he scolds me when I chew my cuticles.

Okay, so maybe it’s a stretch. But I’m noting it here for when I inevitably find out that we are all, in fact, part of one big family.

My dad is a snorer. A robust Olympian of a snorer. The kind of snorer who can shake walls and summon earthquakes with his tracheal vibrations. For years I suffered through family vacations spent sleeping in the same room as my parents. As soon as dad would nod off — which never took long, as damn near everyone in my family is more or less narcoleptic — I knew that was all the wrote, and at best I’d get a couple of broken hours of sleep that night. I buried my face in pillows and shoved earplugs into my head and pitched unholy but silent fits at the injustice. I just couldn’t understand why Dad couldn’t just not snore so I could sleep. It seemed so simple.

Aaaaand then I grew up and into a snorer too. I didn’t even know it had happened until I moved in with my boyfriend in college and he got the pleasure of discovering it and letting me in on the secret. Except, truthfully or not, he told me he thought it was cute. So I always just sort of imagined that I cooed adorably in my sleep a little every now and again, and that my breath smelled of roses and my drool turned into diamonds when it hit the pillow.

Since then I have had multiple people break the awful truth to me again and again: I am a snorer, and it’s not cute, and did I know I sometimes sound like I am going to die mid-slumber?

You win this round of Lesson Learnedness, Universe.

In the intervening years, Dad learned that he has sleep apnea, which is a cruel sleep disorder in which you are sleepy and tired all the time, but the time you spend sleeping is so choppy thanks to your inability to breathe properly that you don’t get any rest at all. Hence being tired all the time. He wakes up dozens of times an hour, every hour, to try to regain his breath. The doctors put him on a CPAP machine years ago, and it took him a long time to get used to it, but it seems to be helping a bit. Since then, mom’s gotten diagnosed with sleep apnea too. And Grandmaw. The snoring scourge has been somewhat tamed by large, expensive, unsexy apparatuses that are not unlike nighttime gas masks. My (very brief, very digital) research leads me to believe that sleep apnea/snoring is at least partly inherited, and exacerbated by things like being overweight and a fondness for cheese and booze. OH HOORAY.

Recently I have been feeling real sheepish about my snoring problem. See, there is this guy I’ve taken a real strong shine to who occasionally finds himself in my house overnight, and he very often has to get up early for work. My bedroom is quiet — perhaps too quiet — so any rattly peep I make is amplified, causing this guy to lose precious minutes of REM time. I have told him to just nudge me or move my head when I start snoring and I’ll stop. This is mostly true. But I can’t ask him to be the snore police all night. Which is why when I felt him nudge me in the wee hours of this morning, I just moseyed on out of the bedroom and took to the couch. It was a blow to my ego — I mean, I’m still trying to impress this guy, not make him lie awake, cursing my existence — but I’d much rather feel a little embarrassed than lie there and ruin his entire night and the entire next heavy-eyed day.

So obviously I need some kind of soothing, noisemaking something-or-other in the bedroom that will help offset the noise I make. (Frankly, I miss my old apartment’s rumbly loud window AC unit, which did double duty as a cat-mewling masker.) But then what? Lose weight? Liposuction my neck fat? Tracheotomy (Nick’s suggestion)? Give in and go to a sleep clinic and see just how bad my problem is? Ugh. I really don’t even want to know how bad it is, and I’m too stubborn to give in to the CPAP right now, despite how it will probably fix all my problems and cure futurecancer too.

But I really don’t want to run that very sweet man out of my bed either.

For once I actually had July 4 off work. That only happens every few years, so I decided to make the most of it and head to Saltillo to take part in the annual grilled-meat-and-pyrotechnics-a-thon. A fun twist this year is that I somehow convinced the manfriend that he should get in on that shit and come with me. So we took off as early as we could coax ourselves to Sunday (think 2 p.m.), armed with a bag of margarita fixins and a big bowl of chicken salad I had made.

I haven’t taken a boy home to meet the family in … a long time. So naturally everyone acted like the zoo was getting a new animal and everyone wanted a chance to come gawk at it. Within seconds of arriving, we had a margarita in our hands and moonshine had been shoved in our faces. My dad had teased me mercilessly leading up to Sunday, seeing as the manfriend is from Jersey and has been dubbed a full-on Yankee. But everyone was on their best behavior (read: they were goofy as ever) and I was so unbelievably relieved and happy to just sort of watch as everyone got along really well. Even — especially! — through gun show-and-tell time!

Maybe I also felt a little happy because as soon as we got to the house, I started pawing through the medicine cabinet for some Tylenol to knock out my lingering headache (**coughhangovercough**), and since it was kind of hectic and everyone was talking at and around me and I was checking back to make sure the manfriend wasn’t being ambushed and it was just chaos, I accidentally popped THREE TYLENOL PMS instead of actual regular don’t-fall-asleep-instantly Tylenol. My nervous brain did not even register why the pills I was putting into my mouth were blue. As soon as I realized my mistake — made on an empty stomach, no less — I began thinking I should make myself puke, but my sister seemed to think I’d probably already absorbed the medicine. And she was right. Shit got real trippy then, and I set about occupying myself the rest of the evening so that I wouldn’t fall asleep. This involved a LOT of coffee and M&Ms. And a lot of sympathetic looks from the manfriend, who was probably worried that I would fall asleep and leave him to the wolves. It was not unlike being in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie. Whatever you do, do not close your eyes.

But I mostly kept it together. Well, I stayed awake. I was pretty unable to comprehend complex sentences (people would talk to me and it just seemed soooo faaast) but my emotions felt super squishy and nice. The fireworks were pretty awesome, especially this one set called Chicken on a Chain. Yes, I don’t know what the hell that means and even when I was on sleepy drugs, it didn’t make any damn sense. But they sure were pretty.

Monday I got up early thanks to phone calls from the manfriend, who was stationed downstairs to sleep while I was upstairs (my parents are at least consistent in their old fashionedness). He wanted a tour of Saltillo, which I gave him in all of ten minutes. Then we headed out to Savannah to go to Walmart. I told him all the ridiculous hometown stories I could muster. Yes, including the one about the local decapitation lore. I am a fucking charmer. We ate delicious and greasy ground beef-based meals at the Worley Bird Café (named for Savannah’s current most famous export) and came back to Saltillo for more time with the family. The manfriend is such an unbelievably good sport, even when he was informed that because I have referred to him as “manfriend,” everyone else has started calling him “Manfred.”

He’s a catch, I tell you.

Zinnia grown from a bag of second- and third-generation seeds my mom kept from her own garden.

The weekend I visited my parents for Father’s Day, my sister and nephews and I took a let’s-get-out-of-the-house sashay down to downtown Saltillo (I will NOT admit to accidentally leaving my brother’s giant diesel truck’s emergency brake on during the entire trip, and wondering why accelerating was such a pain in the ass), which included a trip into the Saltillo Landing Cafe/Grocery as well as a peek inside the Robertson family’s antiques store, which I had not been in before. Last time I went into the building, it was a gameroom-slash-knickknacks store being run by Clifton, an enterprising young man I had graduated high school with. I’m told he has run off to California — smart boy — and now his parents run the space and keep it stocked with some actually freaking awesome wares for reasonable prices (check out that link for a glimpse of an amazing baby blue vintage fridge; also just out of the frame is a $125 functional? floor radio from EONS AGO). My sister, always the one in our family to sniff out a deal, asked if we could sneak into the back room and see what wasn’t yet on the showroom floor. We’re sweet-talkin’ Southern gals, so naturally we got our way. And lo and behold, we stumbled upon that dresser (which I will henceforth refer to as a sideboard) above, as well as this chest of drawers. They were marked down from $40 apiece to $25. That’s right, math-heads, $50 for the set. I cleaned up the joy piss that ran down my leg an after some obligatory DO-I-REALLY-NEED-THIS-HOW-WILL-I-GET-IT-HOME hemming and hawing, I was leaving my number with the fill-in clerk (the proprietor’s mother-in-law, adorably) and a few days later I got the call that I could indeed have the pieces.

My brother delivered them to the house Saturday on the honor system; I haven’t paid a dime for these beauties yet, and the seller even sent along a can of paint for touch-ups, as she had planned to paint the pieces before selling them. While they could use some work — there are cigarette burns and some water damage and they both smell musty — I just kind of adore the color that they are, even if it clashes with my wall. There’s something sunbursty about that color, the way it darkens at the edges. And don’t even get me started on the hardware.

I originally had it in my head after the first viewing that I had some art deco on my hands but I don’t think that’s the case. I’m terrible at identifying furniture and architecture styles, and the internet has been surprisingly unhelpful in my sleuthing efforts. If you can look at this and tell me the style (other than mid-century modern, which is my closest guess, which probably means it’s anything but), I’d be mighty grateful. I feel like I really lucked out here, and I want to reiterate that it was my sister who pushed me to go for it. She could taste the bargain victory whereas I was merely smelling whiffs of it (I have never been good at thrifting, and I will never be a Dave or Amy and I mostly accept that).

This is a lily at my mom’s house. My flowers are looking pretty puny lately, as I’ve been too preoccupied to coddle them properly. :)

This weekend I got my hands on my grandmother’s memoir manuscript. My mother has been keeping it unavailable for as long as I’ve known about it. That’s because it is my grandmother’s first-person account of her descent into what she straight-up calls insanity, and that is a particularly and understandably painful subject for my mom. Nana was bipolar (I) and schizophrenic, with a long stretch of alcoholism thrown in there. She spent some time in mental wards and received shock treatments. I know all these hazy stories about her past and the unbelievable things she did when my mom and aunt were kids, and I have always wanted to know these stories from my grandmother’s perspective. Now, in my bookbag, is a double-spaced, typed manuscript, complete with pseudonym key and chapter outline.

I woke up early Sunday and hit the road damn near at the time I was aiming for — a feat for me — so I could make it to the parents’ around noon, as my dad had to leave for work at 1:30. We wanted to squeeze in some Father’s Day time in that small window, and we eked it out with great aplomb, I have to say. There was crying. The good kind. After all, it had only been a week earlier that my sister was in bad shape at the hospital and our entire world looked like it was going to be turned upside down. I could see the relief and comfort in both my parents’ eyes: All their chickens were once again under their roof. They are no more happy than when that happens. We gave my dad his gifts — some straw hats he likes to wear in the garden, a movie, a book, cards (his big present won’t arrive until this weekend; it’s some kind of manually propelled go-kart thingy) — and then my sister presented him with a DVD she had made the night before featuring pictures of the family fathers. It was so lovely. I turned around to see my dad sobbing. “You have maid my heart soar with joy,” he said later in a text message once he’d gotten to work. (My mom tittered at the misspelling, but we figured he gets a pass since he’s basically the best dad ever.) He kept saying how blessed he was to have kids like his. Which is funny because we keep learning again and again how blessed we are to have a dad like him.

Krissie’s prognosis is better. I visited yesterday and she had apparently just tried to get out of her room before the nurse corralled her. She’s ready to get out of that place. I would be too. She’s texting now, and checking Twitter to read back on all my updates (she was so out of it for most of that stuff that it’s probably a pretty bizarre timeline to read), and generally feeling more upbeat. Which is just amazing.

Soon she’ll be eating solids and getting out and about like old times.