Home for Squishmish

On Tuesday we were cooking everyone-leaves-Seattle-for-the-holidays holiday dinner. As housemates sliced apples for dessert crumble and boyfriend chose proper music for festive food prep, I was trying to spin a pile of yams into yam-fries with the budget mandolin I had purchased a few days before. If you have a mental picture of me trying to cut potatos with the higher strings of a small banjo then you need a quick trip to the kitchen definitions corner (no, this corner isn't punishment for your ignorance - here, put on the cone-shaped hat of enlightenment). The mandolin is the ultimate hand-powered slicing and dicing machine. Interchangable racks of blades fit into a slanted plane that leads unsuspecting vegetables over this first set of vertical blades for dicing and then to a perpendicular blade that slices off the scored bits into a pile of julienned goodness (if you are using that rack) or french fries as is the case here.

The yam is sturdier than the general potato population and requires vigorous acceleration down the plane of the mandolin to get the half-inch fry blades through. You really have to put your whole arm into it. If that doesn't work, you have to make a blood sacrifice. On a particularly vigorous slice-and-dice attempt I successfully swiped the blades through the yam and straight into my left wrist - you know, the part with all those severable little blue veins pulsing at the surface.

Luckily, I have two housemates with seemingly unlimited first aid sense and experience, a boyfriend who can support my fainting weight, and a third housemate who can see me bleeding from somewhere between four and six hash marks in my arm and calmy drape a dishtowel over my shoulder saying, "There, that will protect your white sweater from the blood." Seriously, these people are life-savers. The cuts actually missed all my veins and only one of them was deep enough to consider stitches, but I do tend to pass out at the sight of blood flowing uncontrollably out of my body and in doing so run the risk of falling neck or headwise onto a sharp object.

The wound cleaned up nicely (the precision cutting of a QFC mandolin!) and we all enjoyed a slightly delayed, slightly overcooked celebratory meal. The bigger impacts of the injury came during my cross-country flight home two days later. With gauze wrapped around the wounded wrist and the dark eye-circles of overnight flying, other passengers could only assume that I had not only tried recently to kill myself, but had also failed at it. The fact that the cuts had entered the itchy stage of healing, causing a lot of bandage fidgeting, simply heightend the intrigue. I ended up using the drama of it all to my advantage. As usual. I was seated next to the one person who keeps their personal light on for the entire trip. Last time I went to Maine, it was a woman who wanted to take advantage of not sleeping to catch up on crocheting. This time, I was tipped off to my misfortune when my seatmate withdrew not one, but three light-reading books out of their personal item before stowing it safely under the seatback in front of them. At approximately 4 AM EST, I rolled up my sleeve and stared fixedly at the gleaming serated foil edge of my uneaten peanut pack: light off.

When my parents picked me up at the Portland, Maine airport, they did not notice the gauze like strangers had the night before. They also failed to notice my older brother, who they picked up at the same time. At lunch, my mother led conversation with exclamations like, "Sarah! What do you want for dinner? I saved latkes in the freezer for you, and I made you pasta putenesca!. And African cous-cous!" and, "Grandma has been asking me everyday when Sarah is coming, she can't wait to see you!" My mother fired off these topics while giving her order, which, as usual, she did in the style of playing 20 questions ("Do you serve coffee?" Yes. "Can you make espresso?" Yes. "Can you make a latte?" Yes. "Can you make it with skim milk?" No, no skim milk. "Oh, I don't want that then, do you have other hot drinks?" . . .)

While ignoring one of her visiting offspring seems harsh, my mother's practice is one the whole family lapses into on occasion. Being with my brother can be like lucidly dreaming your way through a Ben Stiller funny-cause-it's-so-damn-awkward movie; you can sense that he is about to break some chick's nose or light a gazeebo on fire, but you are powerless to prevent the shame and pain it will cause. Since fight is not an option, an instinct to ignore takes over, much like my losing consciousness response to watching the lifeblood leak out of me.

Fairly early into lunch, however, my brother says something that breaks through our unintended barrier. "I got presents for everyone, but it was stuff they don't let you bring on the plane, so it's all still in New York." Last year my brother had really wanted to get my cousin Kelvin a pellet handgun, until my mother's tantrum at Dick's Sporting Goods stopped him. Shopping in New York without her shrill guidance, his possible purchases were worrisome. Fireworks? Drugs? Jars of acid? Our anxiety was not quelled by the fact that his present to me, which could make the trip, was a t-shirt print titled "Get Off My Property," which treated everyone who chanced to look at my chest to a view straight down the barrel of a very large silk-screened rifle.

It took 24 hours to tease out of my brother what the untoted gifts were; bath salts and body lotions featuring various essences of the Dead Sea. Apparently, these were packaged in quantities too large for the 3-1-1 of carry-on, and in glass too fragile to check ("The bottles are really beautiful, you would have loved them if I could have brought them up here.") My dad and I were both skeptical of my brother buying bath salts, an purchase usually reserved for romantic partners too smitten to see that the gift has little actual purpose (for a fraction of the cost, Mr. Bubble will make something worthwhile in your tub rather than sit there in undissolved crystals clogging the drain). "The salesgirl was very sexy," my brother explains, "and, well, she also touched my bum."

My dad: "Touched your bum?"
Brother: "And lambada-ed me for a little bit."
Dad (to me): "Do you know what that is? Have you 'lambada-ed' anyone?"
Me: (laughing and falling off couch)
"Hey! She gave me her number, BEFORE I even bought anything."
"You going to call her?"
"Probably not, I'm worried about her morals."

Turns out that what my brother spent on Dead Sea beauty products, while small compared to his collective debt to the Federal Government and various credit card companies, was a great deal of his not-really-dispoable income. And the precious spoils of the shopgirl assgrabbing will remain in Brooklyn, far away from their intended recipients among my relations. "It's ok," my brother reasons, "They will make great gifts for the ladies."

But if my brother is the Grinch who accidentally left Christmas on the bus and while running back to get it tripped and spilled hot coffee all over Hanukah and Solstice, my mother is the Grinch who replaced the little baby Jesus in my Aunt's corn-husk nativity with a crocodile in the name of international aid. Though I will have to tell you about that later, lest I let jet-lag win.

When to let your hyphen go

I should be cleaning my kitchen. Half a pound of beautifully marinated, fresh off the grill, wild sockeye salmon sits on the counter waiting, along with the remains of an avocado salad and a smooth but tangy french goat cheese, for its respective tupperware. But this inclination has come on me like a force, and I must commit it to the mythological internets now.

I am thinking of dropping my hyphen. Which would make me Sarah Ross Viles. Or, with middle initial, Sarah A. Ross Viles. I think I would still be Sarah RV, but perhaps Sarah R V?

I was not born with a hyphen. I was born Sarah Viles to parents Nancy Ross and George Viles. Technically, I was a bastard at the time of my birth, the younger of two bastards in fact. However, to my mother, I am pretty sure that joint property ownership, not to mention the creation of joint genetic material, constituted a bond more stable than law. My dad is my mother's second husband. She was divorced from the first before she was the age I am now. My parents were eventually married a few months after my birth (by my grandfather) with both myself and the other bastard in attendance. Their names remained Nancy Ross and George Viles.

When I started school I became alert to the shocking coincidences that all my friends' parents seemed to have the same last name. Weird. By third grade I had figured out the whoel name changing thing and decided to honor my mother I started on the hyphen path, writing "Ross-Viles" on all the official papers that are thrust the way of a third grader. I had to legally change to Ross-Viles in my senior year of high school so the colleges I was applying to wouldn't accuse me of SAT fraud. $40.00, a breif appearance in a Maine state court and voila, hyphee for life!

I hate the hyphen. It is not a character that I would choose to be a part of my name. It is not a period, or a graceful space, but an arm thrust into a gap. "Wait, I'm not done yet," like someone miming to the person holding their hair back when they puke that there is more to come. OK, not that I think my last name is puke, but I really don't like the hyphen.

And who are we accursed of the hyphen? Until some generations ago it was only brazen women who retained their filial identity into their marriage. A lot of gender disempowerment passes me by. But being slapped with a hyphen as punishment for keeping a maiden name? I guess you could see it as the whale bone slipped out of the corset we refused to wear in the old country and into our enlightened feminist lives. Now parents are giving their kids the hyphen. And I for one, draw conclusions about it.

For instanace:

"Ross-Viles" makes me think: stuffy, perhaps argumentative, self-righteous in a boring way

"Ross Viles" makes me think: mysterious, glamorous, inviting

The hyphen is the Scarlet Punctuation.

So I am phasing it out, much like I phased it in in the late '80's. And immediate benefit is that I won't have to wrastle all the online forms that don't allow hyphens as a character. Long term benefits, I am thinking that once my name is free from the shackles of sexism masked as feminism, I will have bouncier hair, whiter teeth, and probably a spring in my step as well. So if I look and act different, you'll know why.

Stalkers Never Die, They Just Get Invisible and Inside Your Head

I would say that until about a year ago the only recurrent trauma I had in my life was in the form dreams. I had two specific recurring dreams when I was a kid one of which was about disembodied hands coming out of the woods behind my house (no more watching The Munsters for me) and the other of which was crazy with archtypal meaning. In the latter, I would be driving my friend Rachel's family's Volkswagen Rabbit on an unfmailiar stretch of our road. The car would be filled with sentient, wriggling skeletons -- so many that I would have to brush their bony limbs away to see out the windsheild, who were all desperately trying to get somewhere that they couldn't communicate with me. As a kid I hated skeletons, but in this dream I had compassion towards them. I think it amounted to something like, "It must suck to be a skeleton, the least I can do is get them out of this Rabbit to where they are going." Which brings me to Archtype Theme Number 1- Compassion for the Other. Archtype Theme Number 2 was Having to Assume the Role of the Parent while Dealing with the Loss of a Parent. This theme was portrayed in the fact that 7, 8, or 9 year old me was driving the car, when obviously that should be a parent's job, but driving the car was taking so much of my concentration I didn't really have time to think about where the parent was. This apsect of the dream was very similar to another slightly less recurrent dream in which our road had turned into African wildlands (no more Miami Zoo safari ride for me) and my mother had her foot bitten off by a lion. Since she couldn't drive the car without a foot, I had to drive to the hospital along unfamiliar Africa road (I got into the anxiety dreams at a young age).

The thing about a recurrent dream is it conditions you. When I would first have the Volkswagen Full Of Skeletons dream it would be a long affair, full of lucid decisions about where to turn and what to say to the anxious skeletons, and blooming with details like wind rustling leaves off a tree to allow a gap of moonlight through the Rabbit's sunroof and into one of my companion's empty eye sockets. After three or four times though, the dream was more like a movie still thrown up on my brainpan while my subconscious loaded the next reel. However, just the snap image of the german-made car with its desperate macabre load shoved me into terror. I don't remember when I stopped having recurrent kid nightmares. Maybe I hit a point where I was no longer afraid to try to communicate with beings who were different than me, or realised I would be able to survive without my parents. I obviously had them long enough that I remember them with quite a lot of detail, but I can't remember the last time they occured.

Whatever part of my brain that was responsible for the Pavlovian terror reaction to any somnolent suggestion of those dreams has recently dusted off its mechanism and gotten back to work. Only now, it is not triggered by dream images, but by single stimulations in reality that mimic memories from the three nights last year when some guy tried to break into my SWF apartment. The whole stalker thing struck deeper than I would have guessed, as someone who likes to joke about uncomfortable things until laughter jogs them enough in their sockets that I am able to knock them free.

A week ago I woke up at 2 in the morning after only a half hour of half sleep to a voice outside my cracked open window. I now live on the third floor, and my windows are 5 feet off the ground, but there is a catwalk that runs along the bedroom side of my apartment. A man was on this catwalk either trying to rouse someone in particular or just to see what reaction he could get. It was a Saturday night, so it was comepletely possible that drunky catwalker was just on his way out of a friend's apartment. Pre-stalker me would have gone back to sleep. I lay in bed, frozen in worry that any creek of my bedsprings would draw the person to me and he would accomplish whatever the mysterious evil last year's guy failed to compete. Simultaeneously, I was pulled from the bed by the worry that I had forgotten to lock the door, depsite the fact that I was sure I locked the door. Eventually, when it sounded like the man had moved down the walk, I stealthed out of bed and affirmed the deadbolt in its fully locked position, Then I cuddled my phone in bed, ready to dial 911 until I fell back asleep.

Yes, you are thinking, I have flipped. Understandably so, but flipped all the same. I think I am doing alright if I am keeping the flipping to 2 AM in the morning. And actually, there was a whole self-sufficient upshot to the experience as i realized later that my instinct had not been to call an ex-boyfriend, as it had been a year ago, but to call actual law enforcement and emergency responders. Yay!

But then there was tonight. I got home from a jog around 8:30 and set up to cooking one of those huge pasta dishes that can sustain the one bedroom apartment dweller for days. Everything was minutes away from done, and perfect timing too with the sun just set, when an irregular knowck bounced against my door. I was not expecting anybody and ruled out a surprise visit from a friend as the knock was aggressive and irregular, really the knock of someone who didn't know me at all, i thought. I ignored it, thinking maybe I was mistaken and it was a knock next door, but it went on and I worried that the person might just come in so I better face them head on. I went to the peephole and saw nothing. I opened the door and saw nothing. I stood there, peering into grey, trying to figure out which direction the attack would come from. Something tugged my shirt. A little girl in pick stood up to my waste in front of me, holding in one hand the other fist that must have been raw, at this point, from knocking. "Hi" I said. She pointed past me and turning around I saw a paper cone of flowers hanging on my doorknob. "Oh! A maybasket! Thank you!" "Read it," she said. "Happy May Day," I read, "Thank you." And she ran away to her dad, my apartment manager, sho stood 20 yards away at the top of the stairs shrugging. Wow.

I am thinking I will wedge this improvised vase into my brain's paranoid machinery and see if it can at least slow it down.

Happy May Day!

Out in the Open Under Cover

My job is highly satisfying. In fact, a large portion of my total satisfaction with life right now currently derives from my job.
According to the block of management classes I took last spring, this is because my fundamental Maslovian needs are being met, as well as some of my higher needs. Basically, I feel safe and work with nice people -- I don't have tons of job security relative to my fellow county pions, but the value of my job is apparent to me. On a higher plane, I am challenged, I get to use my unique skills, I participate in decisions that affect my work, and I get to go undercover to break the coorporate cycle of selling out health. I spent last Friday night at party in Pioneer Square sponsored by RJ Reynolds to roll out its new Camel cigarette for women, No. 9. Before I continue, let me dispel any worry that I am blowing my cover by writing in such a public place; tobacco execs can't operate the internet because their cloven hooves don't interface well with computer keyboards.

Camel is the biggest tobacco sponsor of independent art in Seattle. Their brainwaash branding revolves around enabling smokers to "express themselves," "live outside the lines," and "avoid experiencing those boring last few decades of their lives." Though not the biggest market share company (which is Philip Morris powered by the Marlboro brand), they do just fine, thank you, and their smokers have clear brand loyalty. But the hard part about being a tobacco company is that your regular customers keep dying premaurely and you are constantly trying to find ways to get the young 'uns hooked. Enter No. 9. You know who doesn't smoke enought? Women! We are about 4% points behind men in prevalence. And the women who do smoke mostly don't smoke camels because, according to market research, camel doesn't have a product they identify with.

No. 9 is Camel's answer. The new cigarette deflects the normal camel branding into phrasing like, "dressed to the nines," and evokes chanel's numbered line, as well as love potion number nine. The packaging is black with minimal hot pink (rose) or green (mint) script and art.
As you can see, the tagline, "Light and luscious" is a feminine twin to the "Wide and delicious" sported by the more manly camel brands (body image for sale, anyone?).

Camel is kicking off the product with sponsored parties in key markets, a category that includes Seattle, much to the thrill of myself and my fellow preventionists. My job on Friday was to increase knowledge about industry marketing. It turns out the best way to do this is by flirting. I am not sure if Alias-style interrogations fall into basic or high-level job satisfaction needs, but they are certainly in the pyramid. A highlight of Friday night was "accidentally" bumping into one of the lackeys highered to swipe ID's and administer surveys goody bag line:

Me: I am soooo sorry!
Lackey: That's ok. You having a good time?
Me: Yeah, this event is awesome! Do you get to go to all the camel parties?
Lackey: No, just the ones in Seattle.
Me: So, when I can next see you?
Lackey: Well, we have an event on the 22nd, and then April 5th.
Me: So you, like, work for camel? What's that like?
Lackey: Oh, I work for _____. Camel highers us to do these parties. But a lot of camel coorporate is here tonight.
Me: Cool! Where?
Lackey: That guy. And that women. Oh, and that guy over there . . . .

Mission accomplished. Lookout, Jennifer Garner.

However, my complete protrayal of mission success is betrayed by the whistling sound at the corners of my satisfaction coming from the gap between the resources and power of the tobacco industry and the resources and power of myself and fellow life-saving do-gooders. The party featured Dj's flown in from New York, multiple wall-sized screens dazzling up custom camel images, male and female go-go dancers, and a VIP room with masseurs, manacurists, temp tatoo artists and a four foot white chocolate fountain. These things are pretty hard to write into a county purchase order, say. In fact, tobacco marketing is so superior that the longer I am in my job, the harder I am finding it not to become a smoker. Standing in line with the other ticket holders before Friday's event, I wondered through my teared up eyes at how smoking made the co-eds looks so sophisticated. I had to run statistics from the Surgeon General's 2006 report on secondhand smoke through my head just to resist asking for a drag.

Did I do any good on Friday? Besides requisition an entire bag of camel shwag for King County property. In interest of job secruity, maybe it's ok to let the problem run its course for a while.

M.O.M.

I really liked Thank You For Smoking. One of my professional hats is Tobacco Prevention Specialist, so of course I appreciated my piece of the public health pie being up on the screen.

A couple of days after the movie I was helping out the Dept of Health at a community open house the UW was having. The booth I was manning consisted of a pamphlet-covered table, a tri-fold backdrop listing the dept's accomplishments, and a TV set up about 5 feet away (by the outlet).

The TV had to be on mute to not disturb the other booth-minders. Nevertheless it was looping silently through all the youth-directed anti-smoking commericials the state had put out in the last few years. heavily featured in the loop were the newer commericals that feature the tag line "Kissing a smoker is just as gross." In different variations, a little clay-ma girl plunges her face into a rotting squirrel before making out and a boy laps cat vomit off the carpet before putting on his kissy face. Watching this over and over and over again I got to wondering, What is it like to have a job where your big project is putting together the specs on clay-mation cat vomit.

The other booths in the room with me had things to give away to the kids that would wander in with their families every 15 minutes or so. It was dumping rain outside, which was probably the only reason families were spending their Saturday afternoons in the health sciences complex. Or maybe they had wandered in accidentally and couldn't figure how to get out (it took two quarters to figure out that the library didnt' vanish and move everytime I left it). The other booths were a nursing training outfit and something else that was boring enough to drop out of my memory. But kids were stopping at both of these booths because they had things to give away.

I like kids and I wanted to be able to talk to some of them too, especially since my volunteer time was not going to get pulled over for unsafe speeds anytime soon. Thus I was overjoyed when I discovered two boxes of health fair party favors under the pamphlet table. One was full of rulers and the other was full of book marks.

While the ruler had obvious utility for all ages -- it could measure things, it was hefty enough to not dissolve in the rain the instant a kid left the building, it was the bookmarks that drew the (minimal) crowds. I think it was the color printing. The bookmarks featured a strip of pictures like you would get at a photobooth at the mall. The strip had head shots of two teenagers and a third frame that was filled with smokey grayness. This was a representation of the tagline that came before "Kissing a smoker is just as gross," which was, 'One in three (kids who start smoking will die prematurely)" It is much catchier if you leave off the second part, and the branding got the point where I think you could do that (then again, I was on the inside looking in). The nice thing about being the state is that it is pretty easy to get billboard space. The billboards for the "One and three" campaign had included one with two girls sunning themselves brightly on the beach while a sculpted white coffin with with silver detailing rested on the third towel. I found this to be a little off message, since it seemed to say "If you start smoking as a kid you will be well-tanned and really hot in a few years -- even if you die you will have a bitchin' coffin." Personally, I think too many kids have Tom Sawyer fantasies for that image and the others in the campaign to really work. The Kissing a smoker thing is mm, ok - but how many of the kids who like clay-mation are making out. All making out was really gross to me when I dug clay-mation, so they wouldn't have had a lot of ressonance with me. I hear the next tagline is going to be "No Stank You;" use your imagination. but I digress.

So I am at the health fair with the rulers and the bookmarks and the kids are coming up and I am talking to them about the commercials on the silent TV. We would turn a couple of corners in a media literacy conversation ("What does it mean that there are three kids in the sinking boat and only two life jackets?"), parents would get antsy to go, and then I would offer them stuff. Kind of like halloween with paper goods and a social message. Fine for older kids. Not so fine for younger ones.

A family with two kids, maybe 6 and 8 came up. "That cat on the TV is puking!" they ebulliently reported to everyone in the room, and then, "Oh, bookmarks!" They eached grabbed three. What is on the bookmark, one of them asked, Pictures I said. Why? They are pictures of teenagers who started smoking. What's the other picture of? Well (look to make eye contact wtih parent, get nothing), that's the dead person. What do you mean? I mean, have a ruler, have a bunch of happy yellow rulers that never ever die.

My volunteer time expended, I started thinking about how while alcohol, tobacco, and firearms my be the Merchants of Death, public health, and especially tobacco, is the Merchant of the Morbid. Handing out bookmarks with pictures of dead kids? What is that about?

And so I developed a philosophy. I think prevention education should start at an early early age in the form of learning to be assertive and to understand messages. I don't think it should be about how kissing a smoker is just as gross. The only people who are talking to five years olds about tobacco are the anti-tobacco people. It's a little premature. Teach kids how to watch, analyze, and make decisions. And then when they are old enough to recognize that the person on the bookmark is dead, give them a bookmark. But hopefully at that point they will have some independent critical thinking going on that helps them say "No stank you" because that's a decision they have made.

Night of the Living Condoms

The whole reason I wrote the post before this one was so that I could write about this. I couldn't write about anything so silly without first getting into the not silly reason for not writing. But now I am free to write, I am being stalked again. Somewhat less gravely yet more oddly. A march of used propylactics is beating its way to my door.

I moved apartments (and shook my human stalker hopefully for good) the day before leaving town for a tournament in Oregon. On the first day of play at this tournament I shortcutted to the portapotties through a thin glut of trees (thin enough so that watchful owners were comfortable tethering dogs there). On the way back I noticed in the ruff the largest condom I have ever seen, a magnum on jumbo juice. We are talking a three inch diameter when relaxed, and it was quite relaxed having obvisouly already performed the service for which it was designed.

Stranger still was that not 5 feet away was the Stuart Little of condoms also on the ground. This one had probably been sold in a box that also contained a wide-eyed Barbie learning about ghonnorhea. I was pretty sure it was not actually a condom but a similarly designed piece of latex with a completely different purpose, expcept it was so close to The Great One.

This is where I made my big mistake. I looked back at the other condom, to confirm the gross oddness of it all. Never look back at the other condom. I did not retrace my steps, I did not bend over; I simply turned my head. This was enough, apparently, to let all the used condoms in the world think I took an interest in them. Or perhaps it is a not so subtle attempt by my mother to gain the some grandchildren by disgusting me from safe sex forever. Or perhaps lovers the Pacific Northwest over have started living in fear of rogue bands of devout Catholics rummaging their trash bins and have started spreading their party favors out of incriminating distance of their homes -- a perimeter that apparently crosses my daily beeswax. it may be only a new awareness on my part, a sixth sense of things having to do with sex (when do you see them? all the time).

Whatever the reason, for the last month I have stumbled onto a dried condom about once a week. This is worst possible frequency because it is long enough that I forget about them and get surprised all over again, but soon enough that I can reactively conjure the image of the last one seen, forming a chain in my brain. The longer it grows the more secure the picture of each of them gets in my memory matter. I can picture the first few but don't remember where I saw them. the last two were behind the building where I work and on the crosswalk I use to get from the busstop to home. On the crosswalk. Was it actually used in a moving vehicle before being thrown out the window? Or did some guy strip it off after an especilly quick evacuation from the boudoir? And why my crosswalk?

When I was younger (really about five minutes ago and probably also currently depending on my serendipity meter) I had the feeling that my chance experiences actually were figures that summed up to my life's quest. I was too close to them to know what it was, but by staying aware I could pick up enough clues to get to wherever the great force of my life wanted me to go. The seeming coincidences in my life were actually the music of the spheres expressed in earth form.

I would rather disregard the condoms than enter them in my proofs of greater cohesion in the world, but their case is becoming pressing. My life is weaving with the paths of too many spent lovers these days for it to only be chance. Do they know each other? Do they work at my grocery store? Is finding used condoms my prelude to figuring out the cure for cancer? I am looking to shriveled latex for connections and answers (looking in my head looking, not looking at the sundried condom on the street looking). Of course, there is nothing there but what is there, but who am I to deny cosmic forces at play? so the semen whisperer walks on.

The girl's guide to getting stalked

Just when I was getting a blog-rythym down, my exploitation of the internet as the biggest blank piece of paper ever was cut short by a stalking experience. Starting mid-May a man began making nocturnal slow-mo break-in-and-enter visits to my SWF apartment. When I was home, when I was sleeping, 2 feet from my head. The first time i nearly managed to convince myself it was simply a very large, very aggressive person-shaped cat. The veil fell away when I returned to the apartment in the harsh light of day (after an early evacuation to the nearby quarters of a very helpul despite answering the phone at 4 AM friend) and saw the rear bedroom window screen pried halfway off. This was my "The hook was stuck in the door!" moment. And if you have never sat around a story-driven campfire on the east coast and so have no idea to what I am referring: Get thee to wikipedia, go! Try most famous scary campfire story ever.

But back to the truth that is much more of a hastle than fiction. The non-cat man came twice more. Once the very next night when I had locked myself in the bathroom after hearing what I again had convinced myself was an aggressive cat (apologies to all the really good natured and innocent cats out there). The same helpful friend from the night before drove up and saw the man trying to get into a second bedroom window. My friend manned up and flung about the front seat of his truck for a weapon that said, "I am so scary you can be garunteed to not have to use me." A sneaker was looked over, a medicine ball tested and dropped, the strangely super-sized tire iron that hung on a before-unnoticed mock rifle rack behind the seats triumphed.

Said friend armed with said tire iron charged from his truck, causing the man attempting with the utmost casualness to get into my bedroom window to slowly step back, slowly bend down, and slowly pick up his orange and black backpack. By the time my friend got to the window, the man had gone around the corner of the building. Since the only thing more dangerous than a stranger with candy is a stranger caught in the act of trying to rape your ex-girlfriend who flees to the other side of a blind corner, my friend did not follow the guy immediately. Instead, he gave my apartment wall some solid whacks with the tire iron, a scare tactic akin to the ape-behavior in the opening scene of Space Oddyssey 2001. In the bathroom, again the veil of the nothing-but-cats fantasy fell away. I broke inside.

My breaking was like that of the glowstick you bring home from the circus and keep in the freezer for freshness until the inevitable day when you can resist its dayglo lure no more (cause, c'mon, you're eight). Except my metamorphesis was not to something glowy and possibly toxic. A vial labelled "victimhood" broke and spilled inside me. I immediately felt the stress on my vascularity as its smoky contents tried to hide from all my other anatomy. When the stuff seeped into my identity I wanted to retract, every bit of open sapce became a vaccuum for evil. The event of someone completely disregarding the simple confidences of personal space, privacy, and safety gave me the feeling that horror could approach me on any and all sides at any time. This feeling necesitated a lot of crying.

The bedside manner of the reporting midnight policeman was to assure me that petty theft happens regularly in the warmer months in my neighborhood. Though the cases he described, practiced petty burglers perching on the edge of a property utnil the owners were out for the evening and then feasting on dainties of ipods, laptops and other satchel-sized electronics was not the case before us. This man came repeatedly to a lighted window to watch a girl and then slowly moved towards her against the intervening windowscreen (there had been quite a few other nights when I had heard "cats"). I would have preferred one of the laptop guys, but we get the crimes we get.

The victim thing is weird. The third time the man came a friend who was serving as protector, or at least dissuader, for the night warned him off. This friend assured me that I could totally beat the guy up, possible blindfolded. My feeling was that I was powerless with him because he saw me as powerless enough to be interfered with and disregarded. Like when your mortal kombat character is getting beaten so hard that pounding the buttons does nothing.

You are relieved from reading further metaphors, because the thrid time was the charm. I moved. For obvious reasons, I will not describe my new apartment (or maybe it is a condo or house) on this public forum.

I affirmed some things about myself through this affair. Cheifly, that I deal with even the most stressful and dangerous events by telling funny stories about them. In retrospect, it seems twisted to have your friends laugh at any story whose cheif character is dubbed, "my rapist-to-be." But laughter is the sound of coping. The thing I learned was that this system only holds out for so long. Once the victim was back in its bottle, I faced some long dark nights of the closed,locked, and curtained windowed soul. My PTSD peaked just in time for me to take the wellness assessment levied on all employees by my new boss, King County. I got my personal road map to wellness in the mail today and it includes a lot of stress management: "You feel like you are not in control of your environment. Is there someone you trust who can help you? I mean, besides PBR." PBR is close to laughter for coping. But is only equally sustainable and generates a lot more gas.

If you like endings, there isn't one really. The police called me at 3 AM on the Saturday after the last visit, but I was not near my phone and missed the summons to make a positive ID on a guy with an orange and black backpack they confronted near my place. When I got back to my contact officer he assured me that stern-talking-tos had been talked. Well that's a relief.

I actually think I saw the guy about a month ago when I was driving onto the U-bridge. My skin went taught before my brain could corroborate the image my eyes were sending. I pulled over my car and walked up to the guy, levelling my straight and determined eyes at his sunken and stooped ones, in a brief fantasy. Really, my victimhood rattled its glass and I continued on the bridge and then on and on and on after that.

Hydrophobia

I think it is time we all learned a little more about rabies. When I was little my family had a goat that provided us with milk and cheese, seriously. Goats don't really get bigger than 4 feet at the shoulder (and that is massive for a goat), but my rememberance of our goat was that is was very large. But after 23 years of looking for a species of horse-sized goats, I have conceeded that the goat was probably normal sized and I was just very small. I also remember that the goat died of rabies and have fabricated some childhood memories of the goat foaming at the mouth and an old yeller style ending. Actually, the goat died of tetnus, a less exciting disease that doesn't involve any foaming.

But rabies came up again in my life the other day on a field trip to the Lewis County Health Department, in Lewis County ( 45 minutes S of Olympia). We were there to examine the strategic planning process, or lack thereof, of a rural health department, but the story they first reeled us in with was one of infectious disease. Apparently, a few months ago a kid found a wee little bat under a rock in the national forest that is in Lewis county. This forest is known for its rabid bats. He picked up the bat (Don't ever pick up the bat) and handed it around to all 40 people at the picnis he was attending. Unfortunately, the kid apparently then released the bat back into the wild. Unfortunate, because, had he taken the bat home to be his merry animate souvenier it could have been tested for rabies. As it was, the bat rejoined its thousand of identical bat brethren. Following the CDC's guidelines, anyone exposed to a bat is not available to be tested for rabies should be assumed to be exposed to rabies and in need of postexposure prophylaxis.

First a word on exposure and then a word on prophylaxis.

The best way to get rabies is to be bitten by an infected animal. However, a bite does not need to occur for exposure to happen. Saliva from the animal can infect someone if it gets into one of many eligible orifices (eyes, nose, mouth) or an open wound. Saliva is the key here; blood, urine, feces -- these bodily fluids are safe rabies-wise. Which means that if you get bat blood in your eye or manage to snort guano, don't worry about it. But if the li'l guy licks you, go to the emergency room. The CDC facts page on rabies suggests precaution above all. It warns that bat bite marks can be tiny enough to not be easily visible, thus you should take precautions after any bat handling, especially if you are "drunk or mentally incompetent." The only way to know for certain if you have been exposed to rabies or not after wild mammal handling is to test the handled animal for rabies. In our case, since there was no bat to test, precaution says you must treat everyone with contact as if they had been exposed, which leads us to prophylaxis.

Prophylaxis for rabies consists of five injections over the course of 28 days. The recommended course of injections has never been known to fail, which means that no one who got them properly had ever contracted rabies. Here's the catch, the sooner you start prophylaxis the better because once symptoms of rabies appear (fever, mood swings, paralysis) the disease is irreversably fatal no matter how many injections you get. The complete course of shots is about 1000 bucks a person.

Now we have the problem of the Lewis County Health Department. These 40 picnicers are considered exposed to rabies and need immediate prophylaxis. It can't really be up to the people themselves to pay because some of them might see the risk as too low to be worth shelling out thousands for their family. But if someone in that family then dies it will be the health department's fault for not communicating the risk well enough, plus it will be horrible. So maybe the National Forest should help pay, after all, it was their bat. But, though the forest owns that land and all the revenue is federal, it is in Lewis County and thus subject to the purview of the Lewis County Health Department for public health issues. So the health department does not have much choice but to order and administer $40,000 of shots, burning a hole in their tiny, rural health department budget. So much for strategic planning. I hope that kid grows up to be a public health worker in a rural area.

But there's more to rabies than bats. I bet everyone is wondering right now: Is it true that rabid people will bite other people and inffect them? Well, maybe, but it hasn't yet been documented. So far, the only hunan-to-human transmission cases occured from organ transplants. There have been about 11 cases, 8 from corneas and 3 from organs. I read up on the organs.

An otherwise healthy man came into the hospital with fever and mood changes and died shortly after admission of a brain hemmorage. It was all sudden, so who knows how much time the ER had to take a history, and the hemmorage was attributed to no specific cause (or at least not one I understood from the article). The family of the patient agreed to organ donation and his organs were cleared to be safe for transplant. You see where this is going.

The person who got his lungs died during surgery, no rabies. The guy who got his liver had a smooth procedure and recovered very quickly, The two people who got kidneys did ok. Within 24-27 days after each surgery, all three transplant paitnets returned to their respective hospitals with non-specific encephilitis (brain swelling, a result of an infection of the central nervous system, like rabies. They all died pretty quickly. You can read the case here http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm53d701a1.htm.

Well, that's just really terrible, You get your organ (maybe you're a recovering alcholic with a decimated liver who got the medical cue to turn your life around, or maybe you're the woman who has not had the means to treat her diabetes and has wrecked kidneys as a result which has made it even harder to get by) and it turns out that the fine print on your new lease on life says 'oh, by the way, along with this life-saving organ you are also getting a painful illness that you will have no way to even suspect until it makes you go crazy and start to die.' Really, really terrible, Was it preventable?

I don't know enough about rabies to say. This particular case has driven more rigorous testing of donated organs. But how sensitive are tests for rabies? For those who don't do the science thing, no diagnostic test is absolute. The really great ones are right about 90% of the time, the good ones about 75-80% and the others . . . well, that's why doctors do a clinical examination as well. My guess is that because human rabies cases are so infrequent, there is no great demand for a really good test and it has not been worthwhile for our Mercks or GSKs to develop one (is that a pharmacynical public health student I hear?).

Where I really got to thinking about prevention in this case was in communication between the hospitals with the transplant patients. The first patient showed symptoms 24 days after transplant, the last 27. Since organs are best served fresh, their transplant dates were probably the same or very close. So there was at least a 3 day gap between the first rabid person and the last. Did part of the first patient's investigation include tracking back to the donor and alerting the hospitals who received that donor's other organs? I don't know. It may not even have made a difference since I am not sure the prophylaxis would be effective that close to the onset of symptoms (if the other patient's hospital had the heads up and decided rabies was a possibility).

In my dream medical world. The first hospital immediately tracks back to the donor and demands that the other organ recipients be examined. truth is, the code of communication between hospitals can sometimes be more of a don't ask/don't tell type of thing. This is rooted in the fact that no one wants anyone else to know if they mess up. Medicine, while pretty damn good most of the time, is not an exact science. Health professionals makes thousands or decisions about every disease and every patient. Some decisions are perfect and some of them are not, but are the best possible decision at the time. The grey space is, when is a less-than-perfect decision simply the inevitable result of combining the best-possible decision-making process with the best available information, and when is it a mistake? And now you understand malpractice insurance.

I read about a case a few years ago where a girl in Canada had some kind of surgery as a result of a condition she had. During the surgery, her doctor decided to administer the regular meds for the condition side-by-side with the anasthesia because that seemed simpler than poking more holes in the girl. She died during the operation because of a reaction to the medication. The doctor was flabbergasted -- it's not all that uncommon of a condition or a surgery - how come she had never heard of anything like this happening before? So she did some investigating and found 3 other kids who had all died in Canada in the last couple of years because of the exact same reaction. The respective hospitals had not covered the events up per se, but hadn't put them out there in any way either. What if someone thought it was a error? Well, no, it turns out the true error was not putting the information from the fatal cases out there so that doctors down the line could make decisions based on a more complete body of information.

A pause in writing now, because I get a little overworked when people die from something that the common sense and practice of publc health could have prevented. Deeeeeeep breeeeeeeeeath.

Rabies, batboy, a quick-acting and uber-responsible poorly resourced health department, liver disease, and hospital culture around adverse events. It's been a journey. Don't handle bats, especially when you are drunk.