The reading and voting community of The Big "C" rallied to help Meat out. He bet that 33% of a given group's zippers were made at the YKK factory in South Korea. Of those who voted to represent their zippers, we found a 52% YKK population.
Thanks, Korea, for all you do to keep us zipped.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Skywards
For us, the hardest part of parenting is enjoying our children. Not that Gemma and Joshua are hard to enjoy. But it's hard to clear out a little room from all the other important stuff--the focus on their characters, the discipline, the training in the admonition of the Lord, not to mention the running of a household and the bringing home of the bacon. When all of that is going on, it's easy to forget that these are two terrific little people who delight us. And who delight in us, too.
Since the diagnosis, it's been a lot easier for me to enjoy these kids.
One such moment:
Bryan brought home a lot of SWAG from Alabama. (Laura guessed it. Alabama??? Why would missile war fighters gather in Alabama? Aren't the country's principle military space programs concentrated here in the Springs? But, yes, we do have some stuff going on in Huntsville.)
SWAG is Stuff We All Get. I don't know if this is a real term, or just one that Michael invented on The Office, which is where I heard it. But I like it. And I'm going with it.
He was without shame in collecting it. Hit every table every day, and as the tables were hosted by various military hardware manufacturers hoping to get the next rocket booster contract, there was a lot of nice SWAG. Laser pointers. Mini flashlights. A lot of calculators. Pens, pens, pens! One of which is in the shape of a rocket and the body of it has a light-up lava lamp thing going on. Canvass tote bags. Stuff, stuff, stuff.
I asked Bryan if anyone was looking at him askance as he "collected." He said, "Everybody was 'collecting'!"
The best of the SWAG were foam rockets with rubber bands on their tips. We took them outside last night and started launching them. They got some serious air. Gemma loved chasing after them and bringing them back to launch again. Joshua held on to one and was determined to fire it. He couldn't do it because the rubber band is heavy duty, but he tried and tried and tried. Then he switched to a different model of rocket that did not have rubber bands and started throwing them, making explosion noises every time one landed. He's 3. I think I'm proud. . .
After a while, it wasn't enough simply to send them skyward. We started launching the same time to see whose went the highest. Then, yes, you saw this coming, we started launching them at each other. Specifically, Bryan fired at me and Gemma swooped in to pick them up. I told her, "Here, Gemma, it's Mommy's turn."
And she said, "No, I'm on Daddy's side!"
Side? There are sides? And you picked him? Where's the love, Gemma?
I was fired upon many times.
Then I cut her fun short and got to the rockets first. Picked them all up and stowed them in my cargo capri's pockets. I had 4 rounds and a target smiling back at me.
"Give something to shoot at!" I told him, thinking he might assume a spread-eagle kind of pose.
Instead, he turned his back to me, canted his hips, looked over his shoulder, then kissed his fingers before using them to pat his butt.
I lost it. Could hardly fire, I was laughing so hard.
This eventually gave way to simply lying on the grass, the 4 of us, watching Bryan launch the rockets above us.
One of the kids on our cul-de-sac drove by in the midst of our activity. "Drove," even though she's 9, in a plastic, battery operated Cadillac Escalade. Gemma and Josh love to drive with her, too, usually. That evening, Gemma looked at her friend, then looked back to me and said, "This is a lot more fun than driving in a plastic car."
Amen.
Since the diagnosis, it's been a lot easier for me to enjoy these kids.
One such moment:
Bryan brought home a lot of SWAG from Alabama. (Laura guessed it. Alabama??? Why would missile war fighters gather in Alabama? Aren't the country's principle military space programs concentrated here in the Springs? But, yes, we do have some stuff going on in Huntsville.)
SWAG is Stuff We All Get. I don't know if this is a real term, or just one that Michael invented on The Office, which is where I heard it. But I like it. And I'm going with it.
He was without shame in collecting it. Hit every table every day, and as the tables were hosted by various military hardware manufacturers hoping to get the next rocket booster contract, there was a lot of nice SWAG. Laser pointers. Mini flashlights. A lot of calculators. Pens, pens, pens! One of which is in the shape of a rocket and the body of it has a light-up lava lamp thing going on. Canvass tote bags. Stuff, stuff, stuff.
I asked Bryan if anyone was looking at him askance as he "collected." He said, "Everybody was 'collecting'!"
The best of the SWAG were foam rockets with rubber bands on their tips. We took them outside last night and started launching them. They got some serious air. Gemma loved chasing after them and bringing them back to launch again. Joshua held on to one and was determined to fire it. He couldn't do it because the rubber band is heavy duty, but he tried and tried and tried. Then he switched to a different model of rocket that did not have rubber bands and started throwing them, making explosion noises every time one landed. He's 3. I think I'm proud. . .
After a while, it wasn't enough simply to send them skyward. We started launching the same time to see whose went the highest. Then, yes, you saw this coming, we started launching them at each other. Specifically, Bryan fired at me and Gemma swooped in to pick them up. I told her, "Here, Gemma, it's Mommy's turn."
And she said, "No, I'm on Daddy's side!"
Side? There are sides? And you picked him? Where's the love, Gemma?
I was fired upon many times.
Then I cut her fun short and got to the rockets first. Picked them all up and stowed them in my cargo capri's pockets. I had 4 rounds and a target smiling back at me.
"Give something to shoot at!" I told him, thinking he might assume a spread-eagle kind of pose.
Instead, he turned his back to me, canted his hips, looked over his shoulder, then kissed his fingers before using them to pat his butt.
I lost it. Could hardly fire, I was laughing so hard.
This eventually gave way to simply lying on the grass, the 4 of us, watching Bryan launch the rockets above us.
One of the kids on our cul-de-sac drove by in the midst of our activity. "Drove," even though she's 9, in a plastic, battery operated Cadillac Escalade. Gemma and Josh love to drive with her, too, usually. That evening, Gemma looked at her friend, then looked back to me and said, "This is a lot more fun than driving in a plastic car."
Amen.
Friday, August 21, 2009
The Votes Have Been Counted!
Whew! I am exhausted. "From what?" you ask. No, not the medicine. No, not from being with the kids this whole week while Bryan has been at a Missile Defense War Fighter's conference. (Would you like to guess which state hosts this conference? Which state could possible be among the hot-bed hubs of missile defense action? You'll never guess.)
No, I'm exhausted from watching those two polls run neck and neck all week long! I couldn't write this post last night because the results were TIED on the TV Theme Song question as of 9:30 my time and I really needed to hit the sack. I woke up to find that a "Yes" vote was cast at the last minute, and so Wyatt, Casper and Felix make it in. Sorry to all of you who felt strongly about the discluding TV theme songs. You should have voted more often.
Laura, sister #1, came up with several in the comments section:
1. Sue (as in A BOY Named Sue - Johnny Cash)
2. Eli's Coming - Three Dog Night
3. Oliver's Army - Elvis Costello
4. Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner - Warren Zevon
Bryan tried to submit "Sue," and I turned him down, arguing that the whole point of the song is that Sue is a girl's name. But I'm going to accept it from Laura because she's the one who got all fancy and "excelled" the name list to make it alphabetical and yet still so easy for me.
And, as Bryan was not here to contest the point, the name officially counts.
That'll teach him to go to (insert improbable state name here) for a week.
Also of note is that I'm including "Thompson" which can be a first name, and is different from "Thomas," which has given us a few uses of "Tom" or "Tommy." Here, of course, it's referring to a weapon. But we've in the past used references to rats, so what's stopping us?
Sarah came up with one of the funnest songs referenced yet, "10 Rounds with Jose Cuervo,"--a great example of why I listen to country music when in the car. I laugh and laugh at this song (and a lot of the others) and Gemma calls from the back, "What are you laughing at?" and I shout back, over the song, "Country music, Gemma!!!"
Suzanne posted a long list of submissions.
1. Joseph - Under African Skies (Paul Simon)
Of course, "Joe/Joey" is already on the list, but I quote her here because I find it interesting that she thought of this song while being, in fact, under African skies. She just got back from a 3 week jaunt there with Madam Secretary, and I think it's awesome that she spent her free moments trying to improve our list here.
2. Galileo - Galileo (Indigo Girls)
Yeah. That's a guy's name. Why aren't boys named Galileo anymore? Or if not boys, how about dogs?
3. Earl - Goodbye Earl (Dixie Chicks)
4. Richard - Richard Cory (Simon and Garfunkel)
5. Lloyd - So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright (Simon and Garfunkel)
6. Rene - Rene and Georgette Magritte After the War (Paul Simon)
7. Jeremy - Jeremy (Pearl Jam)
8. Monty - Monty Got a Raw Deal (REM)
9. Marty - Marty (Rusted Root)
10. Wayne - John Wayne Gacy, Jr (Sufjan Stevens)
Oooh. Wayne! This one also shows up in Springsteen's "Darlington County,"--home of the terrific lyric, "Babe, you're lookin' at two big spenders/The world don't know what me and Wayne might do."
This got me thinking of other Springsteen songs ripe for the Name Game pickin', but wait! Suzanne's not done yet!
11. Romeo - Romeo and Juliet (Indigo Girls, or if you prefer Dire Straits or Romeo had Juliette by Lou Reed)
What do you mean, "if you prefer Dire Straits"? Are you kidding??? Hate to go all Barry on you, but of course all decent human beings prefer the Dire Straits version of that song.
12. Napolean - Waterloo - ABBA
Oh! And Nick kicks himself again as somebody else beats him to the ABBA punch. What a time to be gainfully employed and hard at work, eh Nick?
What a monster list. From just 3 people we have gained 17 names! I don't know what the rest of you are thinking about, but I'm glad these 3 ladies have carried the week.
As for a submission of my own:
Springsteen's "Adam Raise a Cain" - Ka-CHOW. 2 more names. And I've actually met someone named "Cain." This was at the wedding of friend who is an ex-con, and Cain was his best friend in prison. I didn't have the nerve to ask him, "Have you felt in any way cursed by your name?"
So today, we add the following 19 names:
Sue
Eli
Oliver
Roland
Thompson
Jose
Galileo
Earl
Richard
Lloyd
Rene
Jeremy
Monty
Marty
Wayne
Romeo
Napolean
Adam
Cain
I just tried to enter these into the list that Laura set up for me. I followed the directions specifically. I didn't mess around with the cursor, was very careful to put where you said to put it! But I couldn't get the new names to be numbered.
Well, for now, we've got the old list:
Abie
Al (taken as different from Albert, because it might be short for Alan)
Albert
Amadeus
Andy
Anthony
Ben(nie)
Bernie
Bill(y)
Bobby
Buddy
Charles(Charlie)
Chester
Chris
Daniel
Davy
Dean
Eddie
Elvis
Fernando
Frank
Fred
Gene
Gus
Harry
Henry
Jack
Jeremiah
Jessie
Jesus
Jim/James
Joey
John(ny)
Juan
Jude
Julio
Kenneth
Lawrence
Lee
Leroy
Lester
Levon
Louie
Luke
Malcolm
Marciano
Maurice
Michael
Micky
Moses
Paul
Peter
Ricky
Rico
Roy
Stan
Tom(my)
Tony
Vincent
Walter
Whelan
Willie (which comes to 62 names, I'm having a tough time with basic technology today as I couldn't get the numbers to copy. . .)
Plus today's 19, plus the 3 waiting in the wings pending the TV Theme Song poll, for a grand total of. . .
79 names!
We're 79% close to 100. And only 21% away from that mark! I never thought this was possible. Never, never, never.
But now. I mean: 79 names! Now I am certain there must be 21 more out there. Somewhere.
No, I'm exhausted from watching those two polls run neck and neck all week long! I couldn't write this post last night because the results were TIED on the TV Theme Song question as of 9:30 my time and I really needed to hit the sack. I woke up to find that a "Yes" vote was cast at the last minute, and so Wyatt, Casper and Felix make it in. Sorry to all of you who felt strongly about the discluding TV theme songs. You should have voted more often.
Laura, sister #1, came up with several in the comments section:
1. Sue (as in A BOY Named Sue - Johnny Cash)
2. Eli's Coming - Three Dog Night
3. Oliver's Army - Elvis Costello
4. Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner - Warren Zevon
Bryan tried to submit "Sue," and I turned him down, arguing that the whole point of the song is that Sue is a girl's name. But I'm going to accept it from Laura because she's the one who got all fancy and "excelled" the name list to make it alphabetical and yet still so easy for me.
And, as Bryan was not here to contest the point, the name officially counts.
That'll teach him to go to (insert improbable state name here) for a week.
Also of note is that I'm including "Thompson" which can be a first name, and is different from "Thomas," which has given us a few uses of "Tom" or "Tommy." Here, of course, it's referring to a weapon. But we've in the past used references to rats, so what's stopping us?
Sarah came up with one of the funnest songs referenced yet, "10 Rounds with Jose Cuervo,"--a great example of why I listen to country music when in the car. I laugh and laugh at this song (and a lot of the others) and Gemma calls from the back, "What are you laughing at?" and I shout back, over the song, "Country music, Gemma!!!"
Suzanne posted a long list of submissions.
1. Joseph - Under African Skies (Paul Simon)
Of course, "Joe/Joey" is already on the list, but I quote her here because I find it interesting that she thought of this song while being, in fact, under African skies. She just got back from a 3 week jaunt there with Madam Secretary, and I think it's awesome that she spent her free moments trying to improve our list here.
2. Galileo - Galileo (Indigo Girls)
Yeah. That's a guy's name. Why aren't boys named Galileo anymore? Or if not boys, how about dogs?
3. Earl - Goodbye Earl (Dixie Chicks)
4. Richard - Richard Cory (Simon and Garfunkel)
5. Lloyd - So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright (Simon and Garfunkel)
6. Rene - Rene and Georgette Magritte After the War (Paul Simon)
7. Jeremy - Jeremy (Pearl Jam)
8. Monty - Monty Got a Raw Deal (REM)
9. Marty - Marty (Rusted Root)
10. Wayne - John Wayne Gacy, Jr (Sufjan Stevens)
Oooh. Wayne! This one also shows up in Springsteen's "Darlington County,"--home of the terrific lyric, "Babe, you're lookin' at two big spenders/The world don't know what me and Wayne might do."
This got me thinking of other Springsteen songs ripe for the Name Game pickin', but wait! Suzanne's not done yet!
11. Romeo - Romeo and Juliet (Indigo Girls, or if you prefer Dire Straits or Romeo had Juliette by Lou Reed)
What do you mean, "if you prefer Dire Straits"? Are you kidding??? Hate to go all Barry on you, but of course all decent human beings prefer the Dire Straits version of that song.
12. Napolean - Waterloo - ABBA
Oh! And Nick kicks himself again as somebody else beats him to the ABBA punch. What a time to be gainfully employed and hard at work, eh Nick?
What a monster list. From just 3 people we have gained 17 names! I don't know what the rest of you are thinking about, but I'm glad these 3 ladies have carried the week.
As for a submission of my own:
Springsteen's "Adam Raise a Cain" - Ka-CHOW. 2 more names. And I've actually met someone named "Cain." This was at the wedding of friend who is an ex-con, and Cain was his best friend in prison. I didn't have the nerve to ask him, "Have you felt in any way cursed by your name?"
So today, we add the following 19 names:
Sue
Eli
Oliver
Roland
Thompson
Jose
Galileo
Earl
Richard
Lloyd
Rene
Jeremy
Monty
Marty
Wayne
Romeo
Napolean
Adam
Cain
I just tried to enter these into the list that Laura set up for me. I followed the directions specifically. I didn't mess around with the cursor, was very careful to put where you said to put it! But I couldn't get the new names to be numbered.
Well, for now, we've got the old list:
Abie
Al (taken as different from Albert, because it might be short for Alan)
Albert
Amadeus
Andy
Anthony
Ben(nie)
Bernie
Bill(y)
Bobby
Buddy
Charles(Charlie)
Chester
Chris
Daniel
Davy
Dean
Eddie
Elvis
Fernando
Frank
Fred
Gene
Gus
Harry
Henry
Jack
Jeremiah
Jessie
Jesus
Jim/James
Joey
John(ny)
Juan
Jude
Julio
Kenneth
Lawrence
Lee
Leroy
Lester
Levon
Louie
Luke
Malcolm
Marciano
Maurice
Michael
Micky
Moses
Paul
Peter
Ricky
Rico
Roy
Stan
Tom(my)
Tony
Vincent
Walter
Whelan
Willie (which comes to 62 names, I'm having a tough time with basic technology today as I couldn't get the numbers to copy. . .)
Plus today's 19, plus the 3 waiting in the wings pending the TV Theme Song poll, for a grand total of. . .
79 names!
We're 79% close to 100. And only 21% away from that mark! I never thought this was possible. Never, never, never.
But now. I mean: 79 names! Now I am certain there must be 21 more out there. Somewhere.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Last Day to Vote!
We have two burning questions running hot at the Big "C." Take a look to your left. And then vote!
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
The Thinning
It began last night in the shower. One hand through the hair before I shampooed. Out came many strands. We all lose a few hairs each day, in each shower, right? Tried the other side. Many more strands.
I had the option of waiting a day or two or three more. Maybe even another week. But this afternoon, I shaved it off. This, for several reasons:
1. My hair really hurt. You know that feeling of letting your hair down after it's been pinned up all evening? (Sorry, male readers. You'll have to choose to believe the women in your life on this one.) Your hair is sore after that, right at the root. For a few minutes, at least. My hair was feeling like that all the time.
2. Why delay the inevitable if it means dropping hair all over my house? The Merry Maids came today, and I was mindful that everything had just been vacuumed.
3. It's really annoying to pull out so much hair while in the shower. There it is, in my hand. Can't send it down the drain. So I twist it up so it holds together, then drape it over the shower handle where it awaits being tossed into the trash afterwards. Repeat. Shampoo. Takes at least 6 swipes through to rinse all the soap out, each soap yielding another handful. Twist each one. Drape each one.
It was the longest shower of my life!
I now look like Natalie Portman in V is for Vendetta.
But soon I'll look less like her, and more like someone else. Though without the hat.
Speaking of which, I do have a cute little hat to wear that a friend gave me. And a wig or two. Photos of those are forthcoming, but I need to wait until all my hair is gone lest the natural hairline throw off the whole look.
I'm not too bothered by all this. I've had a few emotional moments--just more grief--but now that the deed is done, I figure, "Eh." The real bummer of it, for me, is that I feel marked as a cancer patient. Just today, I was chatting with a grandmother (whom I'd just met) as we watched our kids play at a park and she was going on and on about the foot problems she'd been having. I thought to myself, "If she knew about me, she'd not be telling me all this. Or maybe she would, but would do so comparatively. As in 'Of course, it's not as bad as what you're dealing with.'"
And I find that I pretty much like not being thought of a breast cancer sojourner by total strangers.
Hey! "Sojourner" as opposed to "warrior"? Hmm. . . )
That's what a wig is for, I suppose.
The other comfort is that it will grow back. Unlike certain other parts recently cut off of my body.
I saved some hair in a little baggie so I can compare color with the new growth. And I asked Gemma what color she thinks that will be. Purple? Blue? She's hoping for pink.
I had the option of waiting a day or two or three more. Maybe even another week. But this afternoon, I shaved it off. This, for several reasons:
1. My hair really hurt. You know that feeling of letting your hair down after it's been pinned up all evening? (Sorry, male readers. You'll have to choose to believe the women in your life on this one.) Your hair is sore after that, right at the root. For a few minutes, at least. My hair was feeling like that all the time.
2. Why delay the inevitable if it means dropping hair all over my house? The Merry Maids came today, and I was mindful that everything had just been vacuumed.
3. It's really annoying to pull out so much hair while in the shower. There it is, in my hand. Can't send it down the drain. So I twist it up so it holds together, then drape it over the shower handle where it awaits being tossed into the trash afterwards. Repeat. Shampoo. Takes at least 6 swipes through to rinse all the soap out, each soap yielding another handful. Twist each one. Drape each one.
It was the longest shower of my life!
I now look like Natalie Portman in V is for Vendetta.
But soon I'll look less like her, and more like someone else. Though without the hat.
Speaking of which, I do have a cute little hat to wear that a friend gave me. And a wig or two. Photos of those are forthcoming, but I need to wait until all my hair is gone lest the natural hairline throw off the whole look.
I'm not too bothered by all this. I've had a few emotional moments--just more grief--but now that the deed is done, I figure, "Eh." The real bummer of it, for me, is that I feel marked as a cancer patient. Just today, I was chatting with a grandmother (whom I'd just met) as we watched our kids play at a park and she was going on and on about the foot problems she'd been having. I thought to myself, "If she knew about me, she'd not be telling me all this. Or maybe she would, but would do so comparatively. As in 'Of course, it's not as bad as what you're dealing with.'"
And I find that I pretty much like not being thought of a breast cancer sojourner by total strangers.
Hey! "Sojourner" as opposed to "warrior"? Hmm. . . )
That's what a wig is for, I suppose.
The other comfort is that it will grow back. Unlike certain other parts recently cut off of my body.
I saved some hair in a little baggie so I can compare color with the new growth. And I asked Gemma what color she thinks that will be. Purple? Blue? She's hoping for pink.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
VOTE EARLY, VOTE OFTEN
We are burdened by 2 dire questions, folks. Look to your left and vote, vote, vote. And if they don't make sense, read the latest Name Game posting and The Land of Call Signs.
A Note on Games
Yesterday was Monday, so I went to the chemo barn.
My friend, Chris, has been taking me to the protein days, and having her along makes it a fun afternoon. Last week, we tried sitting at the game table in order to play Scrabble, but the position of my port doesn't allow for sitting upright. I have to stay in a recliner, reclined.
Yesterday, I brought my Cribbage board and taught the game to Chris. She humored me. And caught on quickly. And before we knew it, my box was beeping the "All Done" signal.
I love Cribbage. Don't you? What's that? You don't know how to play? Well, get on it!
While on the subject of games, I need to tell you about our weekend's garage sale Find. Namely, The Game of Life. Mint condition. $2.
That's a lot to pay for a garage sale game, you're saying. Surely you could have bargained it down to a dollar, Amy. Right?
Well I wasn't even going to try, that's how much I wanted it.
Because it was The Game of Life, old school. The kind Janice and I played at the McKellar's house when we were young. You know this game: First, you land on a space that designates your profession, and the ideal was the lawyer or doctor space, because they payed the most. And if you ended up as a teacher or, God help you, a journalist, then you wanted to land on the "do over" space so you could get a new profession, hopefully one that would pay more.
From there, you moved your car along the road of life. There were a few choices about which prong of the fork in the road to take. The way to determine which route was to count up how many "Have a child" spaces were ahead of you. The more, the better, because that increased your odds of landing on one, getting a little pink or blue peg for your car, and continuing on in Life with that child.
Why did you want so many kids? Why did you want to be the player who had to use a second car just to tote them around???
Because in the end, you would trade them in for money.
And in the Game of Life, she with the most money at the end wins.
I love this game. Only Americans would invent it. And then play it as a family. I love the big, multi-colored spinner in the middle, and how you have to have just the right touch to make it whiz around instead of skidding to a pre-mature stop.
I love that the worst thing to befall a player has to do with buying an uncle's skunk farm, which turns out to be a bad investment. Recently, I've come to appreciate also how no one ever lands on the "You Beat the Odds and developed a rare-er form of cancer at an improbably young age; if you have insurance, skip 3 turns, if you don't have insurance, skip 3 turns and pay $140,000!" space. (FYI: The military provides awesome insurance.)
And I love the box cover. Featuring the photograph--not illustration--of a Mom, Dad, son and daughter, all immaculately dressed and groomed in 1983 fashion, having the time of their lives playing this game.
But something tragic happened to Life a few years ago--something worse than being stuck with a skunk farm: They "updated" it. I've played this new version. It includes real estate choices, and "life experience" cards that are really just huge chunks of money that ultimately always decide the winner, regardless of how "well" he played the rest.
I can't stand the new version. It creates the illusion that the Game of Life (the game, not life itself) is more than just chance. That it requires several good choices to make. Old School Game of Life was all about chance, and that's why it was so carefree. Should we really be burdening 8-year-olds with the decision of whether to rent or buy a home? Especially when the Game of Life rules don't mimic, at all, the decision in real life, so it's not like we could even think of it as good, common sense training?
Well. The point is, I like Old School Life. And now I own it. And I look forward to playing it with our kids in about 3 years.
My friend, Chris, has been taking me to the protein days, and having her along makes it a fun afternoon. Last week, we tried sitting at the game table in order to play Scrabble, but the position of my port doesn't allow for sitting upright. I have to stay in a recliner, reclined.
Yesterday, I brought my Cribbage board and taught the game to Chris. She humored me. And caught on quickly. And before we knew it, my box was beeping the "All Done" signal.
I love Cribbage. Don't you? What's that? You don't know how to play? Well, get on it!
While on the subject of games, I need to tell you about our weekend's garage sale Find. Namely, The Game of Life. Mint condition. $2.
That's a lot to pay for a garage sale game, you're saying. Surely you could have bargained it down to a dollar, Amy. Right?
Well I wasn't even going to try, that's how much I wanted it.
Because it was The Game of Life, old school. The kind Janice and I played at the McKellar's house when we were young. You know this game: First, you land on a space that designates your profession, and the ideal was the lawyer or doctor space, because they payed the most. And if you ended up as a teacher or, God help you, a journalist, then you wanted to land on the "do over" space so you could get a new profession, hopefully one that would pay more.
From there, you moved your car along the road of life. There were a few choices about which prong of the fork in the road to take. The way to determine which route was to count up how many "Have a child" spaces were ahead of you. The more, the better, because that increased your odds of landing on one, getting a little pink or blue peg for your car, and continuing on in Life with that child.
Why did you want so many kids? Why did you want to be the player who had to use a second car just to tote them around???
Because in the end, you would trade them in for money.
And in the Game of Life, she with the most money at the end wins.
I love this game. Only Americans would invent it. And then play it as a family. I love the big, multi-colored spinner in the middle, and how you have to have just the right touch to make it whiz around instead of skidding to a pre-mature stop.
I love that the worst thing to befall a player has to do with buying an uncle's skunk farm, which turns out to be a bad investment. Recently, I've come to appreciate also how no one ever lands on the "You Beat the Odds and developed a rare-er form of cancer at an improbably young age; if you have insurance, skip 3 turns, if you don't have insurance, skip 3 turns and pay $140,000!" space. (FYI: The military provides awesome insurance.)
And I love the box cover. Featuring the photograph--not illustration--of a Mom, Dad, son and daughter, all immaculately dressed and groomed in 1983 fashion, having the time of their lives playing this game.
But something tragic happened to Life a few years ago--something worse than being stuck with a skunk farm: They "updated" it. I've played this new version. It includes real estate choices, and "life experience" cards that are really just huge chunks of money that ultimately always decide the winner, regardless of how "well" he played the rest.
I can't stand the new version. It creates the illusion that the Game of Life (the game, not life itself) is more than just chance. That it requires several good choices to make. Old School Game of Life was all about chance, and that's why it was so carefree. Should we really be burdening 8-year-olds with the decision of whether to rent or buy a home? Especially when the Game of Life rules don't mimic, at all, the decision in real life, so it's not like we could even think of it as good, common sense training?
Well. The point is, I like Old School Life. And now I own it. And I look forward to playing it with our kids in about 3 years.
Monday, August 17, 2009
HAVE YOU VOTED?
Look to your left. There are two polls and we here at The Big "C" are desperately interested. It's easy. And important. For the YKK zipper question, feel free to vote according to whichever zipper you are wearing today. This is Meat's anatomy we're talking about here--if we don't hit 50% YKK, he's in a lot of trouble.
(If you don't understand the above, read Land of Call Signs below.)
(If you don't understand the above, read Land of Call Signs below.)
Anatomy of a Choice
If you’ve read all of “The Medical Story” posts, you know that early on, we had a Big Choice to make. Should we do surgery or chemo first?
I’ve written without much description that we knew how God was leading us. I want to explain more about that for 2 reasons: 1) I want my children to know and not wonder, years from now, what I was talking about and 2) A few people have mentioned that they wonder what I was talking about.
So: surgery or chemo first?
We chose surgery. We chose a very radical surgery that, we were told, would leave me permanently deformed with a caved-in chest, without strength on the right side, with nerve damage that would limit my range of motion and let my scapula wing out sometimes, and with a cancerous lymph node stuck under my collar bone.
Why surgery?
1. From the beginning, it appealed to my common sense. I knew that the advantage of chemo first is prognostic—e.g. we can see if the tumor responds to treatment and so know for certain that all the cells we can’t see are responding, too. But leaving a tumor and cancerous lymph nodes in for longer than necessary seemed. . .dangerous. Even though statistics show that it is not.
So, from the first, this was my bias.
2. One of the first things I learned about breast cancer is that everyone knows someone who’s had it. For as much as statistics show that the outcomes are as good for surgery first as they are for chemo first, every single story I heard of a breast cancer patient featured
A) a woman who had surgery first and survived, or
B) a woman who had a lumpectomy and then had to go back for mastectomy and chemo, or
C) a woman who had chemo first and then surgery and then, sadly, the cancer came back.
Every single story. And I’d put the number of stories at 30. At least.
I didn’t hear one single story that featured a chemo-first patient who was now cancer free. (Or, in the case of one good friend, a child who endured several additional years of cancer recurrence and chemo before finally becoming cancer-free.) Statistics show that there are as many out there as surgery-first patients who are now cancer free. But I didn’t hear about any of them.
This is what we took to be the first super-natural leading. God speaking through circumstances of whom I happened to be meeting and which cancer patients they knew. Not a big thing. Not enough to base a whole decision on. But it was part of the caseload.
3. When we met with Mayfield for the first time, we concluded the appointment by scheduling the surgery for the following Friday. We were in no way locked into it. I felt completely free to cancel it, or make it a mere port installation. But I also felt a great peace about it. No misgivings at all. Plenty of grief, sure. But not even a slight inclination that maybe we shouldn’t.
We took this non-anxiety to be supernatural as well. We believe God is real and that He loves me and wants to see His will done in my life (even if that includes deformation and other side effects). If this wasn’t cool with Him, I expected the living God to tell me or us with some kind of emotional content: anxiety, disease, non-peace, unsettledness. But we experienced none of this.
4. As I thought and prayed about the choice, Biblical examples kept coming to mind of “cutting out the cancer.” Most days, I read a children’s Bible with the kids and during this time we “happened” to be on the part where many Israelites were put to death because they’d led everyone to idolatry.
And in my own reading of Acts, I “happened” to get to the story of the two fakers in the early church who tried to pull off fraud. God struck them dead. Aside from the places where I was reading, other Bible stories came to mind, and all of them had a certain theme: Don’t mess around with the trouble-causers. Cut the trouble out.
Now, there are also plenty of stories in the Bible that describe redeeming the trouble. It’s definitely God’s character to re-claim what has been spoiled and make it good again. Maybe if these portions of scripture had come to mind and our attention, we would have had to think about whether God was leading us to allow the chemo to re-claim my body from the cancer.
But these portions didn’t come to our attention. Again, we took this as more leading towards the surgery option. It’s important to note that this wasn’t Russian Roulette with a Bible—e.g. Flip open to random page, see what’s there and interpret an answer from it. These examples were what came to mind as we prayed, and what were already on the page we were already reading at that time. Was this God’s timing? That we should happen to be at those portions of scripture on those days?
Why would we think it wasn’t God’s timing?
5. A week after our first appointment with Mayfield, we had our second. The pre- surgical consult. We went in ready for mastectomy, knowing that the MRI showed the muscle had cancer, too, knowing he’d cut out a hefty portion of it.
Mayfield launched into a very serious talk about how serious this surgery was.
OK. . . We knew this already. . .
Then he told us that for the last week, since first meeting us, he hadn’t slept well. He’d had disturbing dreams. That there’d been no good rest because he couldn’t stop thinking about me and my children. He would read Scripture to help ease his mind enough to sleep. His wife, obviously, noticed the distraction and had started praying for him and for me. Finally, he told us that in the case of most other patients, he’d actually recommend chemo first. But that he really thought we needed to do the surgery, as hard as that would be.
I asked, ‘Do you get like this with everyone?’
And he looked at me with disbelief. Did that question even make sense? He’s a surgeon. He’d be dead by age 40 if he bore this much angst over everyone. “No,” he said, “That’s my point.”
“Well. . .” I began, “Are you leading up to some extra terrible news? Because we’re already going to do the surgery.”
No additional news. Why had he given such an intense plea about his disturbed sleep? He just really thought we needed to know all of this.
Okedoke.
We left the office in great spirits. I remarked to Bryan that of all the side effects Mayfield had described, the one I really wanted to avoid was the arm swelling—a potential effect of removing the lymph nodes. I said to him, “Let’s pray against that one.”
10 minutes later, Dr. Markus, the oncologist called with news: He was looking at the detailed pathology report and mine was the kind of cancer that is very responsive to the H protein. So we could do chemo starting next week, shrink this sucker down, maybe even do breast conservation surgery in the end, but almost definitely avoid the “terribly morbid” surgery that would take my muscle as well as breast.
The lymph nodes would still come out after chemo. This means I’d still be at risk for arm swelling. That’s key. If we had left Mayfield’s office, and I had remarked to Bryan, “I just wish there were some other way. Let’s ask God for some other way” and then gotten the call from Markus, maybe the decision would have been different.
Instead, I had very specifically said that the only part I really wanted to avoid was a swollen arm for the rest of my life. And the option that came in 10 minutes later, while offering to change a lot, would definitely not change my risk for a swollen arm.
I told Markus we would call back after talking about it.
This chemo option was tempting. Are you kidding me? Not losing my right pectoralis? Possibly conserving my breast? Of course it looked good.
But, but, but. We had been praying—and others had prayed with and for us—for discernment and wisdom. That we would choose what God would have us choose. What did we expect His help to look like? Writing in the sky? A letter from God in our mailbox? He’d given us scripture, circumstances and a believing-surgeon who had just given a passionate recommendation for surgery even though at the moment he was giving it, we weren’t even thinking there was another option worth considering.
What were we to do with all of the above input? And the absence of any input recommending the chemo first option? Could we write it off? Could I say that, given my bias from point #1, all the rest feel into place because that’s what I wanted/expected?
Yeah. I could have said that. But then what does that say about my alleged relationship with the living God? That He let me fake myself out? That He let me receive as His leadership something that was really just a psychological mistake?
I thought of Lot as we ate lunch and talked about this decision. I specifically mentioned him to Bryan. The famous Lot who enjoyed success and the same kind of wealth as Abraham did. And eventually, their flocks were too big to share space, so Abraham told him: You pick a region and I’ll go the opposite way. Go ahead. Pick.
And Lot “raised his eyes and saw with them” that this one direction was good and fertile. He chose it. This was his pattern for the rest of his life, to walk by sight. He might have had one foot in God’s kingdom some of the time, but all of the time, he had his other foot in the world and he chose according to what looked good and right to him. Of course, this is a life that ended in tragedy.
I told Bryan I felt a similar temptation as Lot did. Look with our eyes and we see the possibility of a healthy breast in the future, and at the very least, an avoidance of a severe procedure. With our eyes, one direction looked good.
But faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. We’re certain that God is powerful enough to lead people as stupid as we are in the way we should go if, in our hearts, we truly welcome that leadership. We’re sure that God’s version of what my life should look like is the best possible version, even if it includes deformity following a bummer surgery.
In those two days before surgery, I was a wreck. A good portion of this was due to my sugar reaction to the radioactive glucose and the rough recovery from it. But a bigger portion was the sheer sadness over the coming surgery. This all was probably even harder on Bryan, who, of course, couldn’t do much to help. He kept saying, “Babe, you don’t have to do this. If you’re not feeling a peace about this, we can reconsider.”
And I kept telling him, “No, that’s just it. I have complete peace about this, which is why I know it must happen, and it just sucks that this has to happen.” I can only describe the actual feeling of those few days as being pressed. Being absolutely wrung tight.
But scripture promises that His joy comes in the morning. The morning came pretty quickly for me, didn’t it?
Praise be to God, for the miraculous surgery that left my muscle behind and pulled that last lymph node out. Praise Him for being the Good Shepherd in our lives. Praise Him that His staff is with us every day, and not just on the days when the Big Choice is before us.
I’ve written without much description that we knew how God was leading us. I want to explain more about that for 2 reasons: 1) I want my children to know and not wonder, years from now, what I was talking about and 2) A few people have mentioned that they wonder what I was talking about.
So: surgery or chemo first?
We chose surgery. We chose a very radical surgery that, we were told, would leave me permanently deformed with a caved-in chest, without strength on the right side, with nerve damage that would limit my range of motion and let my scapula wing out sometimes, and with a cancerous lymph node stuck under my collar bone.
Why surgery?
1. From the beginning, it appealed to my common sense. I knew that the advantage of chemo first is prognostic—e.g. we can see if the tumor responds to treatment and so know for certain that all the cells we can’t see are responding, too. But leaving a tumor and cancerous lymph nodes in for longer than necessary seemed. . .dangerous. Even though statistics show that it is not.
So, from the first, this was my bias.
2. One of the first things I learned about breast cancer is that everyone knows someone who’s had it. For as much as statistics show that the outcomes are as good for surgery first as they are for chemo first, every single story I heard of a breast cancer patient featured
A) a woman who had surgery first and survived, or
B) a woman who had a lumpectomy and then had to go back for mastectomy and chemo, or
C) a woman who had chemo first and then surgery and then, sadly, the cancer came back.
Every single story. And I’d put the number of stories at 30. At least.
I didn’t hear one single story that featured a chemo-first patient who was now cancer free. (Or, in the case of one good friend, a child who endured several additional years of cancer recurrence and chemo before finally becoming cancer-free.) Statistics show that there are as many out there as surgery-first patients who are now cancer free. But I didn’t hear about any of them.
This is what we took to be the first super-natural leading. God speaking through circumstances of whom I happened to be meeting and which cancer patients they knew. Not a big thing. Not enough to base a whole decision on. But it was part of the caseload.
3. When we met with Mayfield for the first time, we concluded the appointment by scheduling the surgery for the following Friday. We were in no way locked into it. I felt completely free to cancel it, or make it a mere port installation. But I also felt a great peace about it. No misgivings at all. Plenty of grief, sure. But not even a slight inclination that maybe we shouldn’t.
We took this non-anxiety to be supernatural as well. We believe God is real and that He loves me and wants to see His will done in my life (even if that includes deformation and other side effects). If this wasn’t cool with Him, I expected the living God to tell me or us with some kind of emotional content: anxiety, disease, non-peace, unsettledness. But we experienced none of this.
4. As I thought and prayed about the choice, Biblical examples kept coming to mind of “cutting out the cancer.” Most days, I read a children’s Bible with the kids and during this time we “happened” to be on the part where many Israelites were put to death because they’d led everyone to idolatry.
And in my own reading of Acts, I “happened” to get to the story of the two fakers in the early church who tried to pull off fraud. God struck them dead. Aside from the places where I was reading, other Bible stories came to mind, and all of them had a certain theme: Don’t mess around with the trouble-causers. Cut the trouble out.
Now, there are also plenty of stories in the Bible that describe redeeming the trouble. It’s definitely God’s character to re-claim what has been spoiled and make it good again. Maybe if these portions of scripture had come to mind and our attention, we would have had to think about whether God was leading us to allow the chemo to re-claim my body from the cancer.
But these portions didn’t come to our attention. Again, we took this as more leading towards the surgery option. It’s important to note that this wasn’t Russian Roulette with a Bible—e.g. Flip open to random page, see what’s there and interpret an answer from it. These examples were what came to mind as we prayed, and what were already on the page we were already reading at that time. Was this God’s timing? That we should happen to be at those portions of scripture on those days?
Why would we think it wasn’t God’s timing?
5. A week after our first appointment with Mayfield, we had our second. The pre- surgical consult. We went in ready for mastectomy, knowing that the MRI showed the muscle had cancer, too, knowing he’d cut out a hefty portion of it.
Mayfield launched into a very serious talk about how serious this surgery was.
OK. . . We knew this already. . .
Then he told us that for the last week, since first meeting us, he hadn’t slept well. He’d had disturbing dreams. That there’d been no good rest because he couldn’t stop thinking about me and my children. He would read Scripture to help ease his mind enough to sleep. His wife, obviously, noticed the distraction and had started praying for him and for me. Finally, he told us that in the case of most other patients, he’d actually recommend chemo first. But that he really thought we needed to do the surgery, as hard as that would be.
I asked, ‘Do you get like this with everyone?’
And he looked at me with disbelief. Did that question even make sense? He’s a surgeon. He’d be dead by age 40 if he bore this much angst over everyone. “No,” he said, “That’s my point.”
“Well. . .” I began, “Are you leading up to some extra terrible news? Because we’re already going to do the surgery.”
No additional news. Why had he given such an intense plea about his disturbed sleep? He just really thought we needed to know all of this.
Okedoke.
We left the office in great spirits. I remarked to Bryan that of all the side effects Mayfield had described, the one I really wanted to avoid was the arm swelling—a potential effect of removing the lymph nodes. I said to him, “Let’s pray against that one.”
10 minutes later, Dr. Markus, the oncologist called with news: He was looking at the detailed pathology report and mine was the kind of cancer that is very responsive to the H protein. So we could do chemo starting next week, shrink this sucker down, maybe even do breast conservation surgery in the end, but almost definitely avoid the “terribly morbid” surgery that would take my muscle as well as breast.
The lymph nodes would still come out after chemo. This means I’d still be at risk for arm swelling. That’s key. If we had left Mayfield’s office, and I had remarked to Bryan, “I just wish there were some other way. Let’s ask God for some other way” and then gotten the call from Markus, maybe the decision would have been different.
Instead, I had very specifically said that the only part I really wanted to avoid was a swollen arm for the rest of my life. And the option that came in 10 minutes later, while offering to change a lot, would definitely not change my risk for a swollen arm.
I told Markus we would call back after talking about it.
This chemo option was tempting. Are you kidding me? Not losing my right pectoralis? Possibly conserving my breast? Of course it looked good.
But, but, but. We had been praying—and others had prayed with and for us—for discernment and wisdom. That we would choose what God would have us choose. What did we expect His help to look like? Writing in the sky? A letter from God in our mailbox? He’d given us scripture, circumstances and a believing-surgeon who had just given a passionate recommendation for surgery even though at the moment he was giving it, we weren’t even thinking there was another option worth considering.
What were we to do with all of the above input? And the absence of any input recommending the chemo first option? Could we write it off? Could I say that, given my bias from point #1, all the rest feel into place because that’s what I wanted/expected?
Yeah. I could have said that. But then what does that say about my alleged relationship with the living God? That He let me fake myself out? That He let me receive as His leadership something that was really just a psychological mistake?
I thought of Lot as we ate lunch and talked about this decision. I specifically mentioned him to Bryan. The famous Lot who enjoyed success and the same kind of wealth as Abraham did. And eventually, their flocks were too big to share space, so Abraham told him: You pick a region and I’ll go the opposite way. Go ahead. Pick.
And Lot “raised his eyes and saw with them” that this one direction was good and fertile. He chose it. This was his pattern for the rest of his life, to walk by sight. He might have had one foot in God’s kingdom some of the time, but all of the time, he had his other foot in the world and he chose according to what looked good and right to him. Of course, this is a life that ended in tragedy.
I told Bryan I felt a similar temptation as Lot did. Look with our eyes and we see the possibility of a healthy breast in the future, and at the very least, an avoidance of a severe procedure. With our eyes, one direction looked good.
But faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. We’re certain that God is powerful enough to lead people as stupid as we are in the way we should go if, in our hearts, we truly welcome that leadership. We’re sure that God’s version of what my life should look like is the best possible version, even if it includes deformity following a bummer surgery.
In those two days before surgery, I was a wreck. A good portion of this was due to my sugar reaction to the radioactive glucose and the rough recovery from it. But a bigger portion was the sheer sadness over the coming surgery. This all was probably even harder on Bryan, who, of course, couldn’t do much to help. He kept saying, “Babe, you don’t have to do this. If you’re not feeling a peace about this, we can reconsider.”
And I kept telling him, “No, that’s just it. I have complete peace about this, which is why I know it must happen, and it just sucks that this has to happen.” I can only describe the actual feeling of those few days as being pressed. Being absolutely wrung tight.
But scripture promises that His joy comes in the morning. The morning came pretty quickly for me, didn’t it?
Praise be to God, for the miraculous surgery that left my muscle behind and pulled that last lymph node out. Praise Him for being the Good Shepherd in our lives. Praise Him that His staff is with us every day, and not just on the days when the Big Choice is before us.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Land of Call Signs
I've been thinking of our time in Korea since last Sunday Storytime. Here's one that you haven't read yet, even if you did get my letters from Seoul.
18 June 2005
We’ve been married for 6 years now and I was thinking the other day about what I like most about doing the military thing. I’m pretty sure it’s the language of it. The military has one of its own, full of acronyms and shortened, unexpected names for things.
On Bryan’s ships, for instance, officers had to get qualified for different positions or duty stations and part of the process was sitting for an oral board with the senior officers. The custom is to bring an edible gift that will be eaten by the board as the examination proceeds. The gift is called, “Smack.” As in, “I have to bring some smack in for the board tomorrow.” Why do they call it “smack”? Because you’re kissing up.
When we have two of something that we only need one of, we call the second one a “battle spare.” When someone gets stuck talking to the motor mouth in the room and absorbs all the excessive chatter while the rest of us are freed up to enjoy the party, the guy who is stuck is called “canon fodder.”
It’s all so clever. I just love it.
And of course, there are the call signs. Pilots all have one because they need one. And they don’t get to choose them, either, so they are never cool like “Maverick” or “Ice Man.” Those are names that a twenty-two year old would pick for himself, not the name the guys you fly with want to use when talking to you at 30 thousand feet. No, real call signs finely blend an apt description with a fair amount of insensitivity.
One of our unaccompanied friends here is Charles, call sign “Hawk” because he’s bald, black and cut out of granite, much like the guy on Spencer for Hire.
One guy here is called “Panda” because he’s as overweight as the Air Force allows and pandas are the one creature on Earth that would rather eat than mate. (To this, Panda himself explains, “But I’ve got 3 kids, so don’t think it’s accurate.“)
Brad, a redhead on our cul-de-sac, is call signed “Archie.” Neil earned himself the call sign “Rude Boy” because of some bad gas he once passed in a two-man cockpit.
A pilot’s call sign travels with him, even when he’s not on a flying tour. I generally use an officer’s real name because using their special language feels too contrived, like a goody-two-shoes girl deciding to cuss. But sometimes a call sign suits a guy so well, I cannot resist it.
For instance, I started out calling one of our unaccompanied friends, “Todd,” as in “Todd Flesh,” but then I got to know him. He is big, out-going, blunt, and lovably crass. So I call him “Meat,” just as everyone else does. After all, this is the guy who declared at our dinner table that he and his wife had four children, but no more because he was “a fixed animal.”
Meat is an Airforce pilot, but this tour, he’s out of the cockpit and planning in Bryan’s office. He does two things almost every weekend: the first is hanging out with Lt. Col. Kim, who, after the Americans stopped going to the soju weekly parties, seized upon Meat as the fun-loving guy who couldn’t be a sucker for his wife like the other Americans. Kim routinely shows up at Meat’s place every Saturday morning to take him out on the town--hiking up mountains, trolling through the fish mart, hanging out at the major league ballpark to cheer on the Seoul All-Stars. Meat complains about this because Kim calls him “Fleshie” and because the camaraderie has made Kim feel so comfortable that he’ll show up drunk at Meat’s house at odd hours and crash somewhere inside, once even in Meat’s own bed.
When Meat is not with Kim, he is shopping. I’ve never known a man to shop as much as Meat does. His favorite excursion is taking the bus down to Ossan, the Air Force base about an hour and a half South of here if there’s no traffic. Most people on Post go down now and then, as the shopping is cheaper there, especially the tailoring of new uniforms. We knew we wanted to get there at least once, so one Saturday, Bryan and I packed up Gemma and drove down with Meat as our guide.
The highway down, like all the roads we’ve driven here, was in terrific shape. Not too much traffic, either. The landmark for our exit is the YKK factory. “They made your zipper, Amy,” Meat said.
I was un-nerved.
“Seriously. Look at your zipper.” I scooched down in the back seat, pulled my shirt up, my waist band down. Sonofagun. YKK.
“That’s a good trick for a party,” he said. “Bet anyone there that you know the letters on their zipper--it’s gonna be YKK. You show me 3 pairs of pants and I’ll bet you my left nut that at least one pair has a YKK zipper.”
“That’s pretty confident,” I said.
“Damn right I’m confident. I hear it’s something like 65% of zippers in the western hemisphere are YKK.”
“But you only bet on 33% odds.”
He shrugged. “It’s my left nut we’re talking about.”
So go ahead, people. Right now. Check your zippers. How about that, huh?
[UPDATE: In the comments section, people have begun checking in on their zippers. I put up a new poll so we can streamline this baby. Tell what's on your zipper!]
Our first stop on Base was their PX. It was at least 3 times bigger than ours and I was gushing with envy. It is one thing to be on Yongsan, thinking of everything that is back in the States that I cannot enjoy right now. It is another to see what the military families here get to enjoy. Their housing looked a lot better than hours. Their playgrounds were new. Sheesh. Air Force. Among the branches, there are rivalries and on-going jokes. What we say about the Air Force is that they build their houses and golf courses first, and then ask Congress for more money to build the airstrips. We ate lunch at Checkers, a restaurant the likes of which we don’t have either.
Then we left the Base to shop and I retracted every last drop of envy. There was basically just one street, several blocks long, with a few side streets connecting, all packed full of the stores Americans would want to shop at. Purse shops. Tailors. Trophy stores that custom make coins. It was just like our Itaewon district, only smaller and with no trace of the Russians. And aside from Itaewon, what was here? Nothing. No subway system sprawling throughout a cosmopolitan metropolis. Just a zipper factory a couple miles up the road.
Meat brought us to his favorite shop where they did a duo business of selling luggage and embroidering luggage tags. “I’ve gotten just about everyone at home some of these tags. They keep placing their orders like I’m the QVC or something.” He said this over his shoulder as he opened the door and stepped in.
All the girls behind the counter looked over and shouted, “Meatie!” at him and giggled.
“Hey ladies,” he said with a big grin. “These are my friends, Bryan and Amy and the baby. What’s the baby’s name again?”
We smiled, said “Anyang” and waited for the ensuing chorus of “She so cyuute!” No chorus. They hardly even noticed us. All eyes were on Meat. He is tall, broad shouldered, blonde, blue-eyed. Everything the typical Korean man is not.
Meat came along side me and said out the side of his mouth, “I want you to know I always wear my ring when I come down here.” Then he ordered more luggage tags. I ordered two for myself, and chose a Snoopy Fly Ace to go on it. Ordered a pink one for Gemma with a Hello Kitty. Bryan picked a boring Navy Blue one with an oak leaf, his rank.
They’d be done in an hour. Before we left, Meat and I took a look at full-sized roller bags, both intending to buy one. My approach to this kind of shopping is to pick out what I want, ask for a price, pose a counter-offer and gauge from the vendor’s reaction whether bargaining was welcome. I didn’t get a chance to pursue my approach because we figured that buying two together would get a better price and Meat told me he’d handle the negotiations.
Meat’s approach was to say, first, “These got YKK zippers? Because if it ain’t YKK, we’re out of here.”
The lady giggled and whined, kitty like, “I don’t know. . .”
“Got to be YKK! Got to stick with the home team, right?” He smiled at her and didn’t bother checking the zipper.
Meat followed his wind-up with, “Tell you what: If you can climb into this suitcase, and let me zip you up, I’ll buy it.”
She blushed and laughed and shook her head and said, “No, no!”
“Come on, come on. I bet you’d fit. Look how small you are.” He turned to me and said, “Look how small she is!” She kept laughing.
We left with a price quote that sounded standard to me, with no discount if we both bought one. Maybe the lady was just starting out hard with the intention of coming down once we came back to buy them.
We poked around the district for an hour. Ran into a guy the work with, Tom Timmerman, call sign “T2.” So I guess not all call signs are insensitive.
We returned to the luggage shop, the name of which I don’t know because we Americans don’t use the names of shops in this kind of district. We have, well, call signs for them. Like, “That luggage shop in Ossan, the second one on the right, across from the MacDonald’s,” or, “The purse guy in Itaewon who’s down the block from the money exchange before you hit the light at that antique place.” It occurs to me that being in a foreign country causes you to give nearly everything your own call sign. It’s either that or learn the language.
Meat and I picked out the bags we were interested in. The lady wouldn’t come down in price. But the price was the same out in the district. $35 for a full-sized roller bag was a better buy than I’d get in the States. Plus, I really did need a piece of luggage to get back there in the first place.
We bought them and paid for our tags. Mine said, “Ponce.”
“Not ‘Babyduck’?” Bryan asked, as we strolled out, rolling our bags behind us.
“Only you call me ’Babyduck.’” I said.
Meat’s tags said, “Meat.”
“Not ‘Meatie’?” I asked.
He grinned. Then he shrugged and said, “You get a better price if you flirt with them a little.”
“We paid full price!” I said.
He blushed. “Yeah. Might as well call me ‘Sucker.’”
18 June 2005
We’ve been married for 6 years now and I was thinking the other day about what I like most about doing the military thing. I’m pretty sure it’s the language of it. The military has one of its own, full of acronyms and shortened, unexpected names for things.
On Bryan’s ships, for instance, officers had to get qualified for different positions or duty stations and part of the process was sitting for an oral board with the senior officers. The custom is to bring an edible gift that will be eaten by the board as the examination proceeds. The gift is called, “Smack.” As in, “I have to bring some smack in for the board tomorrow.” Why do they call it “smack”? Because you’re kissing up.
When we have two of something that we only need one of, we call the second one a “battle spare.” When someone gets stuck talking to the motor mouth in the room and absorbs all the excessive chatter while the rest of us are freed up to enjoy the party, the guy who is stuck is called “canon fodder.”
It’s all so clever. I just love it.
And of course, there are the call signs. Pilots all have one because they need one. And they don’t get to choose them, either, so they are never cool like “Maverick” or “Ice Man.” Those are names that a twenty-two year old would pick for himself, not the name the guys you fly with want to use when talking to you at 30 thousand feet. No, real call signs finely blend an apt description with a fair amount of insensitivity.
One of our unaccompanied friends here is Charles, call sign “Hawk” because he’s bald, black and cut out of granite, much like the guy on Spencer for Hire.
One guy here is called “Panda” because he’s as overweight as the Air Force allows and pandas are the one creature on Earth that would rather eat than mate. (To this, Panda himself explains, “But I’ve got 3 kids, so don’t think it’s accurate.“)
Brad, a redhead on our cul-de-sac, is call signed “Archie.” Neil earned himself the call sign “Rude Boy” because of some bad gas he once passed in a two-man cockpit.
A pilot’s call sign travels with him, even when he’s not on a flying tour. I generally use an officer’s real name because using their special language feels too contrived, like a goody-two-shoes girl deciding to cuss. But sometimes a call sign suits a guy so well, I cannot resist it.
For instance, I started out calling one of our unaccompanied friends, “Todd,” as in “Todd Flesh,” but then I got to know him. He is big, out-going, blunt, and lovably crass. So I call him “Meat,” just as everyone else does. After all, this is the guy who declared at our dinner table that he and his wife had four children, but no more because he was “a fixed animal.”
Meat is an Airforce pilot, but this tour, he’s out of the cockpit and planning in Bryan’s office. He does two things almost every weekend: the first is hanging out with Lt. Col. Kim, who, after the Americans stopped going to the soju weekly parties, seized upon Meat as the fun-loving guy who couldn’t be a sucker for his wife like the other Americans. Kim routinely shows up at Meat’s place every Saturday morning to take him out on the town--hiking up mountains, trolling through the fish mart, hanging out at the major league ballpark to cheer on the Seoul All-Stars. Meat complains about this because Kim calls him “Fleshie” and because the camaraderie has made Kim feel so comfortable that he’ll show up drunk at Meat’s house at odd hours and crash somewhere inside, once even in Meat’s own bed.
When Meat is not with Kim, he is shopping. I’ve never known a man to shop as much as Meat does. His favorite excursion is taking the bus down to Ossan, the Air Force base about an hour and a half South of here if there’s no traffic. Most people on Post go down now and then, as the shopping is cheaper there, especially the tailoring of new uniforms. We knew we wanted to get there at least once, so one Saturday, Bryan and I packed up Gemma and drove down with Meat as our guide.
The highway down, like all the roads we’ve driven here, was in terrific shape. Not too much traffic, either. The landmark for our exit is the YKK factory. “They made your zipper, Amy,” Meat said.
I was un-nerved.
“Seriously. Look at your zipper.” I scooched down in the back seat, pulled my shirt up, my waist band down. Sonofagun. YKK.
“That’s a good trick for a party,” he said. “Bet anyone there that you know the letters on their zipper--it’s gonna be YKK. You show me 3 pairs of pants and I’ll bet you my left nut that at least one pair has a YKK zipper.”
“That’s pretty confident,” I said.
“Damn right I’m confident. I hear it’s something like 65% of zippers in the western hemisphere are YKK.”
“But you only bet on 33% odds.”
He shrugged. “It’s my left nut we’re talking about.”
So go ahead, people. Right now. Check your zippers. How about that, huh?
[UPDATE: In the comments section, people have begun checking in on their zippers. I put up a new poll so we can streamline this baby. Tell what's on your zipper!]
Our first stop on Base was their PX. It was at least 3 times bigger than ours and I was gushing with envy. It is one thing to be on Yongsan, thinking of everything that is back in the States that I cannot enjoy right now. It is another to see what the military families here get to enjoy. Their housing looked a lot better than hours. Their playgrounds were new. Sheesh. Air Force. Among the branches, there are rivalries and on-going jokes. What we say about the Air Force is that they build their houses and golf courses first, and then ask Congress for more money to build the airstrips. We ate lunch at Checkers, a restaurant the likes of which we don’t have either.
Then we left the Base to shop and I retracted every last drop of envy. There was basically just one street, several blocks long, with a few side streets connecting, all packed full of the stores Americans would want to shop at. Purse shops. Tailors. Trophy stores that custom make coins. It was just like our Itaewon district, only smaller and with no trace of the Russians. And aside from Itaewon, what was here? Nothing. No subway system sprawling throughout a cosmopolitan metropolis. Just a zipper factory a couple miles up the road.
Meat brought us to his favorite shop where they did a duo business of selling luggage and embroidering luggage tags. “I’ve gotten just about everyone at home some of these tags. They keep placing their orders like I’m the QVC or something.” He said this over his shoulder as he opened the door and stepped in.
All the girls behind the counter looked over and shouted, “Meatie!” at him and giggled.
“Hey ladies,” he said with a big grin. “These are my friends, Bryan and Amy and the baby. What’s the baby’s name again?”
We smiled, said “Anyang” and waited for the ensuing chorus of “She so cyuute!” No chorus. They hardly even noticed us. All eyes were on Meat. He is tall, broad shouldered, blonde, blue-eyed. Everything the typical Korean man is not.
Meat came along side me and said out the side of his mouth, “I want you to know I always wear my ring when I come down here.” Then he ordered more luggage tags. I ordered two for myself, and chose a Snoopy Fly Ace to go on it. Ordered a pink one for Gemma with a Hello Kitty. Bryan picked a boring Navy Blue one with an oak leaf, his rank.
They’d be done in an hour. Before we left, Meat and I took a look at full-sized roller bags, both intending to buy one. My approach to this kind of shopping is to pick out what I want, ask for a price, pose a counter-offer and gauge from the vendor’s reaction whether bargaining was welcome. I didn’t get a chance to pursue my approach because we figured that buying two together would get a better price and Meat told me he’d handle the negotiations.
Meat’s approach was to say, first, “These got YKK zippers? Because if it ain’t YKK, we’re out of here.”
The lady giggled and whined, kitty like, “I don’t know. . .”
“Got to be YKK! Got to stick with the home team, right?” He smiled at her and didn’t bother checking the zipper.
Meat followed his wind-up with, “Tell you what: If you can climb into this suitcase, and let me zip you up, I’ll buy it.”
She blushed and laughed and shook her head and said, “No, no!”
“Come on, come on. I bet you’d fit. Look how small you are.” He turned to me and said, “Look how small she is!” She kept laughing.
We left with a price quote that sounded standard to me, with no discount if we both bought one. Maybe the lady was just starting out hard with the intention of coming down once we came back to buy them.
We poked around the district for an hour. Ran into a guy the work with, Tom Timmerman, call sign “T2.” So I guess not all call signs are insensitive.
We returned to the luggage shop, the name of which I don’t know because we Americans don’t use the names of shops in this kind of district. We have, well, call signs for them. Like, “That luggage shop in Ossan, the second one on the right, across from the MacDonald’s,” or, “The purse guy in Itaewon who’s down the block from the money exchange before you hit the light at that antique place.” It occurs to me that being in a foreign country causes you to give nearly everything your own call sign. It’s either that or learn the language.
Meat and I picked out the bags we were interested in. The lady wouldn’t come down in price. But the price was the same out in the district. $35 for a full-sized roller bag was a better buy than I’d get in the States. Plus, I really did need a piece of luggage to get back there in the first place.
We bought them and paid for our tags. Mine said, “Ponce.”
“Not ‘Babyduck’?” Bryan asked, as we strolled out, rolling our bags behind us.
“Only you call me ’Babyduck.’” I said.
Meat’s tags said, “Meat.”
“Not ‘Meatie’?” I asked.
He grinned. Then he shrugged and said, “You get a better price if you flirt with them a little.”
“We paid full price!” I said.
He blushed. “Yeah. Might as well call me ‘Sucker.’”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
