Chronic Bad Breath

During every commercial break on Paramount Plus, there’s an advertisement for HIV medication. My kids asked me, “Would you go out with someone who had HIV?”

Without even thinking about it, I replied, “Hell no.”

They love hypotheticals, and tacked on the condition, “What if he was the love of your life?”

I said, “I’ve wanted to break up with someone for having chronic bad breath; HIV is way worse.” I added, “Someone with HIV should go out with someone else who has HIV. Based on this commercial, there must be millions of them.”

We are watching Paramount Plus for South Park, but I also watch it for Drag Race. This last season stood out to me. The cast was much younger than usual, and almost all of them were well-adjusted musical theater kids.

Usually, every season, there is an ex-crack head prostitute contestant or someone approaching fifty who is referred to as the crusty old grandma and has a drag style that hails back to the eighties. This season, though, there was one character who had to take on all these roles, and they were 32 years old. 

It was a tame season, a bit of a bore really. By the end, you could tell that this cast of drag queens was a few years out from being the stars of their high school drama departments, and their families all loved them, encouraging them to pursue their dreams of being on Drag Race. The height of drama in the confessionals was when a contestant revealed they used to be fat. The follow up question missing, "Were you sucking dick for Twinkies?"

This season was far less entertaining than a cast made up entirely of ex-junkies trying to quit smoking and stay rail-thin.

This is likely the hardest thing a person can do: stay skinny after quitting smoking. Mary Karr suggested knitting every time you crave a cigarette. In Whoopi Goldberg’s latest book, when she quit cocaine, she told herself, “You are going to gain twenty pounds, and you have to be okay with that.” 

I don’t know why I used quotes there; I am definitely summing up a sentiment from a book I read last year. That is not a direct quote from Whoopi’s book.

I have to lose ten (more like 15) from quitting vaping. I still try on my jeans, sometimes they go over my butt, and I can yank the zipper up, but sometimes I can't get them much farther above my knees. I have to be nice to myself, like these kids on Drag Race’s supportive families. So what, I have to lose ten (maybe 15) pounds; it could be a lot worse. 

I could have chronic bad breath.

Bra in Purse

 

A week ago, one of the kids I tutor didn’t show up for her appointment, and when I texted her grandma, she told me they tested positive covid. I saw them the day before, so she added, “You will get Covid. I will pray for you.”

I thought that was really nice of her. I prepared for the oncoming sickness, I vacuumed, caught up on laundry, and filled the fridge with groceries. I didn’t want to have to deal with these things with covid, which always makes me feel like my joints are broken. Plus, I had a lot of things going on that week; G had a book report, they both had a math test, and I had a job interview.

Not to toot my horn, but my cover letter was five stars. The day of the interview, I still felt unaffected and showed up looking like a professional anything-you-want-me-to-be. Midway through the interview, it dawned on me that I had zero experience with the would-be job. 

Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t rocket science, but I’d be Chat GPTing the shit out of my daily responsibilities. After four months, I’d realize it’s not a lack of talent but a lack of passion limiting my love of the position.

My motivation was slightly off. It was an administrative role at an elite private school, so I figured the lateral salary move would be offset by a significant tuition reduction for my kids attending, a stipulation I’d make after they offered me the job.

I think they figured out, too, that they should hire someone who has a solid knowledge base instead of a person who just has confidence. I had a lovely time talking with the hiring committee, but I forgot to send a thank-you email afterwards. My subconscious was helping me out.

After the interview, I picked up the kids and we came home to work on this book report and study for math tests. Midway through, it was discovered my son didn’t have his antibiotics, and we needed to go pick them up from his dad’s. I had been pajama’d since we walked in the front door and wasn’t about to change. I threw a bra in my purse in case of an emergency, and we went and picked them up.

Back at home, I thought about another looming responsibility: I needed to tell my kids that my parents’ dog had passed away. It was hard on my parents, and I knew my son would take it just as badly. The dog started as ours nine years ago, but when my plate was overflowing, my parents came in and scooped up this dog, who they quickly fell in love with.

I put off telling him for almost two weeks because he always has so much homework to do, and then he has soccer on the weekend. I knew once he heard the news, he’d need the rest of the day off. I told them on a Saturday after his soccer game. G acted as I expected. He was totally wrecked, and I sat next to him for an hour. Kiki acted as expected; she’d poke her head around the door and mouth, “Where is my iPad?”

I mouthed, “No iPad!” And waved her away, noticing a slight pain in my elbow.

My daughter and I went to a musical the next day. We got all gussied up and had a great time. As we were walking from the theater to the car, my daughter fanned out her sundress, and a young man slowed down in moving traffic and, out the window, said, “You look great in that dress.”

She looked at me, confused, and asked, “Is he talking to you?”

I confirmed I had a bra on and said, “No, babe. He’s talking to you.” She smiled and said that was nice of him, totally oblivious to stopping traffic with her ethereal glide up the sidewalk.

Today, as I packed up after teaching a class, the next group of students came in. They’re mostly young men heading towards a career in engineering, a field much closer to rocket science, and probably at risk of being Chat GPT’d the shit out of as well.

I eavesdropped as this kid was talking. He said he always wanted to work on cars and got certified as a mechanic, not knowing it was unnecessary when he was hired at a dealership. He said, “The guy who trained me at work is the dumbest person I've ever met in my life.”

I turned around to erase the chalkboard and laughed. This kid’s anger was coming across as hilarious. As I erased the chalkboard, my elbow joint hurt even worse. It might be psychosomatic, but I can’t get covid in only one joint. I’m probably developing tennis elbow from erasing chalkboards because I teach like an old-fashioned lady.

An entire week passed, and I’m confident I did not get covid or a new job. I think anyone could probably do any job out there, especially with some help from the computer gods. If thats the bar, though, it’s pretty boring. There really has to be a desire to learn everything, to notice things that can’t be bullet-pointed and iterated. There is so much information to glean from the obliviousness. Really, it's all the good stuff, the stuff that makes you smile, or gives you tennis elbow.

Toohey'd

 

I'm coming up on six years sober, two years single, and one day since I finished reading The Fountainhead. I bought the book ages ago, but only got around to reading it a couple of weeks ago.

It’s a great read with key takeaways. First: anyone held in good public standing is a spineless bitch with no real identity. Second, altruistic pursuits are ultimately selfish; create for yourself, not for anyone else. Lastly, don’t care what other people think, because other people don’t think.

The rape thing with Dominique is strange. Her psychotic obsession reminded me of the intersection of my married, drinking, and motherhood nights when I took to cyberstalking an old boyfriend. I think there were moments in those nights when I felt convinced I was reading his mind too. I’m glad it worked out for ol’ Dominique. 

Not so much for me, in that department. I can admit I’ve been unlucky in love. My relationships haven’t exactly been success stories, but that does not define my self-worth. I’m the sum of all my experiences, and when the right person comes along, I’ll know without doubt. These past two years have been pretty fucking amazing, and cliché as it sounds, I’ve been in a relationship with myself, one I never had the space to enjoy before.

Something strange happened while reading the book: Dax Shepard referenced it twice in recent episodes of Armchair Expert. It made me wonder if I’ve been Ellsworth Toohey’d. The book offers a compelling look at how public opinion can be manipulated. I won’t say it’s more relevant now than ever; public persuasion has always been a part of the human experience.

When the kids watch South Park, I cringe and point out that the jokes are offensive, as if they’re stupid. They think the obviousness of my commentary is what’s stupid. The show is on Paramount Plus, the streamer with abusively long commercial breaks. I can make a snack, change the laundry, and wash my face during one string of advertisements. 

The other night, I was tired, so I just let the ads come at me. The first commercial was about suicide. Is their pursuit of suicide prevention really a suggestion of suicide to anyone who hadn’t thought about it? The next two commercials were for pharmaceuticals; pills promising to dissolve suffering. The final one was for KY jelly. I turned to the kids and said, “I don’t think South Park is the problem anymore. It's the damn commercials.”

Society’s fixation with mental health often feels like a distraction from a deeper issue: people living without purpose. That seems clear to me, but I’m a mother, so I worry anyway. Some days when I pick up my kids from school, I am subject to a full-blown manifesto about the injustice of having no control over life as a middle schooler.

My favorite quote is, “This is one moment, but know that another shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.” I want my kids to hold on to what makes them unique. I don’t want the Howard Roark spirit beaten out of them. Sobriety has helped me get off the roller coaster of highs and lows, but as a mom, I have to jump in that open seat next to my kids and make sure they pull the safety bar down. I want to show them: buckle up, this ride won’t last forever, but it can throw you off course if you don’t accept it and settle in for the damn ride.

Anyway, who’s to say whether these opinions are truly mine, or if I’ve just been Ellsworth Toohey’d into thinking them? I’ll move on to a new book, and with it, a fresh set of ideas. Ones I can attribute to individualism or collectivism. In the end, I guess it’s really about how selfish I am.

Flying

 

Two nights ago, I had one of those dreams where you wake up, but you’re still asleep. I tried to fully wake by attempting to fling over on my side. But I stayed in the dream and just rolled off the side of the bed. I got up and saw Kiki in the doorway. She wore her pink pajama set, which she often wears, and it looked like she was waiting for me.

We walked through the house to the back door and excitedly opened the sliding door to go outside. The backyard looked different. There were little white lights strung around everywhere, and a huge deck with fire pits and TVs hung up. I sat in a chair in front of a fire pit and said to her, “I’m so happy we're in this dream together.”

She replied, “This isn’t a dream.”

I jumped from the chair I was sitting in and flew high into the sky, to show her it was a dream. I flew over the yard and then hovered above the house, looking back at her. Then she flew up into the sky, too.

Then I woke up. The next morning, I told my daughter about the dream, and I asked her, “Did you have the same dream?”

It felt right. The dream left me feeling so amazing. She told me no, and added something about how ridiculous the question is.

I’ve had the kids for most of this month, and it’s been lovely to have them all the time. The only extracurricular is G's soccer. He is new to the game, and he’s picking it up. I get antsy watching. My body reacts when I see the ball being kicked around as if I could pull some puppet strings attached to the players. 

When I played soccer in middle school, I was, without question, the worst player on the team. The only person who was thrilled to have me on the team was the second-to-worst person. Everyone else was indifferent because I never could mess a game up in a critical moment, since I’d be watching from the bench. It didn’t faze me, and I had fun hanging out with my friends.

G’s soccer games can be intense because the kids are damn good at soccer. They're juggling that ball, and bouncing it off their heads, and I’m at the sidelines doing the dog pound chant from Arsenio Hall. Some of the parents are cut from a different cloth. I smell their militant self-discipline. 

I was once reading my book while the team warmed up, and listened to this dad talk about his son to some other parents. He said, “He is reaching a limit. He has continued to be top of his class academically, and he has two hours of practice every night and four games a weekend.”

This explains why they're all so good, playing in multiple leagues each season. Whatever they did to their kids early on to make them get in line, I commend. I start screaming at my kids to put their shoes on thirty minutes before we actually leave, otherwise we will be late. One hour of homework has to be rewarded with two hours of TV. We are finally at a point where I can believe them when they tell me they don't have homework, after two years of parent-teacher conferences, where one time my daughter said to the teacher, in front of me, that I am too trusting. My jaw dropped.

I get it, though. When I get home, I don't want to work. The minute I walk in the door, I change into pajamas. My daughter does the same, usually the pink set. If I didn’t have to worry about one day finding a man because my kids will move out in five years, I'd probably only eat ice cream sandwiches and have a full wardrobe of matching sweatsuits. I don’t think I will find one at a soccer game, even though it is the height of my social life these days.

The kids are going to their dad’s this weekend, so I can say goodbye to these dishpan hands at the same time as I say goodbye to them in the morning, but I already miss them. Tonight, when I walked into Kiki's room to say goodnight, I said, “That was my favorite dream. I think one day you’ll have that dream too. From your perspective. Why would we have to have it at the same time?”

She said, "I don't think we're that connected. Maybe it would happen with my dad."

Then I hit her over the head with a pillow, and she started laughing.

The Stapler

 

When I was young, I remember my dad screaming about his stapler. It was either missing or broken. My brothers and sisters treated his desk as a portal to our adulthood. Stapling, taping, and scribbling just like an adult does, working on whatever they're working on at their desk.

My Dad was plagued by five kids who had no idea that the stapler had a real purpose, and wasn’t just amazingly fun to play with. We committed other criminal acts at the home, such as when thumbtacks were discovered inside the VCR. I was the family graffiti artist, and as a child, I took to our family van with a Sharpie marker. I remember when I drew all over my dad’s briefcase, and I was at an age when I was learning how to hold a pen, so it was just violent scribbling.

I suppose a child psychologist could have really tapped a pen at their lip while looking at the scene, but my dad probably just gave a furious roar, and then sucked it up, carrying that desecrated briefcase back and forth to work each day till my mom bought him a new one for Christmas.

I’m approaching my fourteenth year of parenthood, and I have gone through at least ten staplers. No one acknowledges when they broke the stapler. I find out when I go to staple, and I press it down to no avail. I flip it open and see that some part of the mechanism is broken beyond repair, but the staples have been colored rainbow with Sharpie markers.

I still think my desk is a sacred space. I love pulling my chair right up to it, organizing papers, and putting my pens in their little mug. It’s funny because even though I work at my desk, I end up taking most of my Zoom meetings in my bed, so I’m not interrupted. This is when the desk is free for someone else to pull the chair up to it. Maybe to pretend to pay the water bill by hole-punching it and sticking it inside the printer.

The wall in our entryway has a hole in it because someone repeatedly swung the door open like they were Kramer running into Jerry’s apartment. My brother-in-law had to fix our bathroom floor because of mindlessly showering with the curtain on the outside of the tub. Currently, the kitchen table has clay cemented to it from a volcano mold.

Aside from a furious growl and then a sigh of defeat, there is not much I can do about it. Now I know to buy scissors in bulk because they might be inter-dimensional objects, put a stopper in front of the wall to protect it from the door, and always have a stash of paperclips on hand.

Nothing like the act of paper-clipping to calm my nerves and remind me that I am doing important things at my desk. It’s not quite as good as a stapler, but I’ll put a new one in my stocking at Christmas.

Cruising

 

The kids and I went cruising at the end of July. In the end, cruising is about swimming, sun, and food, so now I know, it is not necessary to fly halfway around the world to go on one.  A solo backpacker traveling through a foreign country may be able to envision themself as a sort of culture pirate, but when you are on a cruise, these delusions do not even cross your mind, as it feels more like a six-day field trip with an adult preschool.

Our trip started in Venice, a city exploding with tanned, shirtless men in jeans carting things about on a dolly with a cigarette hanging from their lips. Thousands of Streetcar-Named-Desire-Marlon-Brandos are busily moving about this city, making it gorgeous and functional. 

My kids were confused by the prevalence of cigarette smoking. They come from a generation where they’ve been conditioned to think smoking is as bad as shooting a rhinoceros. It was effectively nonexistent on TV for the last fifteen years, and if it weren't for vaping, it could have been wiped from young people’s lives.

After Venice, we got on the cruise, and it was fun in the Mediterranean sun. We’d go on exciting excursions, hot-tub at night, and have meals in the restaurant with our two exotic waiters. One of them loved Miami, Florida, and he’d loom around our table like a new kid at school wanting to pull up a chair. I’d feel him looking at me, and then when I’d look up, his eyes would dart away. I couldn’t tell if he was socially awkward or if it was me.

Around the fourth day into a vacation, I have to suppress the desire to say, “That was fun, I’m ready to go home now.” Because I don’t want to flip a switch where everything goes from exciting and new to old and dull, I prefer the gradual change of a dimmer knob.

I don’t drink, and my companions are twelve and thirteen years old, who will climb into a game and start talking about Bomb-bomb-bombing-goose and Tee-tee-tee-gas-whore, where I have no idea what's going on.

I’d go to the gym in the morning and walk around in the afternoon. Sometimes I’d sit in a chair on a deck that was in the middle of the boat. It looked out to the endless ocean. I’d drink coffee and feel like I was getting in touch with God, sending him a mental email that wasn’t about much more than the awe of vast nothingness.

I’d come back into the boat, and the exact opposite state of mind would take over. The ship, like an ant farm, appears choreographed. Walking on the pool deck in the evening, the swimming pool was the same color as a clogged toilet. The tanned, bloated bodies fanning out from the pool, splayed like gunned-down soldiers. A No Doubt cover band is taking care of the five-gun salute. This is humanity, I thought. This boat could sink, and it would make no difference in the world.

The trip home was an epic disaster. I will spare the play-by-play, but eighteen hours of flying was stretched into forty-eight. I didn’t get any sleep and looked like I hadn’t seen a shower in days. When we set out on this journey, I put on my cleanest clothes, but they were clean for a reason. My Jorts, oversized low-rise jean shorts that go below the knee, are something Gwen Stefani wore in the year 2000. I find them fashion-forward; my daughter finds them nauseating. 

When we were back in the States, I could call my sisters again. They tether me from a complete collapse of self, and they make me laugh. I told Lacey I was looking like a cactus-faced bum, and she told me to send her a picture. Kiki took a full-length shot of me, and the response was immediate. “Oh bitch, you’re wearing Asics!”

My older sister is a brain surgery nurse (I don’t know the technical term, but some high-pressure bad ass shit) and the only TV she watches is Disney Plus with her three kids, but for some reason, she has the banter of a seasoned RuPaul contestant. She saves this hilarious part of herself for her family. Sometimes our phone conversations are like finding buried treasure. I greedily cram as much of it into my memory as possible, knowing no one else will get to enjoy this.

My younger sister and her family went on a cruise out of San Francisco, and jealousy pulsated through my veins because they didn’t need to get on an airplane. When she came home, we compared our notes, and she commented on the number of people who were rascal-fat, incapable of walking, but zipping into that buffet room. I told her it sounded like the Steve Jobs movie, Wall-E, where they make fun of fat people for an hour and a half.

My cruise didn’t have that. Maybe it is just an American thing, and the flight would certainly kill anyone that size. There are a lot of people still smoking in Europe. Not vapes, but good-ol ciggies. Maybe the obesity epidemic in the US is correlated with the decline of cigarette smoking. It seems more likely to me than fast food because fast food isn’t just an American thing; it’s available all around the world.

This will all start to change with GLP-1s, and to be honest, I’m fucking jealous. I wish I could get on one; it would be amazing to have no appetite, one less thing to think about. I don’t care if I become terrifyingly thin like Karen Carpenter, so fragile I’d need to use a rascal for fear my bones would snap when I swat a fly away from my decaying body.

After we came home from our trip, I had a month before my summer vacation ended. I’m working on multiple writing projects that I planned to tackle, but without a deadline, I flailed. I watched eight hours of TV a day, read ten books, and snacked like there was no end to my appetite. I chew my stupid nicotine gum with such ferocity, I’ll probably end up with the jawline of a pit bull. 

On a cruise ship, it is an effort not to dwell on the thought that the ship could sink. I fell asleep each night thinking about it. My plane route home resembled a bulletin board in a CSI room. I had no control, and after a while, I succumbed to the thought that this could all be leading up to my plane crashing. This all makes smoking a cigarette very appealing. 

I spent the last month lying on my couch like a sunbaked sea lion. I never truly enjoyed it, afraid I was making myself more and more creatively stunted with every minute I delayed writing. However, like a switch being flipped, I woke up this morning in a different state of mind. I go back to work tomorrow, and there’s so much for me to get done.