Wanna know what's gross about me?



Note the wide-eyed yet glazed look. 

 I’m an onychophagiac. Since birth, I’ve had my hands all up in my mouth—hell, maybe before birth.  As an infant I sucked my thumb, and my parents tried to solve the problem by putting a sock on my hand.  A few years later my dad would employ the same method to get my southpaw brother to turn righty (and he did!), but the sock didn’t keep me from sucking my thumbs, and it seems to have been a clear transition from thumb sucking to fingernail biting.  Maybe there was a period, in Kindergarten, where I chewed the shit out of my pencils, just to feel the give of the soft wood against my strong front teeth. But as longas I can remember, I’ve been a nail biter. 

                My mom tried things.  Some kind of junk she painted on my nails to make them taste bad—didn’t taste bad enough. She bribed me with a nail kit, or with a bright red polish I coveted.  No matter what, I couldn’t stop biting my nails.  Maybe it was anxiety as a kid—I also had insomnia and panic attacks—but as an adult it became second nature.  I’ve always hated it.  The feeling of plunging my exposed nail beds in hot water when I worked as a dishwasher.  The way my lips get dried out when I do it.  The throbbing pain when I tear the wrong piece off, which can only be soothed with a tight bandage over the fingertip.  The way my fingertips are starting to wrinkle, I assume from being damp my whole life.  Just the other night while I worked on an essay, I had to stop what I was doing and paint my nails, which I do approximately once a year, because I was distracting myself with my chomping. 

                My husband hates it when he hears me chewing my fingernails.  He also notes that I often stare into space, looking a little dull, let’s say, and chew on myself, as he calls it.  It drives him bananas, and every now and then he will sort of slap my hand out of my mouth.  Which pisses me right off. 

                And I can stop.  If I keep my nails painted, always painted, I don’t bite them.  One summer my friend got married and I grew my nails out for the whole summer.  It was a pain, but I kept them painted all summer long.  Oh, I can stop biting my nails easily. 

                But the thing is—OK, like right now my nails are painted still from the other night.  I haven’t bitten them.  My cuticles, on the other hand, are ravaged.  Hangnails abound in various stages of healing. 

                That’s one of the grossest things about me.  I chew my nails and pick fingernail chippings out of my teeth.  See, we're getting to know each other.  There are other gross things about me, but that's, like, second year material at least.  What’s gross about you?

Dozens of reasons to love Pam Houston



Pam and me!  At my house! 

Pam Houston visited EWU last year for a reading and a craft talk.  I got to do the introduction at the reading, have dinner with her, and then she came to a party at my house and we got to chat about literature, my cats, and kids. I was a big fan before that, though, which was why I jumped at the chance to host.  I first read Houston’s only work marketed as creative nonfiction, A Little Bit More About Me, a book of personal essays, and I took to her right away, as they say, because she has a voice that you just don’t forget. 

                Houston says her fiction and nonfiction alike is around eighty percent autobiographical, and being drawn to nonfiction and still sort of unsure about where the boundaries lie, for me personally, between fiction and nonfiction, I loved listening to her read some sections of her newest novel, Contents May Have Shifted, with the narrator named Pam, who is a writing instructor and world traveler, an animal lover and an athlete, as is Houston in for reals life. 

                The novel is structured in 12s.  Each section is titled with a flight number, and then followed by a dozen tiny travel essays.  Wow, has she traveled.  Tibet, Spain, Mexico, Scotland, Newfoundland, Iceland, France, New Zealand, Tunisia, Laos, Argentina, Turkey.  And that’s only a dozen of the places she writes about.  Houston doesn’t give us any concrete indicators of chronology, but if you read carefully you definitely see a narrative unfolding.  It’s not a new story, certainly (Sam Ligon was known to say there are only two stories anyway—was it sex and death, Sam?), but Houston chronicles relationships and her own vulnerability.  The relationships with men change and sometimes end, but her friends stay and accumulate, and the relationships with beloved animals also provide a subnarrative.  There is camaraderie and heartbreak, love and loss. 

                What sets Houston apart from a lot of other folks writing about these same things is, first of all, is that her narrator doesn’t just rattle off flights and trips and terrific emotional struggles.  She lays them out carefully, reflecting on each one, sometimes drawing from an earlier story, reminding us of the movement.  And there is a great momentum in this novel, as the narrator flies around the globe looking for a reason to live and a reason to love herself.  During a few close calls in air travel, the narrator never comes off as frightened, but being left to contemplate herself seems to terrify her.  (If you think this novel’s a simple “Why can’t I find love” story, you’re way off.  Consider the original ideas for a title:  Suicide Note and 144 Good Reasons Not To Kill Yourself).  And there’s a soft but definite turn in the novel about two-thirds of the way through, in which Pam the character seems to begin a process of understanding, after the plane she is in is struck by lightning, which takes out an engine. 

Where on the continuum I fall, when this kind of thing happens—between Oh please not how that things are finally looking up and Well this sucks but it will sure solve a great many problems—has become my mental health measuring stick in this era of exponentially increased sky traffic, airline bankruptcy and accumulating mental fatigue.  This, I understand, is not at all the same as being suicidal.

                Aside from the writer at the desk, which us NFers might talk about too much but which nevertheless is critical to creative nonfiction, I find inspiration in Houston’s writing because holy crap, does she care about her sentences.  After not reading her work for a year, I forgot how her writing echoes, how it hits you.

He tells me we’ve been put on earth to crack each other open, and then to stick around long enough to watch the thing that, having been cracked open, suddenly shines.  He says he knows there is only a thin wall between himself and all that shining, but sometimes he forgets how thin the wall is, because somebody came along when he wasn’t looking, and painted the damn thing black.   

That’s a pretty good description of good writing, too, I think.  Cracking ourselves open and looking for the thing that shines. 

HPV Vaccine = Still A Big Fat NO

Recent research in an American Cancer Society journal about the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, shows that the younger girls who are getting the shots aren’t finishing up the series.  Three shots are required for the vaccine, the second spaced one month after the first, and the third 6 months after the second.  Several articles have speculated that the reason this is happening is that parents aren’t aware that three shots are needed.  More encouraging (advertising) from doctors would remind the parents and the girls that they must complete all three sticks.  Only 20 percent of the girls getting the shots complete the series and are therefore protected against the four strains of HPV most likely to cause cervical cancer.


BACK OFF MY PARENTING SKILLZ!

Amanda Marcotte over at RH Reality Check wrote an article yesterday called “Why Aren’t More Girls Getting the HPV Vaccine?”  

*Bess raises hand*  Pick me!  Pick me!

It could be that parents are reading the package insert.  Gardasil hasn’t been researched for many years at all.  What they do know is that the length of efficacy is only five years.  Boosters may be required (how many?  Three more, every five years?).  There are plenty of people arguing passionately that the side effects are worth the risks, and that’s just fine.  For their daughters.  Because I am not the parent of anyone else’s children and I don’t have the right to make decisions for them.  My daughters won’t be getting the shots (if the vaccine hasn’t been taken off the market by then).   

One thing I’ve not seen anyone address when “discussing” this issue is the duration of protection.  I’m not sure if the pro-Gardasil folks are OK with needing possibly indefinite boosters or what.  But again, I don’t care.  You do your thing with your kids and I’ll do mine.  

So why do these arguments always turn out the same?  As soon as I and another person commented with our answers to Amanda’s question, I mean she did ask a question, she fired off the tired “Oh?  Don’t agree? You’re a shitty parent.”  SIGH.  Here’s another passive-aggressive reply.  I’m sorry you feel that way. 

Operation Oopsie

Operation Rescue, an anti-choice group, is about to have some major problems.  Some shady person has stolen a bunch of medical records.  And not just any old medical records, but the records of women who visited a clinic in Kansas that yes, DUM DUM DUM….performs abortions.  Troy Newman, the president of Operation Rescue, received the records from last month, from an unidentified person, who Newman idiotically repeats that the man insisted the records were obtained legally.

Except that they weren’t.  They couldn’t have been.  Medical records are not given out to anyone. If Troy Newman’s buddy “obtained” those records, they are ill-gotten gains, to say the least.  It is against federal HIPAA regulations to have those files in his hand without a properly executed Release of Information form.  Which form he obviously does not have, which form the unnamed Newman pal obviously did not have.  Actually, he would have needed dozens of forms, one for each damn patient. 

So.  Obviously this is some illegal AND immoral shit going on.  Newman says some stupid crap about the files showing illegal shit like covering up child abuse, or that the files were improperly disposed of.  Riiiiiight.  I’ll go ahead and wait on the LEGAL proof of that, if it’s all the same to Newman's dumb ass.  An attorney for the clinic called the FBI after someone broke into their dumpster last month. So someone’s obviously looking for something, but they wouldn’t have found April’s medical records in the trash.  Duh.  Medical records are kept for about a decade, and then they are disposed of—by shredding them.  So April’s records wouldn’t have been in the trash.  And if April’s records from over ten years ago were in the trash, they would have been shredded.  Further, it’s unlikely the clinic, with all the anti-woman crazies like Operation Rescue out there, would even put the records in the clinic’s dumpster.  Right alongside the aborted fetuses, amirite?   

I’m super interested in how this turns out, even if it turns out Newman’s insider only got him sign-in sheets or something.  Hopefully a whole bunch of people will be in some deep shit over this.  Which is too bad, because it takes away from their time helping women.  HA!

The Poet Game

Where do poems come from? I wish I knew. And I do know, in some sense because I can feel the place they arise from but I cannot manifest it with words, which in and of itself is ironic.

I can try to explain it as the place of contemplation. The place where you work yourself out. Where the poet mind meets the earth. Where the poet mind meets philosophy. Where the poets make their own philosophies.

I find myself writing poems after small moments that feel important. Minute tragedies of living within small moments of beauty. Moments where the lesson learned was in front of me all along.

Poems can come from a plane's wheels leaving the ground. From wishes and nightmares. More likely they arise from the space between the two.

Sometimes, I can feel a poem coming on. This has happened to me since I was young. The need to put words to paper. To let the metaphor of living poor out.

I sometimes forget the poet side living in me and when I don’t have one of those moments for months, like recently, I fear it could be gone forever. The flux of life gives us the small tragedies. The large ones. The whispers of perfection. The continued fall of mankind. As poets, our job, duty, liveliness is to grasp these pieces, make them whole, if even for a moment; to try and make sense of what is real.