tiltawhirl

The Punisher

If you've ever been an overnight guest in someone else's house, there's a good chance you've slept on a fold out couch. I've slept on quite a few, and it seems like spending the night on even the nicest, newest one is akin to spending the night on some sort of medieval torture rack. But I don't think I have ever encountered anything like the guest bed my parents used to have - The Punisher.

I think the Punisher started life as my sister Charlene's bed. The Punisher was a twin-sized trundle bed - a regular-ish twin bed with a bed underneath that pulled out from and then sprang up to the height of its evil parent bed. I am not sure why this arrangement was necessary, whether that extra hidden bed was ever someone's assigned sleeping place, or if it was there in case of overnight guests. My mom wasn't big on sleepovers - I think she was pretty annoyed to see US in the morning, and theoretically, we lived there.

The Punisher came with these nifty kelly green bolsters that I guess would let you disguise the Punisher as a daybed as well. Those bolsters weren't really useful for much else but I do remember us (Char and me, then later, me and Chris) beating the living shit out of each other with them. I can remember running down the hallway with one, screaming, with a pillowcase on my head (which had a pillow inside of it, to make the pillowcase stand up like a magnificent headdress). So, they did serve some purpose. This behavior may explain my mother's reluctance to have overnight guests.

When you pulled the underneath bed out from under the Punisher, it was often a challenge to get that underneath bed to rise up to regular bed height the way it was supposed to. (Let's call that underneath bed "Spawn of Punisher" for clarity.) You had to push down a little on SOP to get it to release and come up, and most times it wouldn't react right away. So you'd push down on it a little harder, and harder, and soon you'd pretty much have all of your weight on it, and be jumping on the thing until SPRROOOINNNG it would launch upwards, propelling you toward the ceiling, through the roof, and up into the sky. SOP developed the habit in the later years of crashing to the floor in the middle of the night, while you were asleep, making it the guest bed equivalent of a nonconsensual trip on the FreeFall ride at Great Adventure. A system of ropes was deployed to lessen this risk.

But overall, SOP was a fairly comfortable bed, once you got past the initial rocket ship ride to the ceiling during setup, and once the midnight plunge to the floor issue was resolved. SOP was nothing compared to the back breaking horror of...The Punisher.

The thing about a trundle bed, at least, the thing about The Punisher, was that in order to accommodate SOP, there was no boxspring underneath the mattress. As I think about it, I would expect there would be a sturdy platform under there instead, but based on the way it sagged, I would venture a guess that there was NOTHING under there. Just a bedframe, with a mattress. I know this can't be true, but that was the way it felt to lie on it.

The Punisher sagged when you LOOKED at it. Just the weight of your eyes on it would make it creak, then sag. And that brings me to the other issue - the creaking. Raising your index finger to the side of your face to scratch generated enough creaking to wake the whole house. Scratching your face three times resulting it CREAK CREAK CREAK - every movement amplified enough to telegraph your every move.

The Punisher was banished several years ago from the computer room where it conducted its reign of terror. Once Chris moved out, his old room was outfitted with a very nice queen sized be that I will confirm is VERY comfortable. But I think I heard that Mom put the Punisher up in the attic. At night, when it is quiet, if you listen closely, you can hear it....

(softly) crreeeeeeeak.......... creeeeeaaaaaak..........

the great initial carving caper

My parents had this hideous furniture when I was a kid. It was all Mediterranean styled, mostly red and black I think, with wooden arms that had like knobs on the ends of them, kind of like you would see on a stair railing. It was hideous, but it went really well with a painting they had of three Spanish looking dudes that hung on the wall above it.

At some point, I got an overwhelming urge to carve something into the wood arm of the couch. I decided that the smartest thing to do would be to carve my SISTER'S initials into the couch. At least what I assumed my sister's initials were - CEA.  I was too young I guess for it to have registered on me that my sister went by a different last name.

When my mom saw it, Charlene got in trouble of course. When my sister protested that those weren't even her initials, I think my mom suspected she might be telling the truth, but couldn't definitively say one way or another which of us did it. It wouldn't be the first time a family member who wasn't technically named Aumack used the Aumack last name. Just ask my cousin Peter, aka "Gonzo Aumack" as he introduced himself at my brother's preschool.

a family tradition

My Uncle Kenny recently brought up a childhood story about his brother, my Uncle Eddie, drawing a penis and trying to convince my grandfather that it was NOT a dirty drawing, but instead, a rocket ship.

When I asked my mother about this, it reminded her to ask me if I was involved in the drawing of a penis on her paperwork that she needed to return to the dentist. Apparently, said penis was drawn over the holidays while Ryan and I were visiting.

I was *not* involved in this incident, but I can understand her targeting me as a primary suspect. When my brother Chris was in maybe 4th or 5th grade , I took his homework and wrote "Chris smells" on it. He  did not notice, and turned it in with my comments still intact.

He got in trouble for it with the teacher, and found himself in "The Gotcha Club". Now, I don't know what the Gotcha Club was, I imagine it was something akin to this teacher's "Shit List", but he was mighty upset about being in it. The thing that was always so confusing to me about the whole thing was, why was he in trouble? It has to be pretty obvious he didn't write that about himself. And if he did write that about himself and turn it in, wouldn't the teacher recognize it as some sort of self esteem problem?

tip of the iceberg

I don't think I have bought a head of iceberg lettuce in at least five years.

You know, the big perfectly round ones, with the size and heft of a basketball?

They always make me think of the salads we used to get at some of the restaurants we went to when I was a kid. I think they had them at the Pour House and The Sitting Duck. It was like a quarter of a head of lettuce, just a big wedge on a plate that had this chilled metal tray insert. Then they poured bleu cheese or Thousand Island dressing on it. The upgraded version had bay shrimp on it and chopped hard boiled egg. But mostly it was a big hunk of iceberg lettuce with salad dressing on it. Since iceberg lettuce has no discernable flavor, it was just a delivery mechanism for salad dressing.

Now it's all about the spring mix. Which is very tasty, and better for you. But sometimes I think about them when it gets hot outside.

I'll let you in on my thought process here, which may not be obvious.

The restuarants I mentioned above (and a lot of restaurants near where I grew up) are always air conditioned within an inch of "meat locker" coldness. So when it is hot out, I think about going to a restaurant where it is nice and cool, and that makes me think of those iceberg wedge salads on those cold metal plates.

earmuffs

When I was in 1st or 2nd grade, our teacher asked us to draw a picture of the lunchroom. At the time, I was in this phase where I was doing some weird things, drawing-wise, with hair. For some reason, I was drawing these sort of swirly, cinnamon-roll looking things on women's heads where their hair should be. I was explaining it to someone today, and described it as "kind of a Princess Leia-thing". Except now I realize that this was at least two years prior to the release of Episode IV, so I think Mr. Lucas has some 'splainin to do, about stealing my hairstyle.

I think was just trying to draw neatly coiffed pretty beauty pageant hair. My own hair is more similar in style and texture to something that you might use to clean a frying pan. As it grows, it gets wider at the bottom (much like my body). When I am due for a haircut, my hair starts to take on the shape of a triangle, Roseanne Rosannaannadanna style. It's a fetching look. So the hair I drew in my pictures swirled into obedient circles, nice and neat.

After we submitted our posters, the teacher submitted them in a schoolwide contest. Surprisingly, mine won first place. This was surprising for two reasons:

1. I can't draw.
2. It wasn't a particularly interesting picture. It was just a bunch of people in the lunch room.

As I went up to get my prize, the teacher said "See? In the drawing, it is SO noisy in the lunchroom that people are wearing earmuffs."

I just smiled, and never admitted that this was not my artistic vision, that it was just hair.

across the frozen tundra

There was a huge ice storm when I was a kid in NJ - I think it was in 1977. It had snowed first, then this ice storm came along on top of it, making all the snow hard and glazed. If you were careful, you could walk on top of it without breaking through the ice. This was best accomplished by slithering across it on your belly, distributing your weight.

I remember spending a long time out there, I had a hoe with me that I used to sort of pull myself along, traversing the backyard like an Arctic explorer, and repeating the phrase "Across the frozen tundra" over and over under my breath.

my master plan

He asked me "Do you have a plan?"

We were in my car, and he was driving. I enjoyed the intimacy of the act, of him driving my car. It was like him using my toothbrush, or me wearing his sweater. But we hadn't really reached that point yet, he was a guy I liked and I was, well I wasn't really sure what I was to him.

"Do I have a plan?" I replied, stalling for time. Yes, I have a plan, I replied in my head. To make you my boyfriend, to get you to kiss me, to make you love me and want to be with me forever, that's my plan.

"You mean, like plans for tonight?" I asked instead, by way of clarification.

"No, you know, like a life plan. That you'll have done this or that or the other thing by a certain age, that you'll do this thing, then that, and so on."

"Oh, that kind of plan."

He talked about someone else, a friend of his who had a plan, a very well organized one. He said "I don't have one, I was just wondering if everyone did."

"Ah, well, no, I guess I don't have one either."

We drove on in silence for a while. When we reached the parking lot where he would leave me to get in his own car to drive home, he kissed me for the first time.

fish tales and friends

It's been three years since we packed our things, murdered our fish, and moved from Portland to Seattle.

We had a small freshwater fish tank in Portland. We had had the tank for almost exactly a year before Ryan accepted a new position here in Seattle. During that year, the population in the tank dwindled from its initial "stocked to the gills" state down to a single occupant.

The movers were coming to pack up our things and put them in storage more than a week before we'd be in our semi-permanent house, and the likelihood of our fish surviving a three hour non-temperature regulated drive up to Seattle, then a week more in a hotel room without a stable tank seemed unlikely. Our fish was going to have to sleep with the fishes.

It's cruel to just flush a live fish down the toilet, I learned via the Internet. Instead, as recommended by several fish care experts, I put the fish in clove oil, to put it to sleep, then added vodka. I used good vodka - Grey Goose. He listed over to one side, then floated to the top. Then I flushed him down the toilet and said goodbye.*

Goodbye to Portland as well. Seattle is lovely, probably prettier in terms of sheer natural beauty than Portland, but I miss living there.

We had good friends there, friends we made when we were in our 20s and early 30s - when it's easy to make friends. We had weird parties where people brought real hookah pipes that frightened half the guests, and raccoons drank out of half finished glasses of Jack Daniels and left pawprints all over some guy's resume that was lying on the porch. (I can't explain, because I never figured it out myself.) We had giant dinner parties at cool restaurants and holiday dinners with friends. Then in a flash it was over. Then, almost everyone (including us) moved away. We still have two very, very good friends there that I probably wouldn't trade for 50 of the people I know up here, but that's it.

When you are young you imagine that you'll be making new friends forever - that you'll meet new people and you'll just keep collecting new friends and having new adventures. But it seems like it doesn't work out that way. Has my set of requirements become too narrow as I've become more decided about what I want (and won't tolerate) in a friend? What if I start to be friends with someone and we're hanging out in a restaurant and all of a sudden they say "You know, I don't know if I mentioned this, but I hate gay people"? Or they try to sell me into some sort of pyramid scheme? How do you gracefully escape that situation? These aren't risks I'm sure I'm willing to take anymore. I don't know if I had more faith in new people back in Portland, when we moved there 9 years ago, or just more energy.

But I also know with people you're meant to be friends with, it doesn't take much energy. It gives energy back to you. I was born to be my husband's best friend - I think it was the job we were both training for until the minute we met.

With my friend Carol, when we met 13 years ago, it was impossible not to like her. Becoming friends with her was a foregone conclusion for me the first time we met, which was weirdly enough, in a job interview. I left the interview thinking "Even if they don't make me an offer, maybe I'll see if she wants to go out for lunch sometime. She was really cool." I got the job, so it was irrelevant, but still funny.

We're still friends, although I don't get to see her or talk to her as much as I would like, since she lives in NJ. But the magical thing about people that you're meant to be friends with is this - when you talk to them again, it's like no time has passed at all. It's "Hi, how ARE you!" and then a minute later they say that thing, that amazing hilarious thing that only they would say, that makes you laugh and you are reminded all over again why you were fast friends with this person.

*If this sounds uncharacteristically cold-blooded for me, in regard to a drowning a live fish in vodka, please note that this sang-froide was a condition of having fish in the house. Ryan made me promise - no naming of the fish, no anthropomophizing of the fish, no discussing the fishes' feelings or thoughts. The fish had to be regarded as decor that ate. Otherwise, this was never going to work, and he was not excited at the thought of coming home and finding me prostrate on the floor, crying about dead fish.

i hate you, entertainment book.

I hate the entertainment book.

If you know what the entertainment book is, you're probably thinking "How can you hate the entertainment book? It's full of coupons, designed to save you money, and buying an entertainment book usually results in funds raised for some worthwhile organization. Shame on you! Shame on you for hating the entertainment book!"

But I hate it anyway. I've never owned an entertainment book, but I have been terrorized by it.

My mom is a big fan of the entertainment book, and has been for a long time. Every year, she'd get the entertainment book, and would immediately sit down, looking through it, plotting all the different ways she would torture us with it in the coming year. As soon as there was any discussion of doing ANYTHING, she'd slink away and come back with that damned book.

"If we're going to McDonald's, there's a buy one Filet O Fish sandwich, get one free coupon in here."

"But, no one wants a Filet O Fish sandwich. They are disgusting."

"Well then if we go to Wendy's, they have buy one get one free baked potatoes."

"Wendy's is 20 minutes away. And we have potatoes HERE."

And so it goes. The entertainment book always wants to sell you two of the thing that no one wants ONE of.

There were always two possible outcomes with the Entertaiment book. Either my dad would take one for the team and eat the Filet of Fish sandwich with grim resignation and pretend he was enjoying it, or there'd be some loophole that would prevent us from using the coupon. My mom would have already torn the coupon out of the book to present it, so she'd have to tuck it back into the book. By the end of the year, the entertainment book was falling apart - torn out coupons jutting out of every page at wild angles. My mom also puts other coupons that will never get used in there - non Entertainment book coupons, so that adds to the overall disheveled appearance of the book.

I was talking to my dad recently on the phone and we got on the topic of the Entertainment book. I told him I hated it, and that I wanted to throw it out the window of a moving car while crossing a bridge. He offered, with no hesitation "She keeps it in the driver's side door pocket in her car."

the strange scent of YooHoo

Bob drank a bottle of chocolate milk in our team meeting today. It was one of those dairy company type chocolate milks - the real stuff. Not nonfat or soy, or Nestle's Quik, which tastes more like water with vegetable oil in it. It was honest to God actual chocolate milk, like 2% milk.

I've always thought it was kind of a trick, that 2% milk sounds so much healthier than whole milk. But isn't whole milk something like 3%?

All of this discussion in the room about the chocolate milk led to someone mentioning YooHoo.

I drank some YooHoo back in childhood days. But I stopped abruptly when I decided it smelled like mother spit.

My mother used to take me out to the bus stop, and once we got out there, she'd realize I had something on my face - breakfast usually. She'd dab her tongue with a tissue, to wet it a little, then rub it on my face. I'd walk around the rest of the day smelling like mother spit. One day I realized that the smell of my mom's spit on my face those mornings was very similar to YooHoo. I think it was because she had just finished a cup of coffee before rubbing spit all over my face. Once I made the connection, it was difficult to drink a YooHoo without thinking "Mother spit - you are drinking mother spit".

It should be noted - mother spit is not necessarily more distasteful than the spit of any other family member or person. It was just my first encounter with foreign spit. I would go on to have more casual encounters with other people's spit later in life, but never would it be rubbed (intentionally) in my face, or served to me in a yellow can.