In which I find out that the guy who visited me in Miami had a crush on me but I didn't have a clue but maybe our mutual friend was imagining things

When I got back to the US after my stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile ("Peace Corps lite," we called it because we were in large cities that had coffee shops and movie theaters and electricity), I stayed with various amazingly generous friends in Austin until I had a job and got a place of my own in Miami.

I stayed at Tom and Sherri's for a few months, then spent a month at their friend Cindy's place while Cindy was out of town on a business trip. Cindy had a roommate, George, who was a very nice, very quiet guy who put up with having a stranger live with him for a month. George and I didn't do too much together. We had nothing in common except we were friends with Tom and Sherri. But he was nice. We would chat occasionally, but we each really just minded our own business.

George is the main part of this story, so remember what I just said.

The one thing I remember from staying in that house was that there was dog hair in the bathtub because Cindy blessherheart used to bathe her dog and then not clean the tub. I can put up with a lot - it takes a lot to gross me out - but I am kind of particular about where my naked feet go, especially when they are attached to my naked body. I won't even take my socks off for yoga because the idea of putting my naked feet where others have trod bugs me.

Note that I will, however, put my naked hands on that same mat. I am not consistent. I don't know why. I will also happily buy used shoes at consignment, but only if they are odor free and in good shape. So there you go. I have inconsistent squeamishness.

That said, I don't think most people would be happy about a dog-hair filled tub. Lots of coarse black hairs that blocked the drain. Ick.

I am also not a fan of mildewy shower curtains and have just one word to say to people whose shower curtains are black and slimy: bleach. Just spray some bleach on it. You don't even have to scrub. You don't have to live in grossness.

Look. If I, who can pee in a hole into the ground in the "bathroom" at the La Paz bus station while an old Aymara lady and her granddaughter watch me because of course there are no walls or stalls and then not wash my hands because there is no sink, can be grossed out by something, it's pretty gross. My standards are really low. See heed me when I tell you to clean your dang tub.

Know that I feel a wee bit bad criticizing someone who was so generous to me. For what it's worth, this was over 15 years ago and I have changed all the names. I am indeed grateful that Cindy let me stay in her house. It was very nice of her. And maybe she was in a rush before going on her trip and just didn't have time to clean the tub and it's sure not like I had anything better to do and it was nice, actually, to be able to do something for her and make a contribution to the household by doing some cleaning. There. I feel better.

Then I moved to Miami.

What I discovered about living in Miami is that people in Miami have a lot more friends than people who live in cold places. As in, I have never had so many people want to visit me in the middle of winter in my life.

Which was fine. I had a guest room. I liked seeing people. Most of my friends are excellent houseguests, as in, they didn't leave their towels or the bed linens on the floor and didn't leave their trash all over my house. I made a few extra copies of my housekey, gathered a collection of information about local attractions, stocked the fridge, and told my guests I would see them when I got home from work. If it was the weekend, I said I'd meet them for dinner. No, I had no wish to accompany them or to take them to Miami Beach. I had done that. Been there. My Saturdays were not for being a chauffeur but for doing my laundry, going to my swimming workout, and grocery shopping. Stay at my house, yes. Get my services as a tour guide, no. I was working until 9:00 p.m. or later most nights. My free time was for me.

After I had been in Miami for about a year, Sherri emailed me - George was going to Florida to watch the shuttle launch and wanted to know if he could stay at my house.

Of course he could stay! I had stayed in his house for an entire month. I was delighted to have a chance to return the favor.

He was going to have a car - drive up for the launch on one day, then go to the Keys the next. Fine. Use me as a hotel. I don't mind. It's a little bit of work, cleaning the bathroom and making the guest bed, but again, George had been very generous with me and I owed him.

All went as planned. George arrived. Gave me a lovely hostess gift. (He has excellent manners.) Stayed one night, went to the shuttle launch, returned. While he was gone, I got a call from a Peace Corps friend, W., who had a long layover in Miami the next day on her way from Washington DC to Argentina. Did I want to hang out?

Sure! The next morning, I told George that I was picking my friend up from the airport to hang out with her and that I might not be home when he got back from the Keys.

He asked what W. and I were going to do. I shrugged. Go to lunch. Talk. Nothing special.

Maybe he could hang out with us? he suggested.

I was taken aback. "I thought you were going to the Keys," I said.

He told me it was too overcast to do that.

Oh sheesh. I had been looking forward to time with someone who knew me and whom I knew and I wasn't happy about incorporating a relative stranger into the mix. But what do you say? He was a nice person. A guest in my house. "No! I don't want you with us!" I didn't have it in me.

After I picked W. up at the airport, the three of us went to lunch. It was fine, but W. and I didn't have the conversation I had wanted to have - you know, where we talk about men and gossip about our mutual friends.

W. left that evening and George left the next day. Life returned to its sad normal of 13-hour days at the sweatshop of Ryder corporate finance.

A few weeks later, Sherri emailed me. How did it go with George?

Fine, I told her. He saw the shuttle. Whatever.

No, she asked. I mean, how did it go?

I still didn't understand.

Her exasperation came through the monitor. He likes you! That's why he wanted to go to Miami!

Well knock me over with a feather. Talk about playing it close to the chest - share a house with someone for a month and you don't have a clue that his interested in That Way. Was I clueless or was George too understated?

I am generally clueless, but George had given me no hint whatsoever. Coming to Miami did not count as a hint. I was a hotel. Not a destination in and of myself.

And of course George had said nothing. Not a word. There had been no flirting. No statement of intent. Nothing. I am not a mind-reader and even if I were, I would not have been looking for this sort of information in George's blesshisheart mind. Nice guy, but no chemistry and I had learned my lesson about ignoring my chemistry instincts after the disaster with the guy I dated right before I went into the Peace Corps.

There is no better way to ruin a perfectly nice friendship than to try to push it to romance. The kissing never gets better. Ever. It's either there or it's not and there is no sense forcing it. Your friend who says, Oh no! It can get better! is a liar - she left her husband three years after she told you that.

I had to tell Sherri that I was not interested. Which is something I hate to do because I always feel as if I have been forced into it because the guy involved has refused to properly interpret my signaling. As in, if I had been romantically interested in George, I would have given him some indication. You know - like asked if I could go to the Keys with him or tried in any way to spend more time with him.

Although - and this just crossed my mind - maybe George had said nothing to Sherri and she was trying to matchmake. That's better. I like that a lot better than 1. I was clueless or 2. I had to reject a really nice guy. He probably had no interest in me at all. Whew.

In which I make a severe miscalculation about my bladder capacity on the Bus to Cartagena (OK, not Cartagena but still to a place in Latin America)

Have I told you guys about the time I made the Mexican bus driver stop so I could run into the bushes and pee?

No. I haven't. Because I try not to tell the same story twice here.

And yes I know this is a pee story and some of you don't like that sort of thing but everyone pees. Everyone wants to know how the astronauts pee. The first exhibit I wanted to see when Primo and I went to the space museum in Huntsville was the one explaining how the astronauts did what had to be done when they were in space.

My mother doesn't like it when I blog about the toilets in foreign countries, but once you've exchanged a 1000-lira Turkish note for a piece of toilet paper about the same size as the note, which makes the thinking person wonder, Why not just eliminate the middleman and use the currency for toilet paper? and then managed the fine art of balancing just right over the hole in the ground (hint: butt should be lower than the knees), you are over your squeamishness. Now you just want to know what toilets are like all over.

After my stint in the Peace Corps, I was living in Austin, unsuccessfully looking for a job because apparently, employers thought Peace Corps = "Teva-wearing, dope-smoking, unbathed, kumbayah-singing hippie."

Which is definitely not me. Oh sure sometimes I don't shower every day, but that's because 1. I am lazy 2. my husband is stuck with me because he would be too mortified to go through a second divorce and 3. the air here is super dry in the winter. But I wear cute shoes. I might not shower every day, but I draw the line somewhere. I wouldn't be caught dead in Tevas or Crocs.

I was in Austin. Looking for a job. Couldn't find one. What a better time than when one is unemployed to hop on the bus to Laredo, then walk across the border and get a bus to Guanajuato? Great idea, huh? That's what I thought.

Buses in Mexico are easy. Mexico has good roads and the tourist-class buses are comfortable and have toilets in the back. I am not crazy about the practice of forcing passengers to watch whichever movie the driver feels like popping into the video machine, but earplugs can block a lot of car chases and gunfights.

On a 13-hour bus ride from northern Chile to Santiago, I was forced to watch Ghost, which led me to the very bad decision of getting my hair cut like Demi Moore's.

I look nothing like Demi Moore. I do not have her fragile beauty and her thick, dark, lustrous hair.

I am a sturdy gal whose ancestors gave me the gifts of a strong body that could give birth in a potato field, then keep harvesting once the baby was tied to my back. I have fine, flyaway hair that when it is not covered with Clairol #24 Clove is at best a mousy drab, only now it is graying mousy drab.

The Demi Moore haircut? Did not work on me.

Bus movies = evil.

Back to Mexico.

After I had wandered through Guanajuato's cobbled, colonial streets lined with thick walls broken by heavy oak doors and gone to the mummy museum where the disinterred, mummified corpses of those whose families couldn't keep paying the cemetery taxes are displayed, I got bored and decided I needed to go to Dolores, the small town whence El Grito de Dolores, the start of the Mexican War of Independence.

I walked to the bus station and got my ticket but still had 30 minutes to wait. I decided that Staying Hydrated (remember - this is the town where corpses mummify instead of decomposing) was important, so I bought a two-liter bottle of water.

And proceeded to drink most of it.

Before I got onto the bus.

Which, much to my surprise, did not have a toilet.

I was an old pro at Latin America bus travel, having just spent ten weeks returning from Chile, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer, back to the US over land.

I took a bus from Salta, Argentina, to Asuncion, Paraguay. The ticketseller in Salta told me the ride was 12 hours and that the bus was air conditioned and had a toilet.

Liar.

The bus was not air conditioned. That would not have mattered so much if we had been going over 15 miles an hour and had generated a breeze, but it is hard to go fast when you are on a road that is mostly sand. We stopped for a break and I asked the driver to turn on the A/C.

He shrugged. "No A/C," he told me.

"But it says on the ticket! It says right here!" I demanded shrilly as I showed him my ticket, which did indeed say there was A/C, A/C that I had paid extra for as a rival bus company had cheaper tickets on non-air conditioned buses.

He shrugged again, drew on his cigarette and turned away from me. He didn't care. I could ride. I could not ride. All the same to him.

In a way, the lack of air conditioning was not so bad, because the heat that caused me to sweat out all my fluids so that the lack of a working toilet ceased to be a problem. The gap-toothed, sweating man sitting next to me who sucked down beer after beer never seemed to need a toilet, either.

Perhaps the high point of that trip was when the man behind me threw up in his seat and the driver refused to clean it up. It wasn't his vomit, the driver said.

When Lars, the Danish nurse who was sitting next to vomiting man and with whom I had bonded over our mutual discomfort in the northern Argentina heat and our mutual hatred of the noisy four year old sitting in front of me, asked the driver again to clean it up, the driver pointed out that the vomit was not actually in Lars' seat so what was the problem?

In Bolivia, the buses didn't have toilets at all, but we made frequent rest stops that really weren't for passenger convenience. They were beer breaks for the driver. My friend Kelly and I, on an earlier trip, took the bus from La Paz back to Chile. Only half an hour into the trip, the driver pulled the bus over at a cafe. "Twenty minutes!" he yelled over his shoulder as he got off the bus.

Kelly and I went inside the cafe to wait. Twenty minutes passed. Then thirty. Forty. We were looking for the driver. "Is that him?" she asked. "The guy over there? With the empty beer bottles in front of him?"

Yes, it was. Our driver. On his third beer. Ready to drive 11 hours on unpaved roads to the Chilean border.

On my overnight ride to Cochabamba (overnight is the only way to travel in Bolivia because you really don't want to see how narrow and twisting those unpaved mountain roads are), we stopped at a solitary cafe' on the altiplano. No toilets.

"Out back," a man told me when I asked.

I looked behind the cafe. I saw the mountains, looking flat in the moonlight. Small round shadows on the plains drifted and floated toward the mountain and away from it. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized that the shadows were Aymara women, squatting in their full skirts and petticoats. Squatting, standing, and leaving little dark circles in the dirt.

What was I supposed to do with my used toilet paper?

Air conditioning, indeed.

The next cafe' did have a bathroom. The toilets had no seats, which was common in South America, which makes me wonder if the toilets were sold without seats or if there is a strong secondary market in toilet seats down there and if so, what are those seats used for because it's certainly not toilets. There were showers but no bulbs in the light fixtures. The illumination came from candles stuck in sand contained in cut-off two-liter soda bottles.

I was used to traveling on Latin American buses.

But I hadn't planned appropriately for a Mexican local bus.

Two liters of water? In a half an hour? Before a bus ride?

Ten minutes into the ride, I thought, "Hmm. I could pee were the opportunity to present itself."

Twenty minutes into the ride, I thought, "I need to go now."

I looked at the back of the bus, seeking the toilet because of course there would be a toilet because how else would people pee?

No toilet.

No toilet and the road was getting bumpy.

Thirty minutes into the ride, it started to hurt.

I went to the front of the bus and politely asked the driver how far we had to go.

He waved his hand and said casually, "Not far! Not far!"

I smiled tightly and returned to my seat. I knew what the Latin American, "Not far!" meant. It is a synonym of "Four more blocks," which in Chile, was the substitute phrase used to mean, "I have no idea where this place is you seek but I am afraid if I admit such to you, I will seem either rude or stupid or both, so instead, I will lie to you and then we'll all be happy."

I tried to wait. I tried to think of anything but peeing.

When that didn't work, I started looking around for a bucket or an empty 64-oz Slurpee cup or anything that could capture and contain liquid.

Nothing.

I asked the driver again. "How much longer?"

Again, he waved his hand. "Not far. Not far."

I waited. I waited.

It's only 57 km from Guanajuato to Dolores, but in Latin America, you don't convert the kilometers to miles and estimate your time based on 55 miles per hour. Otherwise, you get too depressed. Instead, you just look at the number and ignore the units. That is, think of 57 kilometers as just 57. That's an hour. At least. Throw in the rest stop the driver makes a few minutes into the trip because you know he's tired and you're at an hour and 15 minutes.

A few minutes is a very long time when your bladder is about to explode. You realize that Einstein was right when he talked about that time stuff and how a minute with a pretty girl is not the same as a minute on a hot stove. Something like that. I just had to pee.

Finally, I couldn't take it any longer. I returned to the front of the bus and hissed at the driver, "If I can't pee right now, I am going to die."

Proper Mexican women do not talk like that.

Heck, proper American women do not talk like that.

His head swiveled, his jaw dropped, and he stared at me. There must have been some fierce determination in my face or perhaps desperation that made him take pity on me.

"OK," he said. "OK." He gently pressed the brakes. Stopped the bus. Opened the door.

I ran. There was a line of bushes about ten yards from the road. I scooted behind them, pulled down my pants, and squatted. As the pain left my body and well-being flooded me (honestly, that feeling of getting to pee when you have needed to pee for so long is almost better than [wxyz]), I glanced up and over the bushes to the bus. Every window had at least two faces pressed to it. As I pulled up my pants, walked back to the bus and returned to my seat, they all stared at me without saying a word.

"Thank you so much," I told the driver, my chin high. I felt great. I would not be daunted.

I would also not drink two liters of water just before getting on a bus again. There is only so much kindness you can expect from strangers.

In which the cute guy in my Portuguese class turns out to have sweaty hands and poof my crush is killed

When I lived in Miami, I didn't have a TV, so I needed things to do in the few short hours when I was not at work in the salt mines known as Ryder corporate finance. When a person does not have TV, she is forced to do things. Horrible things. Things to fill her time. Things like read. Like tutor algebra to high school students, which she thinks will be solving quadratic equations and factoring polynomials but instead turns out to be times tables and converting fractions. Like take violin lessons. Like go to Returned Peace Corps Volunteers parties.

Like take salsa dance lessons. Like learn to speak Portuguese.

It is far far better to own a TV than to be forced to entertain onesself. How on earth did I survive my adult life until I met Primo and married him and his big-butt TV?

True confession: I did have a TV when I was in grad school. I had bought it shortly before grad school so I would have something to distract me while I polished the brass candlesticks that my mother had "let" me keep when she and my dad moved to Saudia Arabia. I jumped on them because what 20something decor is complete without large Turkish brass candlesticks? That need to be polished? A lot?

Once I had the TV, I got into the 30something habit. (And yes, I am watching my library's website to see when they get their copy because I am not willing to pay $25.97 to amazon.com just for a fleeting pleasure. I could save that money for shoes! or purses! Although the dark and brooding Michael. So sexy. So whiny. Maybe he's worth $25.97.)

There were some other shows I had to watch. Me, who used to snicker at her grandmother for dropping everything to watch As the World Turns every afternoon, had become an addict and remains one to this day. I have become my grandmother and am an ardent Friday Night Lights, Downton Abbey and Glee fan. I do like me my soaps.

I even have Primo hooked (ha! Hook 'em!) on Friday Night Lights. At first, he didn't want to watch a

1. Stupid

2. TV show

3. about Texas

4. and football,

but five minutes into the first episode, I knew he would like it and forced him to watch with me. I used my usual "You only have to watch 30 minutes and then if you don't like it, we'll turn it off" tactic, which served has served me well for musicals (Oklahoma, My Fair Lady) and some romantic comedies.

Here is the My Fair Lady strategy:

Me: Thirty minutes. That's all. If you don't like it after 30 minutes, we'll turn it off.

Primo: It looks stupid.

Me: Maybe, but it's Thanksgiving weekend and you don't have to work and you can spare 30 minutes to watch a movie with me.

Primo: Fine. [Grumble, grumble, grumble.]

Thirty minutes later. I grab the remote and turn off the movie.

Primo: What are you doing?

Me: I said only 30 minutes. It's been 30 minutes. Your suffering is over.

Primo: I don't know.

Me: What do you want to do? Should we put together a puzzle?

Primo: It's not that bad.

Me: No no no. I said only 30. That I wouldn't make you do more than that.

Primo: I guess I could watch the rest of it. It doesn't suck.

That technique has gotten Primo hooked on Friday Night Lights. Here is how hooked he is:

When we realized the library did not have Season 3, we bought it.

That's right.

We paid money for a TV show. We don't even have cable, y'all. If you don't count our property taxes and our amazon.com prime fees, we do not pay for movies and TV. We get them from the library and from amazon prime.

Where was I? Oh right. Hooked on TV shows. So I gave my TV to my brother when I went into the Peace Corps and never asked for it back because I wanted more out of life than vicariousness. Is that a word? I wanted to live my own life, not watch someone else's. Now, of course, I am perfectly happy to watch someone else's drama. As long as it isn't my drama, I'm happy. Vicarious is fine with me.

And now back to Miami and the Portuguese class and the sweaty-handed guy Claude.

Oh the Portuguese class. When I signed up, I thought I could go straight into Portuguese II because I already spoke Spanish, but the world-weary clerk told me that mami, in Miami everyone already speaks Spanish.

Then she would not take my registration form unless I completed the "race" box, which annoyed me to no end because seriously, Miami public schools adult education program? Does it matter what my race is if 1. I want to learn to speak Portuguese and 2. I am paying you money to teach me?

But the clerk, she does not care. She is like the clerk at the marriage license office when Primo and I applied for our license. I filled out my section of the form, ignoring the stupid "race" box because again, it's relevant to my marriage how? and pushed the form across the counter to the clerk, who was busy busy busy looking at her fingernails. She slowly looked at the form, then pushed it back to me, telling me that I had to answer the question.

I should have

1. told her to look at me and decide for herself what I was or

2. written "human," because is that not what we all are in the end?

Alas, I had not found my inner revolutionary at either point, so in both cases, I chickened out and wrote an answer, although who knows? Maybe I do have some other ethnicities in me of which I am unaware. People 300 years ago got around more than we think. I could be a little bit of everything.

In the Portuguese class, where I was slotted unceremoniously into the Portuguese I section and where it did indeed turn out that everyone in the class already spoke Spanish, which was not a problem except when the conversation turned, as it always does in Miami, to that maldito I spit on heem Castro, the conversation was no longer in Portuguese, which was what I wanted to learn, but rapidfire Spanish, which I already speak albeit not with a Cuban accent, which meant I had to concentrate very very hard to understand what the heck anyone was saying.

But I learned some Portuguese, enough to get by, and enough that when the teacher assigned us our end of class speech assignments, I could turn the tables on her.

Why do American men prefer foreign women? was the topic that she, a carioca, assigned to me.

Oh heck to the no. Uh uh. I was not going there. Betray my kind? No thanks.

Instead, I wrote about why foreign women preferred American men.

American men are not the most handsome, I noted. Italian and Argentine men are the most handsome.

They're not the most sophisticated. That's the French. Maybe. I don't know.

But they're the nicest. American men are the nicest. Sure, men do bad things to women in all cultures, but in the US, it is not socially acceptable to have a mistress.

After the speeches, a professora made us sing "Over the Rainbow" in Portuguese. I don't want to step on any toes here, but that is a vile song in English, much less a pretty language like Portuguese. I think she hated us.

But that's not what this post is about.

There was this guy, Claude, in my class, in both Portuguese I and Portuguese II. I spent all of Portuguese I trying to figure out how to get him to talk to me. In Portuguese II, I somehow succeeded. And I somehow convinced him to go to the Sunday evening salsa class in Miami Beach.

Gosh I miss Miami. In January, it is almost always warm there. It's mid April and we are having thunderhail here. It snowed three days ago. I have a space heater pulled up next to me. I can't get decent Cuban food here. My Spanish has gone to poop.

And finding a decent salsa class here is nigh impossible.

In here's defense, we do have killer bratwurst, cheese curds and frozen custard.

Primo has been promising to take dance classes with me for a couple of years. Yet he keeps loopholing out because of class conflicts with our theater tickets or travel or whatever. There are not enough salsa classes to overcome our other obligations.

But in Miami, there was a class every Sunday night in Miami Beach. The teacher's name was Luz. She was the best dance teacher I have ever had.

After the salsa class with Luz, I took a swing dance class that did not require one to sign up with a partner. I was the only unpartnered person in the class. The way the teacher is supposed to handle this situation is to have everyone change partners every few minutes. You're supposed to be learning the steps, not how to dance with a particular person.

But this teacher - "Bad Teacher," or "BT" for short - didn't do that. Instead, she told me to practice by myself.

Practicing alone is not a good way to learn to dance.

When BT would see someone doing the step wrong, rather than gently correcting that person, she would stop everyone, look at the ceiling, and announce, "SOMEONE is not rocking back on the two count."

We would all look at each other, at our feet, and at BT, wondering if we were the SOMEONE of whom she spoke.

Luz was not like this. Luz had us split into a line of men and a line of women to learn the basic step, then she would have us practice with each person down the line, correcting us as we went along.

I had told Claude about the class and he for whatever reason said he would accompany me. I picked him up at his apartment, which was not far from my cute little Coconut Grove WWII-era duplex that has since been knocked down so that a crappy condo can be erected in its stead.

We went to the class.

I danced with him.

Reader, he had Sweaty Hands.

I know, I know. How can I, a flawed human being, demand perfection of another human being? How can I demand dry hands when I don't even have slim, toned thighs and naturally curly hair?

But Sweaty Hands! Ick!

My crush, she was over. Finito.

I didn't think Claude was interested in me at all. I thought he just wanted to learn to dance.

But when I dropped him off, he asked if I wanted to come up to his place for a drink. I think he might have said "coffee," but at that time, I did not know what joy coffee would bring to me and so my first thought would have been, "But I don't drink coffee."

Actually, I think those were my words to him. "I don't drink coffee."

When Person A extends the Sweaty Hand of Friendship or Seduction to Person B, the proper response is not, "I don't drink coffee," unless Person B is not interested in Friendship or Seduction.

Or unless Person B is so darn rude, clueless and unsophisticated that she blurts out the first words that cross her brain.

The world's most sophisticated women are not to be found in the United States. Or at least they are not to be found in my car.

Claude looked at me, startled at my abrupt response/rejection of his Sweaty Hand of Friendship/Seduction. Um OK, he said. See you in class.

And that was the end of my Portuguese salsa dance adventure with Claude.

In which I have to hear my friend Janelle getting busy

Have I ever told you guys why I hate skiing? Other than the obvious - that it is 1. an expensive sport where you 2. have to wear clothes that make you look fat and 3. be cold?

The first time I went snow skiing - and the second to last time because somehow, the magnitude of the disaster didn't really sink in - I did not enjoy myself. I got altitude sickness, which was bad enough, but it was the nighttime torments that were truly awful.

But let's talk about altitude sickness and the advisability of maybe taking some ski lessons like your friends, who were serious skiers and who had no interest in hanging out with novice you, who had never been on snow skis before, kept suggesting.

No! No lessons for me! How hard could it be, anyhow?

Those are the famous last words that have preceded every haircut I have ever given to myself. I would like to say that I learned the self-haircut giving lesson a long time ago, like when I was 12, but that would be a lie. I have taken scissors to my own hair within the past three months and I am less than three years away from an AARP card.

Omigosh. I hadn't really thought about it like that. I am just now getting used to the idea of being in my 40s and now I have to start getting ready for 50? Does this mean I will never be thin and with good skin and hair, all at the same time, ever? Has the chance passed me by?

I think so.

Crap.

That means I am going to have to work on being a nice person instead. I'd rather just diet.

Back to altitude sickness. I ignored my friends' advice to take some lessons and followed them to the top of the hill instead. They zipped down merrily and I stood there, trying to think of what to do next. I had poked around some on the lower slopes but this was a little bit harder.

Did I mention the altitude? We had come from Austin, which is not a high place, to Utah, which is. I hadn't had a lot of sleep. I think - this was over 20 years ago - I think I might not have eaten breakfast that day, which would be highly unusual as I Do Not Miss Meals.

You know those people who say that they forget to eat? What a bunch of crap. I have never forgotten to eat in my entire life. I have been prevented from eating and it's been miserable, but I've never forgotten. Indeed, I carry emergency food in the car and in my purse - peanut butter stuffed pretzels, dried pears, Kashi mocha granola bars, almonds and red licorice - just in case I'm out and it's a mealtime. I will not be stuck without food.

But I think I had skipped breakfast. So there I was: up high, not a lot of sleep, and no food in my stomach.

Guess what?

That's a combination that leads to feeling like crap which leads to the utter and total humiliation of being taken down the mountain by the ski patrol because you feel too crummy to ski.

And then you have to wait in the lodge because you 1. don't have a key for the condo and 2. even if you did, you can't remember where it is.

I hate skiing.

And I hate the condo part of skiing. There was a group of us. My friend Gwen and her husband. Gwen's brother and a friend of his. My friend Janelle and her husband. My friend Alexander. Me.

Here were the sleeping arrangements:

Bedroom #1: Gwen and husband

Living room pullout bed and whatever I didn't really pay attention: Gwen's brother and his friend

Bedroom #2: Janelle and her husband

Loft off Bedroom #2: Alexander and me

Alexander and I were not an item. (Not from a lack of interest on my part, I assure you.) The loft was a little cubby up high in the wall off the bedroom. You had to climb the ladder on the wall to get there. No door. It opened right into the bedroom. There were some mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor. Alex and I each had our own sleeping bag. No hanky panky. Alas.

First night. Alex and I had climbed into the loft. Janelle and her husband turned out the lights and went to bed. A few minutes later, I heard a noise.

A noise I hadn't heard in a while because I had a rather lackluster love life, although I realize in retrospect I got around a little more than I probably should have. Oh the perils of setting low standards for onesself.

But I knew that sound.

It was the sound of sex.

It was "We're trying to be quiet" sex, but it was sex nonetheless.

I lay there, horrified. I didn't know if I should say something to Alex or not. What is the protocol in this situation?

They didn't stop.

I pulled my pillow over my head. I didn't want to hear it.

The next morning, Janelle acted as if nothing was wrong.

The next night, we went through the same thing again. Quiet, then, sound of sex, then pillow over head.

This happened every night of the trip.

Did I mention Janelle and her husband had been married for 20 years?

Knowing what I know now after just 2 1/2 years of marriage, I should respect someone who can do it every night. But every night while I had to listen?

And WHO WANTS IT EVERY NIGHT? When I was in college, I thought daily sex would have been the bomb, but in college, you don't have to clean bathrooms or make supper or go to work or cut the grass and you have a heck of a lot more energy. In real life, you want to read your Belinda Carlisle autobiography and then go to sleep.

I was miserable on that stupid trip. I couldn't ski and I was too broke and too dumb to take lessons. I felt like crap. And every night, I had to dread hearing someone else's love life while a man on whom I had a massive crush lay next to me.

When we returned to Austin, somehow the subject of Janelle's nocturnal activities came up. Somehow the information that I had heard them came up.

She didn't even have the grace to be mortified. She just laughed and said that her husband always got romantic on vacations and that they had tried to be quiet.

I made a mental note never to be anywhere near them at bedtime again.

In which I wear a teddy, high heels, pantyhose and a coat to pick Primo up from the airport and nothing else

It's a good thing I didn't have a flat tire is all I can think of now. Or that my radiator didn't blow up, which it had done before. Maybe it didn't go because I had already gone through the trauma of getting home from work with steam pouring out of the hood of my car and stopping every few miles to put more water in it. And then I got lost in the south side of town and it was pouring down rain and I ran out of water from the jug I kept in the trunk and a man came up to me as I was just sitting here on the muddy side of the road and, after telling me that I was definitely not in my neighborhood, asked if I needed help and I was a little apprehensive because hello, he was a stranger, but dang, I really didn't have any other options.

He popped the hood and looked and confirmed that I did indeed have a bad radiator and that I should drive straight to a garage to have it replaced, which is what I should have done that morning on my way to work when I first saw the billowing clouds of steam emerging from a place where you never want to see steam. Did I mention that I saw said billowing clouds of steam right as I was passing Sears Auto? Oh how dumb was I?

The Strange Man asked for some more water for the radiator and I told him I had none. We both fell silent. What to do? What to do? This was a rather desolate part of town. It was raining. No place convenient to fill the jug.

Except the big ditch by the side of the road. "But that water is dirty!" I protested.

He just looked at me. "Ma'am, that radiator has to be replaced anyhow. You just need to get home."

He filled the jug with rain water and poured it into the radiator. It worked. I chugged along home at about 20 miles an hour, staying on the side roads because if your car is going to fail, you definitely do not want it to fail on the highway.

I'm talking to YOU, my old Subaru, whose drive belt snapped on Highway 183 in Austin as I was on my way to see a customer. This was in the days before cellphones, so I had to leave the car and walk to the Whole Foods 100 yards away to call Triple A, who asked me where the car was and I said, "Right here by Whole Foods!" with an implied "Duh!" but then I realized that the person I was talking to was not even in Austin and didn't that shake my world view that something as simple as ordering a tow truck was no longer a local operation.

My similar recent experience was hearing John Tesch, on his radio show, talking about dental hygiene for pets and explaining that some pets need braces.

Braces? For a pet?

He went on to say that the braces are not for cosmetic purposes but because some breeds of dog have congenital teeth problems, to which I would say, Get a dog that doesn't need braces.

Braces. For a dog. Honestly. I'm just finally getting used to the idea of needing to brush the cats' teeth. For which they do not appear to make the appropriate toothbrushes. I went to Walgreen's just to get a little kid's toothbrush and all they have are Dora the Explorer and Dumbo toothbrushes, which cost $4 apiece. Just a generic small toothbrush would be fine with me, thanks, and I'll bet many parents do not appreciate having to spend that much on a disposable item.

Back to the teddy and the car. Given all the car drama I have had over my life, you would think I would know better than this and it's a good thing nothing bad happened this time, but I will never do this kind of thing again.

Primo's birthday was coming up. He is very hard to shop for. When he sees something he wants, he buys it. Within reason, of course, although I would argue that nobody needs 300 bottles of wine in the basement.

But we do not lack for stuff. We are over-stuffed. I would like to divest of a lot of our stuff, but I do not control all that now that I am a married woman. When you marry, you don't get to to be The Decider about how much crap enters your house. That is sad.

I thought I would make a Grand Gesture. Lingerie! What man doesn't like lingerie?

But where does one buy fancy lingerie? My underwear usually comes from Target and before you laugh, they have some cute underwear and why pay a lot for something that wears out at the same rate regardless of the source? I always laugh when I see white t-shirts in fashion magazines priced at $200. For a white shirt? That is going to stain as soon as the wearer eats raspberries? No. You buy your white t-shirts at Target and just get five each season.

Back to the underwear. Target does not or did not at the time seem to carry seduction lingerie, which is a category of its own.

I had to go to the mall, which I hate, because you have to find parking and then walk past all the stores that don't interest you or worse seduce you and your thin, unemployed now for a year wallet and yes I mean Godiva Chocolates and Origins Soap. I am powerless in the face of fancy chocolate and fancy soap.

So I parked right at the Dillard's entrance and went straight to the lingerie department, which I think is actually called "intimates," as if "lingerie" is a bad word. Or maybe it's just harder to spell.

The saleslady was so nice. She helped me find a red teddy which of course did nothing to flatter me in the cheap mirrored, florescent-lit dressing room, especially as I tried it on over my underwear, which is how you are supposed to do these things.

You would be surprised, though, at how tacky some women can be in the dressing room. I worked at Macy's for only a month and even in that short time, I saw complete chaos in the dressing room. As in, is it really too much trouble to put that evening gown back on the hanger after you try it on? One of the full-time salesladies told me that she had found - um - various human fluids and solids in the dressing room before. Oh ick.

When it came time to pay, I hesitated. This red teddy was not inexpensive. I hadn't worked in a while. I was living off my savings. But I decided Primo was worth it. I paid. The lady wrapped it and put it in a bag.

Then I drove straight to TJMaxx, where I found a similar item for one fourth the price. Oh snap.

I tried to time the Dillard's return for when the saleslady wouldn't be there because I didn't want to face her after she had been so helpful. But I also didn't want to waste the gas on making another trip. Dillard's was on the way home from TJMaxx so there you go.

She was there. I was mortified. But I decided honesty was the best policy, so I just told her I had found a similar item cheaper elsewhere. Maybe she didn't care. When I did returns at Macy's, I didn't care why someone was returning something as long as it wasn't because the product was defective. A good product can be re-stocked, a bad product cannot.

Speaking of that, if you want to return the elegant (and I use that term loosely) denim jacket with the studs on the yoke and collar a year after you bought it (with the tags on it and with a receipt), I will ask my manager if it's OK. When he says fine, return it for store credit, I will do so.

What I will not do is re-sell it to you for the one penny value the jacket has now acquired in the inventory system. After three months, products roll out of inventory and you can't return them by just scanning the bar code, etc, and pulling up all the data. You have to key in the item number and price. The system assigns a value of one cent to old inventory, hence the term "pennied out."

But just because the system says the value is one cent does not mean that that is now the sale price. Do not ask me to sell it to you for one penny. I would rather set it on fire than do that. If you wanted it, you could have kept it at the price you paid. And don't tell me that the other clerk does it all the time because that's just baloney.

Maybe the Dillard's lady didn't care. Maybe she just shrugged and thought, "Eh. Whatever." I hope so.

So now I had my red teddy for only $10. I had a nice spring coat. I had high heels. And Primo was flying in.

I put on the teddy and tried to put on the shoes, which were not very comfortable without pantyhose for I come from the pantyhose to work tradition and have bought my shoes accordingly. I removed the teddy, put on hose, then donned the teddy and shoes again. Looked in the mirror. Rolled my eyes. Oy. Really? But in for a penny.

Put on my nice flowered spring coat that I have not gotten to wear once this spring because it's been too cold for a light spring coat and drove to the airport. Prayed that the car would not die and I would be there on the side of the road in a coat I dare not remove lest I frighten small children.

Made it to the airport. Saw Primo waiting outside of baggage claim. Hugged him when he came to the car. And flashed him.

Which he liked.

Refastened the coat immediately. I am not good at this flashy sexpot thing. I am more of a white t-shirt and jeans person myself. But - he liked it. He liked the chocolate cake I had made for him. He was a happy boy. But he doesn't seem to mind my usual bedtime getup of red and white striped knit pants from Lands' End plus his yellow Beer Bike t-shirt from college. Primo, fortunately, is very easy to please.

The teddy has lived in my dresser since then. Four years, I think it's been. I finally put it in the Goodwill bag. I know if I tried that stunt here in the frozen north, the brakes would fail and I would careen into another car and then the ER people would laugh at my getup or I would get a flat and have to change it in the snow. We keep blankets, coats, gloves, and a snow shovel in the trunk for most of the year here. I do not need to tempt fate. It's back to Target underwear for every single day. Married + cold climate = no more teddies.

In which the scent finally leaves my dad's clothes

For years after my dad died (in 1997), I had this dream where I would hear his voice calling me from the kitchen. It was the kitchen in my place in Miami. I lived there after he died and of course he never visited. But I would hear his voice clear as day and I could even see him standing there and I would wake up and run to the kitchen because maybe his death had been a bad dream and he wasn't really dead.

Every time I got to the kitchen, it was empty. I would be left bewildered at how I could have been so sure that he was alive. I had heard his voice! It was his voice. I had heard him. And yet there was nothing.

And each time I woke up and found out he was really dead, it was like he had just died. You never get closure. Those grief counselors they send to schools every time something awful happens? Do they do any good? Talking about death does not change it. Telling someone you feel crummy doesn't make you feel less crummy.

You never get over losing someone you love. You just get used to it. But sometimes, even when you think enough time has passed that you accept that this is just how life is now - Life Minus One - you will be shocked at the sharp, fresh pain that stabs you. That pain should be dull and small by this point, but it's not. It's almost as bad as it was the first time.

Your mileage may vary, of course. I suspect that if a parent or sibling who was never All That dies that those left behind don't mourn so much. Maybe they feel guilty about things that were unresolved or feel guilty that that don't mind that the person is dead, but they don't have a big empty gash inside of them that never quite heals. That, too, is sad, because who wants a crummy parent who won't be mourned? Then the mourning is for the relationship that never was.

And of course I am talking out of my elbow here because how can I possibly know how someone else feels? I have no idea. I can just imagine. Let's just say that there are some people in my life whose absence I will not mourn as much as others and I would think that others would have similar situations.

I digress. I have lived over one third of my life now with my dad dead. I have almost 14 years of memories that don't include him. I don't look around my house now and think, "Oh! I remember when Dad repaired that dripping faucet!" I don't think, "That was the year Dad got the turkey skin out of the trash." My home now doesn't have cues about my dad.

All I have is a photo on my dresser of my dad and me from 25 years ago, taken in the front yard of our house in San Antonio, a few years before my parents moved to Saudi Arabia. I am standing behind my dad with my arms around him and clasped around his neck. We are both wearing red, which was not something I did much in those days even though really, I look good in red. My hair is John from the nice beauty shop in West University blonde; my dad's is silver.

We are both smiling broadly and naturally but with our eyes open, a rare instance indeed for both of us as we are both not photogenic at all and quite awkward in front of the camera. Usually, we have forced grimaces, but my mom caught us at the perfect moment - laughing but before our eyes squinch shut.

We look happy.

There are reminders all over my house of my mom. When I vacuum in the basement rec room, I think about my mom spending three hours pushing the carpet cleaner back and forth to suck the water out of the soaking wet basement flood carpet.

Oh yes. We have annual basement floods. Have I told you about them? Perhaps I'll write about them later, but let's hope that I don't have any new material this summer because the floods put Primo in full freakout mode. Fortunately, they are followed by full engineer mode and we have saved our carpet each time, but it is a pain in the neck.

I see the irises in my front garden that my mom brought me from her garden and that originally came from my grandmother's garden up north. I have a bottle of leftover soy milk in my chest freezer for her next visit. Fortunately, lactose intolerance is something I have not inherited from her. Most people would probably agree that chubby thighs, a small bosom, and a tendency to migraines would be enough of a heritage to inflict on anyone.

When my mom visits, we talk about my dad. We tell Primo about him and Primo politely listens. Primo somehow turned out to be a very nice person, despite everything, and for that, I do thank his parents. They did one thing right at least and that's all I'll say about that for now.

Primo watched the videotape my mom gave me of my dad's last days. Someone lent us a video camera when my dad was in hospice for the last week of his life and we taped my dad telling stories. He lies there, bald and shrunken, 50 pounds underweight, in his hospital bed. In one shot, my brother, sister and I gather around him, unsmiling, with flat eyes. It's hard to radiate joy when your father is dying. But my dad, of all of us, makes an effort. He tries to smile and put a good face on it.

When he is telling stories, he genuinely smiles. He talks about hitting a big seagull once when he was riding his bike down a long hill in Panama. The bird got the short end of the stick as Force = Mass times Acceleration, which would have been

Force = [My dad's then-170 lbs] x [about 9.8 meters/second squared and I say "about" because that is the rate of gravity in an environment with no friction, but as my college physics prof always advised us, I am ignoring friction even though friction is real and you can't ignore it and also disregarding the fact that my dad would have been descending at an angle as opposed to dropping straight down, so you would have to throw in some other math there to make it come out right - so about but definitely less than 9.8 m/s2]

Force = whatever the math works out to but definitely more force than an eight-pound seagull could absorb without losing some feathers and the contents of his bowels

My dad laughs as he tells this story. Primo turns to me and says, "Wow. Your dad really had a strong [regional] accent," which is true and which is something I had never noticed before because he was just my dad, you know? But now that I hear that accent a lot, I recognize it a lot easier. Ainso?

I visited my mom earlier this month for a few days. She had a minor outpatient surgery to improve her vision and I went to help out during her convalescence. My "helping" turned out to be griping about having to get up at 5:15 a.m. to take her to the surgery center. After that, I got the ice pack from the freezer and put salve on her eyes. And made her supper and did the dishes. And kept her company.

Don't you wish you had a daughter like me?

It should have been my dad doing all that. Not that I minded - well, I was not crazy about the getting up early part - but you're not supposed to be widowed when you are only 54, as my mom was. Even 68, as she is now, seems young to be a widow. Lots of men older than that still hanging out, taking their slow walks around town in their sensible brown shoes and stopping to talk to me about the apple blossoms that have finally appeared or when to plant tomatoes or the millwork on the old Victorian house down the street.

One afternoon, while my mom was taking a nap, I went into the big closet off the guest bedroom. My mom has decades of her clothes in there - things she will probably never wear again but cannot bear to part with. One item is a beautiful belted, tailored yellow dress she made from a Vogue pattern, which, for those of you who do not sew, is the fancy, expensive brand of clothing patterns. But the dress is lovely and has bound buttonholes, which, again for those who do not sew, are a real pain in the neck but a sign of Quality.

If I had put that much work into a dress, I would not get rid of it, either. I would make a little shrine around the dress showing that I used to be able to sew like a pro. There is almost no point to sewing one's own clothes any more as decent clothes are available at a more than reasonable price at consignment stores and nice fabric is so expensive and who wants to do all that work with cheap fabric? It's like when I knit - I buy real wool because I am not going through all that with acrylic.

She has her clarinet from high school, when she got a One at State. Her dolls from when she was a little girl. Needlework from my grandmother.

And my dad's clothes.

Not all of them. Enough. A few suits and sport coats and a track suit.

She has moved three times since my dad died. The clothes have moved with her. Every time I visit her, I go into the closet to run my hands over my dad's clothes and to smell them. For years, his scent lingered. I would bury my face in the silk sport jacket and inhale.

How do you save the smell of someone you love? Every time I smell the combination of moth balls and lavender, I am back at my Granma Sylvia's house. Primo and I had a month-long breakup during our courtship. I didn't wash his bath towel the entire time. Instead, I kept it hanging on the shower curtain rod and sniffed it every time I went into the bathroom. I could pick my mom's pillow out of a dozen random pillows. I still put on Polo cologne every time I am in a department store because that is what my college boyfriend wore and he smelled so good.

This time, the smell was gone. My dad's scent was gone. I can't even remember what it was like. Maybe a combination of clean sweat from riding his bike to work, airplane fuel (he was more or less an aircraft mechanic), and Old Spice. The Dad Smell. It's gone. It will never come back.

In which I get to walk out of a living slam book session in a snit

After I had been a Peace Corps volunteer for a year, the director of my agency, Pilar, said we were going to do a review of the previous year. Great idea! It's always good to look back at what you did and whether it worked or not and then decide what adjustments, if any, to make to your strategy.

I was the business advisor to a group of Mapuche women in southern Chile. This group of 135 women had a small store where they sold the traditional Mapuche textiles that they had woven by hand.

My assignment was to make them profitable, which was not so easy as I had no authority whatsoever to make my four co-workers at the store do what needed to be done, like not accepting any rug or blanket unaccompanied by a purchase order or not accepting any product not meeting a minimal quality standard. Or not continuing to extend credit to the women (for buying yarn and dye) when they never paid us back. Which would be bad enough under normal circumstances but is even worse in a period of inflation and when your IADB stipend is denominated in dollars and the dollar is losing against the peso. Little things like that.

It wasn't that my co-workers didn't want the agency to be profitable, but when you get paid whether your store is profitable or not - we were funded by a grant from the Inter-American Development Bank and that money paid the rent and my co-workers' salaries - it's not so necessary to make the tough decisions. Why make women cry - women who desperately need the money from their rugs and blankets - if you get paid whether you reject their product or not?

Let me digress right now and tell you that one of the most satisfying moments of my life was a few months ago when Maria, my counterpart at the agency, found me on facebook and told me that I was right and she was wrong and that she should have listened to me.

We are talking about something that happened 16 years ago. I had told her repeatedly that Pilar, the director, needed to do things differently for the agency to succeed and that I would help Maria prepare the documentation to show Pilar what had to happen and why. But Maria always resisted and I eventually dropped it. She resisted because she was the one who had to stay at the agency and she was the one whose living depended on this job. I was dabbling. I was there for two years and gone. I had no skin in the game, other than an interest in adventure and building my resume. But for Maria, this was all real. She did not want to challenge the status quo. It was safer that way.

That said, I was right and Maria was wrong. She told me that after I left, Pilar destroyed the agency and it was all because of the things I said. I took no satisfaction from knowing that the agency had ceased to exist - I would rather have been wrong - but still. My opponent. Vanquished. Ha.

So Pilar called a review meeting. I prepared some notes - analyses of sales and operations and things that had worked and what we could try in the next year. I was ready. I was ready. Oh we were going to do great things.

Pilar pulled chairs into a circle. She sat. My three other co-workers sat. Our three unpaid college interns (my idea) sat.

Pilar started.

Gold Digger, she asked. What do you think you could do better next year?

I pulled out my notes and started to talk. We need to do this and that and tha-

She interrupted me. Here's what Gold Digger did last year that I didn't like, she said to the others.

What?! This is not a review!

She turned to me and glared. I don't like the way you got upset when I sat at your desk.

The incident to which she referred was actually multiple incidents. Pilar had her own desk. She had her own office. But she didn't like it in there. She liked the having of her own office because she liked the trappings of power, which also included having our receptionist place all her calls for her, even though she maintained that her Struggle was against the Patriarchy and Western Imperialism and Hegemony. She struggled against all power except her own.

She didn't like to be alone, though, so would hang out in the office that Maria and I shared.

I do not like sharing an office. I like power as much as the next person, but even more than power, I like solitude so I can get some damn work done.

But Pilar wanted to be where the action was and that was in our office, which was also where the computer resided, which meant the three interns were there as well, as the use of the computer for their school projects was one of the few job perks we could offer.

Several times, I returned from lunch to find Pilar sitting at my desk. In my chair.

For those of us who do not struggle against Western Imperialism and Hegemony every day and for whom the concept of property rights is as mother's milk and who would never ever sit uninvited in a colleague's chair, we know what a major breach of office etiquette this was.

I have never ever ever sat in a colleague's chair at work. Until this point, no colleague had ever sat in mine. In the movies, when they want to show someone being totally disrespected, they show the disrespecter sitting in the disrespected's chair.

The first few times, I merely asked Pilar to get up.

She was never in a hurry to move.

The last time, I came back from the little corner bakery where I would time my visits for when the rolls came out of the oven, saw her sitting there, and snapped, Pilar, get out of my chair. Now.

She got all pissy with me.

I suggested that if she did not like being in her office that she and I could arrange a trade.

She did not like that idea. But she didn't sit at my desk anymore. Clearly, though, she harbored a grudge about my reaction to her desk usurping because she brought it up in the review.

I thought we were going to talk about how to make this place run better, I said.

Pilar glared at me again. I also don't like the way you take everybody's stuff off your desk, she said.

Again, a property rights dispute. I would come into the office and find Maria's purse on my desk. And the interns' purses and books on my desk. At first, I would politely ask them all to remove their personal items from my desk.

Then I got not so nice. At first, I just carefully removed everyone's stuff and put it on the floor. Then I started putting my purse on Maria's desk but she didn't care. After all, she had room: her purse was on my desk. Then I lost patience and one day just swept my arm across my desk and knocked everything off.

I know. I was a bitch. I should have tried to Understand our Cultural Differences and Tolerated and Celebrated Our Diversity.

But I dare you. I dare all of you to remain calm when someone else is 1. sitting in your chair, 2. putting her purse on your desk and 3. eating your porridge.

Pilar turned to the others. What do you want Gold Digger to change about herself? she asked them.

The beauty of being a Peace Corps volunteer is that you are a volunteer. It's very hard to get kicked out of the Peace Corps. I think you might have to murder someone. Or you have to insist on performing The Vagina Monologues despite your country director's warning not to do so. It's all fine and dandy to bring Awareness to the Downtrodden, but if you tick off 1. your boss and 2. your very conservative Muslim host country in the process, you will not last long.

Oh - and if you ride a motorcycle, you're gone. Even with a helmet. Or maybe you just can't ride a motorcycle without a helmet. It's been a while so my memory, she is not so sharp. Peace Corps made that rule when they realized that the number one cause of death for Peace Corps volunteers was motorcycle accidents.

If, however, you are just rude or insensitive or stoned on nutmeg all the time - oh yes I know of which I speak because I have Peace Corps friends everywhere - or just don't do your job, you will be tolerated.

I was rude to Pilar but in my defense, she started it. Seriously. Turning the review session into a living slam book? This was a self-criticism session. I might as well have been in China or Cuba. Comrades! I have sinned against you and the Party! Communism 101.

I didn't have to take that. I had accomplished enough in my first year - increased revenues and profits dramatically - that I could rest on my resume laurels.

I stood. I'm not staying for this, I said. When you guys are ready to discuss how to improve this agency and make more money for our socias [the dirt-floor, outhouse in the back, subsistence farming poor Mapuche ladies], let me know. Until then, I have real work to do.

And I walked out in a snit.

Oh it felt good. Almost as good as knocking the crap off my desk.

Have you ever walked out in a snit?

I don't recommend doing it if you have to have a job, which, as most of us are not heiresses, do, but maybe try it in a volunteer position. It feels very very good to say Take this slam book session and shove it.

It feels even better to find out, 16 years later, that you were right. About everything.

In which my sister is completely, totally right about child rearing and her boyfriend with the fifth-grade son is wrong, wrong, wrong

My friend Anita always warned me never to say, "MY kid would never do something like that" because if I ever did have kids, they would 1. not only do Something Like That but 2. do it ten times worse. She also implied that those without children should not be in the business of judging the parenting skills of those who do have children, but mes amis, that is the main hobby of people who do not have children. To judge the parenting of the bad parents. You do not have to be a parent to know bad parenting when you see it.

NB: My friends are all excellent parents with delightful children. There is no reason to criticize their parenting. I judge and criticize the parenting of strangers only.

Back to our regular programming.

Sometimes, there is vindication. My sister, Jenny, found herself dating the wrong guy for a while.

Sigh. My sister. Pretty, warm, outgoing, liked by everyone who meets her. Deserves better than she has dated and that's all I'll say about that, although I will also say that Jen, I am sorry I told mom and dad that you were living with that guy 15 years ago. I thought they knew! I had no idea you had constructed an elaborate web of deceit, including separate phone lines back in the day when separate phone lines meant something. You know - when the phone was actually attached to the house.

These days, someone could be living in a crack house and you would never know because any time you would call, you would get the person's cellphone or her smartypants phone and not the house phone, answered in your friend's/daughter's absence by the nearest crackhead, maybe Duane, maybe Ginny, who would slur, in between puffs of the crack pipe, "She's not here, dude." And then never give her the message. And you would wonder what the heck is going on over there because every time you call, you get a different stoned person. But that wouldn't happen because you would be calling on a cellphone.

Back to Jenny. Who is not a crackhead. Who is violently anti-crackhead and against abortion but would be just fine with shooting druggie mothers who are delivered of sick, addicted babies who show up on my sister's ward in the hospital.

Jen was dating this guy, Brad, who was a very nice guy but I didn't think was worthy of her, as I have thought of most of the guys she has dated. She deserves greatness! But dating Brad she was and I have to say that he treated her very well. He was a nice, responsible guy. Sweet. Just no spark. But her life. Not mine.

He proposed after they had been dating for about a year. I have to give him major points for style. Brad was the fire chief and took the fire truck to Jenny's apartment building. He got on the ladder and extended it to her fifth-floor apartment. Or maybe extended the ladder first. Whatever. Holding a dozen roses in one hand, he knocked on her window with the other.

As his entire crew watched, he handed the roses to my sister. Then pulled a ring out of his pocket. Asked her to marry him.

She said she would think about it.

Ouch.

But she was right to do so because they had had a lot of conflict over one particular issue.

Brad's son, Billy. Which is not his real name: nobody is named "Billy" any more. Sad, really. If you call a three-year-old boy "Teddy" instead of "Edward," his mother will snap at you that his name is EDWARD. She is absolutely correct, of course. He is her kid. She named him. She gets to decide what he is called. It is presumptuous to re-name someone else. I get that. But wow. All these little little kids with huge names. I like nicknames. Sue me. I never had one - well, except for the nickname my grandparents used - so I was always envious of the kids who did have nicknames. I wanted to be Lizzie or Steph, not The Gold Digger. I suppose I could have started calling myself "Goldie," but it's not really Done to give yourself a nickname, is it?

Brad was a widower, so he did have that going for him. Ex-wives do tend to muck up the works - definitely the finances. And an ex-wife where there is a kid involved - well, now there is a lifetime connection that can never be severed. If you are getting involved with a man with a kid, it might be better for him to be a widower, at least for logistics, although it's sure not better for the kid.

Brad's wife had been dead for several years. His way of coping with being a widowed dad was to indulge Billy, who was about ten, in everything. Who wants to fight with his kid when the kid doesn't have a mother?

But my sister saw that this was going to be a problem. When Brad was promoted to chief, they had a big ceremony at the station. Jen was at Brad's helping him and Billy get ready. Billy came out in jeans and tennies. My sister told him to go back and put on nice church clothes - there would be photos and this was a big deal for his dad.

Billy refused and Brad backed him up.

Billy would eat almost nothing but broccoli. Which is so bizarre I can't even begin to fathom it, but such was the case. My sister, who has some awareness of good nutrition and a balanced diet, would try to get Billy to try other foods, maintaining that man does not live on broccoli alone.

Billy refused.

Brad backed him up.

Billy was the reason for their fights. Brad told Jenny that she had no idea what she was talking about. That she knew nothing, nothing! about raising children and especially about ten year old boys.

My sister informed him that she had a masters degree in neonatal nursing and that her coursework included classes in child psychology and other aspects of child health and rearing. She noted that she had been babysitting since she was 11 and that many of her charges had been young boys. She might have noted that she had more experience with ten year old boys than Brad did.

Brad was not interested.

Fine, she said. Fine. If you don't believe me, then at least talk to a counselor about the issues you have with Billy.

By some miracle - maybe it was when Jen told Brad she had to think about marrying him - Brad did go see a counselor.

Who - vindicated! so sweet! - told Brad that every single thing my sister had told him about Billy was correct and that Brad was doing it wrong.

Oh those are such sweet, sweet words.

But she told him no anyhow because she didn't want to spend the next eight years arguing about Billy.

Smart girl.

In which I get in touch with my inner manager for a change

When Primo and I moved into our house, the basement-flooding, heat-losing, 1928 brick moneypit that we call home, we needed a fair amount of work done. The penultimate penultimate owner had been a little old lady who became too frail and probably too cash strapped to do much maintenance.

The penultimate owner was a contractor who bought the house from her, discarded all the coal in the basement, ripped out the nasty carpets and replaced them with more nasty carpets, cut the gas line to the kitchen where it would have been useful for say a gas stove for those of us who hate cooking with electric, and installed new brass or bronze - whatever - switchplates while ignoring the cracks in the driveway and the carpenter ants in the balcony.

The owner who sold the house to us was a young single guy, Tad, who never shoveled the sidewalk and never wondered why the sidewalk was shoveled anyhow or at least never wondered enough to ask our next-door neighbors, who were the proximate cause of the shoveled sidewalk, as Eric's dad loves his snowblower and would clear Eric and Regina's sidewalk before the crack of dawn and would do the neighbors' sidewalks as well. That is, until he got tired of never being thanked, which meant that once we were in the house, Mr Eric's Dad did not clear our sidewalk. Thanks a lot, Tad.

Tad's other activities, besides not shoveling the sidewalk or thanking the person who had, were to sit in bed without a shirt and lean against the wall. Not against the headboard but against the wall. When a shirtless man leans against a wall every night or so for 15 months, eventually he leaves an oily man print on the paint, a print that is bright and clear once the bed and the man are removed.

Tad's other other activity was to use the microwave for everything - the oven was brand-new spanking clean - without covering his food, which would not have been such a problem except the penultimate owner, Mr Contractor, got the microwave at the scratch and dent center, which I am normally a big fan of, but the reason the microwave was there was because it was missing the interior plastic sheet that covers that little honeycomb screen in the door.

Must I get explicit and describe for you what happens when a person, Tad, heats his uncovered Spaghetti-Os in a microwave with an exposed honeycomb screen? There is tomato sauce and other stuff stuck on the inside of my microwave door that I will never be able to remove because I cannot clean through honeycomb.

What Tad did not do was diligent or even any maintenance.

It was left to Primo and me to replace the balcony that was being eaten by carpenter ants. You would think that carpenter ants + wood would be a good thing but no it is not. You never want someone to say the words "carpenter ants" and then say something about your house. It is a bad, expensive thing.

It was left to us to rip out the nasty carpet and polish the beautiful wood floors.

It was left to us to get the furnace checked. Actually, we waited until our furnace broke in mid-December on one of the coldest nights of the year before we thought to do this one. Oh sure we'd looked at the service record attached to the furnace, which we pass every single time we clean the cat box, and had mused to ourselves, "Well that's interesting. It's been over ten years since that furnace was serviced," but we had never actually considered taking drastic action like having the furnace serviced so we wouldn't be without heat on one of the coldest nights of the year. But if Tad had done it right, then we wouldn't have had plugged tubes so I'm throwing this one on him.

It was left to us to scrape the deep rust off that metal thingy that goes under the bricks at the top of the window opening. Apparently, if you leave these things to rust, they will eventually cause the mortar going on the diagonal from the corner of the window to crack and fall out and then your house will fall down.

By "left to us," I mean, "left to us to find someone who knows how to fix these things and charge us a lot of money to do it."

We had hired a man recommended by the pastor of Primo's church to help us move from Primo's apartment to the house. We called him "Amish Al" to distinguish him from our friend Normal Al. Amish Al had an Amish beard. Normal Al is clean shaven.

Amish Al was great when we moved into the house. He was strong and had his own tools and knew how to assemble Primo's big obnoxious desk and how to take the door off the hinges to get some things inside.

He had only one failing: he showed up too early, which is a common problem around here. I have mentioned my dad's cousin who showed up for lunch half an hour early. I no longer have Dad's Cousin over for lunch; instead, I meet him at a restaurant. He is always early. The past few times, he has called me half an hour before our scheduled meeting time to tell me he is at the restaurant. I tell him that's fine, I haven't left my house yet and I'll see him at 1:30 as we planned. The other day, he didn't call, but when I got to the restaurant ten minutes early, he had already finished his lunch.

When we moved out of Primo's apartment, I told Amish Al to arrive at 1:00. "We don't need you before then," I said. "Primo is not picking the truck up until 12:30. One o'clock or 1:30, even." I didn't need someone standing around on the clock when the clock was mine.

Amish Al showed up at 12:30.

Primo and I were just getting ready to eat lunch.

I had already moved all the food to the house. All the food except the last little bit of freezer crap that I normally wouldn't eat but was there and I will eat bad food before throwing it out, which is fine as a survival strategy if you are expecting famine but not so good if you want to stay in your thin jeans.

We had enough food for two people.

I should have told Amish Al that we weren't ready for him and to come back. But that seemed dumb. Then I made the mistake of asking him if he had eaten lunch because I was confusing the roles of employer and hostess.

He hadn't eaten.

Even though Primo was staring daggers at me, I offered to share our lunch. I should have told Amish Al there was time for him to go out and grab a sandwich. I should have. But I shared our lunch. Which Amish Al found too spicy for his taste. Really, Amish Al? You're complaining about a meal to which you were not even really invited?

But Amish Al did a good job of actually moving, so when we were looking for a handyman to scrape the rust from the whatever you call thems and then paint the metal, I called him. Primo was all, Why do we have to do this now? I have too much work! This is stressful!

And I was all, This needs to be done so we might as well get it over with before winter.

I impressed on Amish Al the importance of not arriving before 8:30 a.m.

"Primo works late and he sleeps late," I said. "Please do not ring that doorbell before 8:30. Not one minute early."

It must have killed him to wait until 8:15, which was when he did ring the bell. "I got here early," he told me.

The rule is if you arrive early, you drive around the block or sit in your car and wait. That's the rule. But nobody seems to know that here.

I have to admit it's not just here. I organized an alumni event for my college when I lived in the south. We were having a little party at Gayle and Jim's house for the incoming freshmen in our area. "Our area" included some towns 100 miles away. The party started at 6:00.

At 5:00, I was at Gayle's house helping put out dishes and silverware when the doorbell rang. It was a new freshman and her family from a town 80 miles away. An hour early. They must have decided they couldn't just take in the sights around town or wait in the coffeeshop. Instead, they came to the party, which was not a party yet. This would not have been a problem except instead of offering to help, they (well, the dad, mostly) expected to be entertained.

The next year, they showed up early again. That's when I realized the dad was just a complete boor.

Amish Al rang our bell early. Primo just sighed and went upstairs. I showed Amish Al what needed to be done and then came back inside.

He completed the rust removal. He did just fine on the rust removal.

Then he started the painting.

Primo went outside to look.

He ran back inside and hissed at me, "He's getting paint on the bricks!"

"So tell him to stop!" I said.

"It's your job to supervise! I'm working! I told you I didn't want us to charge forward on this!"

"Supervise?" I said. "Why on earth should I have to supervise?"

"Because he is getting paint on the brick!"

Here is my philosophy on painting: I should not have to explain to someone that he needs to stay in the lines when he is painting an object. As in, if I hired someone to paint the kitchen, I would not expect to have to say, "And remember: no paint on the refrigerator!"

But perhaps that level of detail and micromanagement is necessary.

As he stomped up the stairs, Primo yelled, "You need to handle this!"

Here's how good I am at confrontation:

Not good.

Oh sure yeah I am a bossy know it all who knows how everything should be done, but my style is to talk behind someone's back rather than address the actual situation. I am great in imaginary confrontations, where I seethe my disdain and contempt at the person who has done me wrong, but in person, I tend to suck it up.

For example, I just picked up a shirt from the tailor. I got this cool shirt at Goodwill for $7. It's black with pink ribbons sewn horizontally at one-inch intervals from top to bottom. It wasn't until I got home that I realized that the shirt had been mismarked and was much larger than I thought. It would fit me with some minor alterations - the zipper would have to be re-set, which would be tough because of getting those ribbons to match. It would fit my boobage-gifted sister as is.

I took it to the tailor and explained that 1. I didn't want to spend a lot of money to have it altered because it was from Goodwill and 2. if it was going to be too expensive or if it couldn't be done properly, I would just send it to my sister. So don't do it if you can't do it right! That was my message or so I thought.

A week later, I picked it up.

It hadn't been done right. The ribbons did not match in the back. And I was being charged $17 for it not being done right.

I said meekly, "So these don't exactly match, do they?"

The tailor looked at me impassively.

I muttered passively aggressively, "I should have just left it alone."

The tailor looked at me impassively.

I was waiting for him to say, "You are correct! This is a crummy job! I will do it over! And I will charge you less!"

But he did not say that so I gave him my American Express card and stomped out of there.

I am not exactly Miss Stand Up For Myself.

But. When it is a choice of a stranger being upset or my husband being upset, I pick the stranger.

I went outside and told Amish Al to stop working. "Amish Al," I said. "You are getting paint on the brick. That is unacceptable."

He looked puzzled. "Oh," he said. "Well I guess I'll clean it off."

"No! Stop! I'll take care of the painting. Wait here."

I went inside and got his money. "Thanks for what you've done," I said.

"So might you have more work?" he asked.

I felt sad because I knew he really needed the work and up to the brick painting, he had done such good work, but he had, in that one move, shown himself not to be trustworthy of working on our biggest financial investment. Plus I knew Primo would have a hissy fit if I hired him again.

I lied. "I'll call you," I said.

In which someone is having a romantic evening in Rome but it's sure not my friend Lenore or me

The summer after I graduated from business school, instead of doing the smart, practical thing and getting a job, I, fed up, fed UP I tell you with how The Corporate Man was Keeping Me Down, didn't even bother to look for work and used the rest of my money, the money I had not used on UT's fabulously low tuition and on my rent for Michelle McMichael the crazy landlady's place or on the car-vacuuming, marijuana importing neighbors duplex and went to Europe for the summer.

I had wanted to go to Europe for the summer after I finished college, but I had a job that started June 3 and what kind of idiot English major takes a trip instead of accepting a job? An idiot MBA will do it but not an idiot English major. English majors are far more realistic and practical than MBAs is what we can learn from this.

Still, I was anxious about the financial impracticality of my upcoming adventure and even worked myself into such a state of anxiety one day that I threw up. I threw up so hard that I burst all the blood vessels around my eyes and had red eyes for a day or two and then black/green/purple/yellow eyes. I was lovely.

Lovely and -- going to Europe. I had exams the first few days of May, then a seven-day interval before my last final, in microeconomics. I asked my micro prof if I could take the exam early so I could get to Barcelona earlier, but he said no, what if everyone wanted to take the final early? I shrugged and said what if? Then he rather implied that I might cheat, even though I scored the highest mark on the midterm in the whole class.

I had had a hard time with the material, so had studied and studied and studied. I was the last person to turn in my midterm because I had checked and re-checked everything. I thought I was the dumbest person taking the test.

This professor was not a fan of mine. I sat in the front row because I was a front-row sitter. I had learned my lesson from college, where I often did not wear my glasses to class because - get this - they were ugly glasses. Not wearing glasses = not being able to see the board, which is a necessary thing for oh, calculus and chemistry. Little wonder I became an English major, hey?

Anyhow, I was a glasses-wearing front-row sitter in grad school because by golly, I was paying for this myself (I also paid for college, but that was loans not cash out of my savings account and you pay a lot more attention to paying money you've earned than you do to money that has not yet been earned) and I was going to be darn sure I learned. One day, the prof was explaining in a very painful and convoluted way an algebraic process that was really just taking the derivative in calculus. I leaned over to the guy next to me, whose undergraduate degree was in mechanical engineering, and whispered, "Isn't he just taking the derivative?"

The engineer, who was from Argentina, whispered back, "Siiii."

The prof stopped. Walked up to me. Asked if I had something to share with the class.

Oh yes. Even in grad school, they treat you like third graders. Although we were acting like third graders, so there you go.

"Yes," I answered. "I want to know why you don't just say, 'Take the derivative.'"

"Because if I did that, half this class would pass out," he said.

Ever the smart aleck and has to have the last-worder, I said, "You're supposed to have a year of calculus as a prerequisite for this program."

He rolled his eyes at me as he returned to the blackboard.

Back to the midterm and we'll get to Rome, I promise you. The class after the midterm, I sat nervously, waiting for my score. I was early to class because that's how I roll. The professor saw me sitting there and walked up to me, holding a sheet of paper in front of him. He stood still in front of me, holding the paper out for me to see. It was a list of test scores, from highest to lowest. I looked in the middle of the paper for my social security number and score, but didn't see it. I went all the way to the bottom of the paper and still didn't see my number. Then I looked back up. At the very top of the list, with a score only two points from perfect, was my number.

I looked up at him and smiled.

"I'm reviewing the test today," he said.

"Do I need to stay?" I asked.

"I should think not," he answered.

And yet he thought I would cheat on the final? The scores were curved. I would never sabotage my own score that way.

I'm getting to Rome. I'm getting to Rome. He wouldn't let me take the test early, so I waited and took the darn test and then left for Barcelona the next day. I skipped my graduation.

Yes, I skipped my own graduation.

People.

You know how there are always these letters to Dear Abby in May about how Oh no! I won't have enough tickets to invite Great Aunt Joan to my son's high school graduation and she'll be soooo offended?

Great Aunt Joan is not offended.

Great Aunt Joan is thrilled.

I made a solemn vow after my college graduation that I would never attend another graduation again, either for myself or for another person. Circumstances dictated that I attend one graduation a few years ago, but with God as my witness, I will never ever ever sit through another graduation again as long as I live.

I will watch paint dry first.

Seriously, is there anything more mind-blowingly dull than watching a graduation?

No there is not.

I finished my tests, skipped graduation, and got on the plane to Barcelona, where my friend Lenore met me, and from there we took the train to Rome, where we were going to stay in her friend Bob's apartment while he was on vacation elsewhere. We had reserved seats in a compartment into which extra people, who did not have reserved seats, squeezed themselves and smoked. The window would not open. The corridors were filled with smokers. It was hot. Hot, smelly smokers. Not enough room. Oh how I treasure those student travel days.

After a very long, sweaty trip, we arrived in Rome. I had read in my guidebook that the Rome train station was rife with pickpockets and I was on guard. While Lenore went to call someone about getting the key to Bob's apartment, I found a strategically sound spot to stand and guard our luggage. My back was to the wall so I had only 180 degrees of area to patrol.

A tall Ethiopian man, holding an unlit cigarette, approached from my right. He gestured to me and I turned to look at him. Did I have a light? he seemed to be pantomiming.

I shook my head.

He pantomimed again.

I impatiently tried to explain that I didn't smoke and I didn't have any matches. Sheesh!

That's when I heard someone shouting on my left.

I turned to see a little Italian man grabbing the elbow of another Ethiopian man. Ethiopian Man #2 was holding my backpack. Which contained my laundry, an apple, some cheese, and my camera, back in the days when cameras were actually worth something.

I snatched the backpack from EM #2 and punched him in the arm.

The little Italian man scolded me. I don't speak Italian but I got the gist of what he was saying: Lady you need to pay attention. PAY ATTENTION!

Nothing like being chewed out in a language you don't speak by someone you don't know.

Lenore and I made it to the apartment. We were pretty tired after being cooped up in the reserved, we paid extra for our own seats but got crowded by seat cheaters, compartment. We boiled some pasta and ate it with butter, then went to bed.

Shortly after we had turned out the lights, we heard a noise. A thumping. A loud, rhythmic thumping. A loud, rhythmic thumping on the wall behind our headboard. A loud, rhythmic thumping that we would feel very lightly in our bed* but was enough to make the crucifix above Bob's bed move. (I don't think Bob was particularly religious - I think the crucifix might have belonged to his landlord. Or maybe there was no crucifix at all and I am remembering one simply because it makes for a better story.)

Then the moaning started.

Is there anything better than listening to someone else's oral delight in sexual activity as it happens?

You know - like those movies we watched in 7th grade history: You Are There. I just googled that phrase. I am not losing my mind. Walter Cronkite did an entire series of You Are There. It happened. I was there.

Lenore and I lay there, waiting. For you know. For it to be over.

And soon, but not soon enough, it was.

The next night, the same thing. Plus an encore presentation at 2:00 a.m.

Lord. Have. Mercy.

At the time, that did not seem so remarkable.

But from middlish-ageness, with job stresses and late nights working and taxes due and sleep so very, very precious, it looks completely different. This was before viagra. Although we have no way of knowing if the same people were involved in each event, if you know what I mean.

Every night while we were there, Lenore and I were treated to a show.

Our strategy was to wear ourselves out walking around Rome all day long and back up the long, steep hill to the apartment so that by nighttime, we were so exhausted that nothing could keep us awake.

We never did ask Bob if that was normal or if his neighbor had also lent out his apartment.

* If there is only one bed in a sleeping place, women friends will just share the darn bed. Men, I think, are more likely to insist that one man sleep on the sofa and the other sleep in the bed.