Here's a story about the bathroom

Yesterday I had a business lunch at a fancy lunch place, which, as we all know, is where you go when you need to business in the middle of the day. First thing I did when I got there, after greeting my date in the work-appropriate manner (passionate frenching) was visit the bathroom. I had just emerged from the subway, and there is no way, after riding the subway, I can sit and eat anything until I scour myself from the elbows down. Maybe also the face. Maybe my face touched something. I can't be 100% sure it didn't.

Before I've even entered a restaurant, I fret over the location of the bathroom. Restaurants enjoy hiding their restrooms so that you have to wander about, sometimes finding yourself in the kitchen before someone sets you straight. This is how the restaurant staff gets back at you for making them feed you. I hate this. I hate walking around with that look on my face. That "I'm acting as I know exactly where I'm going, and I'm about to march straight into a supply closet" look. And then there are the places that can't just indicate "Men" and "Women" on their separate bathroom doors. They have to get cute about it. And you standing in front of the two doors, wondering, "Damn it all, am I a 'Buckaroo' or a 'Cowpoke'?"

Fortunately, my initial worry was alleviated right off the bat. Before I had even sat down, the waitress saw my haunted I Touched Subway expression and pointed me toward the restrooms. She was clearly new at her job, and hadn't learned to loathe us.

The bathroom door had a W on it, which I swear I hesitated about for half a second. "Is that 'Women,' or 'Whoa, This Room's for Dudes'?" I wondered. This was a classy establishment, however, so I was fairly confident in my decision as I strode in.

Here's what happened next. As I was closing the door to one of the stalls, I got my shoe stuck underneath it. I looked down at the shoe and the stall door and tried to figure out how I had managed to wedge my foot in such a painful manner, and I pulled on the door, hard, which is when it came loose and slammed into the front of my skull. I then fell back, where the toilet was, and had to fling both arms out to brace myself against the sides of the stall. Which caused my leather-soled flats to slide on the tiled floor, just enough that I landed, hard, right on the toilet seat. This all happened in a few seconds. WEDGE-SLAM-FALL-BRACE-WHOOPS-THUD. It was fantastic. My head hurt a lot.

I was inexpressibly thankful that I was alone, and no one had witnessed this ludicrous display. (Nor did anyone see me attempt to close the door again, once I had recovered, and find that the door wouldn't latch, and then go to the next stall, and then the next, before realizing the mechanism that latched the door was a turn-y thing and not a pull-y whatsit. I blame the head trauma for this.)

I swore no one would ever know of my embarrassing episode, so naturally I immediately told my lunch date. And then I got home and told Scott and Henry. And now I am telling you.

Uh, camping we did go

Thanks to the unhappy marriage of a course of antibiotics and a week in the Utah sun, I am now reluctant host to a full-body rash, most of which* is invisible but has left my skin sandpapery and feeling like I am being pricked all over by needles and occasionally assaulted by millions of invisible mosquitoes. I’m in a great mood!

(* the part which is not invisible is on the backs of my knees and looks like my skin has actually been removed by sandpaper, which is grotesque, and renders any kind of skirt/shorts-wearing exquisitely painful, and did you know that bandages will not stay on the backs of your knees? I have tried to keep them there, but all the bending and flexing that I apparently do all day long makes them drop right off; I’ve tried to remain still but they won’t stick on for more than a few minutes, so anyone who ever walks behind me gets an eyeful of my awful knee-back situation.)

We were in Utah for a few days to visit my brother-in-law and family, who, inexplicably, live in Utah, even though they swear they’re not Mormon. The kooks. It’s unnerving that they have chosen to live in the middle of the country —I always believed that only zombies would live somewhere that didn’t abut an ocean—but they seem to like it. And my niece and nephew never tried to eat my brains. Maybe they were being polite.

And we went camping! I have never been camping before**, and my brother-in-law Gregg and his wife Carolyn invited us to camp with them, because camping is among their favorite activities, right up there with nude-wrestling bears (probably) and mouth-fishing (after they’re done with the bears).

(**I said this to my mom and she murmured, “Not that you remember.” I’m going to assume she meant I was too little to recall the last time I camped. I think that’s for the best, if I go ahead and assume that. We can’t afford any more therapy for me.)

I was really excited to camp, as I have always wanted to. Camp. For years I've been telling Scott that we should go camping, but he insisted that I would hate it. “You would hate it,” he said. He wouldn’t even bother telling me why. When I asked him to list the possible reasons I would hate camping, he just stared at me, like it was so obvious, it was all over my damned face. Was he focused on the fake eyelashes I need to apply each morning? The exquisitely hot-rollered hairdo? The floor-length satin house-robe I was wearing, as I do each day in the early hours—from 1 pm, when I arise, until sundown—at which point I change into my evening silk pajamas?

“Now, dear,” I said, “I love nature, and nature loves me, and I know deep in my heart that I will enjoy this ‘camping’ I’ve heard tell of.” And then I flounced about comically and powder-puffed my décolletage.

We were supposed to go camping for two nights, which didn't seem like nearly enough time, to me. Why not longer? But then after the first night I had to tell Gregg and Carolyn, with great regret, that if we stayed there for one more night I was going to cram my pockets with stones and throw myself in the river. (We were right next to a river.) (Maybe it was a stream. I think technically it was a stream.)

They took it well.

I actually did enjoy camping, during the daylight. I did! We were in this beautiful campground, and there was even a bathroom, and I am a fan of bathrooms. We relaxed and wandered and ate dinner, and I like all of those things. Henry was having fun checking out nature, and I felt like we were good parents for once, giving him this well-rounded experience. The country! UTAH!

Then it came time to sleep, and so we all bundled up, as it was getting cold, and Scott and Henry and I smushed our bodies into our sleeping bags, and zipped up our tent. So we could go to sleep.

It then occurred to me, as I tried to sleep, why camping is a bad idea. First of all it is uncomfortable. You are sleeping on the ground. Why would you do that? Secondly, if you can’t sleep, what do you do all night? All you can do is lie there. You lie there, and you think. Mostly you think about how the only thing keeping you from being murdered is someone else’s decision not to murder you. At any point during the night someone could drive through the campground—a murderer, say—and that person could think, “Say, what if I murdered these people, all defenseless in their thin, easily knifed-through tent?” And they could then murder you, and there would be very little you could do to stop them. So really all you can do is hope the murderer then thinks, “Nah,” and drives on. Or, “Maybe another day,” or, “Wouldn’t want to ruin that nice tent,” or “I’ve already done enough murdering this week.” (Do murderers ever decide they’ve done enough murdering? I’m not so sure. I’ve never asked a murderer, nor do I ever intend to. And imagining that some traveling murderer has already reached his murder-quota is not enough to help me drift into unconsciousness.)

So then you realized that you’ve thought the word “murder” enough that you will never sleep, and you’re stuck in this tent and there’s nothing to do because 1) it’s dark and 2) it’s cold, and that’s when your child sleep-stumbles around the tent and lies back down the entirely wrong way, which is across all three pillows. And you fight with him about how he has to get back in his sleeping bag, only you can’t fight with a sleeping child, who is crying that you don’t understand and the armor doesn’t work the other way when the raccoons broke the barber shop, lettuce zephyr quantum noodles, and finally you heave him back into his sleeping bag and he sobs once and then is instantly snoring peacefully but now you’re really awake, as is your husband, who every time you stir at all says, “You still up?!” like maybe you two can have a party, but you can’t have a party; all you can do is try and sleep, so you don’t want to talk or look at his wide-awake eyes looking back at you, so you squeeze your eyes shut, at which point you realize you have to use the bathroom.

Which means you have to 1) find the flashlight, 2) put shoes on, 3) not get murdered. And then you think that if you were home, or in a hotel like a sane person, you would not have to do any of these things, and that is why one night of camping is more than enough.

But if we could find a murder-proof tent, and I'm sure you can buy one of those, I think I would enjoy camping very much. So there, SCOTT.

How I know I am not adopted--besides the Irish chin and the Italian hips.

Me: We went sledding Saturday.
Mom: You? You went sledding.
Me: I did. I sucked it up, and I decided to just do it. It looked like fun! I mean, everyone else was having fun.
Mom: So how you'd do?
Me: I think it's safe to say that I am not a lover of danger.
Mom: I'd say so.
Me: I am missing the risk gene. I have no need for speed.
Mom: So, no more sledding for you?
Me: WHO WOULD LIKE SLEDDING? You throw yourself down a hill! I have spent my whole life avoiding falling down hills!
Mom: Ookay.
Me: I'm being hurtled down a hill and people are running away! I was inches away from head trauma! I do not understand winter sports.
Mom: As your father says about skiing: you put two sticks on your feet and throw your face in the snow.
Me: Oh, I won't ski. No.
Mom: I think that's for the best.

The lost week

I don't know what happened. Maggie came over last Monday, and then it was Easter Sunday and my head hurt. Maggie was all "let's go out all night!" and I was like "okay" and she said "drink this" and I muttered "if you insist." Events progressed in this manner. What specifically happened, I couldn't say. We brought Sarah and Zan along with us for much of it, and there were exotic fruits. Here's one. Yeah, we ate that thing.

That, by the way, was a cactus pear, which looked like it should taste like an overripe berry, and instead was like a mealy cucumber. I have dubbed it "the fruit of lies." Other fruits were far more palatable. Gooseberries, we discovered, taste like orange Starburst. Highly recommended.

We had purchased all kinds of crazy fruits because Maggie wants to taste 1,000 fruits. This is the great thing about Maggie Mason, that these things even occur to her. When she told me of her quest, I insisted that everyone knows there are only four fruits in the entire world—apples, bananas, grapes, and bananas—and that she is a silly goose. But oh no no no, she insisted, there are in fact quabillions of fruits. And so we went to a fancy grocery store and found all manner of nutty fruits, and we took them to a bar. And when she told the host and the waiter to give us a sharp knife and plates and also share in our exotic fruit experiments, they had no choice but to comply. This is the Power of Maggie.

And that's not all! With the greatness of our collective mind-force, we came up with the most brilliant fetish site ever. Introducing: wheresmyshoe.com. Featuring helpless, lovely women, wondering what could have become of their missing shoe. Won't someone help them?

We will make millions.

Scott pointed out that in the picture I've linked to, Maggie is in fact holding her other shoe in this picture, which makes it not so much "Where's my shoe?" and more "Confused about shoes." "Unsure as to how shoes work." "You mean the other one goes on the other foot? It can't be that easy."

Somewhere in there we spent the day with Dara Torres—which, if you're sleep-deprived and achy, can really mess with your head. When one is feeling that unfresh, one should not spend an afternoon with a dazzling, glowy creature. Nevertheless, we had a great time, and discovered that Dara Torres is (not surprisingly) gracious, especially when faced with sexually aggressive elderly women (long story). She is also (surprisingly) enthusiastic about Rock of Love. So that was nice. We were there courtesy of Hewlett Packard, which arranged for us all to get together and fed us sushi. I had a few minutes to interview Dara, but I had no idea what to interview her about because I have only a personal blog in which I talk about my dumb feelings. So we chatted about the Internet. And I learned that Dara Torres has, like the rest of us, read mean comments about herself, and she has cried. You guys, the Internet made a mermaid cry. (I wasn't supposed to tell you that part, about how she's really a mermaid, but now I'll pretend I'm just kidding.)

And now I am recovered and will drink nothing but sparkling water for the next fifteen years. Unless Maggie comes back to town, in which case I promise nothing. Nothing!