Grandma.

I had a haunting dream about my grandmother several nights ago. I'd forgotten about it till just now when I found written on the pad by my bed, "grandma dream letter. I am dying, I am dead, etc." There's not much more that I remember of the dream, just the strange, slightly terrifying but exciting feeling of reading a letter that I knew was from my grandmother somewhere on her way out of earthly consciousness.

My grandmother was 97 when she died a few years ago. She and I had been close when I was young. At the time, she lived in Waukegan, Illinois, the town where my mother and father met and married and where I was born. Actually, my mother lived on a farm in Gurnee, and I think they got married in a church in Lake Forest or one of the other little farm towns around there, before that whole area turned from small farms to suburban sprawl. But my father lived in Waukegan with his mother.

Waukegan was, maybe still is, a slightly seedy town on Lake Michigan. There's a Navy training base there. Grandma lived alone in an apartment downtown. (She and my grandfather had divorced and then he died in the early 60s and she didn't remarry.) The block always seemed to be lit up bright even at night, and bustling with sailors and other people in fancy clothes. There was a candy store on the first floor where we bought caramel corn sometimes. You had to push a button downstairs and wait for her to buzz you in, which I thought was very glamorous. I'm sure those visits, my grandmother's apartment with the pegboard wall covered top to bottom with her oil paintings, like a studio in Paris -- she painted, some original but mostly copies of Impressionist landscapes and such, which she sold -- car horns, bits of overheard conversation on the street below, I'm sure that's when I fell in love with city life. She used to say to me, conspiratorially, "You and I are city folks, aren't we?" A couple of times, I was allowed to visit her for a few days by myself, and we'd go out for Chinese or, if we had dinner at home, she'd make sandwiches with tinned sardines, or we'd eat crackers with processed cheese that came in a jelly jar. I was in heaven.

A few years after my parents married and my brother and I were both born within a couple years, my father got a job in Indiana and we moved. It was only a few hours drive, but back then moving 4 hours away was like moving to China, so we went from seeing Grandma frequently to seeing her once or twice a year. When she would visit my family, first in Indianapolis and then in the little college town where we moved when I was 12, she would get us kids all dressed and take us out "bumming." We'd window shop all afternoon and then have a "hamburg" at the Woolworth's counter. She wouldn't go out of the house without putting on a dress and dark red lipstick.

Soon after I left for college and then New York, she moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. She had other family in that area and I think it was where she grew up, though my knowledge of her biography, or my father's for that matter, is pretty vague, but it meant that we saw very little of her. For years, she took the Greyhound down to Indiana every Christmas, but as she got older she did that less and less. She wouldn't fly. I got busy with my life. We wrote letters, she sent packages of weird stuff, used Christmas decorations, odd expired snacks, knick-knacks.

Four or five years before she died, when I hadn't seen her in several years, J and I planned a leg of our tour in southern Minnesota so we could visit her -- by this time she had moved from her high-rise apartment to an assisted living facility. J and I had been playing shows in retirement homes, so she booked us a gig at her place. I don't know why this was the only time we did that; seems like it would have been the natural thing to do since we were traveling all over the Midwest anyway, to book shows in that area more regularly so I could see her during those last years of her life, but that was the only time we did it. (As I look at that last sentence, I have to laugh, because so much in those years of Y'all, in retrospect, looks like needless chaos, and it seems as though a few small changes in our organization would have made things much more sensible and functional, but we were flying by the seat of our pants and always, always our life consisted of about 20% more than we could manage.)

Anyway, we did a show for Grandma and all her little old lady friends at the retirement home. She wore her Y'all t-shirt all day and beamed through the whole show. She and J hit it off instantly. J has a thing for little old ladies, and Grandma has a thing for tall, handsome men. (I'm not sure what she made of him in his green lace dress on stage, but to be honest, I'm not sure what any of the old folks we performed for made of that. They enjoyed the show, and that's what's important.) I'm not exaggerating when I say that watching her and J laugh together -- I have pictures to remind me -- is one of my sweetest memories, one of the high points of my whole life. We spent two days there, and it was the last time I saw her.

My parents visited her more regularly those last years. She became more and more frail, though I don't think there was any particular health problem besides the fact that she was very, very old. Eventually she moved to the nursing wing of the home, and she began to withdraw. My parents were with her shortly before she died. My mother described her to me later as just sort of curled up at the foot of her bed, and I don't remember if these were the words my mother used, but the image I took is of her almost turning inside out, trying to disappear. It's an image that haunts me.

There's so much more I could write about Grandma, and I imagine I will -- I feel her living spirit in me every day -- but that's enough for now.

Tsk. Tsk.

I can be picky about language. But I'm also usually ready, before most of my bookish friends, to throw in the towel when a certain "incorrect" usage becomes common.

Like the disappearance of the word "whom," or like "they" and "their" as genderless singular pronouns, since "zhe" and "herm" never really caught on. I'm slowly getting used to that. I don't like the role of pursed-lipped school marm, but I do appreciate precision in written and spoken language, so it can be a hard call. When do you give up?

I think I see "loose" used for "lose" more and more often. In fact, I think I see this more often than I actually see the word "lose" written. And now I'm starting to notice that people use "lead" instead of "led." These are both spelling rather than syntax issues, and I tend to be even less resistant to spelling irregularities. Sometimes I even like them. I like "thru" and "tho." I like "tonite." English could certainly stand some housecleaning in the spelling department. Lose/loose and led/lead types of problems are inevitable when your language has more exceptions than rules. Still, it's jarring, because in my head, "Did you lose your sweater?" is very different from "Did you loose your sweater?"

Hair on the Face.

Word is that mustaches are making a comeback. That's infuriating news, because I thought I had finally settled on some facial hair that I wouldn't have to shave off after a year or two because everyone else was sporting it too.

I like facial hair, but I don't have a lot of choices because most of my beard is patchy and thin. It's thick enough on my chin and upper lip, so for a while I had a goatee. But the whiskers on my chin grow sideways, so I looked like the bottom half of my head was caught in a windstorm while the upper half remained undisturbed. I gave up and shaved it off, but I left the mustache, at first because I thought it was funny, but then I decided it was kind of sexy -- and nobody had mustaches, at least not last year -- so I kept it.

Before the goatee, I had that little patch under the lip for many, many years. I thought it suited me. I resisted shaving it off when it became popular, but eventually it got so ubiquitous I couldn't stand it any more.

It's not like I need to make a huge statement or anything, but I do like to appear a little unusual. I think it's because of my shyness. Because I have trouble actually talking to new people, I need to telegraph something about me with my appearance. And I just like facial hair. I like it on other men, I like it on myself. It's manly, and I like that.

Pee-Shy.

I promise I won't turn this blog into a dream journal, but this one was so weird and disturbing and funny that I can't not write it down.

I was moving back to New York and moving back in with my friend JG on E. 10th St. (JG was my first roommate in New York. We went to Parsons together. I lived with her from 1981 to 1983 and again, after leaving my first long-term relationship, broke and desperate, from 1990 to 1992. We were very close, but she was one of a handful of women I knew in college and immediately after with whom I had difficult friendships. I was always falling short of their expectations of me.) In the dream, the situation felt very precarious and I felt emotionally fragile. J dropped me off there with only a small suitcase and, I think, one box, and he drove away.

I had barely arrived and set down my stuff. I was going to pee when JG walked into the room and said "What are you doing?" I said I was going to pee, and she said she had to go too. (There were two toilets in the living room.) I turned around and saw that she was completely naked. This in itself wasn't a surprise; JG was often naked. She liked being naked. What was a surprise is that she had a big honkin' pink shlong. I tried to swallow my shock, and I tried unsuccessfully to urinate (I've gotten very pee-shy in my old age).

When she was done, we were standing in the kitchen talking, and I said something like, "I see you have a penis now." And she said, "Right, and you're going to be giving me some." I said, "Some what?" "Blowjobs! I'll give you some too." I said, "No! Absolutely not. That's not what this is about. I'm not going to do that." She looked terribly wounded, and she ran away. She started moving her stuff back into the bedroom that she had cleared out for me.

I was suddenly really, really upset and scared. I decided to call J and ask him to come get me, but my cell phone wouldn't work. I kept punching "8," which is the speed dial for J, but when I would press "Call," it would go to another menu. Every time I tried it, something different would happen. (I don't know J's number by heart to just dial it.) I kept trying and trying and trying. I knew that I had no place to go. I woke up.

When I went back to sleep later, I returned to the dream. I was still in JG's apartment. There was a party. I was avoiding her and covertly trying to arrange to get the hell out. Our mutual friend from Parsons, F, was there. We were leaning against a wall in the bedroom talking. (He was one of those boys in college who become really aggravating to their friends because they take forEVer to come out even though everybody already knows. Those boys are usually Catholic, aren't they?) I was trying to get him to give me his phone number, but I sensed that he didn't want to give it to me. I had an escape plan in my head that required his number. I was coming on to him, salaciously, considering we were at a party and surrounded by people holding cocktails and talking.

One More Day.

I usually think the whole Mercury-in-retrograde thing is pretty silly. Like El Niño, it turns into an explanation of every little inconvenience or difficulty that happens to occur. As if these things don't happen all the time without an astrological excuse. But tell that to my cell phone, which I think must be watching the calender, because about three times a year it goes haywire.

I think my friends have gotten the message that I hate talking on the phone, and nobody calls me any more. I have the cheapest plan available which I think is 400 minutes, and still I only use about 150 of them. My phone gets more use as my alarm clock. Two days ago, instead of snoozing for 6 minutes like it's supposed to, it snoozed for an hour and a half. Seriously, it still said "snoozing" on the screen when I woke up with barely enough time to get to class. And this morning, though it was set for 6:30, like always, it went off at 1:59. When I went to reset it, it was still set for 6:30.

According to this web site that J sent me, today is the last day of this period of Mercury in retrograde, and the last four days, including today, are supposed to be the worst.

Fear of Heights.

Thank you all of you who ordered CDs. I sold a handful, and it'll help with the bills. One curious thing happened, though. Every time a CD is ordered, CDBaby sends me an email with the name and email address of who bought it so I can put it on my mailing list (if I had a mailing list), unless the customer blocks his or her personal info. Even if it's an anonymous order, I still get the city and state that it's being shipped to. One of the CDs that was ordered this week went to the same suburb of Indianapolis where my sister and her family live. Now, I've never told my family that I have a blog.

Not that it's such a big secret -- it's on the Internet -- but I feel some freedom in what I write about if it's not in the back on my mind that this forum is my family's first source of news about me. I'm close to my family, and I share more and more of my life with them as I get older, and I share more with my brother and sister than I do with my parents, but there are things I censor, mostly things having to do with sex or having to do with the general precariousness of my life.

In a way, I like these "getting caught" moments. When we were on the road, J and I were blogging weekly about our experiences, alternating weeks. The way I created my blog entries, since I was keeping a pretty detailed personal journal at the time, was to start with my personal journal and edit out the arguments and the sex and anything else I didn't want to share with our fans, and then I'd post it on our web site.

Well, once I had to go back and replace an archived blog page, I don't remember why, and when I went to repost the edited page on the web site, I accidentally posted my personal journal page instead. That particular diary entry happened to contain some juicy stuff: lots of relationship strife and a meditation on Internet sex and taking naked pictures of myself. Since we seldom had occasion to read old blog entries, the page stayed there for months. We found out while we were Scotland and in the middle of the most difficult time in a very difficult patch in our lives -- and the way we found out is another harrowing story which I won't go into here. But curiously, after it blew over, I felt relieved and even exhilarated.

I'm very afraid of heights, but lately I'll make myself walk right up to a railing on a high balcony or the edge of a cliff, because I learn that just because it's terrifying doesn't mean it's going to hurt me. It's one less thing to be afraid of when the world doesn't end because somebody caught you masturbating or whatever, and that's reassuring.

It could be a coincidence that someone in my sister's town ordered a CD. It may not be her. But how do I find out? If I ask her, "Do you read my blog?" and she says, "What blog?" what do I say then? It'll seem like it's a big secret.

Today.

The second flurry of exams is past now. (By chance, all my courses are on an irregular exam schedule, with either 3 or 4 tests, instead of the traditional midterm and final. For most students, the upcoming week is midterms.)

I got a 98 on my American Government exam. I missed a question about executive agreements. It was a multiple choice question, and there were only two possible answers given what I knew about executive agreements, which are agreements made by the president with governments of other countries, which are like treaties but don't have to be ratified by the Senate. I knew that. The distinction between the two answers was that one said executive agreements have to be within U.S. law and the other said they could be outside of U.S. law. I finished the rest of the test and then pondered that question for about 10 minutes. It was silly to fret about it, because I had no idea which was correct. That particular piece of information wasn't in my notes, it wasn't in the textbook. It must have been something the professor said in lecture and I hadn't written it down. I just took a guess, and I could have done that ten minutes earlier.

So, a 98 is pretty good, but I still wanted to know the answer, just to know. I approached the professor after class yesterday and asked her. She said, "Well, if you read the question carefully, there was only one possible answer," which struck me at first as an odd response. She must have thought I was questioning the fairness of the question. I can understand why she might be defensive, because students question everything, trying to get an extra point here or there. It's incredible how much bargaining with professors goes on. I don't remember that we did that when I was young. Maybe I was just too timid to bargain.

Anyway, I wanted to say, "I read the question carefully about 25 times. That's not the problem. The problem is that I still don't know the answer." I didn't say that. She told me that executive agreements have to be within U.S. law because the president is acting as a U.S. citizen when he makes these agreements, whereas a treaty is outside of U.S. because it is an agreement between or among governments. That's what I wanted to know. (My slogan -- "Academia: it's not just about learning.")

I got a 92 on my Biology exam last week. Adding my 10 points of extra credit, my score is 102! I also got an A on that English paper I blogged about recently. In Spanish I'm hovering somewhere between an A and B, I think, and I'm working as hard as I possibly can, so I just have to be happy with that.

I had a dream last night that I was being chased by a giant cat. It looked like a house cat but as big as a house. (Like in the Japanese horror films, where they'd film a fly or something and project it really huge so it looked like a monster.) After I escaped from the cat, I was on a ledge somewhere miles up in the sky, and there were tiny babies and kittens crawling around, some of them falling off the edge, while a veterinarian was explaining to me an elaborate medical procedure -- like an autopsy performed while they were still alive -- which was done on the babies and kittens after they fell. And somebody was eating French fries, which I could smell but not see.