I will be studying Near Eastern Civilizations. I will learn Arabic and I will get my ass kicked by the best public university the U.S. has to offer. And thanks to six years of military service, I will not be footing the bill.

It feels pretty goddamn good.

Well, I’ve been traveling, of which I have taken many, many photos, and I’ve also started a nonprofit to help veterans get free art lessons. And, I’ve been learning the ukulele. I’ve even written a few songs. Wanna hear/see/love them? Okay!

(By the way, I am not left-handed, as this video would have you believe – not that there’s anything wrong with lefties, hell, I even married one, but in this case, the issue is with PhotoBooth, which I used to make the video. I have since amended the problem, but don’t care deeply enough about it to make a new video. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.)

So, yeah. Not lazy, just busy. (But you’re always on my mind. I love you.)

Uncle Billy should not be entrusted with a newspaper, let alone a giant wad of cash. He is clearly insane.

There is a reason why, in Non-George-Bailey Universe, Uncle Billy goes to the insane asylum after losing his business: He is a lunatic. His brother, then nephew, are basically paying him hard-working people’s money as a salary for being alive – and perhaps for cleaning up after his creepy, twenty-year-old raven. He is inarguably the most irresponsible person in Bedford Falls, but for some reason it is he who is chosen to make the deposit to the bank – a deposit totaling more than seventy thousand of today’s dollars. Whomever authorized Uncle Billy to carry that much cash anywhere, it certainly doesn’t seem to have been George, who is obviously much smarter than that.

Drafty houses should not have to be tolerated.

George didn’t want to live in that house. He thought it was an old dump. His wife wanted it, and she coerced him into moving in – he had no other choice. What was he supposed to say, as he danced with his bride, Hawaiian tunes lilting on the Victrola: “Um, thanks honey, but I’m more of a condo man”? He was screwed from that point on. No wonder the kid catching a cold was the last straw. Jesus.

Why didn’t Zuzu’s teacher make sure her coat was buttoned?

The woman is a teacher in an idyllic little town where it just so happens to be snowing continuously, yet she fails to send a five-year-old child outside in a coat that is securely buttoned. She fails. George’s tax dollars are indeed paying her salary, and she is indirectly responsible for his child’s illness. He has a valid point in yelling at her – although the “stupid old cow” remark may have been a bit much.

It is truly annoying to hear a child play Hark the Herald Angels Sing over and over and over again on a piano. Seriously.

Even if it’s your child, you don’t want to hear it. Especially if it’s your child, because then you have to accept responsibility for it. George isn’t a huge fan of Christmas carols, and he later mentions he’s “not a praying man,” on top of which he’s having a nervous breakdown already, yet somehow he’s supposed to good-naturedly put up with clang clang CLANG CLANG clang clang CLANG CLANG on Repeat? Come on, that’s worse than water-boarding.

Mary really doesn’t understand his problems.

Why does she prattle on and on about parades and decorations when it is blindingly obvious that there is something, shall we say, violently amiss, with her husband? The man’s hair is falling rakishly across his eyes, lady, get a clue – this can only be a sign that something troubling has happened. Take a break from stringing tinsel and ask George why he looks like he just escaped from prison. There appears to be a disconnect here.

When your life’s goal was to travel the world, it is reasonable to hate your office job that your family guilted you into taking and keeping for your entire adult life.

Poor George, all he ever wanted was to pursue his own dreams, like everyone else he knew. Even Ernie, who was happy to drive his little cab around tiny Bedford Falls till he keeled over, was free to change careers if it ever crossed his mind. George was his family’s last hope because, let’s face it, he was a bit of a sucker. He didn’t have to stay back from school to run the business or give his brother all his college money; the kid was about to get a football scholarship and a job after graduation. It’s completely natural that George would regret a decision or two – he’d never wanted to do anything in his Bedford Falls more than he wanted to leave it.

Angry George Bailey is tired of conforming to his community’s idea of what and who he should be. He’s had it with cleaning up other people’s messes and saving everyone’s day. He wants to go exploring, and then he wants to build things, didn’t we hear him the first time? Unfortunately, every single person in his life insists that he stay put and take care of them. Amazingly, they’re shocked and horrified when he finally loses his shit.

I request an alternate ending, o gods of movie sequels. I want to see George Bailey shake Clarence the crazy angel’s hand when he grants George’s wish never to have been born. I want to see George Bailey fix his hat on his head, straighten his back and whistle “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” right on down the road, through the snow, in any direction, and keep on walking. As the snow covers his tracks, fade out.

It’s part of Oakland’s charm. The neighbors behind us have chickens for eggs and roosters for fighting. The roosters crow angrily each day at six a.m. to wake us up, at noon to remind us that getting up should be followed by dressing, and at five p.m. to let us know it’s happy hour. The neighbors’ dog, Brownie, has no voice box, which doesn’t stop him from barking every time we enter our backyard. We’ve lived here for a year and a half now and still, the second I step into the garden, I hear Brownie’s hoarse wowwr! wowwr! I tried to go back to their house and meet him once, but as I approached, he lunged toward me and into the fence. It held, surprisingly.

Eric and I have made this strange setting our home, not because we’re trying to prove anything, but because we can’t exactly afford the Berkeley hills on his income and my lack thereof. Luckily, neither of us minds our neighborhood, probably because we’re away from home often enough that all the things we’d find annoying under normal circumstances, we instead find appealing. The landlords don’t speak English? Great, we can maintain a friendly distance, convincing them of our upstanding character via enthusiastic waves and sparkling smiles. The neighbors are loud at all hours of the night? Well, as it turns out, so are we. We also like to have parties, which they never crash or complain about. There’s a bus stop and a shady liquor store across the street? Yep, and they sell cartons of a half-dozen eggs, which is perfect when you’re only going to be home for two days.

As G.K. Chesterton said, an inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered. I firmly believe that applies to our living situation. After all, what are we doing in this low-income, high-risk city if not having a twisted little romp through reality? It’s definitely a step or two closer to safeness than Baghdad, the only other place I lived for more than a year after the age of sixteen, so it seems I’m doing something right.

The inconvenience-as-adventure idea comes in handy when he’s off in another state while I’m at home. Sometimes I go into my happy-housewife routine and clean up some dog hair from the couch or whatever, but usually I use his tour schedule to plan my own. Of course, he makes money on his tours, while all I usually make is friends and sometimes a wrong turn in Wyoming or what have you, but it’s still in my heart to travel. If it’s beyond the realm of rationality for me to accompany Eric to Chicago, Denver, New York City or anywhere else equally appealing, I make peace with the situation by simply going somewhere else, usually in my car. Sometimes it’s nearby (today, it was Sonoma, only a ninety-minute drive) and sometimes it’s not (the car and I made it to New York this summer, then stopped in Colorado for a couple weeks before heading home through Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon). Either way, it makes me feel better.

I have to wonder, though, if this is how I’m going to be forever. I know, I know – I’m still relatively young and full of energy and blah blah metabolism etc., but sometimes it seems like I’m doing all this traveling compulsively, you know, the way alcoholics drink and politicians lie. I do it even when my body is tired and my mind dulled by the white noise of the interstate. I do it when I can’t afford it. I have trouble driving onto a freeway without being nagged by the urge to keep going to the end! until I reach my exit and breathe a sigh of relief. I can’t help but ask myself: Self, do I have some form of addiction? Well, maybe I do. But I also have a whole fuckload of adventure.

These conversations always happen at the strangest times. Because Eric’s band plays a lot of festivals, it’s not uncommon for most of the fans in attendance to be dressed in some sort of outlandish get-up. As a supportive spouse, I like to get with the spirit of the occasion and dress up, too. I meet dozens of people at a time, some weekends, and when a person I’ve just met at a festival asks me what I do, I usually just say I’m a student. If the conversation goes on for a while, often my military history comes up (it was, after all, six years of my life).

“But … you’re covered in glitter and wearing a tutu,” they say. “What did you do in the Army?”

So I tell them I was a journalist, and there’s a bit more disbelief, followed by the inevitable,  ”Did you go … over there?”

Most people have no idea that the military trains its own journalists to write pro-military articles, so I offer a short explanation of the whole miserable deal to them – still covered in glitter, wearing a tutu, holding a margarita, high on … life – before returning to the party. After these interactions, I often ask myself if I didn’t just make the whole thing up. The person I am now is, I like to think, almost entirely removed from the person I was then.

Believe me, I know I’m one of the lucky ones. Most former soldiers – most people, in general – never get the chance to start life over in their mid-twenties with a bank account full of tax-free combat pay. Not only did I get that chance, but meeting Eric brought my “starting over” plan to a whole new surreal level. For example, at midnight on New Year’s Eve 2007, I was on a shitty base outside Baghdad, sneaking off to have a couple of beers with the British soldiers (since they were allowed to have alcohol). At midnight on New Year’s Eve 2008, I found myself dancing on the stage at the Oriental Theater in Denver, while Eric and his band played “Lovelight” for hundreds of acid-headed fans. If that doesn’t fuck with your sense of reality, I don’t know what will.

Sometimes I feel like everything is happening so fast. My world went from desert camo to sequins and feathers in such a very short time. It’s a big part of the reason I haven’t been blogging much – I’m sort of in a constant state of amazement that this is my life, and I have to savor it, every moment of it. When I was miserable all the time, it was easy to write about it – just hit the “Bitch Mightily” button and you’re there. Now that I’m happy all the time (or, well, most of the time. There was an Experience at the DMV yesterday that I’m still recovering from), I often find myself with writer’s block, unable to focus.

But now it’s time to half-click, center and recompose, as my photographer friend puts it. I’m applying to three schools for next fall – UC Berkeley, San Francisco State and UC Santa Cruz – and all of them are going to require me to get myself some goddamn focus. In the meantime, I’m attempting to plunder my Iraq blog for possible book fodder, and working with a new, local nonprofit group called Veteran Artists, which helps veterans connect with local artists to get free art classes as a way of dealing with PTSD or other combat-related stress issues. On the weekends, I don my sparkliest costumes and head to the show, wherever it is.

In fact, on Halloween night, I’m going to be performing in a drag show benefit for VA (like it? “VA”? We’re taking it back from that silly old Veterans Administration) at a theater in San Francisco. If you’re in the Bay Area and want to come support us, check out the deets:

Oh, life! You are so weird and wonderful. The great doctor said, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” Well, I’ve got my ticket right here. Let’s go for a spin.

:::

The wedding was as perfect as I could have imagined it being. We held it on our friends’ ranch in Santa Cruz, and let me tell you, if you’ve never gotten your West Coast hippie friends together with your East Coast Christian family members, you’re missing out. (Surprise! they all get along quite well.) It would take me about as long to write about the whole thing as it’s taken me to actually complete an entry here, so instead I’d like to share a few favorite moments.

- On the morning of the wedding, Eric got his men friends together for a chest-beating breakfast before the ceremony. I got my ladies together about forty-five minutes later. The men’s plan was to have breakfast, then walk up to the ridge (the whole property is on a huge hill, from the top of which you can see the ocean and the mountains) and have a testosterone-y send-off for Eric. The ladies’ plan was to gather several bottles of champagne and citrus mixer, then walk up to the ridge and drink mimosas. Unlike the men, we didn’t think to plan for food (who needs it, when you’ve got mimosas!). Luckily, as were were passing the site of the men’s breakfast, we discovered that two of the men had stayed behind to clean up. Like true gentlemen, they cooked us a delicious spread with all the extra food they’d brought. Completely un-ironically, it was mainly sausages.

- We decided to have the dog be the ringbearer. That kind of thing works out splendidly when the temperature is cracking 100 degrees, the ceremony is next to a coi pond, and the dog is a lab. Disaster was narrowly averted. The best part of this is that in the video of the ceremony, you can’t see the dog making a beeline for the pond. I say, “Come here, Bones!” and then there is, shall we say, a commotion, off-camera. We plan to let those who weren’t there draw their own conclusions.

- Eric and I wrote a song together and sang it during our ceremony, and I didn’t fuck it up. Booyah.

- Because we didn’t have a limitless budget, we stocked our bar with only wine, beer and champagne. Because our friends are wonderful, they set up a second bar, stocked with only a hookah, high-grade tequila and margarita mix. Thus, we had a lot of extra wine, which is never a bad thing.

- My dad and brother played harmonica and guitar, respectively, with our wedding band, a string band from Portland called Fruition (check them out! I will send you a CD if you want!) for a cover of Stevie Ray Vaughn’s “Pride and Joy.” Then Eric’s friend beatboxed with them for a cover of Blackstreet’s “No Diggity.” Both songs were met with massive approval by our guests, all of whom had by then discovered the margarita bar.

- Rather than asking any specific people to make toasts or speeches, we invited anybody who felt so inclined to step up and say a few words. Our housemate, whose pseudonym will be P-dizzle, is a performance poet who competes in poetry slams nationwide. He performed an amazing poem that he had written for us, completely unsolicited. Then my cousin got up and told everyone about how, when I was eight, I dressed up like a mermaid and sang “Part of Your World” from Disney’s The Little Mermaid for our whole family. “It’s on video!” she made sure to mention. Luckily, it’s hard to get embarrassed when you’ve been drinking champagne for three hours.

- A friend in Wyoming sent us twenty pounds of elk meat for our dinner, which was barbecued shish-kebabs. I repeat: twenty pounds of elk meat. That she and her family had personally killed. I can’t really think of a bloodier wedding present. It was delicious.

- One of my oldest friends is an artist who works in all sorts of media. Most recently, he had been doing airbrush stencils on people’s skin at Burning Man and other music and art festivals. He brought his airbrushing supplies to the wedding, and painted anyone who so desired. By the end of the night, at least half of the people were painted – and not just the hippies. And let me tell you, friends – once you’ve seen your conservative aunt from Buffalo with flowers and the word “gratitude” airbrushed down her arm, dancing to string band music alongside your friends from Northern California who grow medical marijuana as their primary source of income … well, that’s when you know you’re doing something right.

Here are a few photos from the day:

Yay, love!

Of course, we don’t write. Not as a class, anyway. The old “conventional” methods of writing instruction have been tossed away, in favor of a format I’ve learned to refer to as “The Douchebag Lecture.” This is where a professor stands in front of the class and talks about his pet social issues and personal views on something or other for at least thirty minutes, thus ensuring that there is “no time” (as if he had apportioned it in the first place) for writing exercises or workshops. He spent the aforementioned half hour yesterday talking about the uselessness of The Canon, and assigned us all to create “[our] own canon.” Because apparently that’s a better use of our time than, say, writing our own poetry.

After he was done proselytizing, he spent the rest of the time asking the class what we thought “poetry” was, and writing people’s responses on the board. He then put up a poem on the projector (on a transparency, even! Can you believe those still exist? I’m surprised he doesn’t carry a Walkman to class, as well) for us to discuss.

The poems, plays and essays he chooses to share are generally lovely enough in their own right, but they also tend to contain some sort of undisguised social commentary. For example, the poem he picked yesterday was about a group of friends on a warm summer evening, sitting on the porch watching TV with the sound off. The poem used typical imagery (all of that “bathed in the blue light of the flickering screen” jazz) and was an obvious dig at American culture. I have no problem with that, not being a huge fan of American culture myself, but after reading the poem, he devoted multiple minutes of class time to discussing “what the author could have been trying to say, here” – as if it was something that had to be discovered.

I was unimpressed. So I used my class time to practice my haiku skillz.

Pompous prattling,
audible idiocy:
not creative writing

“No time” for classics,
but your play is required? Who’d
you blow to get this job?

“Blah blah blah blah blah,”
I hear when you open your
worthless, worthless mouth

I’m not paying to
hear your piddly world views. Your
voice inspires no one

I would rather do
anything else than be here -
you useless time-thief

Subtlety eludes
you. Cliche’ is your main game.
You are teaching … why?

:::

I asked for inspiration, and hoo boy, did I get it. I got inspired to write journal entries about my creative writing professor – specifically, about his almost comical lack of competence and professionalism. If I had to guess, I’d say he blew the school board to get his job, because any instructor who claims that “we don’t have time to read the classics” and then proceeds to assign his own embarrassingly unpolished play as required weekend reading is clearly pulling some favors. The class is at 9 a.m., and when it first began, I would make sure to get coffee before class in an attempt to be pumped for some writing, man! Now I smoke a bowl before class, because otherwise the fact that we do absolutely no creative writing during class would irritate me to the point where I might say something rude. I also wear earplugs, so that I’m not distracted by my professor’s self-important blathering while I’m journaling about his joke of a class. I mean, seriously, guy – if you want to go on and on and on about things that aren’t particularly relevant or interesting, don’t teach a class. Be like the rest of us and get a blog. Christ.

:::

Let’s see, what else has been WEDDING PLANNING going on … I suppose I’ve been doing some WEDDING PLANNING traveling, planting some flowers in the WEDDING PLANNING garden … oh, and have I mentioned that we’ve set a date? I swear I won’t bore you with the details, unless you ask. Or mention it. Or talk about someone else’s wedding within earshot. Or mention the date (September 25th).

Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll keep it to a dull, tulle-enfolded roar. Just as soon as I share with you  my frustration with (and also total dependency on) this nifty little site called TheKnot.com. A friend of mine referred me to it, and while I have to admit it’s easily the most useful wedding-planning tool since the shotgun, it’s also quickly becoming the bane of my existence. For instance, did you know that there are approximately eleventy trillion ways to do your hair for your wedding, and if you don’t pick the perfect, yes PERFECT one, you will be miserable and kittens will cry at the mere sight of your wedding album? Well, if you didn’t, The Knot will be pleased to imply it for you at least once per day. In case you don’t get the message right away, it will add that you CAN get a dress for under $3,000! But only if you are a BAD BRIDE, one who doesn’t understand the significance of this, the most special day of your life and that is to include the day of your BIRTH, goddammit. It will give out your address to local vendors, who will send you glossy postcards with pictures of seven-foot-tall supermodel brides wearing tiny shoes that cost more than the Lasik surgery you’ve been saving up for. Of course, it will also help you budget, make to-do checklists, and arrange your guest list in a pleasingly alphabetical way – which is why I haven’t slammed my laptop shut and run, screaming and flailing, for the hills.

:::

My dog has some pretty creepy, almost-human mannerisms that I don’t always notice until he starts doing something undeniably Doggish. For instance. He just rolled his eyes at me and let out an audible sigh, followed by an audible fart, before plopping dejectedly down onto the couch, presumedly because nobody has taken him for a run in the last five hours. Then he licked his genitalia for at least three minutes straight. Sometimes I could swear he’s judging me, but then he gets his leash wrapped around his own legs or something, and I am reassured.

:::

Oh! I got a job. I’m a part-time receptionist/graphic artist for a cannabis club.

In other words: Fuck you, The Army. I have a new call sign now:

Over the past four months, I have spent a considerable amount of time traipsing around California with Eric, with a few breaks to go to Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Florida, Jamaica, Grand Cayman and New York (twice). His band’s touring schedule has sort of become my vacation schedule, you see, as long as the transportation costs fit into my budget (I usually make them fit, using my expert Tetris skills). For example, if Eric’s band is booked to play a cruise, all I have to do is get myself to the port, and voila! I am on a free cruise (my first cruise ever, by the way – it sort of blew my mind). Isn’t it great how that works? So that’s why I haven’t been around so much – life keeps distracting me.

Perhaps it’s time for a bit of catch-up, since there have actually been a few major happenings since mid-September. Pardon me if I veer off into List Mode, but that’s really the only way I can keep things straight.

Happening #1 – Divorce
My divorce from Ex-Husband is now final, after only two and a half years of “separation.” It was actually more like three years of separation, because we hadn’t lived together since September 2006, before my second deployment to Iraq. I didn’t feel like bothering with all that paperwork for a while, especially while I was on the road more often than not, but when Eric and I started dating, I figured it was time to get that divorce. It’s slightly awkward explaining to your boyfriend’s mother that, heh heh, I’m sort of still married. Now that’s all taken care of, and Ex-Husband was perfectly civil and cooperative about the whole thing. On a related note, did you realize that in order to obtain a completely mutual, amicable, no-fuss divorce in the state of California, it costs three hundred and fifty dollars? It only cost us TEN DOLLARS to get a marriage license, folks. I’m just saying, that’s less than what you pay for an oil change. But all joking aside, I am now happily divorced, just in time for …

Happening #2 – Engagement
In early November, a few days before my divorce was final, Eric surprised both of us by proposing that we “make it official.” He then got down on his knee and asked again, using the slightly more romantic (and traditional) phrasing, “Will you marry me?” to which I responded, “Of course!” and that settled that. We have been enjoying a ridiculously happy relationship for just over a year now, and see no reason why we shouldn’t continue indefinitely. Since neither of us have the money for a wedding at the moment, though, or the energy to plan one, we’re planning to bask in the glow of engagement bliss at least until this fall. I would invite all of you to the wedding, but as it turns out, we will probably have to incur a small amount of debt just to get all of our families and close friends drunk. If any of you have any suggestions about how to throw a cheap wedding/reception, please come forth with them! We’re open to just about anything, including Mexico and any other countries with a cheap currency exchange rate.

This is where we got engaged. Doesn’t suck, right?

Happening #3 – Goats
Did I forget to mention that we had goats for three months? We kept them in our backyard and called them our kids (because that’s what they were, har!). I never intended to be a caretaker of goats, but a friend of Eric’s had a couple of ‘em who needed a temporary home, and as we have a sizable, slope-y backyard, we stepped up to the plate.

So, as it happens, you know what totally destroys all the weeds and extra shrubbery in a sizable, slope-y backyard? Goats. Goats and nothing else. We had been experimenting with weed-whackers and other loud, ferocious pieces of gardening equipment for a number of months, and nothing – nothing - had worked to get rid of the jungle in the backyard. The goats took care of it in about seven minutes. I highly recommend this solution to anyone who has a friend with a couple of goats and an unruly yard.

We also invented a new game called “Chase the Goats,” which involved pursuing the goats around their pen as they let out wild bleats and pranced around like nancies. We played this game sober, believe it or not. Don’t judge us.

This is The Goats. Their names are Grandma and Pegasus, and they want to eat your garden.

Happening#3 – Traveling, Traveling, Traveling
As I mentioned before, late fall and early winter have been chock full of destinations. We’ve traveled by land, air and sea to five states, one foreign country and one British Overseas Territory, not to mention all of the in-state adventuring we’ve packed in. We managed to visit all of our immediate family members on both coasts, spend Thanksgiving in both Washington and California (thank you, Southwest Airlines, for the $60 flights!), have weekends in a yurt in Santa Cruz and a mansion in San Francisco, celebrate Halloween in Yosemite and New Year’s Eve in Denver, sip domestic Red Stripe in Jamaica and locally-brewed Mirror Pond Pale Ale in Portland, hike in the Adirondacks and have our collective breath taken away by Jackson Pollock’s paintings in New York’s MOMA. Needless to say, I’ve gotten really good at the whole packing/unpacking thing, but Eric and I still manage to lose at least one belonging in each place we visit. At the moment, I’m waiting to get my bikini back from Fort Lauderdale, and he’s mourning the loss of his ski jacket on a plane somewhere between Denver and Orlando.

Our next destination is Albuquerque, where we’ll be driving this weekend, so I can attend an event held by this esteemed organization. As you may know, the military prohibits active-duty soldiers from speaking or acting out against the war in Iraq, which was a major reason for my keeping an anonymous blog during my deployments. Now that I’m out of the Army, I’m free to do and say whatever I please once again, and getting involved with IVAW is one way for me to stretch out my Constitutionally-protected free-speech muscles. Plus, I just love a good road trip.

Happening #4: School
Since it appears that no matter how much experience I have as an actual journalist, I still don’t have a chance of getting a job without a degree, I’ve been cautiously re-entering the world of academia, one baby step at a time. My aim is to get my BA in English or journalism, then enter a credential program and work toward becoming a teacher of English and/or journalism, so I decided to start slow with two courses introducing me to the field of education, and then ease myself into full-time classes in spring semester. Spring semester starts next week, so I’ll have to see how successful my “baby steps” plan ends up being. Hopefully I won’t end up fleeing any classes in a cold sweat, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of eighteen-year-olds I’ll be dealing with on a semi-daily basis. Shudder.

:::

Now that we’re mostly caught up, I should let you know that one of my New Year’s resolutions was to Write More. So I will end this somewhat optimistically: See you tomorrow!

P.S. Yes, Linda, your peer pressure worked … sometimes a girl just needs a little flame under her ass.