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Blizzardmania

the outside lane

So why can’t I sleep tonight? Highly likely that it is the lack of physical movement. My body has been in near hibernation mode for two days, and that means it isn’t really tired. Taking care of that tomorrow. I have already planned a walk for Thor and me.

We lived in Colorado when I was a toddler, and frequently, Mom and I would walk from our row house on base to the BX. For the uninitiated, a BX/PX is your Base (Air Force or Naval, which house Marines) or Post (Army) Exchange. It’s something like a Target, and it’s where you do most of your shopping. There is also a commissary, and that’s where you do your grocery shopping.

One particular day, when I was about three, Mom and I headed out to the BX in a light flurry of snow. Halfway there, the light flurry became a blizzard. We managed to make it in to the store, and Mom bought what she could to bundle me up to face the storm going home, got what she needed, and we started out again. Major effing blizzard.

We were on the sidewalk, trying to make our way, when we hit some ice. My feet went flying out from under me and I went down flat on my back, knocking the air out of me. Mom went down on top of me, landing on her elbows and knees to keep from crushing me, but I got a little smushed in the process.

The last thing I had seen before falling was a parked car, and I was convinced that car had hit me. You could not tell me that car hadn’t run over me. I remember it like it just happened. I was bound and determined, and rather hysterical about having been run over by a car. Mom tried and tried to explain to me that she was what had fallen on me, not a car, but I would have none of it. She even showed me that the car was still parked and had not moved. This shook my resolve somewhat, but I just knew that car was what had knocked me down in the first place. Fortunately, right about then Dad drove by, saw us, and took us home in the car.

I was thinking about that as I picked my way over ice to our mailbox today. It’s funny how the brain works.

Another blizzard story.

Boom, Grandma and I were driving from Dallas to Colorado Springs to visit my Aunt Becky’s family one year. I was twelve–I remember this because I had just had surgery on my big toe, and my cousin James, then just a toddler himself, kept stomping it. I love you, James.

We were doing fine until we hit Oklahoma, and a blizzard came out of nowhere, dumping snow like someone had just opened up the sky. I was fine with it, sitting in the back seat with Oscar, their boxer, to keep me warm. I had my Donkey Kong game, and played that until Boom told me it was going to drive him nuts. Then, I started writing and reading aloud my awful, twelve-year-old poetry about the landscape, between spurts of talking to bored truck drivers on the CB radio.

As I recall, Boom was very tense, trying to drive through the weather, and Grandma was unusually cheerful. My grandmother was rarely what you would call merry. On this drive, she was so chipper, had I known the word, I’d have called her manic. As she would tell it for years to come, “Having Laney in the backseat was all that saved me from going crazy. I wanted to claw my way out of that car, but I knew I couldn’t scare Laney.” I always found this amusing because she could have clawed her way out of the car and it wouldn’t have upset me at all. Boom was driving. That was all I needed to know. If John Young was driving the car, I was safe as houses.

I did think about that the other day when Thor and I were walking.

I don’t like tunnels. I think it’s a touch of claustrophobia, and a touch of having watched one too many thrillers where people meet awful fates in tunnels that add up to my sense of unease whenever I’m in one. And the echoes freak me out.

Thor, on the other hand, has never seen a thriller, so he thinks tunnels are awesome. He also loves making echoes. So, we take the tunnels. Sometimes. Sometimes I can’t bear it, and we take the stairs. Sorry, little guy.

On our way home the other day, I had miscalculated the time, and we arrived at the last tunnel at dusk. This meant a nearly pitch black tunnel, save for the light at the end of it. And this was a tunnel we had to take. Not. Happy. Thor was even a little nervous. I thought, “We’ve got to get through here, and I can’t let him know how scared I am.” And I thought of Grandma and that blizzard.

So, we focused on how cool the lights on Thor’s shoes looked in the dark, and I wondered aloud how fast they could flash, so he ran and I ran with him. And we came out laughing. Well, he was laughing, I was what you might have called a little manic.

Chef Lane

Successful Chef Lane!

the outside lane

Scored a 10 on tonight’s dinner. I cooked pork chops and a kind of casserole thingy. All family members ate everything.

I started by sauteeing about half a cup of onions and half a cup of carrots in an obscene amount of butter, seasoned with salt, pepper, and thyme.

While that was working, I boiled the egg noodles for my casserole and seasoned my pork chops with salt, pepper and thyme.

When the noodles were finished, I drained them and tossed them in about a 1/2 tbs of olive oil. I poured my carrots and onions into the Le Creuset pot I used for the noodles, and added a can of diced tomatoes (with garlic and basil), 1/2 cup of sour cream, and a cup of shredded cheese. I added the noodles back in and stirred ’em up good.

That went into a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes, the last 15 of which, it shared with half a loaf of garlic bread.

While the casserole was cooking, I pan fried the pork chops in the dregs from the sautee butter, over a medium heat. I had intended to put them in the oven after searing them in the pan, but decided halfway through to just go ahead with the frying.

I’m not good at guessing when meat is finished, so I usually use the cuts that are for Thor or me, and I slice those open to see how I’m doing. I try to leave B’s as intact as possible, since he likes his meat on the rare side. Pictured below is my chop.

B said it was very good, and even ate all the casserole dished out. Thor hasn’t been eating much lately, so we had nearly a whole chop leftover. I’ll use it to make pork fried rice tomorrow. Mmm. My dad didn’t cook often, but he could cook pork fried rice like a champ!

Wait…I don’t have any soy sauce. Weather permitting my trip to the grocery store, I will be cooking pork fried rice. Otherwise, we’ll be having Swedish meatballs.

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Loving the Headscarf

the outside lane

Totally hit the jackpot with Love in a Headscarf, by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed. This is the story of Shelina’s search for a partner, through customary Islamic arranged marriage. She studies her perceptions of love and romance, against what her faith tells her about the partnership of marriage, and the respect she owes herself, a partner, and what a partner owes her.

We were strangers but we had to talk deeply and intimately about our futures. Syed didn’t need to explain to me in words how little he would really value his wife and how he would fail to respect others. I saw it in his actions. His words would have only told me what he wanted to believe about himself and what he thought he was like.

I began to ask myself the same difficult questions. Were my beliefs about myself at odds with my actual behavior? Or had I managed to achieve integrity between my words and desires? After my experience with Syed it was very clear to me that just because you are meeting a potential life partner, it does not excuse a lapse in character.

This is a woman who is clearly in love with her faith, and reminds me a great deal of how I wrote and spoke at the sweetest point of my conversion. It is a lovely reminder that the Islamic hijab is not shorthand for a series of oppressions and evils, any more than uncut hair and long sleeved dresses of the more modest Protestant denominations are, but that there are hearts beating with feeling, brains pulsing with ideas, and they belong to living, breathing women. And, the way Shelina explains her choice (yes, her choice) to wear hijab, and her desire to marry a man who is happy for her to wear one is enlightening, and makes it easy to understand why a woman might make that choice.

Islam is not my world, and will not ever be, but I appreciate hearing it spoken of by an intelligent, thoughtful woman. I appreciate learning what she believes of her faith. And, just like I am horrified by violence done in the name of the Christian church, it is very interesting to read what she, her friends and family felt during the attacks of 9-11, and what life has been like for them (as practicing Muslims) since.

I am so glad I picked this up!

Janmohamed, Shelina Z. Chapter 4/Waiting. Love in a Headscarf. Boston: Beacon, 2010. 93-94. Print.

Howling Sea Lane, Lancient History, Women Worth Knowing

Sleep Paralysis! Awesome!

the outside lane

I should have blogged about my night terrors years ago! Stephanie just linked me to a treasure trove of information about sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis! Of course!

According to this site:

Sleep paralysis is a condition in which someone, most often lying in a supine (face up) position, about to drop off to sleep, or just upon awaking from sleep realizes that s/he is unable to move, or speak, or cry out. This may last a few seconds or several moments, occasionally longer. People frequently report feeling a ‘presence’ that is often described as malevolent, threatening, or evil. An intense sense of dread and terror is very common. The presence is likely to be vaguely felt or sensed just out of sight but thought to be watching or monitoring, often with intense interest, sometimes standing by, or sitting on the bed. On some occasions, the presence may attack, strangling and exerting crushing pressure on the chest.

Thank you, Dr. Seery-Murphy. Many, many thanks!

Howling Sea Lane, Lancient History

Night Terrors

the outside lane

So I finished the Jenna Jameson book. It never got any happier. It’s one of those, “It ends as well as you can expect,” kinds of stories. God bless her.

I started Love in a Headscarf and am enjoying it so far. Snow days make for excellent reading. We’ll be having another one tomorrow.

I’ve had very bad nightmares the last two nights and don’t want to go to bed tonight. Normally, I love sleeping! I have very vivid, entertaining dreams, so being asleep is like going to the movies. But when I am on a nightmare tear, it’s difficult. I will probably end up sleeping on the sofa because I’m afraid to get in my bed. That’s silly, isn’t it? But I need the bad juju to go away first.

When I was growing up, my father was frequently overseas, or working nights, or away from home for weeks at a time as a consultant. When he was away, I would sleep in my mother’s room, and she would lock the door, pull the dresser in front of it, and keep a loaded pistol between the mattress and box springs on her side of the bed. Not infrequently, Mom would hear something and come up out of the bed like a jungle cat. She would scramble into her robe, grab the pistol and hiss at me not to move, and not to make a sound. And, like Bambi’s mother, she would instruct me that if something happened to her, I was to run and not look back.

Then, she would creep out of the bedroom, pistol hidden in her housecoat pocket, finger on the trigger, and prowl the hallways. If she was sure she’d heard something outside, she would go walk the perimeter of the house.

Once, when I was around 12, Dad came home early from working a night shift, and didn’t call first. When Mom heard someone rattling around in the house, going through my bedroom, she got up with the pistol. She agrees with the assessment that if my father had not said her name, she would have shot him.

As you can imagine, I grew up to be something of a scaredy-cat. For years, I had to have the sheet pulled up over my ear before I could sleep. I could not have anything hanging off the side of the bed. I could not have my hand over the top of the mattress. Once I had started refusing to sleep behind Mom’s locked door, I had to be centered, and surrounded by pillows, and I was pretty much terrified.

When I was fifteen, I was dozing in bed one night, and to this day I will swear I woke with two things in my room. I fully realize that Occam’s Razor means it is most likely that I was experiencing what was a very vivid nightmare, but I thought I was awake. Something was sitting at the top of my head, a small body with long arms and legs, my head between its bent legs, its calves against my ears. It was leaning over my face, with its long arms cradling my head. The other thing, same size and shape, same dusky gray, was sitting on my chest with its arms wrapped around its bent knees, peering intently at me.

I was too afraid to scream. Too afraid to move. Too afraid to breathe.

I did finally puff out, “Help,” in this tiny voice, and I guess that was enough to wake me up fully because the things disappeared.

The next day, I had to go to work with Mom. It was spring break and she wasn’t about to leave me at home alone, when my boyfriend lived a block away. Probably wise of her, considering. When I went to work with her, I had to sit down in the safe deposit vault of her bank. Emelil, the usual vault teller, wasn’t there, and they had a temp working.

I was still so horrified about what had happened, I told this complete stranger about it. Valerie, was her name, and she was Pentecostal, and she told me I had been visited by demons. Pentecostal Valerie commenced to praying. This was my introduction to Tongues, by the way, and I wasn’t so sure it was me who had been visited by demons. But she seemed very sure of herself, and was very certain she knew how to pray a hedge of protection around me to keep those inky varmints away, so I sat still and let her slap on my forehead as much as she wanted.

None of those particular night terrors since, although, I had another one of those waking dreams where I would swear that I woke to a man standing at the foot of my bed–same bedroom, same year. I see how people think and really believe they have had demonic visitations. I believed that of myself for years. I finally realized that when I have good dreams, where I wake up wondering where the fluffy puppy went, that I don’t think I was visited by an actual puppy, and I put two and two together. But still.

(I am very superstitious about it, to the point that I worry just talking about it will make it happen again, but I decided a long time ago not to be so spooky about everything and I just let it all hang out.)

I was 22 years old before I started forcing myself to hang a naked foot off the side of the bed at night. I still don’t like doing it, but I spent a few years forcing myself to confront that particular fear, so I will do it. Whenever I feel the fear creeping in again, I use the same tactics. I refuse to be afraid of something like that. Anyway, should something ever grab my foot, I have bigger things to worry about than that something grabbed my foot, if you know what I mean. Right? Might as well be comfortable.

I still haven’t stopped barricading my bedroom door when I’m alone at night, but I do wait until Thor is asleep, so he doesn’t see it. I know that’s ridiculous. The last time it happened, we were still in our old house. I lay awake for a long time, deciding whether or not to do it. I had to figure out if it was worthwhile. Because, if the intruder came in the bedroom windows, I couldn’t get out. But the likelihood would be the intruder coming in the back door, and then the barricade gave me a few more seconds of time to get Thor out of the house. But what if the intruder wasn’t working alone? I wished for a big, mean dog. Or even Seamus, who was like a muppet with fangs. Poor puppy!

Working on that one. But I figure that I am doing very well for myself, considering my socialized night fears. Now if I can just get over that fear of sharks in the swimming pool…