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First, I have no intention of dying any time soon.  This is not a goodbye note, or a cry for help.  Just putting that out there so I don’t end up getting sent to the school counselor again.  No, Betty Draper’s instructions to Sally, and one of my LTYM castmate’s essays put me in mind of it, so I figured I’d take a load off my family and let you all know how I’d like to be celebrated in the end*.

1.  Cremate me.  Cremate me as cheaply as possible.  Please make sure I’m good and dead first because it would be horrifying to wake up just as I was being sent into the crematorium, but once you’re sure I’m off to greener pastures, fire up the oven and send me on my way.

2.  Get rid of the cremains.  I don’t really care how you do it so long as you do not keep me, or put me in a place where you feel compelled to visit me.  Ideally, you could just air me out on a breezy day.  I don’t want you to feel tied to a jar of ash, or a man made gemstone, or a locket, or a drawer at the cemetery, or any of the other ideas I found on Pinterest for what to do with cremains.  You don’t need to worry about keeping a piece of me around.  You’ll have me in your memories, and those won’t upset you if someone accidentally knocks them off the mantle, or drops them in a toilet.

3.  Please do have a memorial service.  I won’t care, I’ll be dead, but people sometimes need to say goodbye.  Pick a funeral home where either you feel comfortable, or the place is so creepy it makes you laugh.

4.  At the service, do not play any music you like.  I don’t want you to hear a song you love and have it remind you of my funeral.  So dark!  Instead, play something really twee like Save a Prayer from Duran Duran.  That song is about having it off with a stranger, so it is both grossly inappropriate for a funeral, and impossible to cry over.  Also play Time in a Bottle.  Because I would have requested it anyway.  Or, Girl from Ipanema.

5.  Tell the truth in your eulogy.  Tell your truth.  Don’t feel like you have to say nice things about me if you don’t feel them.  I’m human, and imperfect, so if you need to talk about the imperfections, go for it.  I won’t mind and you’ll feel better.

6.  I would like for someone to pick out what they think is my funniest blog entry, and what they think is the most poignant, and read those.  Read the poignant one first, then say a prayer, then play Save a Prayer.  Then, do my eulogy and play Time in a Bottle.  Then, read the funny blog entry, and maybe play Electric Avenue because that song is awesome and you rarely hear it on the radio, so the chances of my funeral ruining it for you are slim.  And that should be the end of it of the service.  Then, you should go eat.

7.  Please do not do flowers.  Instead, either donate to a food bank, or a women’s group.

8.  Should I shuffle off this mortal coil before my son is an adult, please write down some things you remember me saying about him, and give those to him.  Now and then, if you think about it, remind him of how much he delighted me.  That’s the only thing that bothers me about the thought of dying: Leaving him before I’ve cemented in him how wonderful he is.  Remind him that his being made my good life a great one.

9.  Please go somewhere nice for lunch.  If you are on a diet, please cheat.  Eat the most delicious things on the menu, and tip your waiter generously.

10.  You should definitely make up memorial service programs because it is important for people to be able to follow along and see when this thing is going to be over.  You should use this picture of me:

It took me a long time to get my hair that high, and I want it immortalized!  (That’s another reason to cremate me.  No one else does my makeup as well as I do, and I will haunt you if you put me in the ground looking like some televangelist’s wife.)

11.  If I should die of old age, my obituary should read as such:

Lane Buckman enjoyed life.  She was abundantly blessed with family and friends, laughed more than she ever cried, was happier more often than she was ever sad, and was pretty satisfied with her lot.  When she wanted something, she went after it, and when she was finished with something, she put it away.  Unless it was shoes, or the contents of her purse, in which case she left those lying around indefinitely.  She appreciated all the people around her, most especially her son, who lit her entire world.

12.  If something else happens, use the obituary above, and add the following:

While she would liked to have hung around longer out of curiosity and sheer enjoyment, she lived happily and fully, and only regretted that truly unfortunate perm, and having worn that one outfit to the Billy Idol concert in 2001.

I think that about covers it.  Again, I don’t plan on dying soon, and now you’ve all got a blueprint for how it should go down when the inevitable occurs.  How about you?  What would you want for a funeral?

*Because I am a 12 year old boy on the inside, I snickered the whole time I typed that.

Family lore has it that a post in my great-grandparents’ fence was marked by hobos, to indicate a soft touch.  During the Depression, down on their luck people knew they could stop by the Williams’ dirt farm and get something to eat.  There wasn’t money to give out, but Jim and Lola always made sure there was something to eat.  They didn’t have much, but they shared what they had.

Jim and Lola’s daughter, Ettie, would go on to marry my grandfather, John.  John grew up as a giver, so he and Ettie quietly continued in the same vein.

“When I was still living at home and working,” my mother told me, “a woman was laid off from work.  She had three kids, and her husband was gone.  I went home and told Mother and Daddy about it.  Daddy asked me how many kids she had, then he went to the freezer and he started shopping our groceries for her.  Then, he went to the store, and he picked up whatever else he thought she needed.  They took care of that woman until she was able to find another job and get on her feet.  You don’t leave kids to starve.”

My mother, Joan, kept up the work in a multitude of ways (and my dad).  The most lasting impression for me was a couple of children who would show up at the Hardees to beg.  My mother bought them food.  The manager told her that the mother was outside, and she sent the kids in to beg, and suggested it might be a grift, but that didn’t matter to my mother.  What mattered to my mother was that kids were hungry.  She fed them.

I’ve grown up with the same attitude.  I rarely carry cash, so I can’t always help when I see someone on the roadside, but when I can, I feed people.  I cannot abide the thought of people going to bed hungry.  I cannot abide the thought of a mother knowing she is putting her child to bed hungry.  I cannot abide the thought of children, or elderly not knowing where the next meal will come from.

Summer is upon us, and that means school will be out.  For some children, that will mean hunger.  For some children, a school breakfast, or lunch is the only meal they can count on in a day.  Summer vacation means not knowing where the next meal will come from.

Please consider this when you are grocery shopping, and please participate in any food banking your grocery store does.  Please donate cash to your local food banks.  And, please, if you see a family that is begging, even if it might be a grift, find a way to get some food in their hands.

There is nothing wrong with being a soft touch.  There is everything wrong with people being hungry.

A few years back, a friend invited me to a Korean spa.  At the time, I just didn’t have time.  Then I didn’t have the inclination.  Then, when a new spa (SPA CASTLE) opened up about ten minutes from my house, I started eyeing it with wary interest. After hearing good things from trusted acquaintances, I decided to give it a go.

The main draw for me was the fact that there are napping rooms at this spa.  You can go and just take a nap.  There is no down side to that.  In fact, the only down side to the whole concept of the Korean spa is the required nudity.  Yes.  Required nudity.

See, the spa is split into three parts:  Female only, male only, and errebody up in this place.  In the gendered areas, if you plan to get into the spa baths, you’re going in buck naked.  Part of this is cultural, part of this is practical, all of this takes some getting used to if you’re the kind of person who changes in the gym like a Mormon switching sacred underpants.  Like me.  I can count on one hand the number of people who have ever seen me stark naked.  Well, I could three hours ago.

If you want to use the shared baths, you wear a swimsuit.  If you want to use the shared saunas, lounges, restaurants, and have run of the coed section of the facility, you wear a spa issued uniform.  Boys get a blue Tshirt and baggy gray shorts, girls get pink and gray.

You might think that being naked was my main concern.  My main concern was that I would be issued a uniform that would make it look like I was trying to squeeze into my gym shorts from junior high.  Naked looks better than ill-fitted, and I am vain.  I would rather let it all hang out, than look like a sausage with rubber bands wrapped around it.

I am happy to report that the spa uniforms, though absolutely unattractive, fit fine.  They were also soft and smelled really nice.

What drove me to the Spa Castle today, was the realization that Molly Maids would be coming around 9 this morning, and the last two times I’ve had days off when they’ve come, I’ve spent an hour hiding in a bathroom, then hiding in the other bathroom after having made a huge nuisance of myself trying to help them do their work.  In order to avoid that same situation, and since Spa Castle is open 24 hours, I thought I would just go directly over after dropping Thor off at school.  I thought I could avoid chickening out of going by booking a spa treatment, so I scheduled myself a body scrub for 9am.

The website tells you to be there 30 minutes ahead of time, so you can soak in a hot tub before getting scrubbed down.  I got there an hour early because I figured it would take me that long to get used to the idea of being naked.

It took like ten minutes.

A big part of that was the fact that everyone was stripped down.  It isn’t like the gym where there is that one lady who prances around, kicks her foot up on the bench beside you, then bends over to touch the foot she left on the floor, daring you to make eye contact with her anus.  No.  It was just a bunch of naked people.  Fat people.  Skinny people.  Old people.  Young people.  Light people.  Dark people.  Hairy people.  Not-hairy people.  CLEAN people.

Clean is a big deal for me.

Normally, I avoid hot tubs because I don’t like the idea of sitting in a hot chowder of other people’s filth.  Human stew is not my idea of a good time.  If I can see gunk floating on the water, all I can think about is how it is surfing toward me, looking to dry dock on my shoulders and crawl up into my ears.  Gross.

Spa Castle was clean, clean, clean.  And they have showers everywhere.  You shower with soap before you get into a bath.  You shower like you mean it.  You shower like it’s Silkwood because that’s the only polite way you’ll be ready to get into a bath.

Then, when you are sparkling, you find a tub that suits you, and (if you are me) you wallow around like a happy manatee until it is time for your body scrub.  You might also go pool to pool pressing all the buttons to see what they do, and you might accidentally give yourself an enema if you aren’t careful.  I highly recommend pushing all buttons from a safe distance, so that when a jet opens with the force of a fire hydrant, you don’t find yourself blown across a hot tub by a blast of water that leaves your cheeks flapping.

Spa Castle is 140,000 square feet of intimidating, so before going, I read up on Yelp reviews, asked a bunch of questions, and made my plans known to a select few.  I am glad I did because when I was called into my body scrub appointment, I was prepared for these truths:

1. A Korean body scrub is an intimate and brutal thing.
2. It is performed by a woman in her underwear. (In the lady section.  In the man section, I’m assuming you get a man in his knickers.)
3. It involves such scrubbing as to leave balls of your dead skin everywhere.

You know that scene in Shogun, where Richard Chamberlain is shamed for being dirty?  That’s all I could think about as I watched little wads of my skin slough off onto the padded table where I’d been instructed to lie, while this lady in a sheer black bra and panties (so fancy!) put on the equivalent of sandpaper gloves and went to town.  I wanted to apologize.  I had no idea there was so much dead skin on me!  (And I actually have no idea if that scene exists.  Shogun came out when I was a child, and the parts I saw, I was hiding behind a chair to see.  I remember not seeing the excitement about Chamberlain, though.  He was no Richard Burton.)

When my friend told me the scrub would be intimate, she used the word “labia” and I am glad she did because otherwise, I would have–I don’t know what I would have done.  But I was prepared to be treated like a car going through a wash detail, and that’s about all it was.  First, all the dead skin was scrubbed from my body (oh my lord, the amount of it!), then I was sent to shower.  When I came back, I was lathered up from toes to chin, flipped, lathered, flipped again and lathered some more, then rinsed with a big bowl of water. After that, the lady shampooed and conditioned my hair, patted me on the back, and sent me on my way.

So, to recap that, I was pretty much scrubbed and bathed like a baby.  Everything you would do to wash a baby clean?  She did to me.  I feel like I should buy her dinner, or at least a Mother’s Day card.

The treatment left me feeling slick as a whistle, though.  If you can manage the shock of having someone sandpaper the hollow of your thigh, and take the first layer of epidermis from your sphincter, I recommend it.  If you’re uncomfortable having a stranger wipe your bottom, stay far away.  You will die of embarrassment.

After that, I went back to rolling in the hot tub like a manatee (an informed manatee, who knew which jets to avoid) and then hopped into my swimsuit to go try out the coed pools.

Those were fine.  The saunas were all fine.  There were two I couldn’t make myself go into because they looked way too much like the clay ovens used for making pita bread, and I don’t want to go sit in an oven, but the rest were pretty nifty.  My favorites were the salt sauna and the dry sauna.  I like a dry heat.

I ate lunch at the restaurant and the food was nice, and I padded around wearing my soft, nice-smelling uniform, looking for a good place to take a nap.  I never found one.  That was my one disappointment.  I couldn’t find a good place to go to sleep.  I tried in a couple of different spots, but a bird came to hang out next to me on the patio, and some dude came to hang out next to me in the sleeper pool area.  I could have taken a nap in the nap room in the ladies’ locker area, but it was too warm there.

All in all, I really enjoyed my visit.  When you arrive, they give you a pass key shaped like a wristwatch, and that’s what you use to store all your things in a locker.  That’s also your money pass.  When you buy something (like a service, or a bowl of ramen), you swipe your watch.  At check out, you pay for the total you’ve accrued.  I loved this because it meant I walked around empty-handed the whole time.  I didn’t even have my cell phone on me–because those aren’t allowed in the naked areas.

When I walked out, I called my husband and told him not to bother coming straight home tonight.  I told him to go there and hang out in the men’s side for a few hours.  I told him to get a body scrub–I kind of hope he does that before he reads this because that would be funny.

I found my time to be a great benefit.  I’m relaxed.  I feel good.  And all the weird aches I’ve had lately are all gone.  Scrubbed off, jetted away, and floated out to wherever those go.

Should you go? Depends.  What is your nudity threshold?  Butts are butts, and we all have them, so if you can look past the one taking a shower next to you, get on in there.  It’s $35 to use all the facilities, plus the cost of services, food, and drink.  And kids are welcome.  You’ll just want to have the butts are butts conversation with them before you go.

4.8 out of 5 stars from me.

-0.2 stars because of the enema jet

Every day, since that most wonderful one of Thor’s arrival, has been Mother’s Day for me.

I don’t know how I lucked into this kid, who is as easy to like as he is to love.  He is smart, he is funny, he is compassionate, and he is always up for hugs.  He’s too big to burrow into me like he did as a toddler, but he’s found workarounds.  Every day I tell him how much I love him, and every day I am rewarded with the same.  I take none of it for granted.

If I’m doing my job right, eventually this magical unicorn child will leave the nest, and he’ll go make a new life separate from me.  But, if I’m raising the person I think I am, I’ll have the benefit of his friendship.

He has made me a better person in a hundred ways.

This was one of the candid photos from the LTYM show, last month.  I love that little face looking out over his grandmother’s shoulder, tucked right into my side.

We just spent the past hour wadded up on the sofa, watching Top Gear together, he and I.  Now and then, he would reach over and grab my head, wrench it back toward him and hug me as hard as he could.  He said, “I just can’t be close enough to you!  I love you too much!”

You know, I’m still surprised that he loves me back with such enthusiasm.  I know how much I love him, but since he’s been old enough to express fondness, I’ve been surprised at how much he loves me.  I was happy just to be The Food Source, and be appreciated for making sure his belly was full, and his hiney was dry.  What a delight to be appreciated as a person, and loved as an individual.

I’ve been getting my panties in a wad over a variety of news articles in the past few days.  I finally decided on one to rant over in my blog.  I have chosen to be openly angry about the shooting at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas.  I am angry at two sets of people:  People who bully and bait, and people who take the bait and try to turn tables on bullies with weapons.

You know, the world would be a better place if we could all live by the rule: Don’t be an asshole.  Just don’t be an asshole.  How hard is that?  Isn’t that what Hammurabi’s Code, the Ten Commandments, and every other set of moral guidelines boil down to?

But since people are having such a difficult time, I’m going to make a little list here to help.

Ways to Not be an Asshole

• Don’t make fun of people
• Don’t make other people’s suffering your entertainment
• Don’t try to humiliate people for fun and/or sport
• If you know someone has a sore spot, don’t poke on it
• If someone pokes on your sore spot, don’t shoot at them
• If someone makes fun of you, don’t try to kill them
• If you are angry or sad about something, don’t try to kill the people around you to make yourself feel better–or humiliate, embarrass, shame, or otherwise make people feel worse, to make yourself feel better
• Don’t start physical altercations
• Don’t threaten to kill, maim, rape, or otherwise hurt people
• Don’t get mad because someone else has something you want
• Don’t get mad because someone else has something you thought should only belong to you (remember Junior High, when Gretchen bought the same sweater you had, and you lost your damned mind because ONLY YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO GET TO WEAR THE CUTE SWEATER?!  It’s the same thing with civil rights and religious liberties.  We can all walk into Target, and we can all buy the same sweater, and sometimes it’s going to look better on Gretchen. Grow up.)
• Mind your own business
• Don’t take your loaded weapons into Chipotle and terrify people just because you can
• Don’t use “it’s a free country” to validate your actions like you are a freaking seven-year-old telling someone they aren’t the boss of you
• Don’t behave like the world is your personal Jerry Springer show
• If you are in a position of authority, don’t mistreat and/or kill people because you can
• If you are in a position of financial power, don’t Marie Antoinette people
• Don’t bully people
• Don’t kill the people who have bullied you
• Don’t talk on your cell phone in public restrooms
• Don’t be rude to strangers
• Don’t yell at customer service people/bank tellers/waiters/teachers/anyone just because you need to get something off your chest
• Don’t abuse people or animals

Feel free to print that up, fold it, and keep it in your pocket.  If you find yourself wondering, “Am I behaving like an asshole?”  Pull out the list and consider if your actions either fall into, or adjacent to any of those categories.  Proceed, or change course as needed.

I would address Pamela Gellar, that you don’t change religious fanaticism through provoking fanatics to do what their holy books and/or leaders tell them to do, but you can’t talk sense into crazy, and she is clearly as crazy as a bedbug, and also an asshole.  You don’t save lives by provoking a war.  You don’t keep safety by inviting a threat.

Just act right, people!

(Here I add the caveat that we cannot ignore world problems, and we cannot ignore how masses of people are being abused and tormented.  We must shine a spotlight on humanitarian issues if we are ever going to solve them, but we solve nothing by stooping to schoolyard dirt kicking.)