Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions (6 page)

a) There are ten pairs in
the package. Why would there be ten pairs if they were reusable?
I’m trying not to think too hard about the alternative answers to
this question. (
Oh, no she
di’int.
)

b) I can’t stop myself
from wondering what kind of ear gunk gets on the little green foamy
things—gunk I won’t see because, well, they’re foamy and they’re .
. . green.

I’m waiting for the day
when this is the biggest problem in my day. Until then, it’s back
to my Internet research on the least painful forms of suicide. Just
in case.

October 15, 2000

Night of the High Rollers, or Why I Won’t Be
Changing My Name to Bugsy Siegel Any Time Soon

Most of you have probably never been to Vegas (and
certainly not to visit your parents), and therefore wouldn’t
realize that the “old” Las Vegas is really downtown Las Vegas, with
Main Street as its, well, main street. The currently famous Vegas
Strip is a several-mile long stretch of roadway called Las Vegas
Boulevard. Up until last night we’d been concentrating most of our
sightseeing to the Strip. Last night my folks took us all downtown
to Fremont Street to see the shops and to view the Fremont Street
Experience.

Fremont Street used to be a regular street populated
with cars, but a few years ago they closed it off, paved it over
with new cement, set up outside kiosks, and kept up the
“traditional” casinos there (including Vegas Vic and Sassy Sally,
that neon cowboy guy and gal seen in the movies). They also hoisted
a huge canopy over the street—not a typical cloth canopy, but one
comprised of over two million light bulbs. These bulbs are
computer-programmed to change color and give off different
synchronized light shows (complete with music) every hour.

It’s one of the few situations where casinos
voluntarily turn off the lights on their marquees, and that in
itself is saying something!

We got some splendid pictures last night, including a
doozy that I can’t wait to post on my Web site. There were three
women walking around as living promotions for some “girlie” show,
dressing in neon-colored skin-tight leather-like body suits, black
bobbed-haircut wigs, and
Matrix
-like sunglasses. I think
they were each about eight feet tall (their legs came up to my
chin) and wore size 2 bodysuits. (Then again, who would make those
bodysuits in size 18W anyway? That would have to be against the
law, wouldn’t it?)

We bought a few souvenirs. (Doesn’t everyone need
personalized Las Vegas condoms with a pair of dice on the package?
There are way too many jokes here about taking chances and
gambling, but I’m too genteel to mention any of them. Except, I
kind of just did.) My folks took Gracie back to their place and
left Wayne and me to break the bank at a casino of our choosing. It
was about nine-thirty p.m.

We had been mentally budgeting an “entertainment”
amount of a certain dollar figure, assuming that we’d still be
spending far less than most folks spend on vacations, and far less
than even the price of going to the movies. The machines are fun,
the “ping!” is pleasant, and frankly, the people-watching is better
than anywhere in the world.

We ended up at a downtown casino called Fitzgerald’s.
There is a huge 3-D leprechaun on the side of the building, tipping
his hat mechanically twenty-four hours a day and pointing toward a
gaudily lit pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It beckons you
in. It entices you to get that pot of shiny gold.

However . . .

What they don’t tell you is the obvious fact: The pot
of gold is ON the building and not actually IN the slot
machines.

Every casino has its own buffet, café, or
restaurant—all designed with one goal in mind: to keep you from
leaving. If you’re hungry, they want you to eat there, at any loss
to them financially, as long as you don’t leave their doors to eat
and probably never come back because you meandered into a different
casino instead.

Fitzgerald’s has an added distinction: It boasts its
own McDonald’s, complete with glitzy lights, of course. (Why there
is an obviously Scottish restaurant like McDonald’s in an Irish
casino is beyond me.)

Wayne and I played nickel poker for a long time,
sitting adjacent to the hourly
Tribute to Elvis
singer who’d
serenade us all loudly with his renditions of “Love Me Tender,”
“Viva Las Vegas,” and other things he assured us were Elvis songs.
He looked the part. He sounded the part. But I could have done
without the continuous gush of “This is only a tribute to ‘The
Kaannng’ . . . No one can
really
imitate ‘The
Kaannng’ . . . ‘The Kaannng’ is my idol and I don’t pretend to be
nearly as good as he was. . . .” And I think I also heard him
mutter, “But do I have to wear the polyester jumpsuit with the fake
love handles sewn in?”

More later in another section. . . . My dad is
calling us to a dinner of grilled hot dogs and hamburgers. You can
grill out all winter in Vegas.

Dad, thank you . . .
thankyouverymuch!

Continued . . .

Did you
ever have one of those days where you spend inordinate amounts of
time trying to save money? Clipping coupons, flipping through sale
flyers, driving the extra ten miles to a better thrift store? Well,
I seem to be having one of those
lifetimes
.

I freely admit that I
brought this on myself. I’m a self-diagnosed underachieving genius.
Actually, the genius part is self-diagnosed; the underachieving
part is well-documented with empirical data. I came to grips with
this tendency one day while I was still a single mom when I asked
one of my sons to help me find some penny wrappers I’d stashed
somewhere so we could wrap the stray pennies hidden around the
house.

I tried to make the
penny-hunt a game for my youngest daughter.

“Let’s see who can
find the most coins!” I said, thinking myself very clever until she
scampered from her bedroom with her entire set of pogs, thinking
they were coins.

My plan was to walk
to the convenience store and annoy the clerk by paying for a jar of
overpriced spaghetti sauce with rolls of pennies. I was at the
mercy of the corner store that day because the car was in the shop
with an expensive, debilitating illness—curable, but tragically,
not until payday.

We didn’t find enough
change in the couch cushions—or the candy dish, or the junk drawer
in the kitchen, or the pockets of my jeans, or the kids’ jeans, or
even in all the piggy banks in the house combined. And we never
found the penny wrappers.

I
thought,
How did I get into this
predicament? I’m a bright girl—but here I am, typesetting business
cards for a living and using paper napkins for the next thirty-six
hours because we just ran out of toilet paper.

In dire
circumstances, I often want to leap immediately to the too-easy
answer: “I must have done something wrong and God is punishing me.”
My mama taught me well, though, because when
other
folks are in dire
circumstances, I never think ill of them. Instead, I weep with
them, watch their faith grow and flourish under adversity, and
admire them from afar. But when
I’m
the one in a bad way, I’m positive it’s because I
flubbed up big-time. This day was no exception.

As I ran down the
steps, holding aloft the grimy quarter I’d found wedged in a corner
of my room between the baseboard and the carpet, I wondered what my
mother would say if she saw me like this. I had never wanted for
anything as a child, and my parents were doing twice as well in
their retirement as I was doing now in the prime of my
scatter-brained life. Oh sure, I could blame my sorry financial
state on the modest full-time job I was forced to hold after the
unforeseen divorce, or on the distraction that comes with being
back on the chopping block again and dating for the first time
since the Reagan administration. There were plenty of places to
shift the blame—and all my supportive friends would pat me on the
back for my efforts as a single mom. I could easily dodge this
shameful bullet.

Yet, as I searched
the pantry for a stray can of decent vegetables I might have
overlooked, and as I contemplated using the Hamburger Helper as a
side dish without putting meat in it (which works, by the way), I
decided to take the time to pray a little. God’s always had
interesting ways of getting my attention away from the mundane
day-to-day stuff and back to Him where it belongs. He knows even
better than I that self-inflicted poverty will get me every time.
Prayer born of poverty refocuses one’s perspective.

I stopped measuring
the worth of my life by money that day. Good thing, too, since I
didn’t have any. I started measuring it by relationships—with God
first, then with family, then with others. Was I communicating with
God? Was I teaching my kids by word and example? Was I faithful in
the little things? (Answer key available upon request.) There was
plenty lacking in my life that needed even more attention than the
pantry or the car or learning to decipher a bus schedule again.

I said grace that
evening at a dinner of cheap chicken salad sandwiches, Zesty
Italian Three-Cheese Hamburger Helper minus the hamburger, and half
a bag of miraculously un-freezer-burned frozen corn heated and
slathered with cheap margarine and salt. The kids were happy—these
were some of their favorites, and to them this was better than the
fancier roast beef and vegetable dinner I would rather have served
them.

Seeing the simple
smiles on their unknowing faces, it was easy to be thankful for
God’s many blessings— again.

I obsessively checked my e-mail for the umpteenth
time. Keeping in contact with friends and family across the globe
was a cinch with e-mail. I had become the E-Mail Queen. Nothing
could distract me now.

My toddler came to my desk and began to play doctor
with me using her play-doctor kit. She tested me for all sorts of
disorders, the names of which I didn’t recognize as they tumbled
out of her preschool mouth. She grabbed a fat pink thermometer and
poked around inside my ear as I typed. When she hit a sensitive
spot, I jerked my head away from her and asked, “Addie, what are
you doing?”

She blinked at me, looked into my ear, shook her
head, and said, “Mommy, I’m going to have to take your brain out
now.”

I balked, then chuckled and went back to my online
mission field. She climbed onto the footrest of my chair and took
my face in her hands.

It might have become a poignant mother-daughter
moment, if only she hadn’t whipped my head to one side and stared
into my eardrum again, hoping to find
something—
anything!

She planted herself between me and my keyboard. I
heard “You’ve got mail!” wafting from the computer speakers, but
was powerless. I sighed, trying to ignore the urgent sounds of the
computer.

I spoke to her as she continued her poking and
peering. “You have to take my brain out? Why?”

She rolled her big blue toddler eyes at me. “Because
you’re done with it.”

Was it that obvious?

Diet Diary:
I’m down eight pounds so far, having gone up two
pounds over the holiday season for reasons I can only blame on
everyone around me:

•
The neighbor brought over homemade cookies.

•
My mother gave me a
non-refundable gift certificate to a Chinese buffet.

•
There was a one-pound
chocolate bar in my stocking. At least I
think
it was my stocking.

•
That eggnog poured
itself down my throat when I wasn’t looking.

And the list of credible
excuses goes on.

I will allow myself one
real excuse: It is impossible for the woman of the house to go on a
diet unless she takes everyone else down with her. And I doubt
anyone in my house is willing to take a bullet (or a celery stalk)
for me. This time I’m on my own . . . but I still have to cook for
everyone else. And, in my case, “everyone else” includes one
teenager on a sugar-free diet, another teenager on a
sugar-free
low-carb
diet, yet another who comes into the house just long enough
to drink a gallon of milk in one gulp, and a man who eats anything
I put in front of him as long as he doesn’t have to cook it or
clean up after it . . . or even put his own one lousy plate in the
dishwasher after he’s done inhaling the food like a shop-vac. But I
digress.

This is a huge dilemma,
the kind of dilemma someone like me—with no will power of my own
and no inclination to borrow someone else’s—cannot bear for very
long without dire consequences. Consequences like eating a Quarter
Pounder and washing it down with a Starbucks Frappuccino, followed
by a pack of Ho-Ho’s.

Some days I fight the urge
to yell, “That’s it! You’re all on your own!” and enact that
declaration as house law for the next year and a half. But what
kind of eating lessons would I be teaching myself if I could lose
weight only when I have to cook for no one but myself? Easy enough
when you’re
single
, but tack on a handful of teenagers with metabolisms running
at twice the speed of light and a husband who never met a Hot
Pocket he didn’t like, and you have a diet disaster in the
making.