megfowler.com

I’ve had a giant, wicked crush on David Letterman for more than 17 years.

I have about 250 Christmas songs on my iPod.

I send more than 1,000 texts every month.

I eat about 1.5 meals a day.

My ring size is a 5.5.

The most hot wings I have ever eaten in one sitting was 45. And that was wrong.

I can only hold my breath for 1 minute.

I own 18 different Norton Anthologies from my degree.

My average latte has 3 shots of espresso.

I own 16 pairs of Havaianas.

I learned to read when I was 2.

I have only 8 toenails.

My blog has been live for 17 months.

I get an average of 8.6 comments per blog post.

I can tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue in under 15 seconds.

I used to run a staff of 110 every summer.

I’ve moved 16 times, which is roughly once every 2 years.

I ate 25 whole jalepenos to win a contest.

The longest I’ve gone without coffee since I was 16 is 40 days.

The next longest time after that was 3 days. Oops.

I’ve grown 5 inches since I was 17. And 2 of those happened since age 30.

I’ve been a camp counsellor for more than 700 girls.

13 of those girls are currently my Facebook friends.

I have 12 kinds of lip balm/gloss in my purse right now.

I’ve only owned 1 pet on my own.

I’ve been in love once. Or twice. Or three times, if you count my laptop.

When I got up this morning, the first thing I had to do was put another loonie in the coin dryer downstairs.

Now, unlike most people, I’m somewhat coordinated first thing in the morning, primarily because I have the nanny/camp director/former-dorm-prankster ability to be truly awake as soon as I’m awake.

Klutziness sets in mere moments later, but for that first half hour or so? AWESOME.

So I crept out of the dark house in my pajamas to steal around to the door in back. I wasn’t wearing any shoes and all the timer lights were off, but I am comfortable with that particular journey, given my divine love for all things laundry. But as I felt for the correct key on my way down the barely-lit steps… well, it was then that I saw it.

It.

This semi-shiny, oddly-shaped lump.

At the bottom of the stairs.

Where my feet were due to arrive in mere seconds.

Now, in my mind, this lump immediately became a rat, which I blame solely on my roommate.

How can I blame a rat on my roommate, you ask?

Well, I’m not blaming the rat on her, per se, but rather this odd fear I’ve developed of potentially rat-related things because of her OVERWHELMING FEAR of even the THOUGHT of rats. If there COULD be a rat nearby, the area must be avoided. If a rat has TOUCHED it, you must not touch it. If you SEE a rat, you must go immediately in the other direction.

I mean, whoa.

Granted, it’s not like I ever ENJOYED rats or CRAVED time with them, but now I am inordinately spooked by rattus norvegicus.

And at that moment, I was about to step on one. In bare feet.

Then it happened.

Some sort of weird Matrix-like power overtook my physical bearing, and I leapt over the rat in slow motion. Well, it might not have been actual slow motion, but there I was, legs cycling like someone shot from a cannon, arms waving like someone trying to hail a cab, hair flowing behind me like someone from a shampoo ad.

Then I smacked into the door.

But I had cleared the rat.

I quickly unlocked the door while rubbing my (break number five?) nose and turned the light on. Then I wheeled around to see what, in fact, the rat would do now.

At this point, I realized it was a giant lump of wet leaves.

Like the other giant lumps of wet leaves that are currently lying all over Vancouver, as generated by big trees and big winds and big rains.

I got my laundry at this point, and was able to avoid feeling ridiculous, because who would know I’d mistaken leaves for a rat?

Ahem.

By the time I left the house, my nose felt better and I was over the rat shock, so I popped in my ear buds and put on some Christmas music for my stroll down the hill to the bus. Now, I don’t want to hear a WORD about how you think it’s too early to be listening to Christmas music, because I’m not making YOU do it, I’m doing it to MYSELF.

If and when I come to your home, duct-tape you to your radiator, and put on the Boston Pops in July, THEN you can complain all you like. Well, you can mumble something, because I will have gagged you with the tape, as well.

But back to me.

The first song that came on was Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”.

Now, let me make two things really clear here:

1. I was not raised on modern “pop” Christmas music. Jazz, yes. Classical, yes. Old standards, yes. Carols, yes. However, my family had no Boney M or ABBA Christmas. We DID have the Muppet Christmas with John Denver, but somehow that was less “pop” than just “frog and pig”.

2. I don’t listen to much Mariah Carey. I mean, damn, the girl can sing. Even if you don’t like thirty vocal runs in every song you listen to, and you don’t buy into the giant boobs-big voice correlation (Dolly Parton! Aretha Franklin!), you gotta admit she’s got some chops. But no, I don’t have a lot of her stuff, even if she was just fine pre-Glitter era. I find it’s just a little… whoa.

But this song — THIS SONG — is a bit of a masterpiece of fun and jolly and if you sing along with it, you can easily convince yourself you are able to hit notes you’ve never been able to hit.

And really… all I want for Christmas IS you. So.

I was dancing on down to my stop when I saw the bus approaching at a mighty speed. A mighty speed that exceeded my own mighty speed, and was destined to leave me busless.

So I ran.

Which is fine. I can run. In fact, I used to do it all the time. Mostly away from bees.

But what I should have remembered was:

a) Klutziness had set back in
b) I was wearing slippy boots
c) WET LEAVES EVERYWHERE! Not rat-shaped ones, but giant lumps of leafy gook coating the streets nonetheless

As soon as I picked up momentum, I hit a leaf lump and it was ON.

Or I was ON… err… on my way down the hill much faster than I intended, without making steps of any kind. I was coasting. Magically.

Levitating, really.

And let me tell you, flying through the air while listening to Mariah Carey sing? It’s kind of like being an angel.

I must have been a real angel, too, because God spared me. I landed on the sidewalk without injury and was able to catch the bus.

Once I got on the bus, there were no seats, so I shuffled to the back to hang on for dear life. It was at that moment that I remembered I wasn’t wearing any lipgloss of any kind. So I did what many other women do every single day.

No, not that.

I tried to apply makeup while doing something else at the same time. Usually something far more important than putting on makeup.

But what can I tell you? I hadn’t had any coffee yet, and I’d faced the trauma of avoiding a leaf rat AND a leaf tragedy. So I wasn’t in my right mind.

With one hand, I pulled out my hand mirror and whatever tube of lip colour ended up in my fingers first. It turned out to be red lipstick, which made me smile, because red is the colour of Christmas and Starbucks cups and vixen-esque women. Yes!

But have you ever tried to apply lipstick and hold a mirror in the same hand? Yeah. If you can do that, cool for you, but I can’t. So I put the mirror in my other hand, and looped that arm around the pole to steady myself. Then I began to put on the happy, happy red.

It was precisely at that moment that the driver chose to do a donut or jump a bus full of schoolchildren or something else incredibly jarring, because I ended up sticking said lipstick in my eye. Right in my eye. Squoosh. Into my eye.

I think it happened quickly enough that no one saw, but I’m likely kidding myself and everyone is talking over their water coolers right now about how I caught the “red eye” this morning to work.

But can I tell you? It did make me see things differently. And there’s all sorts of jokes I could tell here about “seeing red”, but that’s not what I mean.

What I learned was that OUCH. @#$!%! LIPSTICK IN EYE IS BAD! #@$!%!

Then I got myself a triple venti nonfat Gingerbread Latte.

And all is fine now.

Morning!

Last year’s Christmas posts, in case you needed more reasons to put the TREE UP NOW:

The longest Christmas post EVER.

My roommate and I love on the season.

One of the strangest things about my blogging experience is the fact that my close friends and family members seem to be learning about me from what they read here.

The internet can assume it knows all or knows nothing about who I actually am and what I go through, but I’m consistently surprised by what the people who actually know me… well, didn’t know.

How did I miss telling you about that? How did I manage to keep that to myself?

Wasn’t all of it obvious? Couldn’t you read that on my face?

No.

I can never figure out if my reticence is a quirk of the introverted side of my character, or a function of bad relationship scars I’ve sustained over the years. And the latter always makes me roll my eyes at myself. Letting your scars define you always sounds so self-indulgent and Garbo-esque.

But there it is.

Once burned, twice shy, I guess?

I think my struggle with infertility has made this strange disconnect more obvious to me in the last year. I’ll get emails or phone calls from people I talk to regularly saying, “I had no idea you were having such a hard time with that, ” or “Why didn’t you tell me that was so difficult for you?” after reading one of my entries.

And I don’t know what to say to that. How would I bring it up in conversation? How would I talk about it without being a downer? How do you dredge topics up in conversation when what you’re going through is in direct opposition to the experiences of the other person… and might make them feel strange? How do you communicate something hard and not feel the need to rush in and say, “But I’m fine, I’m fine. I swear, I’m fine.”

It’s the most awkward topic in the universe to me at times, too, because it combines the utter weirdness of speaking about one’s girl parts with the idea of grieving. Grieving girl parts.

Yeah. Not something that usually goes nicely with a latte, especially when the other person is bouncing a baby on their knee.

Or is, you know… a guy. Who has no girl parts.

Here, I can flesh things out and clear my head and say everything that needs to be said right then, and no one presses me for more or wonders later about the look in my eyes or feels guilty that they couldn’t relate to what I was going through at all. They don’t have to say anything back. They don’t even have to read it if they don’t want to. They can choose to know, or choose to keep some distance.

It does make me a bit of a chicken. Or a big chicken. But it’s a start, and it feels good.

There isn’t a place in my life beyond a small circle of friends and family where everything comes out. And even with those people, I tend to work out the deepest things in the deepest parts of myself, where my thoughts don’t bounce off one other like echoes in a canyon.

I guess to most people — people who can talk about something serious without stumbling madly over their words — it seems impossibly complicated or indulgent to feel your way through life like this.

But the more I write, the more I feel comfortable about bringing my thoughts into the light.

Maybe I’ll learn to do it out loud, eventually.

A year and a half ago, I was diagnosed as infertile by my endocrinologist, after a battery of tests and examinations and years of wondering why my body didn’t act like everyone else’s. I have an autoimmune disorder that created/contributes to the problem — a disorder which I’ve likely had for more than a decade. Maybe longer.

It wasn’t the kind of thing you’d think to get tested for, or look up on the internet by name. To this day, I don’t really understand what impact it will have on my life beyond the news I received that morning. I take hormones to restore my system that leave me feeling wonky a good portion of the time. I hope they’re doing more than that.

I know my risk of cancer is high. I know my risk of diabetes is high. I know my risk of osteoporosis is high.

“Risk” is the word that seems to keep coming up. That doesn’t really inspire digging on my part, as much as it should.

It is a part of me now, though, so I should probably ask more questions, and take more proactive action to deal with everything… if that’s possible.

I should.

I really should.

And I will.

To be honest, though, all I’ve really focused on since that day is the baby thing.

The no baby thing. The babylessness.

It’s hard to explain — unless you know me well, or have known me a long time — how much of a smack to the head that news was. Why it seemed ridiculous on top of hurtful.

Why I felt like someone had taken away some part of me that already existed, rather than just telling me something wouldn’t exist in the future.

I know there are problems people have that are so much worse. Problems so bad I would be thankful to have what I have in comparison. I wouldn’t even pretend to understand what those people go through.

It’s even harder to explain — regardless of how well you know me — why the grieving has come and gone the way it has. I suppose I shouldn’t say it ever went, but it has seemed more manageable and reasonable at times. In those moments, I can focus on thinking positively and make plans to be a different kind of parent.

Lately, though?

Not so reasonable.

I think I’ve spent a month now trying to be upset about anything but infertility, because I can’t really think of another problem in my life that doesn’t have a semi-obvious (if challenging) solution. It’s so much easier to be pissed off at something I can control or change, because that means there’s an end to the anger and sadness.

A limit to what seems limitless.

Granted, the people around me are likely confused as hell as to why I’m revisiting old frustrations, but when did I ever promise to be normal?

I just can’t do that anymore, though, because it stops being a coping mechanism and starts being dishonest fairly shortly after I begin. And I’m no fan of making my friends insane.

So.

I’m still pretty angry about the diagnosis. And sad. And a little confused as to why something that wasn’t wrong to want, something I would have been good at, something I had always dreamed of… well, why it would suddenly become so complicated.

And I know it’s not the end of the world.

I know I can still have kids.

I believe I will love my adopted kids exactly the same way I would have if I’d carried them inside me for nine months. Not to mention by the time a kid shows up, my overwhelming happiness will likely cause me to explode into a million tiny pieces.

I can also assure you I will do everything in my power to make sure my babies know they are the most special, spectacular, adorable, magnificent, gifted, slightly over-encouraged little ones on the face of the planet.

I know that nothing about infertility inhibits my ability to parent. Not even a little. I’ll do my best.

What it does do, however, is make me loathe my own body, and not just because it lacks the shape I wish it had. My body is in dire need of a thousand cosmetic and internal changes, but I’d trade all the reduced inches and tighter muscles I can come up with to have that one part of me work the way it should.

What it does do is make me irrationally frustrated at people who struggle with having a second child. Second. Child.

What it does do is pound on my heart without warning when I see photos of friends in hospital beds holding tiny, shriveled gnomes in giant, soft blankets. I see their exhaustion and I long for it so much it surprises me.

What it does do is make me love and hate mommyblogs all at once. And avoid the infertility ones like the plague.

What it does do is make me lie quietly for a second when I hear the upstairs baby wake up every morning in the room above my own. She has words now.

What it does do is make me look differently at relationships, since the adoption process is something my future boy will have to be more than okay with… which includes the expense and time it will take. Am I worth that? What can I do to be worth that?

What it does do is make me frost over when people tell me it’s not the end of the world. Of course it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. Only the end of the world is the end of the world, and if that was the only measure for grieving, then no one should be doing anything but smiling like the sun itself was shoved up their ass. Until the world ends, that is. Then get out your Kleenex.

What it does is different every day.

I’m not really okay with it, though.

Not right now.

Overall, I know things will be fine. I just don’t like waiting to see how they will turn out, or wondering what I’ll need to do to make my dreams come true on new terms.

I would not have predicted I’d still be struggling in this particular way, all these months later.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the whole journey, it’s that nothing is predictable.

I want to be more honest about it, to write more about it, to do more to figure out how this thing has taken shape in my head. I worry that I’ll end up being indulgent or boring or alienating in walking through it more openly, though, especially if you came here for a list or a laugh or something that wasn’t… well, this.

But I guess it’s MegFowler.com and not TheEternalSunshineOfMegFowler.com.

Which is a URL I should own.

And a dream of being that is really only possible if I dig into the clouds right now.

So here goes.

In the past two days, I’ve suddenly become all passionate about doing the following:

Trying three new recipes per week and getting GOOD knives
Learning about spices
Singing every day
Buying a sketchbook and… um… sketching
Planning out my wardrobe (and wardrobe purchases) so I don’t appear to have chosen my outfits in the dark
Stretching in the mornings
Getting regular massages or something that will make me walk in a less tinman-esque fashion
Learning about colour harmony and contrast in decor so I can make smart decisions about purchases
Paying more than $20 for a pair of sunglasses so I don’t look like an owl

Any suggestions for me on any of these goals?

WHOOOOOOOOOOSHrattlerattleWHOOOOOOOSHBANGdripdripdripWHOOSH.

It was a little, uh, stormy last night. And apparently, it’s going to stay that way. Windy, at least. Here’s the current Environment Canada warning:

WINDS SOUTHEAST UP TO 90 KM/H OVER EAST VANCOUVER ISLAND..THE SUNSHINE COAST..GREATER VANCOUVER..GREATER VICTORIA..FRASER VALLEY WEST..HOWE SOUND AND SOUTHERN GULF ISLANDS WILL SHIFT TO SOUTHWEST 60 GUSTING 90 KM/H NEAR NOON. WESTERLY WINDS GUSTING TO 90 KM/H THIS MORNING FOR INLAND VANCOUVER ISLAND WILL BEGIN TO EASE LATE THIS AFTERNOON. SOUTHWEST WINDS 60 GUSTING TO 90 KM/H WILL DEVELOP IN FRASER VALLEY - EAST INCLUDING CHILLIWACK NEAR NOON. NORTHWESTERLY WINDS UP TO 80 KM/H WILL BEGIN TO EASE THIS AFTERNOON OVER WEST AND NORTH VANCOUVER ISLAND. THIS IS A WARNING THAT POTENTIALLY DAMAGING WINDS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING IN THESE REGIONS. MONITOR WEATHER CONDITIONS..LISTEN FOR UPDATED STATEMENTS.

I like that they do it in all caps. Makes it seem that much more ominous, you know?

And if there’s anything weather likes to be around here, it’s OMINOUS.

I slept for maybe two hours, wondering if the wind was going to steal into my bedroom and take me away to wherever it was headed. Like Ohio. Or Arkansas.

It sounded like a freight train/leaf blower combination, with a side of vacuum cleaner.

Which I guess it was, come to think of it.

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada, Australia and the UK, which corresponds with Armistice Day in France and many other countries, and Veteran’s Day in the US.

Groups and individuals across my country will recognize the sacrifice and service of the men and women in our armed forces with readings, music, the laying of wreaths, flyovers, salutes, and a moment of silence.

The felt poppies people wear to symbolize remembrance have been everywhere for weeks. I’ve had the chance to chat with a few of the veterans giving them out by donation, since the pins in the poppies never seem to hold in my clothing. I’m leaving a trail of them across Vancouver.

There’s no way putting my coins in their change boxes compares to what they’ve given, or if any sort of thank you would be enough.

We both know that in the moment, though. And yet still they thank me.

I recall standing in Vancouver’s Victory Square for the annual ceremony a couple of years ago, holding hands for a few moments with an old man next to me who was there alone, just like I was.

We chatted about the day, about how I looked a little like the girl he’d married… and how he still had the chops to pick up 30 year-olds on the street with lines like that.

We giggled. He had a great wink.

Then we were both red-eyed and silent, listening to “The Last Post” and watching the planes soar overhead.

In that moment, the imbalance of my remembrance against his sacrifice made the day more real than it had ever been for me before. But even so, he thanked me at the end for coming out (and laughed at me being all blubbery in response.)

It was my privilege. And not nearly enough, again.

But still important.

So for him and all those like him, and for those that continue to fight in unimaginable places and situations, I commemorate this day.

We remember.