Richard Marx and I'M IN MENDO I GOT MY FLIPPY-FLOPPIES

It's January in Mendocino County. I know this because I'M IN MENDOCINO COUNTY BITCHES. It's rainy, I'm alone, I brought so much kale, chard, parsley, cilantro, and dill they put it all in one paper bag at the grocery store, I took a walk on a country road where the only thing I heard were my footfalls. It's ME TIME FOR THE MIDDLE-AGED.

I'm out here because a couple months ago I hit the wall like REALLY hit the wall and asked SJ if I could go away by myself for more than a week. This guy. Immediately he says yes. Hugs me. Says it's a great idea. We have TWO KIDS but more importantly TWO CATS – the kids have redeeming qualities. Right after I left, everyone got sick, including one kid puking, plus it was a holiday weekend, which to anyone who doesn’t know means NO SCHOOL which means NO CHILD CARE. SJ is having NOT ME TIME.

I just finished five months at a new job where I tried something that always works, being a new person attempting to change long-established routines from the bottom up, since the bottom is where I lurk, and it did not go well IT DID NOT. For that reason I had a five-day storm of anxiety that ended in me having a panic attack BY MYSELF, whereas normally I reserve them for when SJ is home. I went from 10 years of thinking I was the BEST copy editor, and getting lots of feedback to that end, at least to my face and in performance reviews, because for 10 years I was the ONLY copy editor. Then I moved onto a team of the world's best copy editors and realized that I am NOT THE BEST COPY EDITOR and at least on my team may in fact be THE WORST COPY EDITOR.

When I do something really, really, really, really well, like when there's breaking news and I'm the only one on and I copy-edit the stub, write the hed and dek, pick the photo, write the caption and alt-text, do the URL, proof the byline, do the tags, choose the commissioning desk, choose a rich link, launch it, move it in the back-end queue, send an alert CORRECTLY AND NOT WITH A FACTUAL ERROR WHICH I ALREADY DID ONCE REQUIRING A GLOBAL CORRECTION, then put it on the homepage in the correct slot according to my knowledge of news judgment, and do all this within 10 minutes, nobody notices or says anything because THAT'S MY JOB I'M SUPPOSED TO DO THAT. However, when I fuck one of those things up, which has happened a couple times, TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE NOTICE but especially the people on my team whom I like and respect so much I have turned into my 22-year-old Jenny the Jester persona – I am no longer going for BEST AT MY JOB, rather I am going for HEART OF THE TEAM.

Boss: This new girl. Is she actually good at her job?

Colleague: Well, no. But everyone likes her! And she's so emotionally fragile! We can't fire her!

My son, aka Silver, like the horse, is suddenly grossed out by kissing and underwear. If anyone kisses in a movie we're watching, he covers his face with his little boy hands and cries, "Gross! Is it over yet?" I bought myself a very expensive pair of underpants at a boutique here – $26!!! – from a brand called Thunderpants I CANNOT and showed them to him over FaceTime, they're sort of boy shorts in kelly green with a thick dark-green border, they look like Underoos, because I seriously believed he would say, "Aww! They're so cute!" because that is the baby I left at home. What he said was, "Ew!" So we are in a new phase. Noted.

Also, my son, whom I once called the Barnacle for how closely he clung to me, was unmoved about me going away for eight days – I somehow forgot to tell him until the night before, so apparently I was equally unmoved about leaving him for eight days – because he saw it as an opportunity to play more video games with his dad (it is).

This week has been interesting. But not too interesting. My goal was to not have any goals, to not attempt to accomplish anything, but rather to answer my needs as they present themselves. On Day Five I'm realizing I have the need to accomplish things, and sitting on a couch all day watching Succession, writing in a gratitude journal WHO HAVE I BECOME, reading We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman EVERYONE IS RIGHT ABOUT THIS BOOK I WISH I'D WRITTEN IT BUT GOOD THING CATHERINE DID INSTEAD, and occasionally making myself a cheese plate is only amazing IN RELATION TO doing other things.

So I shopped. I walked through the town where the opening sequence to Murder She Wrote and a lot of Cujo were filmed and bought second-hand jeans and overalls, underpants (see above), a loofah with a bamboo handle, a pile of used books, and presents for the kids. I'm constantly amazed by how completely a person can change. When I was younger and trekking through various countries with my Lonely Planet guide open in my hands like a giant MUG ME sign (never happened because they only mug you in the US, ha ha!), I skipped the shopping sections, 100% bored by the idea of shopping and bewildered that anyone in a foreign country would spend time SHOPPING. You're supposed to eat, drink, have sex with strangers, and see things, not SHOP. Your limited money is for ENTRANCE FEES – actually, since most museums in most other countries are free, your limited money is for transportation, lodging, food, and alcohol. It is not for THINGS you must then CARRY and WORRY ABOUT.

One night years ago, when I was dating someone with four degrees and a résumé that literally made me stutter in his presence, this guy – whose online dating name was Septimus Smith, which I recognized as from Virginia Woolf because I also am insufferable – invited me to his apartment so we could have brief, unsatisfying sex (in the middle of the night, there was an earthquake which he slept through but which I was awake for because I was staring at his ceiling trying to guess how long it would be before he broke up with me, which would be another two weeks). He had been trying valiantly to make connections between us – he had written a Ph.D. thesis so we were both writers! We had both left the country so we were both travelers! – and in his apartment he had rugs and art he'd bought in places like Morocco. I was flabbergasted.

"How did you get these back?" I asked, mystified.

"I mailed them," he said, mystified as to why I was mystified. "You don't have things from your travels?"

That was how I found out I'd been traveling wrong. The next time I took a vacation, I bought a rug (but I carried it back in my suitcase – who has the money to mail things from a foreign country???).

This is what's been interesting about this week, both while I was shopping and while I was walking the cliffs of Mendocino County in the drizzle, watching a full rainbow as the sun broke through clouds above the ocean: I have no access to electronics except this laptop (big except, I know, but still). My phone died and the replacement didn't come before I left. The electronics in my car are shot so the radio and clock don't work. This means:

At any given time, unless I'm looking at my laptop or I ask someone else, I don't know what time it is.
I can't take pictures.
I can't talk to anyone who isn’t right in front of me (except when I'm on my laptop).
I can't text (except when I'm on my laptop).

This also means:

When I come back to the cabin after being gone for hours, I check my email, the way I checked my email in my twenties, excited to see whether so-and-so had emailed back, since in those days there wasn't spam and the only people who emailed you were people you knew. In practice this means I'm ridiculously excited to hear from my husband. I am discovering anew how much I like him LET'S SEE HOW LONG THIS LASTS.
I can't take pictures of anything beautiful in Mendocino County. I have to fucking appreciate it in the fucking moment.
I can't take selfies, trying over and over to get a picture of myself looking rested and healthy and happy when it never becomes less impossible since my arm is not long enough to make my nose not look enormous.

I did, however, bring my Bluetooth speaker, which connects to my laptop. That was me, wearing nothing but my new underpants and washing my armpits at the kitchen sink belting out "Hold on to the Nights" by Richard Marx.

For more than a year, SJ had been hinting that I might need to get used to the idea of us spending our limitless money on a new car. Paying off lawyer debt? Paying off IRS debt? Putting money in the kids' 529s? Putting money in our savings account? Paying down the house? Paying down my graduate school debt?

Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, and nah. New car.

Brief aside: Before I met SJ, I had never:

Missed a flight.
Had "lawyer debt."
Had IRS debt.

(SJ would like to point out I also had never had a "house.")

SJ’s van, a 2001 Toyota Sienna, had problems, the most severe of which was it wouldn't pass smog, which in California means you can't get it registered. For SJ it was an ongoing and not unpleasant project of buying car parts, watching YouTube videos, and trying to fix it. At one point I asked him, "How long exactly has the car not been registered?"

He gave me a Finnish look of trying not to look panicked, which I recognize now that I've known him for seven years. To outsiders, it looks the same as "happy," "sad," "annoyed," "interested in what you're saying," and "not thinking about anything right now."

"Couple years," he said lightly.

So it was that two weeks ago, I was driving down our street after dropping Silver off at school and saw the van attached to a tow truck in front of our house. My first thought was the stupid thing wouldn't start and SJ had called AAA. Then I remembered SJ never, ever remembers we have AAA even though every year I give him the new card and make him put it in his wallet.

"That's my husband's car," I called out the window in a friendly way. "What's happening?"

"Belongs to the city now," the meter maid said gruffly.

I asked if we could get some things out of the car. He said sure. I parked and went inside.

"It's happening," I called upstairs to SJ, who, as I'd guessed, had no idea what was happening right outside.

"What's happening?" he said happily. "Ooh, did you get me a latte?"

We gathered the car seat, a jeans jacket of one of Silver’s friends, the toy boats on the dashboard. We forgot the USB-plug-slash-seatbelt-cutter for when you drive into a lake. The meter maid, startled by how friendly we were (SJ said later that when he’d come out of the house, the guy wouldn't make eye contact with him – "They get so much abuse," SJ said), stammered that I had been so friendly that if the tow truck driver hadn't been there right away, he would have let us off with a warning. We watched the van bump down the street. We forgot to take a picture.

Tow yard to get the car out of hock: $700. Catalytic converter that would not guarantee the van passed smog: $800. Resale value of the van: $200.

Later that morning I listened to SJ call the tow yard: "My car was towed this morning? And, I don't want it back. Yeah. OK. Thank you."

We needed a car right away since I was taking my car to come here, so within 48 hours we were the owners of a 2009 Subaru Impreza with 130,000 miles on it we found on Craigslist, most recently owned by a family in Daly City. We were both kind of excited – neither of us had had a new used car in years. We went to the bank together to withdraw half our savings. I yammered on about how we were lucky to have enough cash on hand because most Americans don't have $400 in savings for an emergency.

SJ test-drove the car since I had to work, and bought it. We drove it together later that day, and I looked over at him, surprised. "You're so short," I said. He looked like he was reaching up to hold the steering wheel, which he was. "I feel like I'm half an inch above the road," I said, which I was.

The next day we met in the kitchen, and both shrugged.

“It's just a car," I said.

"It's just a car," SJ said.

Being an adult, apparently, means having enough money to buy a car you don't really want.

I don't have access to any photos while I’m here except the ones I've imported to my laptop for some reason, so the feature image of our wide-open gate and front door is what I came home to one afternoon after my adult husband had taken our son to karate some 45 minutes earlier. The cats, who must have had enough time to realize they didn’t really want to escape, were still inside.

For anyone who doesn't get the reference of the title:

And because I have never shared this with anyone or even told anyone besides SJ and just found it on my laptop: This is a picture of Ryan Coogler, who made a surprise appearance at the Hunters Point screening of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever this summer because he’s a MFG and reps hard. I love him.