I Get Around.

The temperature for tonight is supposed to dip to just below freezing. 31 degrees to be exact. I'm neither excited nor disappointed by this. At some point, I am going to have to learn to love the cold crisp weather of the inland northwest. Might as well start right away. Two days ago, it was damn near ninety and today, I'm not sure it got over fifty-five. I turned on my thermostat for the first time this morning. When I woke up it said it was a bullshit-nineteen-degrees in my house. I started pressing buttons. The highest my thermostat will reach is thirty. On came the fans and out came warm air. Everyone was excited - even Nugget crawled out from under her comforter and napped in the open. I walked around in my underwear a while and before I left, turned the heat back off. Oh by the way, I did put on pants before I left.

I knew I would get home after dark so I on my way out of the house this morning, I put on a pair of gloves, a wind/water proof coat and my beenie. Thankfully. It was damn cold coming home on my bike (with my new headlight and rear flasher) at eight pm. I gained a little warmth peddling up that godforsaken 3rd Street hill. No, there is really no way around it. It reminds me of trying to get from downtown into NE Portland by bike. Eventually, you have to go up a hill. The choices are the steep ass quick incline (NE. 15 th Avenue for example) or the slow graduated incline (N. Vancouver). It's much quicker just to put it into gear and peddle up the steep hill. Either way, your ass cheeks are going to hurt. Either way, every time a car passes I am going to say to myself "If I only had a car. If I only had a car."

I had a car for a while, you might remember it: The Chevy Corsica. My mother gave me the car to drive because she didn't feel safe having me come home to North Portland at midnight from swing shifts at the Y. It broke down at will and preferred to stall mid-intersection. One time, the car stalled near Lloyd Center mall in an on-street parking spot. My friend Tessa and I couldn't get the damn thing to start no matter what we did. Out of frustration or pure absurdity, we took turns jumping into the air and landing our nice plump asses onto the hood. We both did this a couple of times until a nice round dent appeared. I called my mom who said to me, "Just try to turn it over after in a while. Give it sometime, I bet you it will start." One of us got back into the car and low and behold, it started.

That car was a lady getter - let me tell ya - not like I was out cruisin' for chicks or anything. The girls (my sisters) had plastered stickers on the back windows. Inside, it had a pleasant smell of mildew, cigarettes, gas, and stale soda. Mildew from the rusty-rotted floor boards, cigarettes from - well - what was left from Jeff and what I occasionally contributed, gas from a can that tipped over in the trunk, and stale soda from the bums I believed to sleep in my car at night because I left the fucking thing unlocked 24-7. What exactly is the use of locking your car in a neighborhood where your loose (uninstalled) 1989 Panasonic CD Player (which is propped up on two red fluffy dice) gets stolen. Come on now, can a crack-head get enough money for a rock from a stereo like that? I'm not so sure.

Anyways, when I am peddling up that hill, I would do just about anything for a car. I don't ride my bike because it's ecologically more sound. I don't ride my bike because it saves me money - although, that is a perk. I don't even ride my bike to "put the fun between my legs". I ride my bike because it gets me around this small town in a jiffy and it's the fastest transportation I have. It is not, however, my favorite.

You know I prefer my roller skates but since moving to Moscow, I've resisted being 'the weird girl on roller skates'. This is totally acceptable in North Portland where you are apt to see far weirder shit such as the guy who is posted on the corner of MLK and Killingsworth who wears what? A life-jacket. On rainy days he actually latches the front clasps. On sunny days they stay open. Anyway, a few days ago, I gave into the fact that I am that freaky-girl on roller skates and I got out the Reidells (and plugged myself into my Ipod) and tended to my chores on eight wheels: I took Nugget to the vet and back, and I skated to school to what? Pick up my bike. This was probably about 5 miles worth of skating. By the time evening rolled around I had developed a thumb-sized blood blister on each of my feet. I had to cancel my fun for both Saturday and Sunday night because I was hobbling around like a old man with gout (and because I had a hang-over from Friday night, let's just be honest).

The problem with roller skating is that I have to control my urge to jam-out (not with my clam out, thank you). Because I started roller skating at the age of eleven, I have 1) a catalogue of bad eighties music that 2) makes me want to dance on my roller skates, preferably in sync with anyone who will roller skate with me (but preferably, my best friend who has done such a thing with me since I was eleven). Unfortunately, real like isn't an Ipod commercial and I am not so uninhibited to allow myself to dance on my roller skates like no one is watching. No. I can't do it. When was the last time you saw someone jammin' out on a corner - just dancing - to the music in their headphones (that's so eighties) or if your more contemporary, a MP3 player of some sort? What did you think? You know what you did? You smiled and thought to yourself - Ha! What a nut! (and then you secretly thought: I wish I could do that). Well, me too. I wish I could do that and sometimes I do, albeit in short bursts between main streets in back neighborhoods in the middle of the day when everyone is at work and I have a hat on.

The more pressing problem is this: roller skates are expensive and I it's time to replace mine. They were never mine to begin with. I bought them from my best friend and former synchronized-dance-skating-buddy for a mere fifty bucks when I moved to Seattle. They are exactly one size to small for me, have no boot lining, and no stoppers. They have been in this condition since 2000 and I have still used them to get around, to run the dog, to go skating at actual skating rinks and now, I cannot handle it any longer, I need comfort. I am old. Late into last night I started pricing skates and this is what I found. I new set up, the kind that I want, will cost me around $300. You know I am serious about skating when I consider that a pretty good deal.

So I scrapped buying skates for now and I am going to rely on my trusty Target bought Schwinn "Built for Women" bike (that was actually a gift from dear Sharla - Thank you love). It's a nice sturdy ride with a nice cushiony seat for my nice cushioned tush. I have a stolen milk crate strapped on the back which I often put more than the recommended maximum of fifteen pounds (I'm a grad student and a teacher for fuck-sakes). It carries my books, my Mac, my lunch, my water bottle (now if I could only figure out how to put Nugget in it). It has chunky mountain bike type wheels which I think will fare better when it starts to snow out here on the Palouse and it has a low bar - like 'women's' bikes have - so I can wear a skirt on sunny fall days and giggle at the silliness of riding down hill while not trying to expose your fundies.

Seems there are many different ways to get around, some more practical than others, some more fun, some more comfortable. Turns out you can get around without actually owning a car. Turns out cars are the warmer lot of transportation options and I have to say, I am a sucker for comfort.

But comfort will come when I retire... Oh wait, I'm going to be a teacher, who am I kidding.

For now, or until I get enough money for new skates, or until I get enough money for a car or one is given to me, or until I get a different kind of quad (the motorized-jazzy kind), I'll peddle my bike into the cold morning and be thankful I am able-bodied enough to do so, think of the trees I am saving and the cleaner air everyone is breathing one less car is on the road, and I'll curse the assholes who drive by me smiling with their heater running and their windows rolled up, rockin' out to the best of the eighties - something warm and superficially island sounding like Kokomo - on their way to the empty lot across town where they will do cookies in the fresh powder of winter, spewing a freshly unleashed cloud of fossil fuels back into my face reminding me that I ride because, I have to.

A bump in time...

I can't get my mind of my left breast - precisely, my left nipple. I can't tell if I imagining that occasional sharp pain or if I have put a tiny bump of fiction there, born of my little, but certainly not irrational fear. Somewhere in the textbooks of my seven year college stint I read that lesbians are more prone to breast cancer than heterosexual women - maybe due to the fact that we don't often use our breasts for milk delivery. I'm not sure. Ask the "God Hates Fags" crew and I am sure that lesbians are being punished and therefore, of course, breast cancer. I'm not going to indulge myself in the reasons why I might maybe be feeling a tinge of pain now and again. All I know is this, at my annual exam during a chatty moment between my doctor and I about the many ways to feel your breast for lumps, she finds something, brings it to my attention by pulling my index finger over it a few times, has the medical student take a feel for herself and in a very conversational tone tells me, "Check it out in a few weeks, after your period, if it's still there then call me, but don't lose any sleep over it."

Frankly, I'm not one to lose much sleep over anything except for an evening where I get caught up with youtube.com, unintentionally surfing videos of 12 year-old boys lip singing R&B with their shirts off. No, I swear, it's unintentional. But it's hard not to imagine the implications of a lump in you own breast especially in the wake of another family member's battle with the same beast. I'm not scared but I'm thinking about it with the loose ends of my mind - between the nonfiction stories of my peers and the lesson planning for my freshman class - there lingers a brevity of fear, a pictorial of myself in a variety of film-like scenes: crying in the shower, a unilateral scar across my chest, my partner's hand in mine, my hands roaming across my body, appointment upon appointment out on the Palouse, a sharp pin through my nipple.

The mind can go many places in it's exploration in managing distress and in search for meaning.  The fear of death is alight in the minds of many in my family, so it comes as no surprise to me that my own mortality came into question. The reverberations of age and illness permeate all the generational lines: my uncle passed of melanoma, my grandfather's age is taking him, my parents are aging and displaying signs of less vitality than I've known before, and I am at the age where invisibility is diminished by all these things. We can never be sure that we will survive, indefinitely, to see our retirement and certainly for my generation, a social security payment. And when I consider the monetary implications of a breast cancer diagnosis, I realize I don't come from money - no one in my family is rolling in it either - I am a student on a very minimal student health insurance plan with a clinic that doesn't do much more than treat you for the clap or a cough. Anything else is shipped out to an outside provider, someone you don't know who gets to touch your business, whether its Northern or Southern, and all you can do is hope that you like the doctor choices you get.

Which leads me back to existence in itself, you don't really get a lot of choices when it comes to biology or genetics (and if your on the "God Hates Fags" team - then you don't get a choice in what kind of punishment you receive for your sins). If there is a God, I don't think he's on their team. If there is a Goddess, I don't think she would deliver pain to our breasts. If there was a broader pantheon of great Spirits, my hope would be they'd reach a consensus: lets not inflict the human race with cancer - let alone put it in their pleasure places (not to mention mass genocides, war, poverty, etc.).

It's going to be rather hard to keep my fingers off my breast - as if I could magically press into this new found lump and like a zit, the source of the problem would come squirting out. But I am going to keep my hands off it until my next period, until a week after my next menstruation when my doctor says, "It could disappear." But I feel my chest on a regular basis and honestly, I've felt this before. I recall lying in bed a few years back doing my semi-monthly breasts exam, at the house that sat on top of I5. As I felt it up and down, I was wondering if the exhaust fumes from the freeway were as caustic as the log-like power lines they string above poor neighborhoods and reservations. And then I found it, square in the middle of my nipple and I thought to myself, Cystic breasts, and moved on. Nothing to be worried about. I went and felt it again. Round, isn't it. Not very hard. Hmmm... I'm tired. And with that, I was off to dreamland. Not losing any sleep. Nope. None at all.

And such is the case today. I am going to put my trust in my doc and do what she tells me. I will save my worries for when they are warranted. (And if you are my family or friends, do me a favor and do the same). There are better things to attend to: cooking dinner, spending time with friends, having a drink, loving your family or like me, you could be running off to teach freshman the art of writing the essay.