Losing Bet

I'm not used to this.

Usually when someone is being talked
into something, I am the one doing the talking. But now, all of a
sudden, the tables are turned and I'm going to Vegas. 

I didn't
want to go to Vegas. I didn't want to leave Zev for two days and three
nights. I've been telling Keren as much since October. But somehow, I'm
sitting here, at my computer, with Keren on the phone, watching little
white dots dance on my screen as Orbitz.com processes my order for two
round-trip tickets.

The little logo below the dancing dots says, "Your trip, your choice." 

I read this to Keren and say, "Hear that? It doesn't say, 'Your trip, against your will.' "

"Come on," she says. "It will be fun." 

She's
probably right. But I still have pangs of guilt and longing just
thinking about leaving Zev for the weekend. The only time I have ever
been apart from him for that long was after he was born and an
ambulance rushed my ailing baby to Children's Hospital of Orange
County. Doctors wanted to keep me in the hospital for four days, but
the stakes were too high: I talked them into letting me out in two.

And
now I've been talked into spending two days without him. Sure, it will
be nice to stay in bed for a few extra minutes every morning without
hearing, "Mamma! HOLD! Mamma! PICKIE UP!" But I am going to miss him
like mad. 

"Can you tell me again how we got to this point? How did you get me to go to Vegas?"

She laid on her Israeli accent super thick and said, "I have powers."

I
don't know much about poker, but I know that if you bluff and confuse
your opponents well enough, you'll likely win. Keren knows a lot about
poker. She plays every week and usually cleans up. So I guess I should
have known all along that I was going to fold.

Still, I thought
I was playing a good hand back in October when I ducked behind my milk
ducts, telling her I couldn't leave Zev because I was still nursing.
Then came a series of colds. Some family trips. A few work-related
delays. I started to think the whole thing was going to fade away. But
it didn't. 

She lobbied hard: It'll be a good bonding experience
for Zev and Hubby. I can get a massage, go to the spa. I need a break,
a chance to remember what it was like to have zero responsibilities.
Besides, she said, a girls' weekend would be fun.

She had me
there. I haven't had a girls' weekend – or even, really, a girls' night
– in a long, long time. Zev gives me so much love and life and purpose.
But he can't give me the latest gossip or help me pick out shoes. 

Girlfriends
are essential, the people you can retreat to when toddlers (or
husbands) throw temper tantrums and life stops making sense. I should
be more grateful that there is someone in my life who would want to
spend a weekend in Vegas with me.

Besides, Keren's a good girl.
A mom like me. It's not like she's going to get us arrested or dance on
the bar until dawn. It'll be a nice, mellow weekend. 

By the time those little white dots finish their dance and complete my plane-ticket order, I decide I'm all in.

"OK.
Good," she says, and I can hear her smile on the other end of the
phone. "I'll call you tomorrow, and we'll get tickets to 'Thunder From
Down Under.' " 

Oh, dear.

Hi. I'm Mayrav, And This Is My Husband's Penis

I didn't expect to share a picture of my husband's genitals with a
group of strangers at a bar the other night. But, you know how it is.

My
college roommate e-mailed a bunch of us to say she'd be in town, and
could we please come see her and meet her new husband over a few beers.
Hubby agreed to stay home with Zev on the condition that I snap a
picture of his package with my cell phone and show it to Damon, a
school chum we haven't seen in a dozen years. 

This seemed like a reasonable trade-off, so, without asking questions, I shot the picture and headed out the door.

The
first two things I ever thought about Damon when I met him as a college
freshman were 1. "He has long, sexy hair," and 2. "He's wearing nothing
but a towel."   

My first impression of his now-wife Jackie was
that she was easily one of the most beautiful and soothing women I had
ever met. And when I met my roommate, Liz, I remember feeling like a
couple of 5-year-olds let loose in a combination candy/toy store. We
even ran to registration together, holding hands like kindergarteners.

First
impressions are important. And they're often right on the money. It's
something I know well but didn't really think about until after I
introduced myself to Liz's husband with a
friendly, "Hi, I'm Mayrav, and this is my husband's penis."

"I have heard a lot about you, and
you have far exceeded expectations," Eric said. I was relieved. Eric
seemed amused and warm, friendly and drunk. A few other people, though,
were thrown off.
 

One gentleman said, "I'm not going to shake your hand. I've seen where it's been."

I
would have been embarrassed for having made a bad first impression
except that I long ago realized that if two people don't click right
off the bat, they never will. The non-hand-shaker is probably a
wonderful person, but I'm willing to bet that even with the most mild
of introductions we'd run out of things to talk about in 10 minutes.
 

It's
a lesson I learned not long after meeting Liz. We were at a dorm
meeting where the R.A.s made their introductions and went over the
rules. I raised my hand and asked whether there was a policy
prohibiting, say, a boy from spending the night. Everyone – every
single person in attendance – was thinking the same question. I just
happened to be the one who asked it.

I was too naïve to
realize my question was going to make an impression, and I was more
than a little embarrassed after the meeting. But it turned out to be an
amazing litmus test: Almost to a person, those who were grateful that
I'd asked ended up being my friends, while those who hoped/worried that
I was some sort of marauding libertine did not.
 

And the other
night – just as it was in college – the lines were immediately drawn:
People who didn't appreciate a good genitalia joke stayed on one side
of the bar, and those of us who wanted to laugh, drink and reminisce
stayed on the other.

Late in the evening, the talk eventually
circled back to Hubby's organ, and Damon finally explained why he had
been so keen to show it off. When Damon first got to college, before he
had met or spoken to a single soul, future Hubby walked into Damon's
dorm room, declaring without introduction, "I'm going to take a picture
of my penis and send it home to my family."
 

"Those were the first words anyone said to me in school," Damon said, sounding a bit wistful.

It
was the perfect introduction to set the tone for a new, important
chapter in an 18-year-old boy's life: shocking for shocking's sake;
funny, gross and bold but meaningless. The kind of salutation that he'd
always remember.
 

It was strange. It was unsolicited. But Hubby's penis made a great first impression.

Gimme A "D"! Gimme An "I"! Gimme An "E"! Gimme Outta Here!

My elementary school P.E. teacher was great. She was part P.E.
teacher, part cheerleader, always encouraging us, always motivating us.
("Go, Mayrav! You can do it!") But, man, was she old.

I mean
really old. Deep tanned-in-place wrinkles, liver-spotted hands. The
kind of old that has its own smell. So when I went back for a visit as
a high school student 10 years later, I was shocked to see she was not
only still alive, but still teaching. 

At the time, I thought, "Wow. I hope I live that long."

I've changed my mind.

It's
no big secret that you start to die the moment you're born, but the
reality of that fact – the true meaning of it – doesn't really hit you
until you have a kid and are able to compare his growing, blooming,
thriving body with your own decaying one.

After a year and a
half of waking up achy and sleep-deprived, of looking at my flabby self
in the mirror and realizing that it ain't baby weight – it's my changed
metabolism – I've finally come to the realization that it only gets
worse. There is no
when-he's-older-I'll-have-time-for-myself-and-reclaim-my-life. By the
time that happens I'll be staring down the double barrel of menopause
and osteoporosis.
 

And it's not like I miss my teens or 20s.
They say youth is wasted on the young, but it isn't. People's bodies
start their erosion into oblivion long before they hit 30 – they just
don't know it yet.

So if the good old days weren't that good,
and the future is even more bleak, that means that this is as good as
it gets. The apex. The height of my existence. Allow me to describe a
morning in this, the best time of my life: I wake up too early to my
son's plaintive cry, "Momma! Hold-o." Almost immediately after I lift
him out of bed, he covers me in both diarrhea and vomit. Somehow, he's
the one who needs consoling. I clean him off and calm him down and
carry him out of his room and promptly step in dog poop.
 

All the while, my internal organs, long past their growing stages, slowly die.

(I can just hear the creaky voice of my grade-school gym teacher, "Humanity! Humanity! Go-o-o-o-o Humanity!")
 

Now,
you might say, "But, Mayrav, people have a much longer life expectancy
these days. Fifty is the new 30. Growing older doesn't have to mean
growing old."

To which I say, "Dye your hair all you want and
get your cute little Botox injections. Truth is, you're just a pile of
unrealized dreams wrapped in an easily sloughed mortal coil. And no
amount of stolen time is going help you win the Nobel Prize or find a
cure for cancer (unless, of course, you're some old person who is on
her way to winning the Nobel Prize for curing cancer)."
 

If we
as a species started to give up the ghost, as our forebears did, at 30
or 40, we'd die at this supposed apex, our rosebuds all gathered but
prostate cancer averted.

It's a radical idea, I know. And
please, before you fire off an angry e-mail, know that I'm not
literally saying that everyone over 30 should just drop dead. But maybe
we shouldn't put such a premium on trying to elongate our deteriorating
lives.
 

What do we really get out of the bargain? Maybe a few
more vacations, maybe a chance to meet our great-grandkids. That all
sounds nice. But it comes with broken hips and bad eyes and – and this
may be the worst part – wisdom. Wanna know what wisdom is? It's the
knowledge that you're not going to live forever. ("Humanity! Humanity!
He's our guy! Humanity! Humanity! We're all gonna die!")

It's
not like there is any glory in longevity, anyway. Just a lot of dead
acquaintances. I can imagine myself at 102, hunched alone in front of a
too-loud television like a 2-year-old in timeout, wondering, "How much
longer do I have to sit here?"
 

What do you get when you live a
really, really long time? The title of "Oldest Known Living Person."
The previous oldest known living person was Emma Faust Tillman who died
last week at 114, four days after she claimed the title. Forty-one
thousand six hundred and ten days that woman had to endure on this
planet and she only gets to wear the crown for four of them? ("Gimme an
H…!")

No thanks. Not for me. This whole grass-is-browner
realization has me thinking about my gym teacher in a whole new light.
I don't just remember her encouragements but I wonder if she was ever
in any pain on the playground? Did she get winded walking up the ramp?
Did we kids tire her out?
 

Or, I shudder to consider this: Is she still alive?

After Glow

Mom used to keep an avocado pit in a plastic cup on the kitchen
windowsill. My entire childhood, there was always an avocado pit,
steadied by toothpicks, floating in water on the ledge. The pits
usually grew roots. Some even grew little sprouts. But as far as I can
remember, we never had an avocado tree.

I wondered why she kept
messing with those pits, why she didn't just throw them out when she
knew it was never going to work. When I asked her, she'd always say the
same thing: "I don't know."

I don't have an avocado pit in my
kitchen. Instead, I have a strange glow. At exactly 5:50 every morning,
a fizzletickpop! sounds and a fluorescent bulb jumps to life. At 10:50
every night, the light snaps back off again. During the hours in
between seven tiny herb plants are lured into existence by the false
promise of life on their planet – which, as it happens, is an
AeroGarden indoor garden unit. 

I'm not sure how to describe the
AeroGarden, other than to say it's a fantastically overly thought-out
scientific answer to actual gardening. Whereas Mom's plastic cup
glistened in the sunlight, the AeroGarden needs no natural rays.

It
hums. It plugs into the wall. It grows cilantro. It's truly bizarre.
But, it's all I've got: I gave up my garden when we sold our house, so
my in-laws thoughtfully bought this weird little thing for me to play
with instead. 

Under the harsh glare of the specially formulated
"Grow Bulbs," I watch these little seedlings sprout, these future mint,
basil and chive plants. And all I can think about is Mom's plastic cups
of avocado pits.

That and sex.

Gardening – real
gardening – is sexy. The fecund soil, teeming with life and grit and
potential. Soft, delicate shoots revealing themselves slowly before an
eager sun. The vulnerability – to drought, to rain, to wind, to bugs –
adds to the thrill of every surviving, thriving plant.

An
AeroGarden comes with seven soil-free pods. And nutrient tablets. And a
control panel with a little light that goes off when the water gets too
low. There's nothing mysterious about it. Nothing dirty or dangerous.
The sprouts are interesting, but I don't have a sense of ownership of
them the way I did my garden.
 

I remember when I grew my first
watermelon in the back yard. I planted three seedlings; two took. The
day I harvested my first melon was the day I told my sister I was
pregnant. Hubby took a picture of me kissing the six-pound melon. My
face is broken out. My hair is oily. But I have a gleam in my eye that
is pure goddess.

If gardening is like sex, then the AeroGarden
is like fertility medicine. Sure, you'll get your basil. And the pesto
will probably taste just as good. But where is the fun?
 

Something
about watching life struggle into being under a regulated hum and glow
reminds me of the way I felt when we tried in vitro fertilization: I
felt like a television.

Actually, I felt like I had a
television between my legs – and my doctor and two nurses were huddled
around it, watching the game. I even offered them beer. They didn't get
it. I have a policy about not letting anyone who doesn't get my jokes
anywhere near my, um, television. Yet, here was a threesome poking and
prodding me and not getting me at all.
 

Maybe that's why all the
pills and shots and scientific approaches to motherhood didn't work for
me. Or maybe it's a coincidence that I got pregnant only after I
started gardening. I'll never know. That's part of the mystery.

One
thing I can say for the AeroGarden is that it eliminates the need to
turn on the kitchen light. By its strange glow, I made myself an
avocado and turkey sandwich this afternoon. When I cleaned up, I went
to throw out the pit, but thought better of it.
 

Mom struggled
for 10 years to get pregnant after she had me. Ten years of
miscarriages and failed attempts. Ten years of avocado pits on the
windowsill. Ten years, and then she finally had Sis. I'm not sure if
there's a correlation between two seemingly fruitless endeavors, but I
like the poetry in it. So I didn't throw out the seed.

Later in the day, Hubby walked by my desk and asked, "Is that an avocado pit in a bowl?"
 

"Yeah," I said, not looking up.

"What's that for?" he asked
 

I looked over and blinked at it a few times. "I don't know."

Open Letter To Jean and Chris

Dear Jean and Chris,

I am sorry my son almost killed you.

He didn't mean to
liquidate your internal organs. That's just how kids are. They hug,
they cuddle, they take your hands in theirs – and then they infect you
with whatever monkeypox variant they find in their Pampers. They don't
know that every zerbert they give you is actually the kiss of death.
That you're going to end up fraternity-rush-week sick, praying for
mercy to a God whose existence you've begun to question. How could they
know? 

At the same time, I do ask for your forgiveness. In the
hours before Zev showed signs of illness (and by "signs," I mean
"scenes"; and by "scenes," I mean "scenes from 'The Exorcist' "), I
thought it was cute the way Jean was playing Evil Hand with him,
pretending her hand was attacking her face. And then attacking Zev's
face. And then her face again. In hindsight, that level of contact with
toddlers probably requires a special rider on your life insurance.

If
it's any consolation, my adorable bioterrorist infected me so badly, I
couldn't leave the house for four days – I could eat nothing for the
first day and nothing but ice chips for the second. Also, my husband's
illness has somehow traveled from his stomach to his eyes, which are
now red and – there's no other word for it – leaky.

And if your
misery wants even more company, Zev's day-care provider spent her
four-day weekend kneeling over her toilet, too. As did many of Zev's
friends and their parents. It's fairly clear at this point that Zev was
Patient Zero of this baby-bola outbreak, a distinction that has made
him immensely popular in playgroup.
 

No one, so far, has
threatened legal action, and I hope – taking into account our many
years of friendship – that it stays that way. Speaking of which, I am
grateful that you did not alert Hazmat or the CDC about our noxious
little bundle of joy. A lesser couple would have ordered our house
tented and had Zev whisked away, ET-style. So, thank you.

It is
also very kind of you to call and inquire about our diminutive dirty
bomb. He's feeling much better. In fact, he wasn't really all that
sick. Despite exploding from both ends, he never lost his sunny
disposition or his unyielding desire to play – a situation that filled
me with both relief and utter horror.
 

It was also sweet of you
to note that I lost weight in this experience. Zev was the reason I had
started to look like a garden gnome; it only makes sense that he'd
"help" me regain my shape. (I'm considering marketing a weight-loss
regimen that involves licking the doorknobs at preschools. What do you
think?)

The next time you see Zev (if, indeed, you ever brave
another meeting with the little Petri dish), I can't promise you that
he won't be harboring another electrolyte-sapping parasite. But I can
promise that we'll all do a better job of washing our hands and
limiting our zerberts.
 

Again, I'm terribly sorry that you found
yourself dissolving into a foamy liquid and gushing out in unnatural
pain on my son's account. If there is anything I can do to make up for
the four days of your lives that will be lost forever in a blur of
Imodium and Dramamine, please let me know.

Sincerely,
 

Mayrav

No, Woman, No Cry

We're watching the trailers before "Dreamgirls," and Keren leans
over to tell me that she doesn't think the Will Smith "Pursuit of
Happyness" film looks all that interesting. I can't answer. I'm weeping.

Same
thing happens with the "Freedom Writers" trailer. And Effie's big solo
number in "Dreamgirls." She belts out, "And I'm Telling You I'm Not
Going." And I start bawling. 

"What's the matter with you?" Keren asks.

"Well," I explain, "It's time you knew: I'm a wimp for emotional manipulation." 

The
stuff that should hurt – the sticks, the stones, the comparisons to Joel Stein – that stuff just washes right over me. But show me a McDonald's
commercial in which a young child and his grandparents enjoy a softly
lit moment of multigenerational bonding, and it's all over.

I'd
love to say that this is a new phenomenon. Part of the
softening-of-Mayrav-since-childbirth thing. But I've always been easily
winded by an emotional sucker punch. When I first started dating Hubby,
I hid my frailty behind my allergies, maintaining that my sniffles were
the direct result of cat dander, and not of a sweet AT&T commercial
(that little preschooler is all grown up and graduating college and his
parents are so proud!).

My weepy wimpiness doesn't seem to have
a lunar connection; but when I was pregnant, at least I could weep
openly at Kleenex commercials and then blame my hormones. These days I
don't have that excuse. Just a lot of spent tissues.
 

I'm not
sure what causes this condition, but I believe it might be congenital.
Like I was simply born with an overactive schmaltz processor, some area
in my brain that retains images of small kittens and children
overcoming adversity and breaks them down into a salty liquid.

I've
known people with worse schmaltz-processor problems – one of my friends
in high school used to cry if she saw someone else crying. (In addition
to being easily manipulated, I'm also a little bit cruel, and, I have
to admit, we did have some fun with this.)
 

While it's not new,
I've noticed my own defect is getting worse. I'm not sure if
commercials and trailers have gotten more manipulative, or if I'm
getting weaker. But I'll cry at anything now.

I was reading Zev
a children's book about Abraham Lincoln and found myself choking back
tears when I read the line, "A life for sale – like hatchet, ax, or
plow? Abe knew it was unjust to own another."
 

It's not that
slavery isn't worth crying about. But the mention of slavery in a book
about Lincoln probably shouldn't have caught me so off guard.

So Keren's question stands: What's wrong with me?
 

It can't be that I'm  a particularly sensitive soul: I once ended a
conversation between two of my friends by bonking their heads together
(It was really, really mean, I know – and not recommended. But man, it
was funny).

One explanation I've come up with is that I turn
on the waterworks because I'm simply a polite audience member. My brain
deconstructs all the elements of a Hollywood-manufactured touching
moment – the music, the lighting, the sense of a true connection
between human beings – and my eyes just do what's expected of them.Or maybe I'm such a simpleton that I can't steel myself against obvious emotional exploitation.
 

Either
way, I need to figure out what's wrong and put a stop to it. It's
gotten to the point that I can't read certain book passages or listen
to certain songs without bursting into tears. Soon, I'll have to skip
movies all together. Before I know it, I'll be a shut-in, so terrified
at the prospect of tears that I'm afraid to leave my house and the
comfy company of my cat friends. I'll be alone. I'll be ostracized.
I'll be kinda creepy.

It's enough to make me weep.

Open Brain. Insert DVD. Repeat

I'm a little worried about Jeff. Having purposely avoided last
season's "24," Jeff recently bought the DVD of the entire season and
has been watching back-to-back episodes nearly nonstop.

How a
guy chooses to watch TV is his business. But I've noticed something
about him, the way he holds himself, the way he walks. He's skulking a
little now. Like any minute, he could get a troubling call from Chloe
and have to commandeer a helicopter. 

I know what this is: Jeff
is TV-binging. The aesthetic and pace of "24" are bleeding into
everyday life, and it's messing with him.

TV-binging is an ugly
and relatively new disorder that can strike anyone, though it usually
affects people who have DVD players but no cable. Jeff is hardly alone.
I've completely lost Lisa Bee to "Battlestar Galactica." Jean has taken
up residence with Monica and Rachel. Even Hubby is slowly going over
the "Wire."

A few years ago, Hubby brought home the entire
"Twin Peaks" TV series. I had never seen the show but was hooked from
the first episode. Because we had the whole oeuvre in our living room,
there was no waiting for commercials, no waiting for next week, no
waiting for summer hiatus – nothing. Just the complete series,
available whenever I wanted it.

Problem was, I wanted it all the time.
 

Serial
shows are designed for maximum addiction. Is Jack just going to let Ben
die? Are Tony and Christopher going to go head to head? Will Danny win
over Jordan? You just have to tune in next week to find out, and in the
meantime, the suspense is going to kill you.

But what if the
answer to last episode's question is just a remote-control click away?
Who really has the willpower to turn the TV off?
 

Hubby and I
gorged ourselves on two "Twin Peaks" episodes a night – sometimes
racing home early from work so that we could fit in three. We were
"Peaks" fiends. In less than two weeks, we had digested all 29
episodes. That's nearly 24 hours of TV viewing in under 14 days. Any
doctor will tell you that's not good for the brain. But when the show
is as intensely weird as "Twin Peaks," the effects are particularly
deleterious.

My world became a menacing and shadowy wonderland.
For two weeks, I lived in fear of ceiling fans and milk. A simple cup
of coffee seemed significant. I constantly wondered, would cherry pie
actually kill ya? What's worse, I worked with a freakishly tall
gentleman at the time; I half-expected Peter to lean over the cubicle
wall one day and tell me, "The owls are not what they seem."
 

The
thing about TV-binging is that there is no purging. You just have to be
odd and twitchy for a while until the show leaves your system and you
can resume real life again.

In time, I stopped obsessing over
who killed Laura Palmer and began leading a relatively healthy and
productive life. But I know that at any moment I could fall off the
wagon and join the ranks of Jeff and Lisa and Hubby – bug-eyed and
all-consumed.
 

I've come to believe series DVDs should be kept
locked behind a glass counter at the pharmacy, with warning labels on
them: "The small screen should be taken in small doses. Use only as
directed."

In fact, I recently saw an ad for a DVD of a TV
series that I haven't seen, "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." I
found myself thinking, "You know, I heard that was funny," and then I
shuddered, imagining myself trapped in a quirky sitcom for the next
couple of weeks. So far, I have resisted buying the DVD, but I've been
checking it out online, comparing prices. Daydreaming.
 

I am
worried that I'm going to slip, that my resolve to be good is going to
completely crumble. Of course, if it does, I guess I could just call
Jeff to come save me. Jack Bauer-style.