Out Texting In Their Field

Great technological breakthrough in the field of, um, fields, wherein cows can now be fitted with a device that allows them to text their human caretakers, and it's just like you'd think: you can't imagine ever using such a thing, but once you have it, you're texting like crazy. A similar device is being used in sheep herds so that the sheep can advise the shepherd of marauding wolves and the like. This allows a degree of remote shepherding that really wasn't possible before. Shepherd gets a text that a wolf is in the fold and he can arrange for a horn blast to scare the wolf away, theoretically, although in practice if he manages to scare the wolf he is likely to find his entire herd with their feet up in the air in a slick of panic diarrhea. Shepherds who cannot afford to buy a good sheepdog especially are interested in the texting technology. Although one might think that texting devices for a good-size herd might run into some serious money, it turns out that you only really need to outfit one sheep, and the rest pretty much go along with what he says.

Tater and Mr. Greenjeans. Note fishing line.

The cows are capable of transmitting texts concerning their general health and the state of their fertility, allowing the caretaker to get quite a bit more rest (see "fanny farmer"). The ability of cows to text had been thought to be years away. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be overcome for animals to get any good at texting. Hooves, for instance.

Our cat Tater might well be interested in anything that would make communication easier. She thinks she lives with The Stupids. Every day she asks for the exact same thing and half the time we act like we don't know what she's talking about. She would like to play with Mr. Greenjeans. Mr. Greenjeans is one of several rattle-mice she plays with (along with Orange Slice, Goldie, and Professor Plum), only Mr. Greenjeans is attached to a stick with fishing line and we can cast it back and forth for her to stalk and catch. Generally speaking she gives him a good pounce right off the bat and then after that it's all stalking. There you are, flinging the little green mouse back and forth for twenty minutes, and she's all hunkered down watching him. From the human standpoint, there's not a lot of reward, and so she doesn't get to play it as often as she wants to, which is every minute.

The previous cat, (Saint) Larry, was such a stellar citizen that I was able to overlook her main fault, which is that she wasn't near as particular as we were about where she took a dump. She would drop a deuce in the litter box if she happened to be walking across it when the urge struck, but otherwise she'd just plant a dookie any old where. She wasn't trying to make a point. It was just that, as far as she was concerned, the problem was solved when the doot made the exit. So when Tater came along, and right away went down to the basement and found the litter box and put something in it, we gathered around and praised her to the high heavens like she was a five-year-old we were trying to insert some self-esteem into. "Way to GO!" we said, and she looked at us like, "how else do you go?" Tater has no problem with self-esteem.

But we would like her to be able to express herself in a different manner. She is very fond of us, Dave especially, and when she gets really worked up about that, she likes to gnaw on our foreheads. She's never spindled anyone, but the object of her affection could at any time be in for a bit of a denting. Our communication about this has gone nowhere. "Quit biting!" we say, and she says, "I am not biting. I am loving you very much with my teeth."

So it would be pretty cool if we could set her up with some kind of texting device so she could address us more appropriately. It wouldn't be too difficult. We could  have it preset to fire off with "I would like to play with Mr. Greenjeans now," and she could stomp on it all day long. Because she has little feet.

Which was a problem for the cows, at first, on account of the hooves. The breakthrough in bovine communication came when someone realized they only needed to set up the device with two giant keys, "M" and "O," and then it was Katie bar the door.

Have Spurs, Will Word-Process

I'm working on a novel y'all are going to be required to buy someday, and all of a sudden something screwy happens with my computer. It's a sad old Dell that sits off by itself and isn't allowed to play on the internet, and from time to time it just expresses itself as only a Word machine can. Previously, when I came to the end of a paragraph, I hit "enter" to make it go to the next line. Now it goes one space forward instead. To get it to the next line, I have to hit enter twice, which will make it skip a line, and then I have to hit the backspace button. This just started up for no reason. End of paragraph, enter-enter-backspace. Not too tricky, but not ideal.

I'm not as annoyed at this as I could be, because when I was coming up I used to have to do things like type a period and backspace and shift-apostrophe just to whomp up an exclamation point, and I didn't feel put out about it at all. Actual exclamation point keys were a computer development and led to exclamation-point abuse among some users, and you know who you are. Anyway, it might have seemed like a burden, but at least I didn't have to pluck a goose and dry a sheep like my parents did just to write something down, and they were happy they didn't need to chisel granite.

Still, after a while I got to thinking I really shouldn't have to enter-enter-backspace every time I want a new paragraph, and so I went about fixing it, by which I mean I called Beth next door. "Sounds like a formatting issue," she said. I'm familiar with the term. In fact I had already set up a format in which there was no extra space between paragraphs, and there was a five-point indent to start out. That format had just been obliterated by my machine, which elected to institute the "because I can, nanner nanner" format on its own. Or possibly there was a fatal combination wherein I hit some shortcut button while the cat walked across the function keys, but in any case, I didn't know how to undo it.

We have a house next door to us that we bought and set up as a hothouse for talent. We stock it with smart young people and ingratiate ourselves in various ways hoping to maintain a ready supply of tech wizards and, eventually, butt-wipers for our dotage, because we did not have the foresight to spawn on our own. It's worked out really well so far. Beth might be a little older than some we've cultivated. She's only about fifteen years younger than I am, but that's a whole generation in some of the red states. And Beth was the one who taught me the only thing about computer repair that I ever remember, which is that the machine is a lying sack of shit and you shouldn't believe anything it says for one second. One time when I was working on something really important, I started getting an error message accompanied by the dreaded Windows Chord of Doom, and I was frantic by the time Beth breezed in with her characteristic cool. She tried the same thing I did and got the same error message. "Bullshit," she said, and did it again. And again. And the fifth time the machine said "oh, all right" and did her bidding. So now I know that you need to saddle up and sit tall and give 'er a little kick with the heel or the damn thing will try to scrape you off on a low branch every time. Never show fear.

Anyway the issue resolved itself as mysteriously as it had appeared, and I called Beth off the duty. It's still nice to know she's standing by. She's really smart. She's so smart she'll probably be out of the place before we need our butts wiped.

Eeny Meeny Miney NO

When I was a kid, a lot of things didn't make sense, or didn't seem fair. When we were choosing who would be "it," by applying the eeny meeny miney moe protocol, some flicker in my brain told me that there should have been a strict mathematical principle involved that would predetermine the result. At the least I should have been able to figure out that any eeny meeny contest with only two people in it will always go to the meeny person, or that with three people it will always land on the eeny person. Yet somehow the result was always a mystery to me until the very end, because I was too distracted by the concept of catching a turkey by the toe to puzzle it out. Could you call them "toes," exactly? And wouldn't that be really hard?

In the "not fair" category was the infuriatingly arbitrary non-game "Mother May I," in which the designated autocrat in charge could tell her favorite to take three giant steps, and could tell everyone else to take baby steps, and that was that, no matter how polite you were. This was an added unfairness on top of the unfairness that I had never been, and still am not, able to take a giant step.

And many things didn't make sense. I was pretty young when I heard a rumor that people could come in different colors. I had been familiar with black and white, even realizing that it was an approximation--for instance, "white" referred to the shade represented by the single crayon called "flesh"--and I more or less accepted "red" although the red people in question were at best reddish, but when mom said there were yellow people too, I was very excited. I guess I bugged her about it for days. I was visualizing a tribe of proto-Simpsons. Finally mom found a suitable example and quietly pointed him out to me, and we both learned something. I learned that adults made weird and subtle distinctions, and mom learned how to make her child bellow "but MOM, he's not YELLOW" on a crowded sidewalk.

Other things were just plain dumb. We used to do this thing where you'd pluck a buttercup, that small yellow shiny flower, and hold it under your friend's chin. If it reflected yellow, it meant she loved butter. Well. That was dumb, for two reasons. We were a low-budget margarine family, and only bought two sticks of butter a year, for the adults to indulge in on high holy days. I thought real butter tasted strange and icky (I got over it), and I couldn't see why anyone would take the word of a buttercup over my own. Two, it wasn't much of a conclusion. The buttercup reflected yellow under everyone's chin. The whole exercise seemed pointless. We kept doing it, though, because it felt kind of good to have someone tickle your chin with a flower.

It was only recently it occurred to me that the point of the exercise was to weed out dark people. Just because everyone in my neighborhood reflected buttercups didn't mean it was universal. I am going to be very quiet about this revelation because I don't want the Republican Party to start going after the voter fraud we don't have any of with mandatory buttercup testing at the polls. It's bad enough that someone who is not even your mother can keep you from taking giant steps in this world.

And I realized something about that eeny-meeny-miney-moe turkey, too. My parents may have had very good reasons for keeping the "nigger" out. But most people don't.

Meet My Posse

We are very amused.

We here at Murrmurrs, Inc. are not employing the "royal we," rumored to have begun when King Henry II deigned to speak on behalf of God and himself. We here at Murrmurrs, Inc. have no idea what's on God's mind at any given moment.

We use the "bacterial we."

The thousand or so species of bacteria that are sharing my skin envelope have elected me to speak on their behalf. We all get along pretty well most of the time. It's kind of a party in here. I, for one, am tickled to learn more about them (or "us," as I am beginning to prefer). It's only been recently that scientists have attempted to determine how many kinds of bacteria we are harboring, by examining samples from 250 very healthy individuals. Bacteria thrive in our cavities and crevices, and scientists selected fifteen specific areas to swab for organisms: behind the ear, in the elbow-fold, the throat, various parts of the digestive tract, and so on. Female volunteers provided an additional three swabbing points in a moist personal cavity which we will ask you, in the interest of delicacy, to imagine. Okay? It comes back into play later.

The Bacterial Whee!

They found that not only are humans hosting upwards of a thousand species of bacteria on and in their person, but that each human has a unique set--a bacterial signature, if you will. It is more accurate to think of oneself less as an individual than as an assemblage of life-forms all living together, like a coral, or a college dorm. The microbiome, as the assemblage is called, is different for everyone. And the so-called dangerous bacteria are also present in all of us. If we don't get sick, it's because of peer pressure from the other bacteria. This is one reason that antibacterial soaps and antibiotics may cause more harm than good. It's like bombing the bejeezus out of a country. You take out all the bad guys and (oopers!) the orphanages and schools and your odd village and the occasional wedding party, and after years and years, in spite of all the trouble you've gone to in order to deliver freedom, everyone is still pissy.

Studies show that the average adult carries 2-5 pounds of bacteria, and could benefit from a slimming outfit. The vast majority of the microbes live in the gut, and they are partying down. They do nothing but eat and reproduce and amuse themselves by shooting the loop-de-loop intestinal tract and out. The standard turd, in fact, is nearly one-half bacteria by weight, which is one of two good reasons to avoid eating it, neither of which makes sense to a Labrador retriever.

The unique bacterial signatures we carry may be responsible for the state of our health and immune systems, and explain why some people are prone to colitis (say) and others are not. My particular set has rendered me impervious to digestive upset and the flu, but totally slacks off in the throatular region. Nevertheless, I would say that the entire crew is doing a bang-up job, and I've already started up some new crevices for them, chiefly in the back fat folds, should they wish to expand operations.

We start to accumulate the characters in our individual microbiomes at birth, when we pick up our starter set in the final act of sliding out of our mothers (see above). This is one drawback of being born by Caesarian section, and suggests that, from the point of view of its immune system, the newborn in these cases might want to gain immediate exposure to its mother in an area she may not be interested in sharing at the time. I'd ask first, anyway.

This field of study is quite new and suggests many avenues for further research. "We're still scratching the surface," says Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Julie Parsonnet. I think she may be thinking of fungi.

Plays Well With Others

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who learned how to play piano, and people who are still mad at their mothers for not making them play piano when they were young, when they were mad at their mothers for trying to make them play the piano. Actually, there are more than two kinds of people in the world, if you include people who don't like cheese, but for the purposes of this essay we can set that kind aside. No one understands them anyway.

It never occurs to the people who are mad at their mothers that there is nothing stopping them from taking up the piano now, because they've got a lot invested in being mad at their mothers, and that line of reasoning would interfere with their worldview. They've decided you either can play, or you can't. And that works out really well for those of us who can. There aren't as many of us, and unless we hang out with musicians, it's likely that most of our friends can't play piano, and it's possible to start feeling sort of special about the whole thing. "Oh yes," we say modestly, when pressed, "I play," and your friends will pipe up and tell people you're really good, and here's the cool part: they don't even have to have ever heard you play. In my case, they almost certainly haven't. Like most people, I whack away at my instrument in private. But your friends go right ahead and hang a star next to your name and polish it up. After a while, you start to think it belongs there.

A real good way to get over yourself, in a situation like this, is to actually start hanging out with musicians. In Portland, at least, and probably everywhere, talented people are thick as cream cheese, and I finally got to meet a whole schmear of them by joining an informal performance group. Pianists predominate, but singers and string players and poets show up too. I got into it the same way everyone else did: I was shanghaied by Bill Lewis. Bill is a frighteningly enthusiastic man with no sense of personal boundaries, and thanks to that he has badgered a sizeable bunch of individuals, one by one, into showing up to perform something. You can tell him "no," but Bill isn't familiar with the concept, and if you show any sign of weakness, he will take the spatula of insistence, scrape you off the frying pan of trepidation, and flip you right into his group. And that is how, several years ago, I ended up quivering at a piano in public like a bunny in a coyote cafe. If bunnies could sweat.*

Anxiety. It's bad stuff. Right away you realize you've left your talent in your other pants, and within a few measures you have decided that the keys on this piano aren't the same distance apart as the keys on your piano. By page two you're pretty sure that some of the keys are actually missing altogether and before long you're swatting at the keyboard like it's a drum set and feeling really sorry for your audience, because they are kind people.

I kept showing up anyway, and after a number of years, I had conquered my nerves enough that I didn't leave anything on the bench that needed to be wiped up afterwards. And in that time I nurtured a throbbing admiration for chamber musicians, who are, by definition, people who can play well with others. If you're the piany player in a string quartet, one of the things you have learned to do is keep playing, no matter what.

You do not get to oops you do not get to sorry you do not get to shit start over. No, this train is already on the move, and you have to fling your thigh up onto that boxcar and hang on until you can haul the rest of your ass up. You are there to collaborate on something wonderful and your whining option is off the table. It's a good way to approach life, too: act as if it isn't all about you, step out of your own way and keep going.

"You know, it's just a matter of practice and technique. You could learn to play chamber music too," my friend Carole says.

I don't think so. There are two kinds of people in the world: people who can play chamber music, and people who can't.

*I apologize for the density of metaphors. It kept getting away from me. If you wanted a tighter piece, you should have hired a professional.

Vulvarine!

Todd Akin

By now most of us have heard about the interview with Congressman Todd Akin (R-Missouri) in which he was asked if abortion should be allowed in cases of rape. He said "if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." Now he is being castigated for his remarks, which is deeply unfair. Settle down, people! In this country we are free to express our beliefs, and we should not discriminate against people just because they live a different reality-style. That is simply factsist.

Bryan Fischer

Besides, Mr. Akin has plenty of company. State Rep. Stephen Freind (R-Penn) is on record as saying that the odds of a rape victim getting pregnant are one in "millions and millions and millions." As he elucidates, the "traumatic experience of rape causes a woman to secrete a certain secretion" that kills sperm. It's a secret secreted secretion, you see. Brian Fischer of the American Family Association agrees. "When you have a real, genuine rape...there's a very delicate and complex mix of hormones that take place that are released in a woman's body and if that gets interfered with it may make it impossible for her...to conceive a child."

I admit that this last statement gets me pretty fired up. Where is the subject-verb agreement? But the position itself is really very empowering for women. Previously, raped women were seen as victims, and now, according to all these gentlemen, they are anything but. They are magical sperm deflectors in control of their own destinies, able to decide on a cellular level whose sperm lives and whose dies, which is still legal in most states. We are strong. We are wily. We are Vulvarine! I for one am thrilled that our womanly power is being acknowledged in public circles at last. In particular, I like the description of my complex mix of hormones as "very delicate." I've been known to disparage my own hormones as cranky manufacturers of mayhem, at best. Now I realize they are just misunderstood.

A legitimate rape, or a real or genuine or "forcible" rape, is the kind that is bad, as opposed to the kind that you didn't really want but after it happened it turned out it was just what you needed all along. Unfortunately sometimes things go wrong. As Rep. Akin says, "let's assume that [the "way to shut that whole thing down"] didn't work or something." It's possible a woman could in fact conceive a child from a rape, even if she did not have an orgasm. It's a one in a millions and millions and millions chance, to be sure, and most of the pregnancies that did occur have been shown to result from contact with public toilet seats, but it could happen. Fortunately, Mike Huckabee is here to remind us that in that unlikely event, sometimes a truly extraordinary person is created, such as Ethel Waters. Scientifically speaking, the process by which this occurs is that the really good-person sperms are the ones most likely to try to put some distance between themselves and the legitimate-rapist guy. And in such a circumstance, it is only natural and proper that a woman's own powerful maternal instinct take over and she offer up her womb for the better part of a year to see that blastocyst to completion. In case it's Ethel Waters.

There I Go Again

Here's something I never used to do: feel a sneeze coming on, brace myself, cross my legs, let fly, and say "oh shit." I used to just sneeze.

The first time you pee a little when you sneeze, it's startling. What happened there? you say. You go into the bathroom to find out, and sure enough, what you thought had happened actually happened. When you've gone a good fifty years without accidentally peeing, you sort of take things for granted. Then it happens again. After about a year of this you have to conclude that a new reality is in place. It may not be one you had in mind. You might have thought "some day I will retire, and I will be able to maintain a lovely garden and learn to cook and maybe write a little," but leaking urine for no reason? Never made the bucket list.

It's not a lot of pee. It's just a dot, really, but it's concerning. You got your pee volume on the y-axis, and your age on the x-axis, this is not a graph you really want to plot.

In my case, the culprit was a new subdivision of fibroid tumors in my abdomen. You don't schedule those, either, but there you go. There's usually nothing particularly dire about fibroids, but I'm against them. If anything is just going to start growing for no reason, I don't see why it can't give me more height or longer fingers. Anyway, a posse of them is sitting on my bladder, according to my doctor, who assures me they are a threat to nothing but my underwear.

The doctor tells you to start doing Kegel exercises, as though you had just fallen off the turnip truck and hadn't read a single women's magazine ever when you just spent a couple hours in the waiting room of a gynecology office. Kegels are easy. You just squeeze the muscle you have used all your life to stop yourself from peeing. Those of us with a major beer habit know it intimately. You squeeze and release it, and then you repeat. A hundred times a day--says my doctor--in sets of ten. You can do it all day long. You can do it without anyone knowing! Ha ha! What a thrill it is to look right at someone and think "you believe I am listening to you, but really I am strengthening my pelvic floor." If you don't have a life.

I object on principle. Since I've been potty-trained, I never had to do exercises to keep from wetting myself, and I don't think I should have to start now. Of course, I never used to have to tell my skin to firm up, either. My skin used to hug me like it was in love, and now it just slouches around like the cat's pajamas. Even the skin on my elbow just yawns and says "if you need me, I'll be somewhere around here," without getting real specific about it. I didn't tell my skin it was off duty. It just decided "to hell with it" on its own. And frankly, I don't think I have the moral standing to order my skin around. I just lug it around, I'm not the boss.

So that's what all the internal skin is doing too. It's been holding up all these years, and then it retires, and says to itself, what do I care if somebody's underwear gets a little soiled? I don't care. I'm off duty. That's someone else's problem. Oh, and send down some beer.

All right, fine. Now I'm supposed to exercise muscles nobody will ever see. It's one thing to climb mountains and get quadriceps so mighty you need to floss above your kneecaps. That's sort of gratifying, plus you aren't doing it just for drill. You're seeing mountains. It's an entirely different matter to go through a bunch of exercises for the distant reward of maybe not soiling yourself in public. Not that that isn't fervently to be desired--but it does not have immediacy, reward-wise. Kegels advocates tell you that you can do it while you're parked at a stop light. Waiting in line at a grocery store. Anywhere. And they're right.

My problem is that after I do about ten Kegels, my entire face starts squinting. I don't know what relationship my face has with my bladder gasket, but all of a sudden I'm gaping like an insect, mouth slotted down at the corners, eyes bugged out, ears laid back. It's an awkward look, socially. It worries people. Our bodies probably came with a manual like everything else, but most of us don't bother consulting it until we start getting the error messages, and I'm no different. So I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty confident you're not supposed to be able to blink your whole face with your crotch.

But at least I know how to do them. It's right there in the women's magazines. I also know the most flattering swimsuit style for my body type. But no one wants to let me in the pool.