During this time, she had a scary Cuban boyfriend in tow, who went by the mafia-sounding moniker of “Fito Garche.” Andy name-searched him and found this article about Fito’s past history of domestic abuse. Despite the bad blood between him and his old roommate, he mentioned being concerned about her taking up with a guy with such a past. We made jokes about how the old roommate would send Fito after him in the night until she got her money.

Fito never came after Andy, but unfortunately, he did for the girlfriend.

Reaction around the house is mostly that of shock. Andy is out and we’re not sure how he will handle the news. Thing is, he was always positively terrified by the girl, who was (by his account, as I never met her) tough and Amazonian in stature. E also interacted with this girl, and also reports that he’d always found her quite intimidating. Beyond physical stature, she apparently projected a strong, powerful presence whenever she would walk in a room. Not exactly the stereotype of a fragile girl who stays in an abusive relationship. I wonder if, being such a tough girl, she didn’t think to be afraid of this guy when she should have been.

At any rate, it is terrible to see the life of such a strong woman ended at the hands of this psychopath. I really hope they catch him soon.

As of yesterday, I have now outlasted every other staff person here that worked here when I started. I had only been planning on working here for a year, while I got my bearings together. In August, I am coming up on two.

What happened?

A number of things: I got apathetic and pretty comfortable in my situation despite vague discontent. I can pay my bills, go to the doctor every once in awhile, support a gluttonous cat (I’ve often been tempted to put him down as a dependent on my tax return). I can indulge myself with booze and fancy cheeses, and really, what more is there to life? I am a lot better off than many people, and I count myself blessed overall.

I do think it’s time to move on, though, and I’ve given myself a deadline: I will either chase the money wagon and go teach English abroad somewhere in Asia next spring, or I will bite the bullet and go to graduate school. Where, or what, I don’t know yet, but I will!

There are a number of issues with both of these plans. The teaching English in Asia gig has the potential to be pretty lucrative, particularly in South Korea, where most folks in my cohort are headed these days. The reason why South Korea is more profitable these days, I am told, has to do with the fact that the currency there is not tied to the ailing dollar. So teachers’ salaries have more or less stayed the same in South Korea, and with the exchange rates, the payout would be worth more. I’d definitely need to earn enough to save and to pay off my student loans, so South Korea seems like the best option.

My ex-boyfriend is currently there doing the same gig, and marrying a Korean girl there soon, so maybe my copy-catting his plans would make for a little bit of awkwardness! But the main concern for me is that apparently, Asian-Americans often get treated less well than other teachers. Plus I even look Korean (so I’m told), and my name even sounds similar to common Korean names, so people might see me as Korean-American. Would the average person on the street think I was Korean, get mad at me for not knowing the language and chide me for not being true to my roots? I already get enough grief for that from Vietnamese elders, I don’t need it from the Koreans! Of course this is all pretty silly and paranoid, but I can’t help factoring that into my plans.

As far as the grad school thing, the main problem is that I don’t know what to study! As time passes, the prospect of sitting through another creative writing workshop has become exponentially less appealing. I have all sorts of flibbertigibbet notions of going to art school, or culinary school, or what have you. If I am going to commit funds to a program, however, I definitely want to be committed to it, both now and down the line.

But my number one major consideration here is kind of cheesy and heartwarming in a “Full House” sorta way - I don’t want to leave my friends here in Lawrence behind. If only there were some way of packing them all into a big bag and taking them with me everywhere I go! I guess during high school, I was all dorky and shy and didn’t have that many close friends to miss, and a lot of them ended up coming to KU anyways. So I never really had the wrenching experience of leaving home that most people go through.

But now, who can I find that will replace the void in my life that will be left by my roommate Andy, a bundle of constant hilarity and gregariousness? Where am I going to find another crazy redhead who collects animals like they’re state quarters, who hoots and hollers and punches boys until they love her? Is anyone out there more of a sweetheart than Indie Dan? Or as entertainingly pompous as Tall Man? I could go on, but in short, right now I am constantly surrounded by my best friends in the world, and I am finding it increasingly hard to picture the absence of them in my life.

Alas, however, I really can’t stay in this kiddie pool forever. I suppose I should start shopping for a large suitcase!

Enter White Owl, the latest addition. He’s a sixty-one year old Vietnam Veteran who apparently came to campus to study the effects of Agent Orange (apparently functioning as both researcher and subject). Previous to that, he used to hang out in Westport and dole out musical advice to all who would listen, before being driven out of Kansas City due to a house fire. Following the trajectory of crazies, White Owl took up ranting and raving on Wescoe Beach, the same venue that has hosted many a right-wing preacher. Except White Owl’s message isn’t about hating homosexuals and condemning liberals, Muslims, sorority girls, sexually active people, and higher education in general - he’s more about vague pledges to peace, love, and Jayhawks.

Oh yes, the Jayhawks - one thing that sets White Owl apart from any other garden variety aging hippie in Lawrence is his no. 1 fan status. Traditionally hippies don’t care about sports that don’t involve lobbing sandbags with your feet, or a drum circle. White Owl, in contrast, has become the unofficial mascot of the successful football team this year and was present at every single game, hooting and hollering along with the frat boys and their dads.

The other thing that makes him stand out is his recent engagement to a younger woman. Much younger, in fact - she is twenty-two years old. Making an age difference of thirty-nine years. Now I know age supposedly ain’t nothin’ but a number (as long as the bottom number is above age of consent, of course), but damn. He’s old enough to be her grandfather.

Well, okay, he’s way old and she young, but she’s an adult. Yeah it’s a little weird, but whatever.

Then this tell-all interview came out. The child bride speaks! So what are her opinions on life?

On education:

“I am not really planning on continuing [school] next year. I don’t really feel I need to get a degree because I am not sure what I would use it for. I don’t really feel it is right for me to get a piece of paper so I can tell people I am capable of doing something.”

On religion:

“Somebody in the Old Testament wrote that we should be in constant prayer. Our relationship is all about God, and his blessings in our lives. The reason my past relationships aren’t there is because God has to be at the center of a relationship. He is at the center of my life, and if he isn’t at the center of other people’s life, like daily, in their thoughts and words every day, then I don’t want to be with them.”

On their romance:

“I was at Target and he would come and visit me while I was working. One day after work I called my friend Laurel, and I told her ‘At the risk of sounding completely insane, I think I am supposed to marry this guy,’ and she told me that I was insane. I drove over to his place and we were talking. I knew he was feeling bad because I knew he didn’t want to push anything on me, but I knew how he felt about me. I told him my phone conversation with Laurel and he fell to the floor. It was really cool.”

How sweet! Oh, and they are saving it for marriage, but soon after the big day they plan on having lots of babies. Yep, on his (social security) income of course, since she won’t have a job or earning power due to her lack of education. Honestly, if I didn’t see photos of the two, or know that they were hippies, I would have totally dismissed her as a “Math is Hard” Barbie, future Republican politician’s wife, based on these quotes.

Bizarre crypto-conservativism notwithstanding, I wish them all the best. My friend and I have plans to crash the wedding (well, they did say that it is open to all), document and take photos. We may just witness the birth of a new 21st century cult!

Congratulations Stephanie!

At the end of a nail-biter finale episode, in which sour-faced villain Lisa seemed to be getting the winner’s edit, sanity prevailed and the more consistently strong competitor took the gold. Hoorah! I do have to grudgingly admit that Lisa cooked her ass off during the final, and her tom kha gai actually looked quite delicious. Still, if she’d pulled it off and won, after being in the bottom two for the past seven straight episodes or whatever, it would have been the biggest upset in Top Chef history. Upset, as in the audience being upset and burning down the Bravo studios. Luckily, the chef with the best overall record as well as personality won. To think, Stephanie was so nervous in the first episode that she couldn’t stop shaking, and now she is Top Chef!

Sadly Richard choked at the end, but in a way that still retained his respectability. He, Stephanie, and the others (yes, probably even Lisa) will surely get tons of business from this experience. Overall it was a great season, and between this show, Anthony Bourdain’s travel show, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, I have been inspired to cook more and experiment with new kitchen techniques and foods. If only I could afford smokers and liquid nitrogen vats…

The caliber of the two other chefs, Richard and Stephanie, is so much ridiculously higher in comparison that they should have no problems beating her. But dammit, someone who has been in the bottom for the last six straight challenges should not be in the final three. And I now have the fear that Lisa’s insanely good luck will somehow carry her to the title of Top Chef. Like maybe Stephanie slips on a banana peel and breaks a leg, dropping her main course on the floor in the process. Or Richard’s fauxhawk catches on fire.

It did warm my heart to see Dale back, working with Stephanie, and then my warmed heart sank when Dale screwed up and left the main dish out of the cooler all night (pork, definitely something you never ever chance!). This error would have sunk a lesser chef, but Stephanie, with the help of Dale (who felt really awful), pulled it off and made some of the stronger dishes of the night. Go Stephanie!

The next morning I noticed, in addition to the red tape, obnoxious pink flyers placed on the steps, admonishing potential stair goers. “By order of the Fire Marshall, access to these stairs are forbidden until further notice.” Maybe somebody was too lazy to walk over to the other stairwell, and ducked under the tape?

By yesterday morning, they had zip-tied a huge plywood beam across the entrance to the stairs and put more pink flyers down. That’s when I thought it started to get a bit ridiculous.

This morning when I passed it, there were yet even more pink flyers taped to the beam. I am not sure this is good for the structural integrity of the stairs. How many more mountains of flyers and wooden beams can it take before it collapses? I know they are concerned about our safety, but I can’t help but feel that they are insulting our observational abilities. Who knows, maybe they really need all this to prevent the more absent-minded math professors from walking up to their doom.

I’ll update tomorrow if I see a bouncer in a loud pink uniform stationed in front of the stairs.

The thing that struck me as odd, odder than a raccoon in daylight of course - it had not been fazed by the cars zooming past it in the slightest. Of course it kept to the side of the road, keeping the parked cars between it and the curb. It wasn’t until it saw Big Bad Me, the lone pedestrian, that it got spooked.

This guy is the closest one to looking like my raccoon on google image search.

I tried to play raccoon psychologist during the rest of the walk, and musing over the circumstances, maybe I can see why the raccoon would be more scared of cars than of people. I noticed this same behavior in Lily the beagle, a shelter dog adopted by E’s parents. Lily had spent some time wandering the streets before the beagle rescue had picked her up, and was known to be wary of people. We decided to take her for a walk through downtown, to help get her more accustomed to people, and that turned out to be an utter disaster. Any time a group of people approached, she would tremble and try to hide between my legs (tying me up with the leash in the process). The most troubling thing she tried to do was to run towards cars. Moving cars. E and I could not figure out how a dog like that could survive on the streets with such wrong instincts! It was a very lucky thing that she found a loving home.

The notion of cars vs. people reminds me of a short story or maybe a discussion I read once about how, if aliens landed on our planet now, they might mistakenly think that automobiles are the dominant species. We as humans, apparently the lesser species, fight wars to gather the necessary resources to appease our automotive masters. I wonder if the same idea could be applied to animals as well - do animals think of cars as big, strange, smelly animals that go really fast? And if they did think of cars as other animals, which species would they prefer to hang out with, cars or people?

Cars are deadly, sure. The first sign of spring’s arrival is the line of littered corpses along the mile markers on the highway. In a match-up between raccoon and car, even a teeny compact SmartCar, car wins. Raccoon vs. human? If the human is particularly out of shape or small, the outcome is a little more dubious.

Still, there are some reasons why my little raccoon acquaintance might be less uneasy around cars than humans.

1. Cars are predictable. For the most part, they stay on the roads. They tend to behave in a relatively orderly fashion - in cities, they will often move together in big clusters because of traffic light patterns. They move in straight lines and angles. There are obvious exceptions to this, of course (see: drunk drivers, the elderly) but on the whole, cars behave consistently.

Humans, should raccoons ever encounter them, are far less predictable. Sure, they provide food, but usually not willingly. Sometimes a human will be moved to chase the raccoons away from trash bins, or in more rural areas, shoot them with pellet guns. Friendly humans can come off as aggressive, approaching too closely to take photographs (blinding raccoons with flash bulbs). Very young humans, in particular, are prone to shrieking and chasing the raccoons in an attempt to pet them, which comes across as aggression. Which leads me to point two:

2. Cars are generally not aggressive. When a car hits an animal, it’s not intentional; aside from a handful of bored rednecks, most drivers don’t swerve to try and hit the animal. As long as the raccoon stays off the roadway, it’s safe. Humans are another story.

3. Parked cars can provide shelter. Once a car stops moving, it ceases to be a threat to the raccoon (aside from attracting scary humans, of course), and turns into a resource.

4. Cars are colorful and shiny. Raccoons are known to like shiny things.

After going through these reasons, I still think that raccoon was crazy (and possibly rabid). But it was still super cute!

Hate hate hate! How can anyone look at that face and still have an appetite?

All the stupid hats of Ricky from Project Runway’s Season 4, fused with the blockhead conniving of Wendy Pepper from PR Season 1.

The sooner these two are banished from my television screen, never to return, the better. Alas, Dale’s departure this week means that one of these chucklefucks is going to make it to the final four. I would say this is even worse than Tre’s infamous early exit last season, because at least the remaining contestants weren’t completely talentless* and thoroughly infuriating in every way possible. And the worst part: my beloved Bourdain had to deal the blow! I do, however, understand and respect his decision. If only Dale hadn’t made that awful scallop dish, one aberration in an otherwise strong season. If he had lost that coin toss to be executive chef. Or if the judge had just given him the Quickfire award instead of Antonia. If only!

It’s okay, Dale. Let the tears flow. We know you’re better than Lisa and Spike and so do you.

Speaking of kitchen nightmares, maybe I should lay off watching endless re-runs of Kitchen Nightmares for awhile. Perhaps the repeated shots of Gordon Ramsay disrobing are starting to sear their way into my psyche, like the permanent W on the chef’s chin.

I had a dream the other night that Chef Ramsay and I were hanging out at a mansion, listening to folksy music play. He seemed like a duck out of water, far removed from hot kitchens and incompetent line cooks to yell at. So we chatted for a bit about food, and other subjects. Made some catty comments about the band and the line-dancing Branson-esque audience members. Did I mention that we were sitting on a bed?

…don’t worry! This dream was totally G rated and Puritanically chaste. He ended up departing early, leaving a cookbook behind. In the cookbook were scraps of paper, and on those scraps of paper - a long, rambling love letter! In the letter he said that he enjoyed the time he spent with me. Unfortunately he was already committed to a wife and kids in this life, but that in a future life we would surely see each other again, because we were both “weird souls.”

What does this mean? Is my soul mate really an aging, foul-mouthed generator of creative expletives, a crusher of budding culinary dreams? What will I tell E? And if this is truly the case, why couldn’t it have been Bourdain, for chrissakes?

My actual, waking life, dark tempered and foul-mouthed culinary crush. Nothing against Ramsay, but blonde guys with W’s carved into their chins don’t usually do it for me!

* Looking back at that season, I had totally shut out of my memory the fact that Cokehead Brian and Sweaty Bear Howie lasted longer than Tre. So Tre’s elimination still ranks as the most egregious moment in Top Chef History, but this one is definitely a close second.

So I made these for the two little ones:

Baby booties in the sunshine, before delivery.

I think I am starting to get to that age where everyone around me is either having babies or talking about them. I’m still more of a kitten / puppy person myself, I have to say - why no kitten showers or puppy bjorns? Some babies are pretty cute, though, and they are generally a lot more cooperative than their animal counterparts when it comes to wearing knitted gifts!

The parents of the second child have a different therapist who suggests a more conservative approach: Ken Zucker argues that no child under at least ten years old can be said to have gender identity disorder. Children are flexible, he says, and would a therapist ever suggest changing the race of a black child who insisted she was white? Why should gender be treated differently?

To be perfectly honest, liberal as I may be, the skeptic in me would agree with Zucker’s initial assessment of things. I doubt that most children, especially as young as two years old, have a sense of any identity, let alone gender. And having read John Colapinto’s “As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl”, and the tragic life resulting from a highly ill-advised gender transition, I find myself reluctant to believe that well-meaning therapists and parents don’t have any influence over a child’s reported gender identification. Does a two, six, even ten year old really have enough self-determination to say that he is definitely a girl trapped in a boy’s body? Especially if the adults in his life suggest and thus reinforce the notion that he is really a girl? I’m against overly medicating developing children anyways, let alone administering drastic hormone treatments. But without the hormone treatments, then what will happen when the new girl reaches puberty? There are so many complications with this issue that I do agree with Zucker, that gender transition should not be treated lightly.

That said, I find Zucker’s therapy methods alarmingly barbaric. Taking away the child’s favorite toys? Isolating him from other girls his age? Shielding him from the color pink? I get that the parents were concerned about other kids bullying their son for not being ‘normal’, but let’s face it: this kid is probably not going to be ‘normal’ no matter what, and the last thing he needs is his parents bullying him in addition to the outside world. The mother was concerned about her son leading a double-life, hanging out with girls at school, and lying to his parents when he came home. That, I suspect, would cause much more psychological damage to him over the long term. The precedent has been set - he already can’t trust or communicate with his parents, and he’s only what, six years old? What about when he’s a teenager?

Also, I find both philosophies, Ehrensaft’s and Zucker’s, to be lacking in that they both assume rigidly defined gender roles, if not necessarily sex. Why can’t Jonah just be a boy who plays with Barbies and wears dresses? Why can’t poor Bradley, the one undergoing Zucker’s treatment, love the color pink? Why does ‘boyhood’ have to entail playing with Transformers, guns, baseballs and monster trucks? Nobody balks at tomboy girls nowadays, but a tomgirl boy (tommy girl?) is still unacceptable.

Let me clarify - I am not ruling out the possibility that gender dysphoria exists as early as Ehrensaft says it does. I think I’ve seen it in my own family. I’ve observed one of my cousins over the years, and maybe about five or six years ago I went back home for a family visit and thought: “who’s that boy running around with my cousins?” It took me awhile to realize who she was. When they were much smaller (kids grow so fast these days), I remember the cousin in question often wearing the boyish equivalent of what her sister wore, but thought nothing of it.

Lately when I’ve come home, Marissa (not her name, but trust me, it’s just as unfortunately girly), now thirteen years old, has adopted the posture and gait of a teenage boy. She’s always wearing baggy jeans, anime t-shirts and has her hair cut short. I don’t think she’s just a tomboy, as she flat out just looks and acts like a boy. I’ve even noticed that her voice sounds a little deeper these days when she talks. It doesn’t seem like she gets much flak from her parents or other relatives, but I am admittedly not around all that much. I get the feeling that our relatives think of her as a bit of an odd duck, she likes boy things but hey, whatever. It might turn out to be problematic when she gets older and starts dating, or if she suddenly starts adopting male pronouns.

But for now, she’s more or less accepted as who she is, no urging one direction or the other. And that, I say, is natural.

** Update on the NPR story today: Parents Considering Treatment to Delay Son’s Puberty. I guess hormone blockers are preferable to actual hormone injections (estrogen or testosterone), as the aim is to buy time until the child is mature enough for self-determination. But this method of treatment, pre-puberty, can also render the recipient sterile.

So many decisions, so many issues to consider. I definitely don’t envy the parents in this situation. I’m not sure what I would do!