The Mid-West Heads to the Mid-East

On Monday I leave for Iran. I'm so excited I can hardly stand it. I've got basically 24 hours of flying to get there, and in packing I have had the extra challenge of remembering to put a headscarf and jacket in my carry-on luggage so I can leave the plane when we finally arrive. I've packed my kaopectate and toilet paper (they don't use tp over there... more of a water hose to wash your butt and then dripping dry), finagled my wardrobe to accommodate both Islamic dress requirements and Amsterdam dress requirements, bought the perfect travel bag so I can carry my camera without looking too much like a tourist, thumbed through my travel books enough to know I don't think I'll ever be able to read their writing, and listened to Pimsler's Farsi cds up to lesson five. I can now say, I am American (or I am not American, whichever the situation calls for), I don't understand, Thank you (both formally and informally), Excuse me, Yes and No. Mack's dad let me use his Rosetta Stone CD (which I keep thinking is called Rosetta Parks, but click here to know why that is so wrong), and I was able to guess which words meant car, yellow, red, white, blue, ball, woman, girl, boy, man, plane, young and old, but I can't remember how to say those words so I don't think they count. Anyway, I am going to try to blog while I'm there but am not sure if I'll be able to add photos, so you might just have to wait for those. Also, if I can't access the blog from there, which Mack thinks shouldn't be a problem, but just in case, I'm going to email my travelogues through my gmail address, like I did last year.

Thanks to everyone who's watching our furry friends while we're gone. And to anyone who's worried, please don't be. I'm blessed with common sense and a healthy sense of mortality, and even if something awful were to happen and I died, well, at least I'd die seeing something I've never seen before and doing something I've never done before. I can't believe I'm literally going to the other side of the world. It makes me want to cry I'm so lucky. Who knew 12 Mile, Indiana, would be the starting point for a life of so many adventures!

I Sewed Myself to Another Person

An artist friend of mine, who doubles as a professor at Transylvania, asked me last week to participate in a lashing video for a project he's working on. I thought lashing meant, well, whipping, but it turns out said artist friend, who we'll call Kurt Gohde, learned that lashing means going through or around something many times. At least that's what the boy scouts taught him.

Why me, I wondered.

I remember you having a lot of non-traditional piercings, he offered.

Turns out I'm more exciting in people's imaginations than in real life, but in an attempt to keep up appearances, I let him down with an upswing.

Well, actually, only my ears are pierced, but they are pierced all the way up them. Oh, and I'm related to a girl who had her tongue pierced and two of my sisters sported belly button rings. So, yeah, I'll help you out.

A quick call to Leiah to see if she was still hosting a gem on her budding belly led me to Matt's brother Mike. Matt is Leiah's baby daddy, and Mike is the smaller, younger, hippier version of Matt. (Mack, Matt, Mike... what are you trying to do to me people!) Turns out, Mike is also adventurously pierced, with a delightful hoop wrapping around the side of his bottom lip. He also has earrings, but since I had that covered, he offered up some lip. That's when things got really weird.

We used black fishing line, which kept reminding me of the thread they use for stitches, to sew my ear to his mouth, with a respectable distance between the two, mind you (I am an engaged woman now you know). The tip of the fishing line kept getting bendy, so at one point I threaded a needle and drove it through my ear. None of this was painful in the least since the holes were already there, but I have never felt something so weird as thread going through your body without pain. And then I have never felt so weird as being sewn to another human being, like we were in the very initial stages of become leather. And then I have never felt so afraid that my leather counterpart might sneeze and take my left ear right along with him. Fortunately Mike wasn't allergic to my fears and held it together for the entire shoot. We then cut ourselves apart and our bonding experience was over.

Never in my life did I think I would use my earring holes for something other than earrings. How delicious that they took on another role to create a piece of art, that in seeing them become distorted by the thread I realized how I am just another piece of material roaming this predictable little planet.

Kurt's exhibit goes up at the Lexington Art League in September and then at Transy in October. You should check it out. See more of Kurt's work here, here and here.

Six Down, Three to Go

Leiah did it again. She grew. This time her belly button is crying out for help and her body from the front looks like a boob tower. Nowhere but her belly and her boobs scream baby, but those two spots are yelling loud enough to leave you speechless. She didn't, for the record, outgrow the old bikini... it's just lost somewhere. We're not actually scientists, so it's okay if one of our controls is, well, not controlled.
It's been funny adjusting to Leiah being pregnant. In the last couple weeks I've noticed I've been weirdly protective of her stomach. Like today when we rode in the truck to get lunch I was nervous that the airbag was on. And I'm scared cars will hit us and I've got a baby on board. Or if people don't hold the door open for her, I get pissed at them. And she is not allowed to carry anything. I don't even like it when she walks around. It worries me and it looks like such a heavy thing to do. Her name also seems have shifted from Leiah to Pragnet, with occasional spurts of Momma.

Pragnet comes from the Hustonville Haunted House. One of the rules suggests that the following people skip the trip: those with heart conditions, those with a tendency for seizures and "pragnet women." Hee. I love a good spelling error.

Go West Young Woman

Good news. The house has an offer, a full price one with no contingencies, so we're packing up, giving Leiah power of attorney so she can close on the house sale in our absence, and leaving our house the day we head for Iran. I will officially be homeless, which is kind of depressing, and have no place to come home to, which is kind of exciting. Hopefully I can exploit Phil and Leigh's generosity so Venus won't have to be homeless just because I am. We leave for Iran in less than two weeks, which is hard to believe, but not quite as hard to believe that we've got to get all our crap out of here in that amount of time. Yard sale on Saturday for anyone needing home gear (lawn stuff, kitchen stuff, bathroom stuff, tons of stuff), so come on out and buy our crap. Thank God we got a truck last week... just in time. Sorry for the boring post, but I didn't want to pull a "Lisa" and go MIA for weeks at a time. Until inspiration strikes again...