Pretty Much the Sexiest Thing I've Ever Seen

I know this will probably shock most of you, but, well, I can't dance. Especially when sober.

But, if I could dance, I would want to dance like this. And be Beyonce in general.

Four Solid Years

I just realized that today, like this actual day, marks the start of my fifth year of blogging.

Four years done, completely... 411 random ramblings about what I'm doing... hundreds of hours spent in this strange little life archive thing I've got going on.

That's a shocking degree of commitment to something created from a misunderstanding. I hope it's been as fun for you, all five of you, as it's been for me.

Things I Read in the Inheritance of Loss that Made My Brain Twitch a Little

Let me start this off by saying that The Inheritance of Loss is described as "sumptuously written." I've never heard a book, or anything else for that matter, described as sumptuous, but now I may add that as a criteria on certain lists I keep.

As one of the main characters, a judge, sets off from his native India to pursue higher education and elevate his class:

"The judge was accompanied by his father. At home, his mother was weeping because she had not estimated the imbalance between the finality of good-bye and the briefness of the last moment."

As the judge's granddaughter sits with the family cat, Mustafa:

"Then there was the cat, Mustafa, a sooty hirsute fellow demonstrating a perfection of containment no amount of love or science could penetrate. He was, at this moment, starting up like a lorry on Sai's lap, but his eyes looked blankly right in hers, warning her against mistaking this for intimacy."

As Biju, the judge's cook's son who is trying to make a go at it in America with the hopes of elevating his class, is delivering food on bike for a Chinese restaurant in the dead of winter:

"...he began to weep from the cold, and the weeping unpicked a deeper vein of grief -- such a terrible groan issued from between the whimpers that he was shocked his sadness had such depth."

As Sai, who has been studying under a male tutor named Gyan, confers with an older female ex-pat:

"'Time should move,' Noni had told her. 'Don't go in for a life where time does not pass, the way I did. That is the single biggest bit of advice I can give you.'"

As Biju reflects on the life of his nemesis, Mr. Shah, an Indian who was working toward the American Dream as the Indians at home saw it:

"Photos of the exterior (of the house Shah had bought) had been sent to all the relatives in Gujarat, a white care parked in front. A Lexus, that premier luxury vehicle. On top of it sat his wife looking self-satisfied. She had left India a meek bride, scrolled and spattered with henna, so much gold in her sari she set off every metal detector in the airport -- and now here she was -- white pantsuit, bobbed hair, vanity case, and capable of doing the macarena."

As Sai celebrates Christmas with her older ex-pat friends:

"For the occasion, the sisters had brought out their ornaments from England -- various things that looked as if they tasted of mints..."

As the judge consumates with his wife from an arranged marriage, who he's just caught powdering herself with his treasured American powder and puff:

"Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment, he clamped down on her, tussled her to the floor, and as more of that perfect rose complexion, blasted into a million motes, came filtering down, in a dense frustration of lust and fury -- penis uncoiling, mottled purple-black as if with rage, blundering, uncovering the chute he had heard rumor of -- he stuffed his way ungracefully into her."

As all the characters are affected by India's fight for liberation from England:

"For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness, for these crimes the guilty would never pay. There was no religion and no government that would relieve the hell."

As Biju calls home to India from an American payphone to check on his father during the revolution, only to have the conversation stifled by a terrible connection:

"He could not talk to his father; there was nothing left between them but emergency sentences, clipped telegram lines shouted out as if in the midst of a war... He stood with his head still in the phone booth studded with bits of stiff chewing gum and the usual FuckShitCockDickPussyLoveWar, swatikas, and hearts shot with arrows mingling in a dense graffiti garden, too sugary too angry too perverse -- the sick sweet rotting mulch of the human heart."

As Sai searches for the object of her affection, Gyan, in his lower class neighborhood after he rejects her for no apparent reason:

"The churches were dark; the missionaries always left in dangerous times to enjoy chocolate chip cookies and increase funds at home, until it was peaceful enough to venture forth again, that they might launch attack, renewed and fortified, against a weakened and desperate populace."

That was then, this is now.

I think it's a boy.

Not wanting to give my lizard friend any gender predispositions since I don't really know what gender s/he is, I put some androgynous photographs of Brooke Shields and David Bowie up in his cage when he moved in. S/he has pretty much ignored them until tonight, when I gave what I now know to be a HIM a bath and cleaned out HIS tank.

He'd been a little gloomy seeming today, so to perk him up I fed him. Romaine lettuce and cantaloupe... by hand. He enjoyed those snacks much more than the giant crunchies of gross he'd been dodging in his tank for the last week. Then I figured I'd clean out his tank to get it ready to move to its new home with Robin & Joe, a couple of Mack's pals. Robin is desperately in love with some guinea pigs she has, and when she saw my Facebook post about getting Creep from Betsy, she immediately said how bad she wanted a lizard. I offered her Creep because, well, I never meant to have him for life and if someone is that excited about getting him, he'll probably be better off with them. To clean his tank, I had to put him somewhere, and what better holding room than the bathtub with some toasty water in it. Betsy used to let him swim every now and then and he seems to love it. In my experience, I think he uses the bath to drink the water he needs for survival.

Anyway, I get his house all clean and set up again. I get him out of the tub and warm him back up with the heating pad. And then I put him back in his tank and go on about my business.

Well, he didn't just pep up. He got downright frisky.

I kept hearing him trying to climb the wall, so I went into the living room to see what the hell was so exciting, and I found him like this.
That right, all up in Brooke's face, trying to make out with her. He was standing upright on two legs trying to look in her eyes, and when I said his name, he whipped his head around at me as if to say, "Cock block much?"

So I creep...

Betsy up and left Lexington, moving to Louisville in an attempt to make me and Leiah madly jealous. Also because she wanted to and transferred to a better college.

She's lived around the corner from me since the spring, and in that time I've made many late night jaunts over to her house to turn off the lights on her lizard cage or bring her pet some crickets. I've watched him grow from this little thing that fit into your hand into this giant monster descended from dinosaurs that isn't too scary since he has no teeth. He has the most complex eyes, like when they look at you they know your past and your future and can sense all the things you need to apologize for.
Since Mack and I had spent the past couple weeks enjoying life with a hamster in L.A., I told my dad we'd take Creep for a little while. Mack especially liked watching him eat crickets, and having a third party in the house takes the pressure of the two humans having to entertain each other all the time. Some people have babies for that reason, but Mack and I aren't insane.

So my dad brought him over... and his tank... and his Giant Box of Accessories... and thank god Leiah was here when he did. She handled the lizard and watched him play in the tub while I cleaned his tank (this thing poops freakishly big turds). Then she warmed him with the heating pad and put him in his new home. He's cool, but I just wasn't ready to touch him.

I dumped in some crickets, watched him run around like a crazy man catching them with his tongue, and promptly began falling for this strange little guy.
With Mack gone for the holidays, Creep's been my companion. He's given me something to take care of and feed and observe. He's been entertaining and silly. And he even let me hold him and show him off to Mack while we were video chatting.

(Creep LOVES to video chat! He kept cocking his head like he was listening and looking at the person, using technology to supplement his all-knowingness. I guess a computer screen may have been like giving acid to a baby for a lizard tho...)

I think we've found a permanent home for him -- not ours -- and I've gotta say, I'm gonna be sad to see him go. He's started to recognize my voice and look at me like, "Hey. You again." I squeak his name out in the morning and I swear he knows I'm talking to him. I'm going to miss watching him hunt his crickets and crunch his kibble and the way he lays on his rock and basks in his UV light like a proud lion.

I am not going to miss his big turds.

Potty Talk

It's toddler potty training time in our family! Which means that as an aunt, I have to assume responsibility if I'm the only adult around when a kid says they need to use the potty even if I have no idea about the potty routine!

For instance, there was that one time Ben went to go potty and said I had to hold it. I lifted up his shirt thinking it was in his way and thus qualified as the "it" that needed holding, but he whined that wasn't right. I asked again what he needed me to hold, he gave another whiny ambiguous answer, and we shared a very confusing moment in potty training history. I called his mom to ask what was up with holding Ben's boy part for him when he peed, and she was like, "Uhhh, we don't do that. Don't know where he got that. But thanks?"

Which is why I'm glad kids don't form lasting memories until they're 3.

Somewhat related but too cute to pass up, Ben got new big boy panties for Christmas and was so excited he put them on as soon as he opened the package... outside of his jammies. Don't they just look great with his new Buzz Lightyear shoes???Renee is also potty training, but since I'm a girl and know how to potty, there's less confusion with her. Except when it comes to her reading material.

When she told me she needed the green book, I said okay, got up and went and looked in the toys for a green book. Coming up blank, I brought her a different one about happy farm animals.

Turns out she wanted the copy of Crime & Punishment sitting on the back of the toilet.Figures. While Ben sat on the floor reading the farm animal book like a normal 3-year-old, Renee voluntarily skimmed some Dostoyevsky, like a normal Doctor of Russian Literature.These babies. Teaching me more than college ever tried to and making me feel completely unprepared and moronic.

Sugar. And Spice.

Renee is just that age. You know, where she is so cute and so terrible all at the same time. And her favorite words are RIGHT NOW!

Over Christmas, while Shannon was on Crazy Baking Lady Marathon 2009, Renee, who has a major sweet tooth, asked her mom for some caramel that had been made by boiling condensed milk for hours and hours and hours. Shannon, being the Nicest Mommy in the World, a title earned in part by her willingness to let Renee use a cookie cutter to make heart-shaped cheese pieces and in part by her ability to keep her composure when she is being screamed at by a 20-pound dictator, scooped some caramel from the lid to give to her baby girl.

Apparently, that's akin to stabbing a puppy in the eyes with a spoon.

Renee shrieked -- there's not even a word for what she did but we'll go with shrieked -- "NOT ON THE LID!!!" so furiously all you could do was bulge your eyes and laugh at her. Shannon calmly looked at her like she was a patient on the psych ward and said, "Okay, you have to have a timeout. You don't scream at Mommy."

When Renee starts to lose her shit on me, I push her down. Gently, but it's a push and she falls down. And she laughs and forgets that I took all of 6 seconds to open the M&Ms.

You'd think with all the treats she eats, she might be a little sweeter, but I think we're past the sweet baby stage. Last Christmas she was so melty for love that when you'd give her kisses she'd smoosh into you like creamy chocolate. It was wonderful. This Christmas kisses are old news and now she wants candy dammit. And sugar bombs.

Luckily Santa provided her with the sugar, and Christmas morning went off without too much of a hitch since Renee was sufficiently medicated. For every present she opened, I'm pretty sure she had a piece of candy in her mouth.

The gold coins that Jewish kids get because, well, Walgreens had them.

A Christmas tree sucker that lights up.

Reese's peanut butter holiday character... unsure which because Renee never hesitates to bite off their heads.

Look at the yellow sucker eating/present opening multi-tasking!

It's basically the biggest elevator in the world.

Laila and I went to LA County Museum of Art yesterday while Mack listened to boring med school lectures. I've visited this museum a handful of times, enough that I'm starting to feel like I've run into an old friend when I see that piece of the man and the woman from Picasso's blue period, but they've added a building full of contemporary art since I left LA and I was dying to see the art inside.

We rode this giant escalator up to the third floor and went inside to an enormous room full of work by Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol. Then we walked through a lifetime of work by Joseph Beuys, a member of Hitler's Youth who ultimately became a revolutionary art professor and environmentalist. And then we took in an entire floor full of self-portraits from a private collection.

After a couple hours, we were getting tired, so we pushed the elevator button to head back up to the third floor to exit. One of the gallery attendants asked us if we preferred to use the new elevator, and after stepping back a few feet, we realized that the giant glass wall next to us was actually an elevator door.

"It's the biggest elevator in the world," she said.

"Yes, please," we replied, turning our noses up at the piddly little familiar elevator we were standing in front of.

The wall parted and we scooted into an elevator as big as an elementary school stage. We had the entire place to ourselves, so we made some impromptu sort-of-self-portraits to commemorate the day we experienced the biggest elevator the world has ever known.And just to prove how big it is, here's a shot from floor to ceiling, with Laila for scale.

Wax On, Wax Off

A couple days ago, with weather that was just too gorgeous to pass up, Mack, Laila, Shahin and I headed to Hollywood to eat dinner and people watch. And because we're suckers for wax sculptures, we also stopped into Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.

(I should say here that if you are a teacher of any sort, you get free admission, so be sure to ask about teacher "discounts." Also, I love being a student again... discounts to the movies, to museums, to Madame Tussaud's and to J. Crew!)

I love Madame Tussaud's and am always amazed at how realistic and small the people look. For some reason, I imagine celebrities to be taller than me, but in reality, I'm pretty much the same height as Jamie Foxx and Shakira is like a 10-year-old. I also imagine them to be gorgeous, even in wax form, if their name is George Clooney.
Here are some of our other shining moments.Part of what made this outing so fun was Shahin and her desperate need for the Celebrity Mom Translator. If you're not versed in the Celebrity Mom Translator, here's your education.

Six Years Later

The day after Shannon and Charles got married, Leiah and I went to Indiana for our cousin's wedding and met up with the Scott side of the family, including our dad Greg. That was 2003.

It's almost 2010.

Our dad has been splitting time between here and Iraq, working on the rebuild and shooting guns that are bigger than my nephew for fun. He came back to the states over Thanksgiving, so we made a plan to catch up before I left for LA. He booked a smoking room at the Holiday Inn Express and it was official.

The first night he was here Mack and I met him for a beer near his hotel. It was the first time he and Mack met, and the conversation was aglow with contractor talk. Overseas contractor talk. A subject I know nothing about, which was good because it made me a good listener.

And I realized something.

My dad is happy. He seems to love being on missions, overseas assignments, rebuilds, away from home. He's a Marine, and I think that experience scratched an itch he has for danger and gave credence to his preference for being left alone.

That being said, I also realized he cares about his family. He brought us a copy of some 8mm films my Grandpa made of them as kids -- my dad as a 1-year-old walking up the driveway at my grandparents' house and eating rocks, my uncle Mike who died when I was 11 carrying around their pet raccoons, my aunt Deb leading around a giant horse named Buttercup. I saw my Grandma as a stunning 30-something on Easter morning and that ornery twinkle that my Grandpa has apparently had in his eye all his life. I learned that they lived in 12 Mile at the farmhouse I remember but that they also did a stint in Dayton, OH. And then I saw a video of me, about 6 months old, Shan, at the age Renee is now, and my mom, younger than Betsy is now.

For a lot of my life, my time with the Scotts was spent in the moment, for the weekend, enjoying them as they were at that time... which means that I know very little about who they were before these people assumed the identities of my dad, my grandparents, my aunts, my uncles. I've had the opportunity to talk to my mom about her childhood, about the experiences that shaped who she is, and our relationship is richer for it. I haven't been able to talk to my dad about those things, so while some of me may feel like he's a stranger, a big piece of me understands that when you know nothing, you have the chance to learn a lot.

Cookie Monsters

Laila told me the other day that she'd never made Christmas cookies, and since that was one of my favorite parts of winter break when I was a kid, well, I just could not let her go another year without the experience of cutting cookies, sprinkling sprinkles, and eating raw cookie dough on the sly.

Plus, she needs to learn patience and how to see things through to the end, and nothing takes as much patience and sticktoitiveness as making three sheets worth of cookies and decorating all. of. them.

What I Did Today, A Day in the Middle of December

Drank a cantaloupe juice at my favorite beach restaurant, Elvira's Cha Cha Chicken... apparently its infinite deliciousness causes strokes.

Ate jerk veggie enchiladas, black beans and rice and fried plantains on the patio.

Watched Mack climb the rope on Santa Monica Beach.*
Dangled from the rings and remembered how wimpy my hands are.

* Mack climbed the entire rope twice so that I could get a picture of him at the top... proof he actually can climb it all the way.

It just doesn't seem fair not to show it. Especially since he almost shredded the top of his foot coming down the second time.

Like, totally, PS

I'm in LA with LAila, and OMG girls this age are TALKATIVE. Lord help you, Lisa.

So what have we been talking about? You know, hamsters, Taylor Swift, all the single ladies.

I have spent the day looking at pictures like these.



I had no idea there were so many photos of hamsters available for little girls with iTouch's. Hamsters and puppies. And PS, you can only talk about those things in a baby voice.

I love Laila, but I swear, if she ruins All the Single Ladies for me... She's already taken Lady Gaga's Poker Face; she better step off my Beyonce. Or PS, we're gonna have issues.

Three Weeks Ago Today...

Dulywed: Year 3

Dear Mack,

I was watching Top Chef on Tivo today and the challenge was to create a dish using the hotels of Las Vegas as inspiration. The Bellagio and Mandalay Bay were among the featured hotels, and the whole subject took me back three years ago when we spent the weekend at the now-demolished Frontier hotel, to that fateful night when you and I went to the courthouse and promised to be best friends for the rest of our lives in front of three complete strangers.

I remember wearing cowboy boots and picking the most ridiculous bouquet in the little chapel. I remember the minister pushing the play button on his tape player and cuing me to walk down the 6-foot-long aisle. I remember thinking how silly this whole show was and how tragic that some of the other couples there were actually taking this seriously. Our wedding, the one that legally bound us, was a joke.

But then, standing up at that ridiculous alter wrapped up with silk roses, something happened. Since no one else in the entire room mattered, I became fixed on you. I robotically uttered familiar phrases about sickness or health, richer or poorer, and looked into your eyes without being distracted. When I was told to say that I would be your best friend forever, I was jolted. That was a serious commitment, one I naively hadn't considered before that moment, and I had to make a decision right then and there. Staring at you in your grandpa sweater with your big smile and dangerous eyes, I agreed. I promised to be your best friend.

I know that there have been days, weeks, maybe even months in the last three years that I haven't been your best friend. In fact, it's possible and likely that at times I've been your worst enemy. But even in that darkness, in that indifference and carelessness, I'm still glad that I made the promise of friendship. It's created a bridge that keeps our marriage from going under, that gets us over the bad times and back to the good ones, that binds you to me and me to you.

This past year has been full of ups and downs, just like the roller coaster ride we went on at the New York hotel moments after we got married. You graduated from college and I got laid off from my job. You started med school, I started nursing school, and we both stopped doing dishes. We moved away from your family and came closer to mine. We traded endless sun, weekends at the beach and a constant state of poverty for rainy days, mosquitoes and feeling like millionaires. You lost judo the way you liked it and I lost fire dance as I was just falling in love with it, but you gained a judo friend who loves it as much as you do and I reconnected with the arts activism that gives me a sense of purpose. We got my older sister back, we left your baby sister behind. You had your issue with ProstaStrong and I had mine with Metamucil. We drove across the country in a state of delirium, shared the discovery of shadow people, almost died trying to move in and then sat on the porch swing swilling cold beer and getting bored of unemployment. I built a dollhouse, you dissected a human body.

I guess you could safely say this year has been unlike any we've ever had.

A few weeks ago when you were about to burst from resentment for a state narrowed by its dominant whiteness, we escaped to the cemetery to sit by the pond and preserve your sanity. In that small afternoon, while you held my hand so I could hang over the pond and get garbage out of the water, while we watched the fish have a feeding frenzy on bread, while that super fat ugly bird waddled over to our bench to get some attention, I felt like we were best friends, like we are appropriately balanced between helpful and hurtful, between together and apart, between supportive and disruptive. I felt like I did that day at Shakertown, when the whole world fell away and it was just me and you and cartwheel practice.

Of course I love you. Of course I care about you. Of course I think you are deliciously handsome and sexy and smart and funny. But as we spend more and more time together, the thing I value most about you is your friendship.

Thank you for the last three years and for the one we're starting today. Happy anniversary, Mr. T.

Things I Am Thankful For (in no particular order)

1. My family being so close.
2. A husband who knows how to download movies and tv shows.
3. Having friends all over this country.
4. The chance to go back to school.
5. An interesting, centrally located apartment.
6. Babies.
7. The Lexington Art League.
8. In-laws that I actually enjoy.
9. Being smart.
10. Having a gym membership that includes access to treadmills with televisions attached.
11. My mom's turkey with cornbread leek stuffing.
12. Radishes and beer cheese.
13. Beer.
14. Bourbon.
15. Cheap but cute Christmas cards at Marshall's.
16. My bicycle.
17. 40% off coupons at Banana Republic.
18. Tall boots.
19. My silky.
20. New underwear.
21. Hair cuts and curling irons.
22. Poi.
23. The UFC.
24. The Internet.
25. Student loans.
26. Fake down comforters.
27. Tivo.
28. The library.
29. Not getting tickets even though I speed all the time.
30. The snails that come out when it rains.

America's Next Top Models

While in NYC, Heather and I decided to do an impromptu photo shoot in our hotel room to showoff our new threads. Having watched every season of America's Next Top Model, I knew we had to focus on our body angles and smiling with our eyes.

And now, our portfolio.

Transformation

I realized while we were on the plane to New York City for our No Nonsense Between Friends trip that Heather and I started our friendship on a plane. She had a bag of O'Boises potato chips on a flight back to Louisville after our 5th grade day trip to Washington, D.C., and she offered them to me not knowing that I had/have a chip addiction. As I looked at her this time, 20+ years later, I felt a whole new gratitude for her... and it had little to do with the mommy snacks I knew she had in her bag.
Our trip to NYC was incredible. From the moment we walked into our hotel room and discovered a gift basket that put the Easter Bunny to serious shame, the trip just got better and better.

We met with a stylist, were allowed to pick something from his suggestions rack, and then went to eat some of the best pasta I've ever eaten. Then we slept above Times Square in a swanky hotel room and woke up to a view of the Hudson River and a day filled with shopping, with trying on beautiful things without the slightest regard for the attached price tags. We dropped hundreds of dollars without a thought and came to adore the women who fit you for bras at Macy's. Then it was off to another extraordinary dinner, this time sushi that literally melted in your mouth, followed by Mamma Mia on Broadway. Sunday was just more of the same upward trajectory. We donned our new threads, headed to a salon and were treated to a facial and a hair experience unlike any either of us has ever had.
Did you know that lurking under this mass of confused waves and supernatural frizz there is supermodel hair? It was too beautiful to be mine, but there it was attached to my head.
We had our makeup done to complete our new looks, and I can't really describe how this whole makeover experience affected me. I haven't felt this good about myself ever. And I haven't seen Heather treating herself so well our entire lives.

I think that's what's most precious about this whole experience. Seeing someone I love dearly reconnect with who she is, beyond who she is to other people, was the best gift of all. I'm so grateful I was able to play some small part in getting her to that place and that I got to see it happen.

Our trip just kept getting better and better and better, and when it finally hit me how wonderfully lucky I am to have won this, how incomprehensibly blessed I am to have such an astounding friendship with someone who is so extraordinary, how delicious my life is, well, when all those realizations finally settled on me during the stillness of a carriage ride through Central Park, I cried. And I have never in my life been more grateful to have Heather at my side than I was in that moment.

The Cure

Here's what I know.

Betsy was born with hip dysplasia that left her with medical bills so long and impossible to pay that my parents, who had three other kids, just started wrapping her up in them and taking her picture. There she is, in a body cast on the couch, and a bill no less than 12 feet long swirls around her. My dad worked full time, and when he got home my mom went to work until 10 or 11 at night. Sometimes he had two jobs. Sometimes after Betsy's surgeries, my dad couldn't stay at the hospital with my mom because he had to get back to those jobs.

Jennifer was diagnosed with CLL in 2005 after having surgery to have her adenoids removed. Fortunately she was employed at a fabulously supportive accounting firm, one that helped her relocate closer to home to pursue chemotherapy and one that gave her time off during her treatments. It was also one that came with incredible health insurance. And it is exactly that health insurance and the chronic nature of her disease that keeps her in that job. She knows her disease will flair up again at some point, she knows that she will need treatment, and she knows that the only way she can get the treatment she needs is to have health insurance. Which means that even though she wants to try a new career, wants to stay home with her future babies, wants to have the life she chooses rather than the one the health insurance industry forces on her, she can't.

Heather has two sons. The older son has a sensory issue of some kind. He has been to therapy to learn how tricks for how to deal with it. Because of this issue, he was traumatized while trying to pottytrain and had to be admitted to the emergency room. Heather is a stay-at-home mom who has worked as a nurse and an insurance assessor. She told me once that when you put bandaids on a patient in the hospital, the patient is billed for the entire box of bandaids even if they only use two. Same thing for gauze. Some thing for fluids. And the sticker price of these drugstore items are hugely inflated because, hey, it's not the person we're charging, it's the insurance... In trying to get her son the intervention that he needs, she has had to hound insurance companies for thousands of dollars. Normally a financial genius with a safety net that makes me jealous, Heather and her family have gone into debt trying to bridge the gap between paying for the therapy and being reimbursed by the insurance company, which sometimes doesn't happen.

Charles and Shannon were living in England one year and they came home for the holidays. Normally they buy traveler's insurance, but this time they forgot. This was the time that Charles would get appendicitis and spend Christmas Day in the hospital. He came home after one day, back to his old self, except now his old self had a $20,000 bill attached to it. With no way to pay it, they went back to their country, where if I was visiting I could have surgery for free, and hoped for the best.

I have lived without insurance at several points in my life, as has Mack, and fortunately my politics allowed me to take advantage of Planned Parenthood and the services they offer, which come with fees based on your most recent pay stubs, my health allowed me to stay alive, and my luck kept me from drowning in debt. I eat pretty healthily, I exercise at least once a week, I maintain my weight within 10 pounds, I do regular breast exams, I take vitamins, but I am not invincible to disease or illness.

Thanks to the representatives who stepped outside of politics and looked at what Americans need, I may not have to be. The United States may just catch up to other first world countries in providing this basic service to our citizens. We may just be able to stop worrying about how we're going to take care of our parents and how we're going to afford having children. We may just start taking responsibility for our own health, which is something that, like it or not, insurance companies do not let us do.

It's going to be collectively expensive if we get it, one of the biggest barriers to the public health option, but it's no more expensive than paying the overinflated costs we're personally paying now. (Insurance for me and Mack was $400+ per month at my last job... imagine if I donated that money instead to universal health care and it didn't matter how sick I or anyone else got!)

This really isn't about politics. It's about people... Betsy, Jen, Heather, Charles, me, Mack, our parents, the babies we love, you. It's completely doable, it's long overdue, it's anti-American to let people die.

Click here to find out how to nudge your congresspeople to be brave and forward-thinking. And here to educate yourself on what's really at stake.