The funeral is today. I don't know what to say, so I'm just going to quote my sister-in-law, Lynn.

I am ONE LUCKY GIRL to have had the best father-in-law in the world. This evening, Leon's dad Bob passed away peacefully after a long, brave battle against COPD. Bob never missed a chance to give his advice or share his outlook on life, make us laugh with his awesomely smart ass comments and fatten us up with his homemade chili, caramels and shakes. He was a great husband, dad and grandpa. I am so fortunate to have known him.

Bob leaves behind eight kids and sixteen grandkids, as well as a faithful and amazing wife. We'll miss the old man. 

There was a show that started in 1984, when I was my daughter's age, called Puttin' On the Hits. I still remember when Alan Fawcett would announce how many points had been given for originality, appearance and lip synch. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llt7h8lc5iA] 

Yes, in the eighties we didn't even require actual singing talent on our competition shows. 

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My daughter made us watch the premiere of The Voice last night. I actually looked up the bios of some of the singers and was surprised to see how hard they had already worked, how far they had already come, but they still needed help to break out of their echo chambers. It seems insane to me that someone who can sing that well was still relatively unknown until last night. Which then made me think how much talent there is floating around in the world and how with each year more babies are born and more technology is created to make creating and sharing easier and easier and easier until there is so much of it I wonder how anyone will ever find my voice in the heap. And how will I find yours?

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As I was watching The Voice, I remembered Puttin' on the Hits and thought about how much higher the bar is now for talent shows. Then I thought about the Olympics and how someone, maybe Bob Costas, said years and years ago full seconds separated the gold, silver and bronze medalist bobsled times and now hundredths of a second decide who the world will celebrate.

Hundredths of a second. 

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As the opportunities to create and speed up and achieve increase exponentially, so does the competition. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that as I evaluate my own appearance, originality and lip synch. There is so much talent in the world, so many stories, all increasing exponentially by the minute.

Beloved and I got gift cards for Christmas from my parents. I dragged Beloved and the little angel into Old Navy at the mall last weekend to see if I could get a pair of skinny jeans that didn't make me look like sausage links (found some, thank you sweetheart cut). Beloved was shocked I would even try to put something from Old Navy on my body because y'all, we are old. Then Beloved insisted we go mall-walking, because the only time we go in the mall is to take the little angel to blow all her Hoggin Craft money on her burgeoning Build-a-Bear collection. 

Around the mall we went, peering in store windows. Finally, we walked out through Sears. We always park by Sears. Nobody is ever in Sears.

"What is with all this slim-fit men's clothing?" Beloved finally said. "Straight pants, slim-fit shirts? What the hell?"

I stopped walking and looked at him. He was totally serious. He was PUT OUT by the slim-fit.

I started laughing. 

BECAUSE NOW HE KNOWS WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE A WOMAN IN ANY STORE, EVER.

Though I had a cold, I was going strong on Monday. I did seven loads of laundry and accomplished a ton on my work to-do list. On Monday night, the little angel ended up in my bed coughing in my ear from 3-6 am. On Tuesday, her cold peaked, and I kept her home from school. On Tuesday night, I finished the second draft of PARKER CLEAVES despite the onset of a sinus headache. On Wednesday, I was sick but not too sick to go for a jog at lunchtime. I thought I might be able to ride out this cold like I have the last few.

On Wednesday night, I took a turn for the worse.

Yesterday was rotten. I worked from the couch. 

This morning, I got the little angel on the bus, emailed my co-workers, and went back to bed. 

My house is filthy. We didn't clean last weekend because of Thanksgiving travel, and then we put up the Christmas tree and scattered glitter and fake pine needles all over everything. Then Beloved went on a business trip on Monday and between being sick and being alone with a cat determined to knock everything off the counters and a kid trailing snotty kleenexes in her wake, I was in survival mode. 

Today, I'm having to admit defeat. I can't clean. I can't work out. I can barely function. I'm in my pajamas hammering away at my to-do list as best I can.

In the past, I might've forced myself to rally and do what I'd planned to do, anyway. That just keeps me sick longer, though. I really want to kick this cold and get on with my life. So I'm going to stay in my pajamas looking like death warmed over and move back to the couch and shut my eyes to the grime and the running shoes and the ironing piled on the dining room table. Sometimes taking care of yourself can be really hard to prioritize, but I'm really going to try, and then maybe next week I can take the world by storm.

The leaves haven't even turned yet, but last night I found myself lying on my daughter's bed with a frowny face.

My husband walked in. "You look upset."

Me: "Yes."

Him: "Should we move out?"

Me: "No. I mean, maybe. But I think it's just me. You moving out might not help, so you should stay."

Him: "Gotcha."

I proceeded to try to explain that it's October and October means cold weather is coming, and I'm at the first revision stage of THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES, which feels like getting all your syllabi on one day and wondering how the fuck you're going to get all that work done in one semester. And maybe I was having a There's No Point to Any of It day, the kind of day where you realize you're just going to have to make the bed again tomorrow and you can be a totally awesome worker and then you'll retire and three years later the entire department will have turned over and someone will ask who the hell made the decision for the border to be goddamn orange and if you do publish books, they'll eventually go out of print, even the ebooks will find a way to go out of print. One of those days.

I felt like when Louis CK tells Conan about that time when you're in traffic and you have the forever empty feeling because it's all for nothing and you're alone, and Conan looks at him like, I'm not sure I want to admit in public that I know exactly what you're talking about. Can someone please hand me a smartphone? I need to check Twitter.

Yeah. I had one of those days yesterday. I'm still trying to shake off that feeling that really nothing I do is important or worth doing and really, I'm pretty sure that's just my fear talking and I should just revise anyway, because that's what you do in order to occupy yourself until you die.

KIDDING.

Sort of. Because even if that's what it is, maybe that's still something worth doing. 

I'm not a big flag-waver. Sometimes I think it's because the flag of the United States of America has been waved from a bully pulpit so many times I've grown weary of it. Sometimes I think it's because it's so often pictured next to oh, say, a gun or a tea bag or someone shouting 'MERICA! while disagreeing with something political that I believe in, as though having an opposing opinion made me less 'MERICAN! than he or she were. 

Late last week, I skimmed an article in The Atlantic that nailed my ambivalence pretty well, and I flagged it (you know I had to go there) for further pondering:

It is one thing to believe that America's history and founding principles are exceptional, and another thing — deluded and profoundly unconservative — to believe that the U.S. is inoculated against acting badly, or is justified in doing things that Americans would condemn if anyone else did them. 

That's it, precisely. I love my country. I was born here, I grew up in its breadbasket and I was raised quite unironically. I believe in a voluntary military, in the three branches of our executive government and even in the checks and balances that have our government temporarily shut down. I believe in the need for freedom of speech even when that freedom gives a voice to someone I deem an idiot. But man. The last few presidential election cycles have been so ugly. The attack ads get worse every time. I didn't agree with the last few military maneuvers. I'm still mad about Guantanomo Bay. The older I get, the more I realize how incredibly ambivalent I am about my country. I love it, but I question its people all the time. I'm very grateful for the right to vote and freedom of speech and really all of my freedoms, and I think the framers of the Constitution were really brilliant in ways they probably didn't even realize.

There just haven't been very many times since we invaded Iraq that I felt like waving a flag. I felt like linking arms with my neighbors. I felt like praying for the health and safe return of our soldiers. I was excited when the guy I voted for got elected, but that's the guy I voted for, not the country itself. There is a difference between one man or one party or even one idea and an entire country, which is where the flag-waving confusion sets in for me. 

Still, deep inside my thirty-nine-year-old self is the six-year-old who believed that America was perfect. That little girl loved the state of Iowa and didn't realize it was considered a fly-over state by some. She earnestly waved her flag for her country and her pom poms for her town's high school and didn't realize how complex the world is. I miss her sometimes. Last Friday, I got to be her again for a few hours because of soccer.

For Beloved's 40th birthday, I got us tickets to the U.S. vs. Jamaica soccer game at Sporting Park in Kansas City, Kansas. I have nothing against Jamaica and neither did anyone there. There just weren't very many Jamaican fans in the stadium, so everyone in the crowd was kind of on the same team, just cheering and happy and ... earnestly and unironically flag-waving. 

And I loved every minute of it. It turns out the soccer was awesome (2-0, US) but the flag-waving was worth the wait. 

USA!

The days float past quickly, benignly. I am bored without being bored. It's not the painful boredom of childhood but the foggier boredom of a hospital stay. I try to tell people what happened in my day, but nothing is really that important, and rehashing it feels unnecessary. It was a day. Pleasant. Nice weather. Yes. I think about watching television, but most television is stupid, and only when I am truly bored does this knowledge really bother me. I look at the covers of magazines when I go to pick up my prescription and know the angle and ending of every article without turning the pages. It's all so predictable. Maybe this is aging? It doesn't hurt so much as annoy me. I binge book after book looking for a new ending. For a surprise.

I am not sad about the boredom, because I know it will end soon. I can remember spending periods like this in my past, and they never last long. I can feel myself floating in it, this nothing-space, when I don't have much to contribute nor do I feel the need to take much in. My days are like the end of a Prince song, or the laser part of a Grateful Dead show, when you realize twenty minutes in that holy shit, it has been twenty minutes and I've just been standing here staring at that tree.

I leave my house only when necessary. I jog the same routes and realize as I'm coming back up my driveway I barely remember turning around at the halfway point. I find myself walking around my kitchen, shuffling items until they slot back in their proper places. We are hovering, the house and I, waiting for something to change. The leaves, maybe, or my mind. Until then, paused.

"Mama, why does heat make you so tired?"

We crossed the street and headed into the art festival. We're heat-hardy, my daughter and I, indiginous to the sultry Midwest summers like goldenrod and cone flowers. The 105-degree temperature didn't stop us from wanting to look at paintings until we hit the pavement, where temperatures had to be even higher. And the humidity, thick like a washcloth, making it hard to breathe.

"I'm not sure, exactly. Maybe so you'll be forced to slow down and it will be harder to give you heat exhaustion. It's probably your body's way of protecting you."

Each step seemed a little harder. The heat wrapped around my body. I could feel the air molecules pressing on my skin, heavy and saturated. I looked over at my daughter. Her pale cheeks had a high flush with beads of sweat hanging above her lip, unable to evaporate in the thick air. 

"I don't feel good," she said.

My head swam. "I don't, either. Let's get out of here."

I had to pull her by the hand the two blocks back to the car. I actually felt a little dizzy as I squealed onto Main Street and directly to the QT, where we stumbled into the delicious air conditioning and gasped for filtered air. We bought a huge bottle of water to share and hung out for a few minutes by the freezers, alive in our skin in the way of extreme temperature relief -- those first few moments when the cold limbs tingle with warmth or the icy air hits hot skin and you think, in that moment, everything is right in the world, there is nothing better than having this need fulfilled, the return to equilibrium.

We piled back into the car and cranked the air conditioning, turning back toward home. 

"My head hurts, Mama." 

I dropped her off at home to cool down and rest, and I drove to the grocery store to get food, finding myself still wandering a little awkwardly amid the rows, my head achy. 

I don't often have extreme reactions to heat, but when I do, I'm reminded I'm a mortal, that life is delicate and beautiful and to be examined while I have the chance. 

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In something less heavy, I reviewed lice prevention products on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews, because that is life I want eradicated.

We leave tonight for Iowa to run the Warrior Dash in honor of Beloved's 40th birthday tomorrow.

Hopefully will have pics on Monday, provided I can find a waterproof disposable camera!