Tuesday’s hike was getting a little long, or thus spaketh my blisters, when I spotted the largest paw print I’d ever seen in my life. Along with it’s three brothers. The prints were spread out across a stride bigger than my entire person. The front paw alone rivaled the size of my head.

Uh-oh.

I immediately started singing some made-up song, something along the lines of “Hello, bear, don’t eat me please,” and called to the dog. For the life of me, I couldn’t see a second set, though the human footprints ahead were pretty thick. Luckily, I couldn’t see the bear, either, though I made the executive decision to turn around as quickly as I could and get the hell out of the big guy’s backyard. “Leaving now, bear, please don’t eat me, la, la, la, la, la….”

I’ve seen lion tracks before, and actual mountain lions. But I’ve never in my life seen four prints the size of a small dinner plate, apiece. Somehow, seeing evidence of a gigantic (and, I imagined, man-eating) bear scared the crap out of me in a way a lion never could. I still have some sense of cougars as magical creatures. As if the lion I saw was there to protect me. No way could I ever think that about a refrigerator-sized bear. I would’ve been an appetizer.

In the back of my mind, I harbor a bigger fear than getting eaten by bears. I worry that my ability to spot animal tracks might mean the end to any chance of returning to an urban center of civilization.  I want to be a city girl, I am a city girl, and I am increasingly becoming country-fied.  I suppose I could view my Pocohontas skills as insurance that I return. Brooklyn woman spot bear tracks, Brooklyn woman leave woods and therefore live to return home to the mother ship.

Of course, I also have enough Brooklyn in me to plan a hike back up there over the weekend.

Maybe I’ll bring a camera and win some National Geographic contest. (A triptych: Here’s me. Here’s the bear. Here’s me losing my left leg to its oddly-powerful bite.) We’ll see what my blisters say. “Tempting fate, bear, la, la, la….”

On Wednesday, the wind went wild. Only a few hours after Barack Obama was elected president, the winds of change blew through Wyoming.

Yes, there are indubitably more scientific explanations for the weather event, but this is my blog, and I’m sticking to my own brand of meteorology….

We lost some trees (read: gained some firewood) and had to track a couple garbage cans down the street. The wind kept it up all night long, raging against anything that dared stand in its way. My house dared, and it creaked with the effort all night long. A successful effort, it pleases me to report. 

By Thursday, the air was relatively still, again.

It felt, for all the world, like some despotic monster raging against the loss of a political dynasty.

I cried last night when I heard the news. It still seems too good to be true–I guess I’m shellshocked after the last eight years. I keep expecting bad news around the corner. I want so badly to believe that we are this ready, but I can’t let my shoulders drop. I’m tense. What if all this gets taken away? I suppose it will have to be good enough that it happened in the first place.

Our first black President.

Damn. I’m crying again.

After a quarter of my life under the worst administration in history, I finally feel represented. As trite as it may be by now, I am hopeful. We have a leader who can speak well, decide his own policies, and offer a voice for people who never had one in America before.

At the risk of sounding just like every other wide-eyed liberal, I’ll stop here. And cry some more.

It takes a decent amount of feeling badly to get me to go to a doctor. The degree of badness required isn’t equal, body-part-wise, either. A week with an upper respiratory infection is plenty. My stomach–well, that remains to be seen. Because the bad feelings I was left with after the office visit were worse than what I’d come in with.

To start off with, there are no more than a half-dozen gastroenterologists in my insurance network. The only one within 200 miles of me doesn’t “do” office visits. You have to meet with his nurse practitioner. So I met with the nurse practitioner. She asked me maybe five questions about my medical history, then had me describe my symptoms. I did so. From that, she determined that I need an endoscopy, a colonoscopy, and biopsies of every digestive organ.

Really?

The nurse never took my temp, or blood pressure. I’d been running a fever all week. Now, I’m no medical professional, but wouldn’t that be important to suss out? Also, how can you prescribe the appropriate anaesthetic without determining if I have a heart condition?

I called the office the next day to find out how much this was going to cost me. The doctor’s fees alone were more than $3,000. Then I was told to expect separate bills from the surgical center, the anaesthesiologist, the lab and the pathologist. Five bills in all. It’s looking like at least an $8,000 fee. For the doctor’s CYA.

I cancelled the appointment yesterday. My own diagnostic skillls said it’s a gastro-racket. I can’t see throwing money at the problem without good odds of a diagnosis. 

So my belly is still funky, but my head and my heart are in tandem. And my wallet is eternally grateful.

In the author’s own confessional vein, I must admit: I don’t understand Roth’s allure. At all. I’ve got 25 pages left in his latest, Indignation, and by gum the only thing keeping me on task is the promise that the main character dies young. This reveal comes courtesy of the character himself. Yes, the young man is in fact narrating the story of his teenage life from the grave.

It didn’t work in American Beauty and it doesn’t work here.

What amazes me most about this “technique” is not that a man best known for writing about masturbation would use it in the first place. Obviously, Roth is used to hooky premises. Rather, what really rankles is that the book been so well reviewed! Marcus Messner is a bore and an egotist. Yet another Zuckerman-esque mirror image of the author himself. What about this young man–aside from the fact that his life will be cut short (mercifully, for readers)–is supposed to draw me in? 

My criticisms have been met with interesting responses. I’ve been told the equivalent of “You’re not Jewish. You can’t understand.” Or “You won’t appreciate it without a penis.” Ah, so, with a circumcized penis I’d say it smacks of brilliance. Without the requisite reading “tool,” all I see in Roth’s books is bad writing.

I’d be tempted to let it go at that, if I hadn’t been so affected by another circumcized teen male in literature: Holden Caulfield. Now here’s an equally confused, sexually inexperienced, philosophically floundering, prideful kid. Yet he’s endearing. And the world surrounding him is worth wasting time on/in/around. Salinger may have dropped out of society, but he didn’t leave Philip Roth his crown.  

I’ll plow through the remaining pages of Roth I have left, all the while congratulating myself for taking it out of the library–heaven knows what I’d do with it on my shelf. (Speaking of which: any ideas on the choice of cover “art?” The Irish flag? Meaning what, exactly?) Once I’m done with this novel, though. I’m done with Roth in his whining entirety.

Sorry, Nathan Zuckerman, but life is too short for your trials and tribulations. Today may be the first day of the rest of my Roth-free life. A perfect day, in fact, for bananafish.

Mathematically, connectedness is easy to achieve in a topological space. A graph is said to be connected if each pair of vertices share a path. In human terms, however, our life paths are far removed from each other. Even if we meet up at certain points, few of us would say we truly “connect” with many people.

It seems that I’m spending too much time on networking sites, pretending it’s possible to go back in time. It’s addictive: seeking out posts, comments, feedback, sending out feelers, acting like it’s possible to circle the wagons again. The great lie, as I see it, is in pretending that everything old can be new again.  All the good old times? They’re all there! While any regrets, guilt, past harms, fears and idiocy are erased by the appearance of an acquaintance’s avatar on my profile.  If whatsisname agrees to be my virtual friend, then I couldn’t have done anything tooooo bad in my darker days. Right?

As soon as I type the facebook web address into my browser, I am at once in elementary school, junior high, high school, college, grad school, and every one of the (ahem) bakers’ dozen years since. I am every person I have been. For a few minutes, I can pretend that it’s possible to throw a party with past, present and future friends. And be witty, charming, and desirable to them all.

Mathematically, it’s a simple truth to assign the term connectedness to two objects. In Wyoming, I find it difficult to meet anyone worth having lunch with. Refreshing my web page won’t help me through the reality of being very much alone in my outspoken, flighty atheism in a hardworking, Christian ranching community. My paths cross with several people every day. I connect with no one.

But what do I know? The last math class I took was calc in high school. My checkbook isn’t exactly a paragon of mathematical precision. And heaven knows, I use a machine to perform every basic numerical function that isn’t the nine times table. (For that, I still use my hands.)  Maybe even math is harder than it seems. Maybe it’s hard to connect in any form.

There’s something to be said for dreary day jobs:  If nothing else, they teach fortitude. And patience. And strength. Believe me, on days like today, it takes every ounce of energy I have not to wipe my hard drive and just walk out the door. Here’s to hoping I am strong enough to sit still. For the next two hours I will break the monotony by trudging from desk to copy room to kitchen, pouring yet another glass of water, and resuming my brain-dead slump, with my back to passersby. With any luck, the water will run right through me and I will have an excuse to use the restroom.

When the clock clicks over to 5:00 and I’m still here, I will claim it as a major victory.

Seriously, some days I think intelligence ought to be treated like a disability. Just as the stalls are fitted with handrails for wheelchair-bound employees, desks should come with logic puzzles that must be solved correctly in order for you to log into your computer. Every half-hour another one will pop up–in varying degrees of difficulty. If you hire someone with a brain, you should be forced to feed it. Asking a smart person to perform a rote task is like putting the coffee all way to the back in the top cabinet and wondering why the man with no legs feels sleepy.

One day I won’t need to drive 25 miles to pretend I’m not weighing my career options as I stare out the window: homicide, suicide, death by cop…homicide, suicide, fuck it. I can do more than this. I already do–four or five nights a week, I get at least 2 blissful hours of writing time. To pretend that my gray matter matters.

’til then: I’ve got another 8 ounces of water waiting….

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to surmise which box I’ll be checking on November 4th. Approximately thirty seconds after meeting me, my politics become obvious. Most McCain supporters don’t dress like I do. Give me another minute to open my mouth, and there’s no doubt at all. I don’t mind wearing my political heart on my sleeve. I prefer my news media, however, to be unbiased.

For months, the Wall Street Journal has been pushing their liberal election agenda. It feels odd to me to be so affected by a point of view that I honestly agree with. But the source is wrong. I think the WSJ should give equal coverage to the candidates. They don’t pretend to. Thoughout the campaign, the rare McCain article was nearly always accompanied by an unflattering picture. They’d shoot top-down, emphasizing his heavy jowls. The pictures they chose to print of Obama were shot straight-on, or from below.

I only had a few photography classes, but even I know this kingmaking technique.

Today’s article was the worst, however: an “expose” of John McCain’s slaveowning forefathers, and the line of African Americans descended from that plantation. Above the fold. How much more obvious does it get when you smear a candidate with slavery in the first election with an African American candidate on the opposing side?

It doesn’t change my vote. But it will doubtless influence others. Not what I consider the best journalistic ethics. Whatever happened to straight shooting and fact checking? I guess Murdoch’s influence is already in play….

There’s something in me that, since I was a very small child, has rebelled against the idea of joining in with the crowd. I don’t think my logic follows the oft-quoted Groucho Marx “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member,” either. My tendency isn’t self-deprecating, but suspicious. Any club should be thankful to have me as a member. But actually join one? I would prefer not to.

My naysaying streak extends from small rebellions, such as “I’m going to wear jeans on Thursday not casual Friday” to “religion is silly.” I can take it even further, mercilessly criticizing those who have the gall to impose their sheepish beliefs on the populace. This is something I’ve gotten flak for recently, and while I invite anyone who feels “sick for two days” after reading my blog to kindly never log on again, it has also made me consider that maybe I could stand to be a tad more generous. After all, if Jesus Christ did return to earth, there’s no sense in my standing around making fun of the holes in his hands. “Who does this guy think he is? Hey, buddy, what’s with the Birkenstocks….”

I certainly am not proud to be an American, these days, but I have to say: I’m not willing to drop out and stop paying taxes, either. I like my libraries, my paved roads. My (lipservice?) freedom to worship what I will or won’t. Above all, I like that I can keep to myself–a right that I preserved by moving to the least populated state of the nation.

I wonder if the world’s financial markets would’ve been as hard hit if the rest of the developed world had chosen, instead of following the (U.S.A.) leader, to write their own economic rules. To break out from the fold–creating their own market models. As is, we have no safety in numbers at all, only a monster credit nightmare that may not go away in my lifetime.

While it’s a bit officious to justify my cutting sarcasm by saying “if we all walked to the beat of our own drums, none of this would’ve happened” it does seem to be a tiny bit true. Maybe I don’t need to cut so deeply, but honesty doesn’t always feel good. We’re broke and we’re getting broker. We’re religious and getting religious-er. Coincidence?

It’s my truth: cruel, neurotic and unpatriotic though it may be.

As the economy tanks and our country bankrupts itself beyond repair, I find myself divided between two camps: the vociferous gloom-and-doomers and the “hey what’s on TV tonight” types. I have elements of both personalities, and they’re warring with each other. The war comes down to this: Do I want to be a hawk, following the news at every soundbite? Or an ostrich, burying my head in the sand?

The minutes, hours, days, weeks, months following 9-11 found me glued to my TV, plowing through newspapers, eyes wide, mind blank for the filling. Now here we go again with another crisis, a real one, and I don’t think I can perform the surgery required to open my heart up to the terror. Not again. Fear creeps in with awareness–purposeful journalistic techniques–and I find it hard to exorcise the pure panic from my nervous system. I don’t have an instantaneous switch for “calm down.”

Not that reading two tributes to Paul Newman: (the airbrushed People cover article and the Entertainment Weekly version, in which he wears the same shirt but about 20 years more wrinkles) will make the economy pick up, or my country any less in ruins. But it might just save me from freaking out about it for another hour.

Today I will pick and choose my news sources and avoid shouting about the end of the world from the rooftoops. Ostrich? Maybe. But my hawk is skittish, still.