More on Sandwiches and a Near-Pregnancy Experience

So, I finally found a Tulsa sandwich place that had been staring me in the face all along. Bill and Ruth's. They have a mind-boggling assortment of sandwiches, including a three-cheese and avocado one which was all it took to get my stamp of approval. In addition to all the sandwiches, they also have hummus and pita for 99 cents, tabouli, and baklava. Thank goodness, because I was in dire straits (an odd expression, isn't it? How could a strait be dire? And what do straits have to do with anything, really, except as small passageways, which I suppose have some bearing on this story...).

However, Bill and Ruth's is still far enough away from campus that I can't always make it there for lunch. Take this week, for example, when I had CLEP exams scheduled every day over my lunch hour. I was trapped, with Subway as the only lunch place in sight. Well, not quite the only lunch place. There was the vending machine, too. So, for lunch all week, I had a diet mtn. dew, a bag of gardettos, and a package of those little coconut donettes. Vile. I hadn't quite realized how vile, though, until I had my near-pregnancy experience.

Basically, all week I had been experiencing bloating, water retention, incessant urges to pee, and that really annoying tickling sensation in your bladder that you get sometimes and just won't go away. It was really the tickling that got to me. I was getting desperate and considering my medical options, when someone suggested that I think back on any recent dietary changes. I concluded that perhaps the mtn. dew was the culprit, since I almost never drink soda and really am not used to regular caffeine intake.

I didn't realize the full import of my situation, however, until after I went to the bathroom yesterday afternoon and returned, as they say, some 5 pounds lighter. I mean, this was massive. And it occured to me that this was the first time in several days, and that the tickling sensation had mostly vanished. A couple more trips later that day, and I was cured, by God.

I had been pregnant with poop.

Viking Runes, Ouachita National Forest, and Indian Burial Grounds

There are lots of people who enjoy being tourists in other countries and in other parts of their own countries, but too often we forget the fantastic tourism opportunities available to us in our own cities and states. I'm convinced that part of the secret to enjoying wherever you are (even if it's in Tulsa), is to act like a tourist whenever possible.

In Oklahoma, for instance, just this last weekend, Matt and I went for a drive in the Ouachita National Forest, scoping out suitable campsites along a scenic highway in the Ozarks. The problem with finding suitable campsites in OK, I find, is that typically you pull into a parking lot, and there are rows of little squares of asphalt that are called "campsites". No view - just the parking lot and the paved campsite. For this reason, although the view at Queen Wilhelmina lodge)is excellent (originally a Dutch-run hotel on scenic route 88/1 through the Ozarks, just over on the AK side), the Wilhelmina campgrounds are unsatisfactory, in my opinion.

We pressed on, exploring the OK side of Talimena Drive, and discovered Winding Stair campgrounds. Similar problem - campsites a bit, well, too much like camping in a parking lot (perhaps I'm spoiled by hiking the Appalachians to the more remote campsites where you can occasionally catch a glimpse of the Aurora Borealis, if you're very, very lucky), but there were some campsites at the ridge's edge with beautiful views. Additionally, even though the sites were a bit close together for my liking, not a single other person had pitched a tent there. Not sure why this was - light rain showers on and off that weekend? Okies prefer paved campsites? Air conditioning?

Another odd thing about the scenic drive was that the whole thing went along a ridge, so the view was actually obscured by trees from the road itself, and you had to pull off at the many "scenic vistas" peppering the highway in order to see anything.

Anyway, we had noticed on our drive down from Tulsa signs with intriguing things written on them: "Heavener Runestone )" and "Spiro Mounds", for example. I was determined to investigate these locations further on our drive back, so after a filling dinner at the Southern Belle, a train car-turned-diner in Heavener, OK (great strawberry pie), we proceeded to the park which promised us a view of a 12 foot tall Viking runestone, carved somewhere between 600 and 900 A.D. with the words "Glome's Valley". Displayed next to this were two other runestones, and the note that there are only 5 runestones remaining in Oklahoma, but that many others were purportedly destroyed in the earlier part of the 1900's. The plaque notes that it is a shame no one thought to copy down the inscriptions before destroying them. It was quite impressive, worth seeing - and makes Christopher Columbus's discovery of the "New World" a bit less impressive.

Watch out for the hornets' nests by the exit, though, and the precariously-placed, heavy-looking slabs of shale dangerously overhanging an area where the public is lured in to read little plackets about a rumored Viking cave in the area, now obscured by...what else...falling rock. And, if you are reading said placket, much like the rock overhanging your head. Right at this moment.

Spiro Mounds- an archeological site containing Indian burial mounds from the 800's through the 1400's, long over-grown with grass, and looted before archeologists got to them in the 1930's - was a bit disappointing, as we arrived about an hour after closing of the interpretive center. We climbed over the wall surrounding the mounds, though, and toured surreptitiously about the path, taking a few pictures.

My point, of course, is that there are many fabulous things to be seen in your home state. Maybe even Vikings. Go and find them. Be a tourist. Even if it involves wearing a silly hat (I am partial to the foam Statue of Liberty hats shown here: http://www.atlaspen.com/static/products/413312.php?pv=1&item=413312.

Sandwiches, sandwiches, and Sandwich Makers

Too few people take genuine pride in crafting a sandwich. I refer you to the 5th book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy for the ideal sandwich maker attitude - the passage where Arthur Dent is stranded on an alien planet, happily perfecting his craft as a Sandwich Maker:

Today he was just making ordinary sandwiches, if such delicacies, so lovingly crafted, could ever be called ordinary. Today his assistant was away so the Sandwich Maker was applying his own garnish, which he was happy to do. He was happy with just about everything, in fact. He sliced, he sang. He flipped each slice of meat neatly onto a slice of bread, trimmed it, and assembled all the trimmings into their jigsaw. A little salad, a little sauce, another slice of bread, another sandwich, another verse of "Yellow Submarine".

This is exactly the attitude that is missing in today's sandwich makers (notice that I use a lowercase "s" and "m" in naming them) - the loving attitude - the sense that you are creating a delicacy. The excitement of lunchtime.

I used to enjoy Subway sandwiches, but that was before I had had well-crafted Sandwiches, such as the one at Panera (and usually I shun Panera as the Starbucks of sandwich shops) with turkey, bacon, and smoked gouda. Any Sandwich with smoked gouda has got to get high marks automatically, though. It's almost like cheating.

There is also an EXCELLENT Sandwich for a much better value, price-wise, at the Java Alley in the Student Union of OSU in Stillwater. If you are ever there, don't bother with Eskimo Joe's (overrated, and with a rather objectionable name, to boot, in a state where people are sensitive about calling sports teams names like the "Chiefs" and the "Braves"); go straight to the Sandwich place in the Student Union. From the first bite of your Sandwich, you will be able to see that these are people who take pride in their Sandwiches.

I will begin by describing my two favorite Sandwiches. I would have moved on to other Sandwiches, but I enjoyed these two so much that I alternated between the two of them for an entire semester. Coincidentally, they were also the cheapest Sandwiches. One thing about the Sandwich place is that they understand the importance of the Sauce. They are the only place I have found that has flavored mayonnaises - blue cheese flavored, and pesto-black olive flavored. The pesto-black olive flavored mayo, in particular, is DELISH. I have it on their three cheese and tomato sandwich with italian bread warm and tender, three beefy slices of fresh, different-flavored cheeses, and two plump tomato slices. Excellent. Nothing fancy, but beautiful in its simplicity - something like the ordinary sandwich Arthur Dent was making in HGTTG, no doubt. Lovingly made, for $1.99. You can't get cheese slices like that at Subway.

My other favorite Sandwich at this place is a hummus (spelled interestingly on their receipts as humas, almost a terrorist sandwich) and pita sandwich. Creamy, delicately flavored hummus, lightly toasted pita, shredded carrots, two cucumbers, and a cloud of sprouts. Again, lovingly and precisely made, for $2.50.

Now that I am on the Tulsa campus of OSU, I find that the thing I miss the most is the Sandwiches. We have only Subway on campus, and now my lunch desires are frustrated, my lunchtime zest is wilted, my sandwiches are disappointing. My quest is to find just one truly excellent sandwich place in downtown Tulsa, and I will report to you my findings, if they are worthy. Oh, for a Sandwich Maker!!

One further note about sandwiches: there are not nearly enough sandwiches made with avocado. If you are a Sandwich Maker, please do something about this. Thank you.

Rabbit reviews

Warning: This post contains adult material, because I am reviewing vibrators.

As you may know, the "rabbit" style vibrator is a very popular one. In addition to the obligatory vibrating shaft, rabbit vibrators also have a separately-powered attachment on the shaft that looks like two rabbit ears. This is used, obviously, for external stimulation (ahem).

For no apparent reason that I can think of, many of them also have these rotating beads about halfway up the shaft. This gives you the option of feeling as though you have inserted an electric mixer into your innards which you can run at different speeds, creating the illusion of having a wildly upset, er, stomach. No, thanks.

Anyway, my very first vibrator was the Techno Rabbit, of Sex and the City fame (Samantha's favorite, and for good reason). It was satisfactory in every way. The controls were at the base of the shaft, and you could increase speeds gradually through a wide range of speeds.

The Techno Rabbit was an $80 birthday present to myself. Although I thought we would grow old together, it was stolen after we had been together barely a year, under circumstances which I will not go into at this time. (Sob) I have been trying to find a replacement ever since.

My next vibrator was the Jack Rabbit, which was vastly inferior to the Techno Rabbit. Same basic setup, except that the controls were separate from the actual vibrator, so you had to handle two separate things at once, taxing the co-ordination. Eventually, some of the connecting wires developed a highly inconvenient short in them, and had to be held just so.

Unfortunately, the resident sex toy shop in Tulsa is rather limited and does not carry the Techno Rabbit. Instead, I now have the Rampant Rabbit, which is again vastly inferior to the Techno Rabbit. The controls are in the base; however, even though the packaging promises a variety of different speeds, it has two: high and low. Basically, this leads to extreme discomfort. You can't shift from low to high in one step, or you end up hurting yourself. Trust me. I leave it to your imagination. So I now have a vibrating companion reminiscent of a clumsy, inept, adolescent boyfriend. Clearly, this is no good. I'll keep trying to reach a compromise of some sort with the Rampant Rabbit, but I have the feeling that I will eventually have to track down my first love, the Techno Rabbit.

Unfortunately, you can't return these things.

Note to vibrator salespersons: You really need to be enthusiastic and informed about your product, people. I got the Techno Rabbit on the salesperson's recommendation, and he earned my steadfast devotion, or at least my deeply-felt thanks. And he was male. The salesperson in Tulsa was female, so you'd think she'd be a bit better informed about these things. Bewildered by the vast array of vibrators, I asked for her recommendation, and she was distinctly unenthusiastic. Unexcusable. If you're not carrying a VIBRATOR that you can get excited about, then you should obviously throw out your existing inventory (or put it on sale for 75% off and let your customers review it) and replace it with the Techno Rabbit.

Amusing side story about vibrators and credit card fraud: The first time I bought a vibrator, it was at a sex toy store in CT. This was my first purchase from such an establishment, and I had had problems with credit card fraud earlier that year, so my credit card reps were apparently thoughtfully keeping an eye on my account. I was living with my grandmother at the time, so they called her to tell her that they had some concerns about my account - namely, that they thought someone else had been using my card. Fortunately, they didn't give her the full details, although why they even told her that much is beyond me. She was an exceptionally nosy person, though, and often played the innocent old lady card :-) I had to call up my credit card company and thank them but politely assure them that, yes, I was the one who had bought the vibrator.

Jessica Simpson has my dress.

I got this fantastic "Mexican Wedding Dress" from eBay a couple of months ago that I wore to my brother's wedding (to rave reviews from, like, everyone). It's a white, halter-neck Marilyn-Monroeish thing with a handkerchief hemline, kind of gauzy, with embroidered flowers and crochet around the waist that you can see through. I wore it with a pair of nude-colored, really cute heeled sandals that I had gotten last summer in Costa Rica. It was only about $20. (I'll try to come up with a picture later, but here's a link to one on eBay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5407320528&category=63861&ssPageName=WDVW&rd=1

Anyway, I saw a picture of Jessica Simpson wearing a similar dress in blue in US Weekly. I like Jessica Simpson (cute clothes, usually, and GREAT name :-), but I have to report that people liked my dress better. That, I suppose, is my point. That, and you should totally go to eBay ASAP and get yourself one of these dresses, because they are fantastic.

Weddings, Vasectomies, and Other Relationship Issues

My little brother got married last weekend, and the wedding was good. He married the daughter of my 5th grade science teacher, who is one of my favorite teachers (although, to be fair, I have lots of favorite teachers. I pretty much liked them all.) This particular teacher, though, did cow eyeball tosses and introduced me to my very first computer games: Transylvania and Oregon Trail. I also credit him with making me comfortable with math in the beginning (my first real teacher after my mother, that is, to do so). For geometry, I had Mr. Davidson in high school, and for algebra, I had Ms. Woo, also in high school. Perhaps the reason I never warmed up to calculus much was that I had lackluster math teachers in college. I digress, though. Basically, I am happy for my brother, and happy for me, since we just picked up another large, nerdy family with four kids. As I said at the wedding, I am not so much losing a brother as gaining a science teacher.

A lot of people have been getting married lately. A few years ago, I'd have said they were all nuts. A year ago, I'd have said, "Why bother"? Now, though, it sounds like a good idea to me. Starting back with my grandmother's funeral in February, which was barely preceded by the death of my college roommate's college boyfriend and fiance, I all of a sudden decided that I felt grown-up and adult enough for marriage, responsibility, and commitment. It wasn't a gradual thing, but a revelation, like the flipping of a switch. Since family is very important to me, I want to be with someone who is actually part of the family. When someone in my family dies, I want it to be his loss, too. And when someone marries into my family, I want it to be his gain. I realized, basically, that life is pretty short, and so, therefore, is marriage. And if you can't decide that you want to spend that time with your favorite person, you were probably undecided in the last election, too, and there is no hope for you.

And by you, I mean, of course, Matt. Amidst funeral arrangements last February, I told him that I thought marriage was a good idea. I didn't think about it much after that until a couple of weeks ago, after a short conversation about vasectomies with my little sister. I'll spare you the details, but during the conversation, it dawned on me that there was absolutely no commitment in my relationship, and I wasn't even sure how Matt felt about me and commitment and our relationship.

Plus, it bugged me that my little brother was stupid enough to optimistically promise marriage and the rest of his life to some little 21-year-old, and Matt and I, after having been together for 6 years, weren't even close to doing this. It also bugs me that possibly this new fixation on marriage has something to do with my environment here in the religious South, close to my family. Is this really what I want, or just what other people want?

Anyway, we had the talk, which ended completely unsatisfactorily, and I realized that perhaps I didn't want marriage to someone who was apparently so ambivalent about me and our relationship, and about sex in general. I am now in relationship limbo, and I'm not sure what to do about it just yet.

Egg bombs, more delivery room stories, and fireworks

Another excellent weekend. Saw War of the Worlds and Batman returns, shot off fireworks, made deviled eggs, had champagne & lobster bisque brunch on Sunday (highly, highly recommended if you're ever in Tulsa -- Bourbon Street Cafe at 81st and Lewis), and played pool volleyball with a bunch of doctors.

What was I doing with a bunch of doctors, you ask? Well, it seems that in my program, it is popular for English majors to pair off with doctors (not a bad pairing - someone has to support the English majors, I guess). Since I know the English teachers from class, I know the doctors by default, as most of the English social events involve doctors. Unfortunately, if you go to these doctor parties, an orchestra of pagers goes off pretty much non-stop throughout the evening/afternoon/morning/whatever.

These events are often a source of useful and interesting information, since I know little to nothing about medicine. In the interest of becoming better informed about pregnancy and delivery, I asked about poop, and strange pregnancy stories in general. The doctors confirmed that, yes, poop is pretty common in the delivery room, as is pee. They seemed unfazed by the whole thing, and claimed that it's a natural part of giving birth, which is generally undignified, anyway, so why does a little poop matter?

What they seemed most concerned about, actually, was water breakage. I guess sometimes you get a woman in whose water hasn't broken yet, and when she's pushing, it can explode all over the place, including in people's faces. (Side note: my English teacher friend whose husband is a doctor says that his gym sneakers were absolutely covered in blood and other fluids from the week he spent during his residency in the delivery room) Other embarassing water breaking moments: in pregnancy, since there's a lot of pressure on the lower abdomen, some women pee all over themselves and think their water has broken. :-O

One doctor also reported a woman of large size who came into the emergency room after having delivered a baby into one leg of her trousers (didn't realize she was pregnant??)

Other notes from the weekend:

I discovered that I can go back on the Lipitor, which I had previously gone off of because I had heard rumors that you weren't supposed to drink while on it.

In Tulsa, even though they outlawed gay marriage to protect us, you can buy these amazingly huge explosive fireworks that could easily blow off your arm, and the clearly unqualified are allowed to shoot them off as they choose. You don't even have to be over 18. Matt went out of his head with joy at being in a state where you're allowed to completely disregard safety, and bought a huge carload full of them (we used to have to drive all the way to Ohio (from CT) in order to buy relatively unexciting explosives for the 4th). For the first time in my life, I was obliged to run from the police like a guilty 10 year old when we set them off too close to an apartment complex and cracked someone's window with the noise and power of the explosion.

If you put an egg in the microwave, it can explode with a large amount of force. Very, very dangerous. Do not try this ever.