This is what karma looks like

A year ago I wrote a story about injuries I was jealous of and a day later I ran into a wall and my chin was navy for a month. Here's the story anyway because now I have the world's healthiest chin again.

Things I'm jealous of:

SCARS.

I wish I scarred easier. Nothing makes me more jealous than someone pointing casually to a part of their body that tells more of a story than the kind of stories my body tells: “Good morning I am a shoulder.”

My sister has a scar on her forehead because she ran into a kitchen chair as a child. And a few years ago I had to have a test done where a doctor pulled a slice of bone out of my back through a giant syringe and I have no physical proof to back up this story besides a hospital bill, because the cut disappeared hours later.

Some people walk into chairs and get to celebrate it for the rest of their lives, I could spend a year juggling chainsaws in South Asia and no one would believe it, maybe even someday I would forget it had happened. “South Asia,” I would say, “Now there’s a place I’ve always wanted to go.” I wish I scarred easier.

SUNBURNS.

I wish I sunburned easier. Nothing makes me more jealous than people who get to enjoy the memory of sunlight days after they return indoors, peeling off pieces of their skin in long, clear strips like pubescent snakes.

One summer when he was little my brother spent too much time outdoors with no UV protection and for days he couldn’t wear a shirt and would sit on a stool in the kitchen, feverish and hunched over from pain. His skin was bright red and shiny from the aloe vera and his bones poked out and he looked like an injured demon playing Gameboy and eating corn chips.

Once I thought I had a freckle but it was actually a speck of chocolate. The only time my skin has changed color was when I forgot to wash my new dark-wash jeans, and my legs turned navy from the dye. I wish I sunburned easier.

BLUSHING.

I wish I blushed easier. Nothing makes me more jealous than people whose faces glow when they exercise, like lightbulbs powered only by soccer, tennis, and chasing the bus.

My friend Katie can’t keep any secrets because she turns bright pink whenever you ask her anything. In high school we always knew who Katie had a crush on and who was having a surprise party and what was for lunch because her face would switch from peach to apple to cherry; she was like a 14-year-old lie-detector test. If Katie were a lie-detector test I would be every machine besides a lie-detector test, never changing, always giving the same non-blushing answer. I am an electric sandwich maker, a can opener, a broken alarm clock.

Once I bought a brand of blush so expensive it was like applying quarters to my face every morning, but my cheeks still look less like roses and more like rug burns and no one was fooled. I wish I blushed easier.

BRUISES.

I wish I bruised easier. Nothing makes me more jealous than someone rolling up their jeans and showing off a giant swollen mark on their shin “Look what happened on my bus ride yesterday.”

Last week while getting off the bus I yelled “THANKS!” to the driver because I’m working on being polite when I feel shy and then, once I had all eyes on me, I stepped off the bus, misjudged the distance to the ground and fell shoulders-first into a puddle while three tied-up dogs watched. It hurt a lot, and I can roll up my jeans and talk about it, but there’s nothing to show. I wish I bruised easier.

Mothers Day however many days late

Lately my hair has been getting longer on one side than on the other. I think it's because I sit by a window but other people said it was because I did a bad job cutting it.

Everyone says I should get it cut by a professional hairstylist but the problem is my hair acts more like a liquid or a gas than a solid - it fills whatever space it's given so the size and shape and texture and molecular breakdown depend on the day. It seems more like a job for a scientist than a hairstylist.

I went to a professional anyway. I brought this list of things I wanted changed:

I DON'T WANT TO LOOK LIKE: Someone who owns a minivan, a child under the age of six, someone who doesn't shave, a talk show host, or a drug addict.

I DO WANT TO LOOK LIKE: Someone you would be fine with sitting by on the bus.

My hairstylist said that was pretty helpful. Feel free to copy/paste that and bring it to your next haircut.

My hairstylist has cut John C Reilly's hair before. What are the odds? John C Reilly sounds like someone I would love to meet.

My hairstylist says that since my hair is closer to chinchilla fur than human hair, hair products are all going to be pretty hopeless so should just mat it down with a generous amount of hand lotion every morning until it's small enough that I can walk through doorways.

"Any brand of hand lotion. But really massage it in," she said. "Your hair's going to fight it."

Considering my other haircuts have been zero dollars and this haircut was many dollars I thought it would look pretty good but instead I look like a bombshell. It's incredible how great my hair looks. It looks so small.

I am smiling in this photo but this is important: the smile is for MY MOM'S EYES ONLY because she hates that I don't smile in photos. But look at the haircut part - does this look like the hair of a five-year-old van-driving drug-addict talk show host? Definitely not as much as it did a week ago.

I'm out of chinchilla photos but check out these rats playing instruments:

And sit by me on the bus, this seat's totally available. I'm just a friendly-looking girl who's real into rats.

Your heart will beat 150 times while you read this

I hate everything about going to the doctor except a few things, and one of those things is getting my heart rate measured. I love getting my heart rate measured.

The average human heart beats 60-100 times per minute at rest. The whole time you’ve been reading this your heart has been beating, it’s beating while you sleep and while you shower, and while you listen to your favorite song or shop online.

At a doctor’s appointment last year I found out my heart beats 55 times per minute at rest, which the doctor said was very impressive, the rate of a marathon runner or a half decent Olympic athlete. Lately I've been running even more and yesterday at the doctor took my pulse and go to the next line:

47 beats per minute! That’s what my resting heart rate is.

Look at all this chart do you even see 47? I don’t. But my eyes aren’t that strong, it’s my heart that’s super strong. According to this chart it's even better than EXCEL'T.

When I was growing up my heart wasn't super strong, it was full of holes. Murmurs is the word for heart holes, it probably comes from the whispering sound of blood slipping out of your heart every second but I'm not sure. I got my heart holes when I was eight, as a side effect of Rheumatic Fever, which I got because I had strep and didn’t do anything about it.

There were five kids in my family, and complaining about feeling sick seemed like an annoying thing to do. I thought "not a big deal, this seems like something I can sort of handle myself" which is a dangerous thought I've had hundreds of times. It's the type of thought that puts you in a hospital with a disease people usually only get in Little House on the Prairie. It's how my heart got full of holes.

On the way home from the hospital my dad decided to take me to McDonald's. Either he thought I was so brave I deserved it, or he figured that my new sponge-like heart condition would make transfats just sort of float through it like gentle rain. The gentle rain theory seems the most likely. Because he didn’t make a big show of it, we just went through the drive-through and ordered a Happy Meal, and the McDonald’s employee who couldn’t see me in the backseat, asked if it was for a boy or a girl.

My dad and I pondered this question while we waited at the second window.

The internet is amazing because I searched "glitter nugget" and found this.

“I bet there are two different toys you can get, and one's for boys and one's for girls,” I said. I was hoping I was wrong and it was actually two different types of McNugget dipping sauces, a glitter sauce for girls and one with crunchy peanut pieces for boys, and suddenly I was starving for glitter sauce even though seconds ago I had never imagined such a thing existed. 

My dad also hoped my toy theory was wrong, he said there was no such thing as toys for boys and toys for girls. My parents were strict about this growing up, we owned only gender-neutral blankets, toys, and books. And clothes, as babies we wore as much green and yellow as newborn die-hard Packer fans or Oregon State fans GO DUCKS. And probably a few other teams but I don't know that much about sports because I'm a girl.

Our parents reminded us all the time: other families thought boys and girls were different but other families were wrong. There are boys and there are girls but on the inside, our hearts are all the same. Except mine, my heart was full of holes.

Ten years and maybe two trips to McDonald’s later I found out at a doctor's appointment that the holes, or the murmurs, had miraculously sealed up, and that my heart was pretty much as watertight as a really expensive brand of ziplock bag. 

And now, ten years after that, or less than ten, now my heart beats half as slowly as a lot of other human hearts, like a whale floating slowly through a crowd of panicked guppies in a McDonalds, now my heart is super muscular and strong, the type of heart some families would say a boy would have, and now exactly forty-seven times a minute it grabs a heart full of blood and holds all of it tight for 1.3 seconds, and none leaks out because there aren’t any holes.

It was a different toy for girls and for boys, in case you were still waiting on why they asked that question at McDonald's. I got a mini Barbie, and a boy with holes in his heart would have gotten a mini Hot Wheels.

What your kids will be like

A few months ago my friend told me that his wife is working at a daycare, and that it’s “the best birth control ever.” 

And I feel like it’s important enough that I tell not just him but everyone: if your wife is working at a day care, you also need to also be using a second form of birth control. I didn’t pay a ton of attention in health class but even with my limited knowledge of reproduction I know that using a part-time day care job as your main method of birth control lowers the chances of pregnancy by about zero percent, in every study.

It seems especially important to remember this because of something that happened the other day in the locker room. There was a mom teaching her toddler to poop, but the toddler was stalling. (Get it! It’s a bathroom joke!)

“Where do babies come from?” the toddler asked in an “I bet this question is going to annoy you and that makes me so psyched to ask you” sort of way. Her mom referenced some vague story about sperm meeting an egg.

“But how?”

Her mom changed the subject: “Do you remember, in your All About Me book, who does your body belong to? Who’s in charge of your body?”

“My body belongs to a man!” she yelled. I don't think she learned it in the All About Me book, I think she probably learned it during the nine months she was living inside her mom, connected to her brain, learning what she could do that would bother her the most. That's where I got all of my best material.

Then the girl just started screaming swear words, which I won't type here in case some of my readers are under three and haven’t learned them yet.

Babies can come from anywhere, the jury’s still out on the logistics and even the All About Me book doesn't have all the facts. If you work at a daycare, it could still happen to you.

The picture on the left is me before I had learned any swear words, and on the right is after swear words. Knowing swear words makes you super tan.

Japanese werewolf book club

Reading more wasn’t even one of my New Year’s resolutions but I’ve already read a ton of books this year. One of them was called 1Q84. It's by Haruki Murakami who is not only a great author but a four-time winner of the "Best Name" award.

It’s 1157 pages long, but if you take out all the parts that are just very specific descriptions of healthy foods it’s a quick 200-pager. The characters in this book may be fictional, but the foods they eat are very real. These meals are simple, homemade, nutritions, and need to be carefully explained, I’m confident no one ate even a snack without the author telling me about it. Rice, pickled ginger, three slices of radish, a cup of tea, an apple, papaya.

But the non-food parts are an awesome story - scary and beautiful and there’s a ton of really weird sex. Really weird sex followed up by a light lunch of cucumber, shrimp, sesame oil, parsley, edamame, and little bit of green onion and lemon juice.

This book had so many great sentences. One of them goes something like “He looked at his eyes like he was seeing if a piece of furniture could fit in a room.” I’m not a professional writer, but I’ve convinced my employer that I am, and I think that’s a great sentence. Another one is "He drank some tomato juice from the fridge, boiled water, ground coffee beans and made coffee, toasted a slice of bread. He set the timer and cooked a soft-boiled egg." Oh wait, that’s another food description. What about "He made rice pilaf using ham and mushrooms and brown rice, and miso soup with tofu and wakame. He boiled cauliflower and flavored it with curry sauce he had prepared. He made a green bean and onion salad."

It's really hard to find sentences that aren't food descriptions.

Anyway, if you want to read a book and you have a sturdy suitcase or wheelbarrow to carry that book around in, you should read 1Q84. Even if it’s not your New Year’s Resolution, but especially if it is.

This is a picture to illustrate that I have two moons hanging in my apartment, which if you've read the book you would know is an insane coincidence. Can you see them? I think my sister has the best smile in the world and this isn't even a real smile.

I don't know Dennis Gilstad but he's also incredibly interested in food in 1Q84. You can see his diagrams of all the food in 1Q84 here, or if you know him he can probably show you in person.