e-love

Just another Tuesday night, I'm looking through my fifty plus new eHarmony matches, weeding and deleting. Sorry, 'archiving,' which makes me feel as though I'm sending the guys to be filed in a stuffy basement library run by old men wearing sweater vests.

I haven't actually logged into my eHarmony account since last December when I opened it. I've been too scared.

The first time I tried to open an account with eHarmony, after filling out the extensive questionnaire, and waiting for the calculating or sorting or whatever secret process eHarmony conducts in five seconds, I was sent back the message "Sorry, you are unmatchable at this time."

Unmatchable? And that only took five seconds? Geez, this is worse than I thought. Granted, I was going through a rough bout at the time and may have answered the question "How often do you feel depressed" by ticking "Most of the time"...

Nothing like being rejected by eHarmony to boost your spirits.

Truthfully, online dating intimidates me. When I finally finished the 'application' process, got accepted, and was in, I suddenly found myself in a whirlwind of men coming into my inbox with impressive resumes demonstrating high marks on our twenty-nine dimensions of compatibility. Seven new matches every time I logged in!––How's a girl supposed to handle that?

Even in our times of telecommunication, eHarmony was not a natural step for me. I used to disdain the concept of internet dating. It seemed too intentional, too obvious. I'm no denier of the importance of compatibility, but at the end of the day, I'm a romantic, wanting something about love to be magical and unexpected. Unlike most everything else in life, I've always been strangely relaxed about love, trusting that the right one will be there at the right time.

I've never been a big fan of e-communication, in which we have the freedom to say and do things we'd maybe never say or do face-to-face. It offers the illusion of relationship, when the reality is much messier, visceral, and complex. OK, so you have 400 Facebook friends, but how many of them have your back when you've got bigger issues than what to comment on that Akon video that Johnny Johnson posted on his wall.

It also occurs to me that an online profile, much like a resume, is really only a list of the parts of a person. At best, it offers a hint of the whole. I'm all for full disclosure in dating, but when I list my one-armedness, it feels like just another disconnected part, a strange bit of trivia. Can you really get a sense of the person without seeing the whole? Chemistry doesn't seem email-able.

Yet the benefits of having some of the dating legwork done for you can't be denied. I often feel too tired for the dating scene. I want to skip ahead to when we sit in twin rockers on the porch till death do us part. So, these days I'm much more open to blind dates and being set up by friends. And I can't help but see how arranged marriages can cut out the stress of finding yourself on a date with a guy who shows up in a kilt and expects you to drive (true story I heard recently). Not that I have anything against kilts.

I opened an eHarmony account in December more out of curiosity than anything else. I wanted to see who I was matched with and whether or not it lined up with the kind of person with whom I thought I was compatible. Turns out, I have a lot in common with PhDs who enjoy the opera and lumberjacks who can't live without their dog. Great, I could have told you that before we started. I didn't, however, expect to be so compatible with Asians and Pacific Islanders.

But I have yet to commit. I'm still not paying for my eHarmony account, which means I can't actually communicate with my matches. And after thirty minutes of reading twenty different top three things they can't live without, I'm starting to have trouble telling any of them apart, and I just want to go to bed.

I'm coming around, slowly. I think looking for love online is a valid option. But I'm still not sure it's for me. I've always believed no matter how large or small the pond, the right fish is swimming somewhere in it, and I'd much rather just happen to meet under the same water lily.


OneArmGirl 

learning to breathe

Astride my bicycle at a red light, I reached back to scratch my back and somehow hooked my, admittedly large, turquoise ring on the beaded strings that hung from the back of my tee shirt. Ok, I thought, no biggie, I just have to unhook whatever's been hooked. I moved my arm left and right, expecting the ring to quickly dislodge itself from my clothing, but after a few seconds of this, I was still tangled. I twisted my hand more vigorously. Nothing. That's when I started to panic. I clawed at the ring with my remaining fingers desperately whilst thinking how absolutely ridiculous this was, yet no less horrifying. What was I going to do when the light changed? I had no hands! My tee shirt was effectively martial-arts-style strong-arming me. I couldn't ride my bike without arms. If I managed to get off the bike without falling over, what then? Was I supposed to fling my torso over the handlebars and try to walk the bike, steering with my chest. Would I have to find some stranger and ask politely, "Excuse me, but I seem to have found myself in a bit of a bind; would you mind detaching my hand from the back of my shirt?" That was so mortifying it didn't actually occur to me.

Unnecessary goal achievement

What did occur to me was that I was on my way to the zoo to meet a cute guy I hadn't seen for a year, a guy I'd been waiting excitedly to see for some time...did I mention he was cute?...Is that how it would go down?––I would nonchalantly stroll up to him, hip popped to one side, arm twisted behind my back, pretending to be a contortionist? I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. But just as I was moving into panic over my own stupidity, suddenly the beads released my ring, and my hand slipped free. The light turned, and putting foot to pedal, I was on my merry way. 

I wish I could say this was one isolated incident. But in fact, just a few nights before, I was sitting shotgun when I attempted to exit the vehicle only to discover that the strap on my purse had become entangled with the very same treacherous tee. Did I wash the shirt between wearings? Wouldn’t you like to know. Fortunately, in this case, Asif, who was sitting behind me, kindly responded to my pathetic whining and disentangled me. 

Getting entangled in your own tee shirt may not be a big deal to those of you prone to random klutziness or unhappy accidents. I am not. I’ve spent my life (mostly subconsciously) learning to be careful and precise. My fear was that any wayward movement or spill might be attributed to my handicap––people would say “Oh, must be because of her arm.” What my friend Michelle once called gracefulness, I call calculated movement. Specificity became my craft, and I perfected it. Whenever I do anything, particularly in front of people, it is efficient, deliberate, precise. Timing and balance are key­­––from turning a baby in my arm to opening a door with my foot while balancing any number of things on my knee.

In recent years, I’ve discovered this obsession with specificity has a side effect. When I am concentrating on a particular task, even pouring milk in cereal, I often hold my breath. This could be for two possible reasons: breathing creates a variable of movement that introduces space for mistakes, or I’m concentrating so hard, I simply forget to breathe. In almost anything I do, there comes a moment where something is suspended, book or baby, balanced between where it was and where it is going, when just a breath could cause a disastrous miscalculation. 

My life is a dance in which command of basic physics and spacial awareness is second nature. At this point, I couldn’t act haphazardly if I tried. So you might understand why finding myself tangled in my own clothes atop a bicycle was somewhat disconcerting. It wasn't in the blueprint; but then, beads rarely are.

But what you really want to know is whether or not I ever made it to the zoo. I did. And I met the cute guy, though just as he walked up, I discovered blood from a razor cut had run and dried down my leg. Hot. Thus, in the first few seconds of conversation, we greeted each other and then I said, “I think I’m bleeding.” To which he said, “Me too,” and pulled up his pant leg to reveal a large cut on his leg. 

Then we proceeded into the zoo, wherein I almost ran into a cement column while I was looking at a map, and later, nearly collided with and sat in the lap of an elderly woman in a wheelchair.

I’m a little concerned.

OneArmGirl

 

 

but what does it mean?

I would first like to set the record straight by announcing, much to the amusement of at least two of you, that I have never slapped any one or thing for any reason, though I imagine it's never too late. And as Joey so famously said, "It only takes one arm..."

More importantly, my lovely and dear Boo, friend and former roommate, is shortly moving thousands of miles from me to the Northeast, where her equally lovely husband is going to school. This is a much lamented event in my life. So much so, that I was forced to drink two beers and a glass of wine just to make it through our last evening together, at some point in the duration of which I may or may not have been sitting on her lap. 

And so, in respectful salute to this separation, I here publish a magazine clipping that Boo cut out once upon a time when she was scrap-booking our six months of living together.

I can tell you from experience that if someone scrapbooks time spent with you, then gives the scrapbook filled with memorable journal entries and funny clippings to you as a gift, it is love indeed. But when I saw this clipping, I knew beyond a doubt that Boo and I will forever be soulmates (is that redundant?)

But what does it mean? I've been entranced and disturbed and curious for several weeks now, pondering the significance of the above. Admittedly, I have some far-fetched ideas about things, but I feel as though I could spend the next six months just staring at this, pondering its wacky significance. But I don't have that kind of time...So I ask you, dear peruser of this ridiculous blog, what does it mean?

Or should I say, what does it mean to you? ;)

OneArmGirl 

Don't know about your local, but here in the dry, fire-ridden Southwest, hopes for fireworks are a bit hampered this year. So as I sit indoors, encased in air-conditioning, I would like to wish you a very happy 4th of July. Or for you non-Americans, just another day. Wherever your day takes you, may it be filled with merriment and plenty of shade.  As mentioned above, I will not be going anywhere without air-conditioning.

But if you have a moment between your coffee and a piña colada, I would like to ask a question. What do you want to know about OneArmGirl? I do my best to offer a well-rounded view of life here at OAG, but living here, it's hard to know what I've left out. Are there holes in my story? Have I mentioned something that you want 'fleshed out' as we writers say.

This is wide open, folks. Feel free to ask anything that tempts your curiosity, from 'How do you feel about online dating?' to 'Have you ever actually slapped someone with your little arm?' I may not, of course, answer all your questions here on the blog, but I need your help. Please help me.

Send all inquiries to OneArmGirl@gmail.com. Let's juice it up!

OneArmGirl   

the others

Growing up one-armed can be a very lonely experience. But this never occurred to me until I was well into adulthood. As a child, I was surrounded by two-handed people doing everything the two-handed way. So I kind of forgot that I was different––like the little chick that starts to bark, thinking the family dog is its mother. 

Meeting another girl––or boy––with only one arm was very rare. I can only think of a handful of occasions. There was a guy in my class at college with a deformity leaving him minus one forearm and hand. But we weren't friends. It was almost like we avoided each other on purpose because it was too weird. The sum total of our communication in four years amounted to a brief greeting one afternoon when he rolled by me on his skateboard. I don't even remember his name. I do remember he was the lead singer in a punk band, and I'm not really into punk.

I'm actually pretty shy when I see people "like" me in public. I feel awkward, wondering if I should talk to them or pretend I don't notice. Most often, I sidle away, feeling like one of us broke an unspoken rule about not turning up at the same place at the same time––someone didn't get the memo, there's been a glitch in the matrix.

But meeting other handicapped people was not high on my agenda for the first twenty-five years of my life. I mostly did everything I could to forget what made me different. I preferred to blend in with the crowd, and when everyone around you has two arms, it's easy to forget you don't.

Allies

But two's company, and when I met Rick, I realized how alone I really felt. Rick lost his left arm to cancer when he was a kid. I met him on a hot summer day at a vaulting clinic. He told me to stand on top of a horse, so I did. The connection was instant. We exchanged notes on one-arm living. He taught me to hold a horse hoof between my legs. Allied in a world of two-armed people, we relished the company. When I'm with Rick, I feel special and average at the same time.

Only several years after college did I start to develop an interest in other people with similar handicaps. It started slow, but now it's verging on an obsession. Turns out I'm in good company. It seems the more I think about it, the more people similar to me I run into...

I recently saw a woman with atrophied hands at a coffee shop. She was sitting with friends, using her nose to navigate a touch screen phone (I can't even do that with my fingers).

Last week, I found myself in a grocery store with two other patrons that appeared to be amputees. It was like a convention that no one had signed up for. I wondered if other people in the store were concerned that it might be contagious.

The one-arm way

At a billiard bar last night with Little Gen and Asif, there was a guy with a stub leg playing pool. Personally, I think he had an unfair advantage, sitting nearly level with the table in his wheelchair. I caught his eye when I walked by and we looked at each other in a moment of recognition, much like bikers hold out a couple fingers when they pass each other on the highway.

This week I received an email from the beautiful and vivacious Pam, one-armed woman and sister blogger at Unarmed...just the way I am. This reminds me that I've never had a girlfriend with one arm or any other missing appendages. Exploring her blog this morning, I find we have a lot of similar interests and I'm suddenly gripped with a strong desire to talk to her about everything she's ever thought, over a glass of merlot, preferably in a rainstorm, on a screened-in porch.

In Poster Child, Emily Rapp's memoir about growing up with a prosthetic leg, her mother explains to her teachers that Emily is not to be called 'disabled,' that she is no different from anyone else. This seems correct, but also sounds a little like rearing children to be "just another brick in the wall."

And I've never been a huge fan of bricks.

OneArmGirl

one-arm bowling

About a month ago, my friend Heidi asked me to join her bowling team to raise money for developmentally disabled adults. I said yes. Though I'd prefer eating calf nuts to fundraising, I sent out a plea to friends and family to support a poor and very pathetic one-arm bowler. It worked. Then, a few days before the game, I got sick, and on the day of, I was in bed with barely enough energy to pick up a glass of water. Bowling was out of the question.

But if I've learned one thing about working with handicaps, it requires constant reevaluation and revision to the plan. So, this past Sunday, I had my own homemade bowl-a-thon with Little Gen and Asif (Little Gen's boyfriend who is staying with us). Asif is from India and only learned to bowl about a month ago, but he is already better than both Little Gen and I. He also cooks us a lot of curry.

Around 9 o'clock we headed over to Holiday Bowl where a helpful young attendant insisted on finding me the perfect bowling ball. "Here ya go, Mami," he said handing me a luscious red nine-pounder, "this is the one I use myself." I have definitely never been called 'mami' before. According to Urban Dictionary, this means I am a sexy Latina, though it occurs to me that I may also be old enough to be his mami.

We sailed through four games, though most of the pictures we took indicate that we did everything but bowl.

I played a bit above my average 70, but kept with my usual one strike and a couple gutter balls per game. Asif, of course, was winning every game. But I pulled ahead and miraculously won the last game. Either I got better the more beer I drank, or my opponents got worse––either seems equally plausible to me. And speaking of that, can you really call something during which you drink alcohol a 'sport'? I have my doubts. Ironically, it occurs to me now that the longer we played, the more developmentally disabled we became.

A family started bowling in the lane next to ours with one miniature bowler. It took everything she had to merely lift her bowling ball in her small arms. But when little Susie Q noticed Finneas, her interest in the game noticeably diminished. She was captivated, entranced. Both parents apologized for her curiosity, which I assured them was perfectly acceptable, and encouraged it with some tiny waves in her direction. She didn't take up my offer to give Finneas a pat, but did afford me a couple shy smiles. I'm glad Finneas got in on the action––I think he was feeling a little left out, riding along while my larger, more competent bowling arm got to play. 

I'm OK at bowling. I think with a little practice, I could be really good. It's one sport where it's not such a big deal if you have only one arm. Problem is, I'm just not a huge fan. Maybe it's the fluorescent lighting or the arcade-like environment; it just doesn't really do it for me.

But you know what does do it for me? Lizards with stub legs. A bearded dragon called 'Stubilina,' to be exact.

'Stubby' for short

Obviously, she was born to be a star. Heidi and her husband adopted Stubilina when her former owner could no longer care for her. Pete tells me these lizards are often missing legs due to their unfortunate habit of biting them off each other in adolescence.

I wonder if Stubilina likes to bowl.


OneArmGirl


And now, we make OneArmGirl history with our very first ever video. Enjoy!

   

broken hallelujahs

I am delighted to announce that for this week's post we welcome guest blogger Mañana Mama, who also happens to be my friend Rachel from childhood. Shortly after OneArmGirl was launched last year, Rachel started blogging her adventures in motherhood, and has since far surpassed OAG in her following. I am addicted to her wit and playful word use. And she makes me believe I, too, could be a mom. That we both grew up in the same high desert neighborhood, studied the same subject in college, and later both worked in print media before pursuing more personal projects, causes one to wonder if there wasn't something in the water––if there'd been any water in the high desert, that is. As evidenced by our play in dry river beds, there wasn't much.

You'll notice it doesn't sound like MM and I grew up a mere 1/4 mile apart. Some years back, she was kidnapped by the British, brainwashed, and forced to speak 'proper' English––an obvious act of retaliation on a former colony for having 'butchered' their native tongue. Yes, we did it on purpose just to piss you off...er, take the piss out of you?

OneArmGirl  

Crooked Arroyos

Like most lapsed Lutherans, I spend far too much time eating soup and mulling over regrets. One of my regrets is that I didn't arm myself better for the steep, treacherous descent into motherhood by asking OneArmGirl a few more questions. I'll explain.

Mom without arms

Just like my favourite English Major, OAG and I grew up in a sort of Arroyo Wobagon, where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average. There were arroyos anyway.

OAG and I met at the age of six, when her family arrived on the juniper block, and our moms bumped into each other one day while checking their mailboxes. In Arroyo Wobagon, your mailbox is a half-mile drive from your house via a bumpy dirt road. Exciting things and chance meetings happen at the mailbox hub – like one time, a postcard got nicked for instance. Our moms got to chatting, realized they had similarly-aged daughters, and the rest is obscurity.

Growing up, we spent a gazillion golden afternoons playing in arroyo dirt. There wasn't much else to do. OAG taught me about being Pennsylvania Dutch. My early research suggested that it was mostly to do with butter and jam, fried in butter. I taught her about being a granola hippy, or the bits of the trade that I knew and could be bothered to get out of the hammock to demonstrate.

Trick-or-treating featured prominently on the Arroyo Wobagon social calendar. During the rest of the year we imagined we were pioneers and cowered from the Baskerville-like hound that stalked the road between our houses. Deep in daydreams, we played round upon round of a memory card game called 'Authors'. When that got old we took entrepreneurial inspiration from OAG's dad and collected old bricks out of the arroyo for a buck each. In the end, everything returned to the arroyo.

Wobagon road

As you might imagine, OAG was always a pretty sharp tack, and she was also unusually conscientious for a kid (remember, 'kid' is the personality type featured prominently in Lord of the Flies). She once begged me to forgive her for accidentally tipping over my plastic horse and breaking off one of his hooves at the shin.

OAG may have forgotten to mention that, when not occupied with arroyo dirt, she spent her youth winning short story contests. And there was that one time when she put on a silly black cape and casually gave the class valedictorian speech. Due to modesty or shame, she has also failed thus far to blog about the neighborhood newspaper that we jointly published – twice - on a printing press of A4 paper and crayola markers. It was every bit as naff as you'd imagine, but we were too innocent to realize it - our dreams hadn't yet been whittled down to dust by the grown-up world.

Occupied arms

After high school OAG went east and I went west. After a few years we traded and she went west and I went east. My itchy feet took me to London by way of the Inland Empire (where the sun always sets), and through a series of unlikely events, this became my home. As so many have before me, I decided that living in London was pretty spiffy, then promptly had children and was economically exiled from both spiffiness and London.

But just before I became a mother, when I still lived in a grown-up neighborhood and had free time, OAG asked me to take a picture and send it to her. She wanted a photo of a beautiful, naked, heavily pregnant woman atop a plinth in Trafalgar Square – a statue by a sculptor called Marc Quinn whose chosen subject, Alison Lapper, was born with a different set of limbs to most people due to a condition called phocomelia.

Of course, my picture didn't do the statue justice. And as I snapped it, a thought flickered across my mind that I had been a slightly oblivious childhood friend. This gut feeling reasserted itself when I read Joey's Theory, not for the reasons outlined in the theory, but more to do with familiarity - I'd just always known OAG, and she seemed perfectly complete to me the way she was. So as a kid, I never thought much about her limbs.

One arm guy

Kids have an amazing ability to take things in stride. In Arroyo Wobagon, team OAG-Finneas kept up with and often exceeded whatever hair-brained thing it was that the kids were doing at the moment––A level of capability maintained into adulthood, as evidenced by those horsenastics photos.

 

Which brings me round to my regret (you thought I forgot, eh, eh?) as introduced ages ago in the first paragraph of this boring meander. I regret not studying Team OAG-Finnaes a heckava lot more as a kid. Because now I have kids and suddenly - BAM – like bad voodoo - I have no arms. NONE. Ever.

Having been both lazy and heavily-armed in the past, I'm pretty useless at managing armless industriousness. And I only have two kids, so I have to wonder what happens to parents of three or four. Do they lose their legs? And their minds? Wait...do I still have a mind?

Niña in a bottle

But even more than practicalities, it is the subtleties to do with fitting in and being understood that make me wish I'd paid more attention. You see, 'fitting in' is not the first phrase that springs to mind when I am careening a massive double-buggy around London public transport like some kind of mad circus act with a pair of poorly-trained clowns and no exit strategy. In these moments I feel like a square peg in a landscape of round holes (fix that badly-injured metaphor as you see fit). I suspect that in a very different manifestation, OAG knows this feeling very well.

Adversity and capability often go hand in hand. Just like trees, people grow around complications and learn from them. My kids both learned to walk by falling over onto their heads and plonking into furniture. As I watched them, I used to think of that William Blake quote: 'Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without improvement, are roads of genius.'

Blake certainly never fit in - he saw angels in the treetops for cryin' out loud - a most unusual form of far-sightedness. Blake lived in Marylebone with his wife Catherine, where they enjoyed pastimes like nude sunbathing in the back garden. In addition to having a crooked genius (not a euphemism) one has to admire such confidence under English skies. Of course, naked prophets and seraphim can no longer afford Marylebone, unless you count a pub called the Angel in the Fields.

Reflecting

Needless to say, these days I am researching juggling techniques like a mad woman and totally open to suggestion. So should you, Team OAG-Finnaes, have any horsenastics tips for navigating the London underground with two clowns in tow and all marbles in tact, I am all ears. Consider this a plea for help and spare hands.

I found myself on Trafalgar Square recently under the shadow of a rain-cloud. The gleaming white marble woman is long gone. Lord Nelson, who lost an arm in battle, is still standing there atop his column with a pigeon still sat down on his head. Some things never change. In Alison Lapper's place there is a ship in a bottle, poised and waiting for fortunate winds, a high tide, and some ingeniously crooked way out of the flippin' bottle.

There was a busker singing under the ship that day. While my youngest daughter soaked her socks in rain puddles, he sang that old Leonard Cohen song about broken hallelujahs.

~Rachel Faith