Missy Diggs

I had reason to be looking at the social security administration web site and was reminded that every year on Mother’s Day they release the list of the most popular baby names of the previous year. I love this list! (Okay, I get that there are some people who don’t think this is what government should be spending their time and money on, but I figure that it can’t cost that much to do —relative to, say, defense spending— and the amount of joy it brings is probably saving us money somewhere else. Really. I believe that.)

The list of top ten girls’ names continues the old-fashioned trend we’ve been seeing for a few years, and really sounds a lot like the list of friends Alice comes up with after she’s tumbled down the rabbit-hole:

And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them.

Well, Alice is a bit distracted, and I guess she only really comes up with “Ada” and “Mabel” which are not actually on the top ten but which I am sure are not too far below, as we have met two or three girls with each name in the last few years. Anyway, they have that same ring to them. I enjoy seeing girls the same age as the Vivid Girl and imagining that Alice knew girls with all the same names. We even know an Alice or two.

Here is a new name that I have not yet encountered:

One of the most popular names for girls (rising this year to number 31) is Nevaeh, which is “Heaven” spelled backwards.  The variant Neveah came in this year at number 891 and Heaven is number 263.

But I am very curious about what other “spelled backwards” names there might be on the list.

I also love how you can find the lists of top names for your state, or track the history of a particular name, or find popular names for twins at this site.

But I still think the Baby Name Voyager is the best baby name site EVAH. It goes with the Baby Name Wizard book, but the web site has such cool interactive features that it makes books seem very boring. (However, I have friends who used the book and picked a super-cool baby name, so I’m not saying anything against the book. As far as I know, the book totally rocks as well.)

I found both of these sites very useful when I was pregnant, and generating lists of baby names was a top priority. I still find them useful as ways to “waste time online”… or when I am engaging in one of my favorite activities, Trying to Name Other People’s Babies. Most of my friends who have been expecting babies in the last few years have received (unsolicited) lists of possible names from me. I don’t think anyone has actually taken my suggestions yet, though. Hmmmm… I guess I’ll just have to keep trying!

Meanwhile, at our house, the babies who have been getting named lately are dolls, and the names are given by our very own baby. The newest member of our household is a stuffed squirrel named Thundercloud Hazelnut Snowy. Most of the baby dolls have had, and kept, their names for years. My favorites are Baby Darling, Baby Macaroni, and of course, Bruce.

So, this is the weekend after my very last chemo treatment, and I am feeling a bit rough… but not too bad. Last night as I tried my wide variety of things to help myself overcome the steroids and go to sleep, I listened to one of my favorite relaxing podcasts. Now, when I first got my wonderful pink iPod (love the lovely pink iPod!) I spent some time on iTunes finding podcasts I might be interested in. At the time I was dealing with the fact that I had been diagnosed with cancer, and so I naturally found The Stupid Cancer Show, which at the time I didn’t really “get” but which has definitely grown on me as my journey into CancerLand has progressed. A friend told me about a bunch of craft podcasts, especially CraftCast, which I love and find very inspiring, and which somehow led me to CraftLit, which I absolutely adore, because not only do they talk about crafts…. they also read you a chapter of some classic book which you may not have time to read yourself because you are so busy doing your crafts! (When I first tuned in, they were reading Frankenstein. Now they are reading Little Women.) It reminds me of that scene in Gone with the Wind when the women are sitting up doing their quilting or whatever while Mellie reads Charles Dickens aloud.

But oh yeah, what was I talking about? Last night I was listening to the NLP People Building podcast, which I found because I was looking for guided imagery/hypnosis/meditation type stuff. I love this podcast, and not only because of the charming British accent of the host Gemma Bailey. Every episode has some sharing from the current People Building newsletter, answers to people’s emails, some discussion of some aspect of NLP or hypnosis, and a guided hypnosis exercise. Last night’s discussion was about how we can use powerful words and phrases in our everyday speech to help keep us in a “positive” state of mind. She gave several examples, like instead of saying “this is too hard,” say “this is not easy.” (you would think saying “not” would put you into a “negative” mindset, but she claims that our unconscious doesn’t process the negative, so your mind would focus on “easy” rather than on “not”.)  Instead of saying, “I can’t do it,” ask “How can I do it?” Various things like that. One that was the most relevant to me in the moment was, instead of saying “I’m exhausted,” say “I’m re-energizing.” So today I am musing on that. It makes sense to me, and actually seems useful as a reminder to do those things that help me re-energize while avoiding those things that keep me tired. So, as you see, I am not sick. I am healing.

It started like this: the Vivid Girl used her allowance to buy a Barbie at the thrift store, and when she got her home she realized that some other kid had already given Barbie a haircut, and she didn’t like it.

Or maybe it started like this: I got diagnosed with cancer, and when I started chemo I decided that, rather than wait for my hair to start falling out I would just shave it all off right away, and the Vivid Girl very bravely helped with the shaving. We kept my hair in a plastic bowl, just knowing it would come in handy some day.

Well, anyway, no matter how it got started, when these two events combined in my brain I knew there was only one thing to do. So I turned to the Internet, of course, and within 20 minutes I knew almost everything I needed to know about how to get Barbie’s bad hair off her head and put my good hair onto it.

The first thing you have to do is crop Barbie’s head close to the scalp, taking care not to nip or scar the vinyl while you’re doing it.

Here’s what Barbie looked like at that point:

Oops, but I forgot to mention, after you cut the hair really short you have to take the head off. Now, with today’s Barbies, who have swivelly necks, this is not as easy as it used to be. Also, even in the old days Barbie’s head would sometimes tear a bit if you popped it off too often or with too much force. But I learned this handy trick on the Internet: submerge Barbie, head first, into boiling water. This will soften up the vinyl and make the head pop right off.

All right, so once the hair is short and the head is off, there are a few way to proceed. I chose to use a teeny tiny crochet hook to scrape the inside of Barbie’s head to get all the hair out. It came out in clumps of red fuzzy knots.

Once the hair was all out, I followed the instructions in this amazing animated how-to to put the new hair in:

http://www.modcolors.com/modbarbiecare/reroot3.htm

I am under the impression that this may not be the “best” way to re-root Barbie hair, but it was definitely the best how-to I found, and I decided to follow the directions I could actually understand. Here is Barbie with her first lock of my old hair:

It took a couple of weeks (and many episodes of Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix) but Barbie finally has a whole new (to her) head of hair:

I put Barbie’s head back on for pictures, but now I have to plunge her back into the boiling water so I can take her head off again so I can apply glue inside to make sure the hair stays where I so painstakingly put it. According to the Internet, the best glue to use is Gem-Tac, but second choice is E6000, and I actually have that (I think) so that’s what I’m planning to use. We’ll see what a dunk in hot water does to her crazy hairstyle. I actually think the hair is so big and bushy because I put too much hair in each hole. I’m going to try to do some styling, and possibly cutting, to see if I can get it to look more like regular Barbie hair. There may be a trip to Sally Beauty Supply for “setting lotion” and other old school styling aids in my future.

I’ll keep you posted.

But now you know what I’ve been doing with myself during my most recent down time. I was working on Barbie’s head when the Vivid Girl did her play therapy last week, and the counselor thought it would be a great idea to make dolls using the hair of kids who have to cut off their hair during cancer treatment. I definitely have to think about the best way to do it. I think it might have to be a mail-order service, because I would hate to think of parents having to spend their time working on such a tedious project. But maybe something where the family sends in the kid’s hair and specifies some preferences on the type of doll, and then crafty volunteers use the kid’s hair to re-root the doll’s head? I would have to get better at it before I would be comfortable offering my services, but it’s worth thinking about. As my Internet research shows, there are plenty of people out there who know how to do this. I certainly never thought I would be one of them!

Well, Tom Waits tickets went on sale yesterday. I don’t know whether the sale lived up to the hype and pre-sale hysteria in selling out immediately or not. What I do know is that I did get tickets, thanks to the devoted efforts of my friend T, who logged on right at 10 am and had a computer fast enough to get me 2 seats right down in front. My two computers were still “searching…. searching….. searching….. ” when she told me she had the seats.

I’m very excited and satisfied to be going to the show the night before my surgery. It seems crazy but it also seems perfect. It feels like I will get a nice big dose of Who I Really Am in The Real World right before one of my biggest adventures in CancerLand. It helps make cancer feel temporary; up to now it has felt pretty permanent. But now instead of being totally lost at sea, I feel like I’m sailing within sight of land. And that is a pretty good feeling.

The Breast Cancer Resource Center of Austin recently held Graphic II, their second annual bra auction and fundraiser extravaganza. The event raised $25,000 for the organization, which provides information and support for Austinites affected by breast cancer. They are the group that run the (free!) support groups I have been attending, so I was eager to give something back by donating a couple of bras. So one afternoon when I was sitting at home resting I pulled out a couple of thrift store bras, my glue gun, and a bunch of silk flowers, fabric scraps, ribbons, and doo-dads and whipped up these two beauties.

I don’t know whether these two sold, or for how much, but the pirate bra was featured in the photo shoot so I have high hopes of its appearing in next year’s calendar. They had the model wear hoop earrings and put a little stuffed parrot on one shoulder; it was very cute.

Speaking of worms, what about spiders? This headline caught my eye today, so I offer this tidbit for your edification:

A new species of spider has been named after Neil Young.

And that’s all I have time to tell you today.

Today’s post will have two parts:

first, a link to the YouTube video of the press conference Tom Waits gave to announce his new tour:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOrG1r3S6ZA

Second, some ramblings about the book I am reading and various other things of interest and note.

I am reading In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson. It’s about Australia. This is the first time I’ve ever read Bill Bryson, although I’ve been meaning to. However, I am fairly resistant to non-fiction and so I was just lucky that a friend took it upon herself to put this book (and many others) into a box and pop it in the mail to me (Thanks, Maria!). So first of all, the book is really interesting because Australia is interesting and also because Bill Bryson is a great writer. It is also laugh-out-loud funny, so that it’s a bit of a challenge to read it in bed if there is a sleeping person in the room with me. It is also un-put-down-able, so I persist despite the difficulty. One thing that I love about Bill Bryson is the way he often ends a story with the sentence “I’m just saying.” It’s one of my favorite phrases and really funny in its way.

I have learned lots of interesting and amazing things about Australia, of the type that make you want to ask people, “did you know….?” For example, did you know that in addition to all the other weird species in Australia, there are also giant earthworms?

By “giant” I don’t mean “twice the size of ordinary earthworms” or anything like that. I’m talking about worms that are 12 feet long and almost 1 inch in diameter. I’m talking about GIANT earthworms.

And did you know that these giant earthworms make a sound? I mean, for all we know all earthworms make a sound, but I’m talking about a sound that humans can actually hear. What happens is this: “If you stomp the ground above them you will be able to hear a gurgling sound coming from under you. This sound is made by the worms moving through their lubricated tunnels as fast as possible away from the disturbance.” Oh, yikes!

And reading this information in my book last night made me want to ask Bill Bryson a “did you know?” question. Because I wonder if he knows about the song that describes the sound made by worms. “There’s a new sound, the newest sound around, the strangest sound that you have ever heard….” I know about this song because I listen to my morning man Jay Robillard on the Lounge Show on my local community radio station, and he plays it from time to time. (He also deejayed our wedding reception but as far as I know he did not play the worm song. He did play “Jeremiah was a Bullfrog,” though, and people sang along.)

Anyway, even though I knew this song, I had no idea there was actually a sound made by worms. A sound that humans can hear. A gurgling, lubricated sound, made by giant worms. At least the sound is made by the worms moving away from you. I’m just saying.

Oh! I just found out something amazing, which is this: Glitter and Dust. Tom Waits. Summer Tour 2008. When I first looked at the dates the first Texas date I saw was Dallas. June 23rd.

And I can’t go to a concert on June 23rd cause I’ll be in the hospital.

but I looked again, and saw this: Houston, June 22nd.

Wah-Wow!

I will be in Houston June 22nd. It’s the day between my birthday (June 21, summer solstice, longest day of the year) and my bilateral mastectomy (June 23, MD Anderson, pray for clear margins and clean path report).

To me, it seems like the perfect day to see Tom Waits, my all-time favorite. I can’t think of a better way to spend the hours that would otherwise be spent waiting, waiting, worrying.

I’ve never been in the hospital before. I’ve had these breasts ever since they grew there, right around the time I started listening to Tom Waits (okay, the breasts came a little before…. but after so many years it’s all a blur). I’m kinda nervous about this whole mastectomy deal.

Tickets go on sale May 16, one week before my final chemo treatment. And I will do what I can to get tickets, but it’s like buying tickets for a U2 show; they’re going to sell out FAST. In mere minutes, most likely. the last time I saw Tom Waits (the only time, the only time I possibly could have, actually, because he doesn’t play that much) I waited in line starting at 6 in the morning, just hoping I was actually in the right line, because they didn’t announce the location of the ticket sales until 9:00, which was also the start of the ticket sales. (Luckily, I was in the right line, and I got a great seat.) When the announcement came at 9:00 that tickets were being sold at the Paramount Theater box office, people literally stopped their cars in the middle of Congress Avenue, jumped out, and got in line. Two huge herds of people came pounding toward the theater from opposite directions: one group had been standing in line at Waterloo Records, several blocks west, and the other group came stampeding from the convention center or somewhere vaguely to the southeast. It was amazing. It was like an end of the world movie, except that we who were in the right line felt elated rather than terrified. So I guess it was like an end of the world movie. The Rapture. “In the event of Tom Waits tickets, this vehicle will be unmanned.” That sort of thing.

So I really want to go to this show. The timing seems perfect, in a truly unbelievable way. It seems like something I would wish for, but that I would never really expect to happen. It’s like a weird personal hallucination. So obviously I will try to get tickets, but I have decided I will also do this: write an open letter to Tom Waits. See if he will help me out here. It’s a once in a lifetime thing. I will happily pay for the tickets, even if I have to add the cost to my ever-rising cancer credit debt. But I would sure feel a lot of comfort if I knew there were tickets for me, and I didn’t have to stress over getting them.

So here goes.

Dear Tom Waits,

In 1985, when I was a poet, I found a black-and-white ad for Rain Dogs in Rolling Stone magazine. I cut it out and put it in the cover of my poetry notebook, along with other soul-stirring mood-making scraps of media. Rain Dogs is still my #1 Desert Island disk, the canvas I stretch out to live my life against, the perfect album for me… it found me at the perfect time, held me in a perfect place, fused me to the world in a way that I needed. Bam. Music can do that, lyrics can do that. Rain Dogs did it to me.

And I’ve been hooked ever since. So I’m a fan. And I remember things like this: David Lettermen asked you about your parents, what they must have been like, and you said, “Well, David, my father was a tombstone and my mother was a tree.” Terry Gross asked what was the first instrument you ever played and you told her it was a cardboard box. Every time I read “Mr Brown can moo, can you?” by Dr. Seuss, I wish you would record a children’s album and include that book: “Boom boom boom, Mr Brown is a wonder. Boom boom boom, Mr Brown makes thunder. Mr Brown makes lighting, splat splat splat, and it’s very very hard to make a sound like that.” Cue the cacophony. Roll the thunder. Bring out the megaphone. Dance.

So, I’m a fan, and I always wanted to see you perform, and you never played, and I would dream… literally, I would fall asleep and dream that I was walking through some New York/Tokyo/Caligari ghost town and I would turn a corner and walk in through a doorway and there you would be, playing the piano, maybe, singing your songs, wearing a hat. And finally you played in the town where I lived and it was like your only show that year, or the year before, or the year after, I don’t know, and I got to see you play and it was awesome. Really like a dream. Like a Christmas morning when you only get one present but it’s the one you really wanted. A pony or whatever. A sparkly pink jeep. The best thing.

And now it’s years later and I still listen to you when I’m not listening to the Wiggles, and I’ve got a four-year-old tap dancing kid named Vivian Starlight, and I’m not young anymore, and I have cancer. A really crummy kind of cancer called IBC, or Inflammatory Breast Cancer, and it’s rare and it’s deadly and it’s scary and the treatment is this: six months of chemotherapy, wait four weeks, bilateral mastectomy, wait four weeks, once or twice a day radiation for six or four weeks, hormonal therapy for five or more years, wait and see what happens. And I’m just trying to make it so I can be with my kid while she grows up.

I get my treatment in Houston at MD Anderson, which is, you know, a good cancer hospital, and the thing is this: you’re playing in Houston on June 22, which is the day after my birthday and the day before my surgery. So I would really like to go to the show. I think it will transform that in-between day from something scary to something star-kissed and magical. And I’m just wondering if there’s any way you could make sure I could have two tickets…. one for me and one for my dear friend who is flying in from Seattle to be with me. I will gladly pay for the tickets. I’ll even buy a t-shirt! I just would like to know that I have them, if possible, without having to stress about getting up early and getting on line and calling calling calling and being put on hold and not being fast enough.

So, please, if there’s anything you could do to help me, it would really be making a dream come true for me, a dream I didn’t even know I was having, and I would dearly appreciate it. As soon as I figure out where to send this, I’m enclosing a fairy doll that I made during my first round of chemo, and if there’s anything else I could send you I will gladly do it. A jar of Texas salsa? An embroidered tea towel? A Barbie doll whose hair has been replaced with the hair I cut off my own head before I started chemo (I’m making one for my daughter right now: I’ve probably got enough hair for two)? A simple thank you note?

Really, anything. Let me know.

And thanks for everything. It’s been nice having a little company on some of my stranger journeys.

wishing you the best,

glitter, and doom,

Missy Diggs

P.S. I’ve never done this before, written to an artist and asked for something, except once, when I was like 6, and my mom took me to see Peter Pan at the Schubert Theater in Chicago, and I wrote to Sandy Duncan and asked her to send me a picture, and when the picture came in the mail I was so excited I ripped the envelope and tore the photo. All of which is to say, I’m not really a jerk who just goes around asking for things other people have to pay for or stand in line for. I just wanted you to know that if I had thought of it, I would have wished for this show, and I really hope you can understand that and help make sure I get to be there. It would mean more to me than this letter has been able to express. It would help weave this whole cancer experience into the bigger picture of my life, and that’s a job that takes some doing.