In the morning, while we’re getting ready for work, my and I husband listen to The Ticket – a sports radio station here in Dallas. The morning show, Dunham and Miller, ranges from sports chitchat to celebrity birthdays to news tidbits.

In general, I like sports radio. In general. But every so often, this show in particular crosses a line that gets my hackles up.  The ever-so-patronizing Women Say the Darndest Things About Sports segment, for instance, or more recently, the post-Grammy reference to Adele’s lineage as possible “chimney sweeps” because of her accent. But today. Today was not sexist or narrow-minded or crass. It was soulless.

It was beyond the pale, as Kimberly said.

Elizabeth Smart (who you remember was kidnapped at 14, raped and abused by a man who had taken her as his ‘wife’ before she was miraculously discovered wandering the streets nine months later and who went on to become a victims’ advocate) married over the weekend. Mazel tov!

The show’s host congratulated Smart on her “second marriage.”

I was stunned. In part, because the banter kept going without anyone pausing to say, “Whoa, man, that’s wrong,” like was done moments later when another voice piped in to question what kind of “baggage” a girl like “Lizzie Smart” must bring to a marriage. Frankly, I was stunned that someone could muster the bile to say that in the first place.

A million angry bubbles formed in my chest. Second marriage. Just like that. Like it’s Kim Kardashian we’re talking about and not a survivor of rape and systematic torture. The glibness of his comment, made from where he sits, behind a microphone, safe in the statistical unlikelihood that something bad (actually really bad – not like a scare at the dermatologist’s office) will ever happen to him, well, it makes me shake my head.

Because it’s disgusting. Arrogant and ignorant.

And just in case it needs to be said in regard to “Lizzie Smart” and her “baggage,” the statistics currently go a little something like this:

One in Four college women report surviving rape (15 percent) or attempted rape (12 percent) since their fourteenth birthday. And the lack of respectful dialogue about victims means that many, many more go unreported. You know what that says? It says Elizabeth Smart is not the only one bringing something heavy with her to a marriage. She may be in company with, say, the wife, daughter, niece or sister of a clueless sports radio personality.

Well, jeepers.

You guys. I’m sorry to be so absent, but I just don’t have anything to say. I’m not even interesting to myself right now and for the first time in a long time, don’t actually have a single story to tell. Everything in the last year was so full of turmoil or stress of one kind or another, my current day-to-day, in comparison, is so spectacularly dull. I mean, getting my very first ticket ever was this big nothing. I got pulled over. I got my ticket. I went on with life and because it wasn’t say, getting robbed or trying to save someone you love from starving themselves to death, the blemishing of my perfect record wasn’t quite the crisis situation I’d have imagined it to be.

My days go a little something like this: I go to work at a job I tragically, really like, so you know, there’s no drama to dig up there. I come home to  a husband I also really like. Sometimes we talk about his Chemistry homework. Sometimes we bake things. Most times we pile on the couch with our fur children and stay there real cozy like until bedtime. Lather, rinse, repeat.

See? Spectacularly dull.

You know Picasso’s Blue Period? Clearly this is Heather’s Lazy Period. And without the gift of retrospect, I have no idea how long it’s going to last. I do know that for someone who is (probably unhealthily) innervated by crisis, all this peace and quiet has been a bit disquieting. Naturally, I tell myself to enjoy it while it lasts but come on. Enjoy what? Seriously, give me a limping kitten to save or a dilapidated shack to renovate because, oh my god, I need something to do.

And then, surely, I’d have something to say.

This week, I flew halfway across the country to participate in an intervention for someone I love desperately. The intervention failed. We failed. I’m pretty sure that goes down in the books as the worst day of my life.

There’s a lot of brain energy – soul energy – that goes into an intervention. Weeks and months of worry and planning, so much heaviness hanging from such spindly threads of hope and then, in the aftermath, you’re left with so much nothingness. Food you don’t really taste and sleep that can’t leave you rested. And then there’s the anger, because everyone needs someone else to blame. Oddly, it feels like the dress rehearsal for mourning.

When the neurologist recommended an MRI, I knew it was going to be costly. My options were: 1) forgo the tests and just assume that my increasingly freaky migraines were not related to a brain tumor or 2) know they were not. I wanted to know. So did my husband. And we were vaguely aware that knowing was going to dent the ole pocketbook.

What we didn’t quite grasp was that it would dent it to the tune of $1,500. After insurance.

I’ve been staring at the online claim summary, trying to do one of those Magic Eye things where if I stare hard enough the real number would magically appear, floating over the backdrop, gloriously containing one fewer zero. And it doesn’t. Though, frankly, that shouldn’t surprise me since I have heretofore been unsuccessful at discerning any Magic Eye poster ever.

Fifteen hundred dollars for the brain doctor to say, “Well, things look good.” He found some (for lack of a more technical term) scarring consistent with migraines, then turned me loose and told me to come back in six months. If in six months he wants another test, we’re gonna have words. About bills. And how fancy brain doctors are probably way better suited to paying these fancy bills than very unfancy marketing and computer programmer folks.

One mortgage payment + one half of a mortgage payment = 30 minutes in a really loud tube under a blanket of insufficient thickness.

The hell. If I were less than fine, I wouldn’t resent it, I’m sure. I’d have lots of other medical bills to resent along with it, so you know, drop in the bucket. But as it is, I’m fine and wondering if these people have payment plans. Surely. I mean, what can do they do if (ha ha. read: when) I can’t cough it up? Repo the MRI? Telepathically cast lesions onto my brain?

That would be a skill, now wouldn’t it? Like Vader crushing that one dude’s throat with his mind.

Here’s where I talk about healthcare reform but, like so many other things that are messed up with this country, it’s sorta a big, fat duh.

In other, much less whiny news, I have worn lipstick all day long today, just like a real grown up. It’s not even flavored! How’s that for leaf turning? It’s like I won’t even need any New Years resolutions – I’m the model of self improvement a full month early. Bam!

This spring, I’m going to be an auntie again (must. contain. the exclamation. points)! This time, though, it will be a driving distance baby. A baby I can snuggle after 3 hours of Glee playlists and one potty break at a rest stop of questionable cleanliness. Our own brood is still a couple of years off (the Dork Lord will be transferring to SMU in the fall and I probably don’t have to tell you that an infant + husband working/in school full time = one of those poor crazy ladies that end up on the news) so this is just the kind of squeeee! I live for.  If only I could be more patient about it. Every day I email my sister and ask if the baby is ready. Every day she tells me, “Not yet.” Is there no fast-track program for kid making? If anyone is eligible, she is, so let’s get on with it!

Anyway, for a bit I was able to focus some of my energies on making her baby announcement, which as distracting for about ten minutes. (See? This is why I need so many orphaned kittens!)