First mammogram.  The machine’s clear plates squeeze in on my right breast.  A sticker clings just above the nipple.  Extreme’s “More Than Words” plays in the radiologist’s office.  I laugh when I should be holding my breath.  We have to start over.  One, two, three, now don’t breathe, the technician says.  She’s not laughing, anyway.  And she didn’t laugh when I told her that the sticker she applied, at a glance, looked like a sound-effects splat in a comic book – kapow!  The sticker marks the place where my doctor, one week prior, found something under her rolling fingertips.

Right there?

Right there.

I only noticed it myself when I hugged my five-year-old Chloe.  A sore place.  Like pushing at a bruise.

***Read the rest here.

Two-dozen little shoe soles squeaked and squelched across the linoleum of the hallway. The teacher at our church school, leading the way, walked backwards for a few steps, winding the cord of her whistle around her finger. The whistle clacked against her rings. She pivoted to lead us into the library, and the squeaks turned to shuffling on the carpet in the dark. We could see the shapes of things we moved between – tables and shelves. We could see the projector and the screen, and with a click of sound the screen held a square of light and the square of light held our moving shadows. When we lowered to sit on a cleared space on the floor, there was a tingle at my fingertips that traveled all the way up my arm, across my chest, buzzing in my rib cage. A movie.

Last time, we’d watched a teeny tiny animated submarine chugging through the currents of somebody’s animated blood stream. The time before that, Ben Hur (anything featuring Charlton Heston in man-sandals was a winner here). And before that, a cartoon tooth demonstrating how to brush himself. It didn’t really matter to me what it was. I could be in class braiding the strips torn off the edges of spiral notebook pages or I could be sitting here watching the film threading through the projector and producing dark blips on the screen. I loved the blips and I loved the pop of sound coming on and I loved the rapid clacking of the reels as the film, whatever it was, began in earnest.

Today, it was something quite different, as the teacher with her hand overlapping the other in the projector stream had told us ….

Read the rest here.

So, my latest at The Nervous Breakdown, If the Shoe Fits …, was inspired by two things:  my surprisingly impulsive denial after a friend said to me, “Oh, I didn’t realize you were that into Star Trek” and then my daughter announcing the other day, “My mind is full of logic, like Spock,” while making the shape of a heart with both hands.  I thought it’d be funny to discuss the ways in which Star Trek intersects with everyday life while at the same time trying to pretend it doesn’t.  Hopefully I pulled it off, and if I didn’t you can just enjoy this photo I’ve titled “Damnit Jim!”: