The Weird Kid

Sean and I voted together on our mail-in ballots, sitting at our table. I sat. Sean walked back and forth in his boxers, eating candy corn and translating the ballot measures. He has a political science degree.

Before we opened our ballots, I was nervous and defensive.

I said, "I can't do this with you if you're going to get judgmental and angry. If you get frustrated because I don't understand something like you do, or I have a different thought, I don't want to do this."

Politics make him angry. Almost nothing else does. Other people's politics, make him angry.

He was cheerful throughout the hour-long process. I voted same as him on every ballot, even the ones I had initially thought different on. He made good strong points, stronger than mine.

But I voted for president when his attention was elsewhere.

I moved from my seat and he picked up my ballot. He saw then , he saw that I'd thrown my vote away. He'd asked me not to, for a week. I didn't vote for McCain. I voted Libertarian. To him, it was the same as a vote for Obama, for the Marxist, for the long bleeding death of our country.

Tension, real tension, grew over all his muscles. No ease, and no playfulness left in him. He walked away from me. He looked out the window. He looked back at me with...something disgusted. I said, "I told you before I don't want to have to defend myself and feel crappy with my own husband."

He choked back the betrayal I think he felt, the astonishment at my...poor judgment? Selfishness? Idiocy? We changed the subject.

I don't understand, why this?

Go vote. And vote privately.

1. Blazing Saddles is a strange movie. It is loudly making fun of stupid white people, and all the stupid white people and (many of the smart white people) I know LOVE it. Crosses barriers. Amazing. The scene I linked to puts me on the floor every time. Not a great movie as a whole, but has some scenes so brilliant they're nearly holy.

2. I call my mom.

3. Prairie Home Companion. I like NPR. I like having it on. But I have to staunch a constant attitude of, "Why are you telling me this? Bank advisory committees in Bolivia? What? Why?" And I feel the same way about PHC. Not entertaining, tired imitation of charm, but I'm glad it exists.

4. Only Alyssa struggled with the moral quandary of declaring her own culture better than everyone else's. I thought more of you would say, "It's very bad but it is wrong to call Africans and Muslims "barbaric."

I once saw a photograph in a religious missionary magazine of a tear-stained 7 year old girl having her thin little legs violently held open by her father and his friends for her circumcision. She was looking at the camera, maybe whoever was holding the camera, like asking for help.
It was sickening.

So, conclusion. Sometimes we should not honor diversity. Okay, I'm cool with that.

-extra question. You women who cut off your son's foreskins...why did you do it? My mother-in-law said she didn't want other boys to make fun of Sean and his brother in the locker room. Sean says in real life, any boy caught looking at, much less critiquing, another boy's penis, would suffer a violent end.

5. Sex In The City: "Walking Vaginal Calluses Posing as Humans," I think that is how my husband described the women on that show. I think this show is as delicious and as gradually poisonous as a cigarette. It is bad, especially in large doses. It messes with a woman, I think, in a place she doesn't feel right away. I would like to read a study comparing women who love SATC to women with high instances of depression.

6. Don't have ranch dressing in the house. Turned in sour cream for plain yogurt. Diet soda. That is all.

7. First off, let me say. I would do THE WORLD to Roger Ebert. I can't explain it. I don't care that he is in his 60's. I don't care that he can't talk anymore and that big portions of his
face have been removed because of cancer. (not in the picture I linked). And I swear to god that fact that he is already married to a successful over-weight black lawyer lady that is his own age MAKES ME WANT HIM MORE. I goddamn love Roger Ebert. I would marry him. I would nibble him.

As for the others, I'm equally sexually attracted to the remaining candidates...though I am not a lesbian, oddly enough. I would spare Hillary, I guess. She didn't cheat on her wife. One night stand with her. McCain, nothing personal, but kill.

(If you haven't answered but still want to, I'm dying to read it).

Now who are you?

I have devised easy questions. If you will answer them, I will know so much about you, I think.

Please, everyone who comes by, answer. I've made it so even anonymous can comment now.

The Questions

1. Blazing Saddles. Funny, offensive, or never seen it?

2. You and your mom. Who calls who?

3. A Prairie Home Companion. True entertainment, comforting background noise, highly irritating?

4. Should all cultures be forbidden from practicing female circumcision on little girls, or should all cultures be honored?

5. The series Sex in the City. Good or bad?

6. A change you made for your health at least 5 years ago that you've never gone back on.

7. Marry, One Night Stand, Kill: Hillary Clinton John McCain, Roger Ebert. (Don't complain that it's an unappealing line up. You must chose.)

Goody goody everyone pitch in.

I'll post last.

My friend's wedding pictures have gone online now.

They were taken by a talented man in black who moved with ignorable urgency throughout the day.

The photos are good. The remind me of the kind of magazine ads I used to tape to my dorm room wall in boarding school. In the foreground is the elegant bridal shoe, awaiting it's performance, and just there, far behind, the silhouette of the bride against a pain of glass.

I'm in some. The man, I think, was an artist, and he tried. He took hundreds of photos he rejected. There is one of me giving my toast, before I left the hall in tears and did not return. I spoke for under five minutes and he spun around me, snap snap snap snap.

I'm shown in a place more beautiful than I remember being in. I'm alone, very alone on the dancefloor, no sign of the DJ behind me or full tables in front. I'm backlit in a moody gloom, my shadow twice my height stretching out of frame. It's beautiful. But I'm not. I'm just not.

It's not the fat. Or is it? I look wrong. I look, distorted and swollen, as if by illness, ancient dropsy. Like a rotten biblical wineskin, swollen toward bursting with misplaced fresh wine. I'm full of good, I swear to you, but the skin that contains me is rotten.

And here is my question. When you look in the mirror, do you say, "Yep, that's me"? Or is a small part of you always puzzled, thinking, "no, no that's not quite right."

I have never matched my mirror. Not as a child, not when I was thinner, and now, as the wedding photos captured, I'm poured into a sick stranger.

Am I the only one?

I collect things that I can hold in my hand, things that I can't stop touching until my own heat has drained their comfort. Metal sculptures, smooth heavy stones, silly putty and the egg it came in. I lose them, I always lose them quickly.

I haven't lost her, though I will. But for a little while longer, Smudge's body isn't entirely hers. It's her's and mine, still so recently departed from inside of me. Smudge sits naked in my lap and drinks her juice. I cup her foot and draw my hand sleepily up her to her hair, feeling it fall through my fingers like water. Then back down, and up again, for as long as she wants to sit still. I squeeze the fat on her thighs and pat her buttocks in a rhythm. Her skin is cool and doesn't spoil when my hand heats it. Again, it is water. She is like the surface of water.

I stop caressing her and she becomes alert. She grunts, mewls dissatisfactions, begins to lazily run her own little hand belly to neck. More.

I'm glad. So we are symbiotic, finally. Or maybe sometimes we are still just one.

Sass is sending me down a brain freak out trip. Two posts, or one and a half, about hating judgmental people. I've got to get my cranky self in on this. It's kind of a peripheral tangent, but, come along anyway.

Don't Judge Other People.

I grew up in the 80's and early 90's, where most television shows devoted a few episodes per season to having an unassuming black man/female/Mexican be horribly mistreated by vicious slobbering white men before showing them up with intelligence and quiet dignity in the end. For further research see "Designing Women," "Quantum Leap," and particularly poignant episodes of my own darling, "The Golden Girls."

People don't want to be like those TV bad guys. So they are vocal in having no problem with black people, the poor, the brassy independent woman. But yet smug Christians still annoy them. And loud-mouthed conservatives. And Rednecks. And Fat People who don't act ashamed enough. And Sarah Palin. Their tolerance can only extend so far.

No one glides through this world without prejudices. It's just some are socially acceptable this generation and some are not.

Your life imprints preferences and aversions and irrational fears on you as you grow up. If you cannot stand fat men who wear suspenders, if for some reason they disgust you to the point of crossing the street to avoid them, I think that's okay. Your making your own life a little harder by needing to cross the street all the time, but that isn't my business. I'm sure you've got pretty good, private reasons for how you feel.

And by that logic, if you can't stand fat black men who wear suspenders, even if their blackness is part of the aversion, that needs to be okay, too. It's just fair. Just so long as you don't try to hurt them by word or deed, your aversions are no one else's business.

And if I AM that fat black man in suspenders that creeps you out, I want to be able to shrug you off, or even tell you that I find you pissy, and then go about my business. Not stand in front of you and demand your praise.

So, in conclusion, I am a massively prejudiced, judgemental person. The more something is safe and familiar to me, the more I like it. I size up everything different with a wary eye. It is a variation of the apprehension that kept my ancestors from being eaten by lions, it is something as deep as my bones. I don't understand how this became a dirty thing.

So Don't Judge Me.

I'm a Libertarian, the party whose ideals amounts too, "Leave me the hell alone." I like that.

But I am willing to like either Obama or McCain. I listened to their third debate, trying to decide who to support. My problem was, when each man spoke, I would nod my head and say, "Yeah, yeah, totally. This guy is someone I could be proud to get behind."

And so on. Each man sounds sensible when they talk, each sounds dangerous when the other talks of him.

So I tried to focus on my own wishes for the country. What's important?

-Keeps guns legal. (McCain)

-Keep abortion legal. (Obama)

-Out of Iraq, let my social security go into an account in MY name, legalize pot, restrict borders, oil independence. (Draw, utter dismal draw, none of it is even hardly mentioned but the last.)

So, why do you like the guy you're voting for? And for some reason, I'm thinking, you are all voting for Obama. So, specifics, if you have them. Don't tell me "Obama is going to CHANGE things," because all I hear when you say that is, "He's handsome, charasmatic, black and not Bush and I want to kiss him." My husband says he is a substance-less shell, every move in his life made only to progress his career and therefore can't be trusted. Also, he's going to "spread the wealth around". Creepy, Atlas Shrugged kind of thing.

I need help. Who is the lesser evil here?

PS No Rants!! I'm looking at you, Kate girl!! Only I may rant.

Now my husband treats our stout homely dog like a stout homely girl from the office he regrets sleeping with.

His head pats are a dutiful courtesy. He is uncomfortable with her meek but desperate overtures for affection, he is annoyed by her following him. Her neediness really turns him off.

It was his idea to divert her passage from my family to the needle at the dog pound. They disapproved of her behavior that they taught her. He said we would take her, and she would live in our yard, her quivering desperation for human affection and constant submissive urination to her owners would be easily ignored out back.

Within two weeks she had mostly stopped the peeing, obeyed simple commands, and I had made her an indoor dog for the first time in her life, sleeping on a color-coordinated doggie-bed in our living room. I found her to be a good dog. This is an example why.

Yesterday the baby stomped her tail, and she calmly pushed the baby off of it with a single paw. Kid didn't even lose her balance. She also waited patiently the interminable time it took Smudge to arrange a Cleopatra head-dress just so on her flat doggy head. She chased off a dog twice her size that wandered onto our lawn last week, and has thrown herself, growling, on 3 separate occasions between the baby (the baby that chases her with a plastic battle ax, whacking at her) and a 'stranger' who got too close.

Frankly, every day that dog doesn't eat that kid she earns two drops more loyalty and love from me, cuz that kid deserves to be eaten.

Meanwhile Sean has become a cat person, because the cat doesn't demand much of anything and is self sufficient. He says his affection is all poured into Smudge now, his former days of empathy with worms struggling in mud puddles all used up.

I'm confused by his insisting he has a limited supply. I know him well, I don't think he does. He loves underdogs, as a rule. Just not this underdog.

Do you remember the instance in which you realized you weren't young anymore?

How sad were you?

My first hint of it came when I realized MTV wasn't interested in me anymore, their shows weren't targeting my decrepit 25 years. But that wasn't too bad. Realizing you aren't a child isn't the same as realizing you aren't young.

But now it is coming on for real. Clothes, There now exists clothes I am too old to wear without looking desperate for something. Hairstyles, too. But I don't want to wear them. That's the strangest part.

I always used to wonder, "Why do those women buys those undefined, bland blouses, when the cool blouses are in the next store over? Right there! They could have them, no one is stopping them!"

I don't have a good answer for that yet. Except it feels like less of me needs to be explained through my clothes.

New rock and roll can feel too angry now, too thin and sheer, too sexualized. I want Lorena McKennitt mourning and coaxing back an old, forgotten way of life, Cocteau Twins filling up an etheral space. Even Roy Acuff and his tinny, trembling sadness, even on the happy songs.

Do we let go of our youth gracefully, happily, with relief? Is it a freedom?

The policeman's questions were a subtle lead to culpability.

"Where are you coming from?"
-Portland
"What were you doing there?"
-Girl's night.
"I pulled you over because you drifted toward the white line."
We were near an intersection, and there seemed to be many, many lines on the road. I pointed to the one my car was sitting on.
-That one?
"Yeah. It made me think you'd been drinking."
-silent (don't do his job for him).
"Have you had anything to drink tonight."
-Proudly, exactly. One half of one Mojito with two glasses of water, two hours ago. (HA! Suck it.)
"That's it?"
-I think alcohol tastes like cough syrup (and prescription tranquilizers work way better).
"Why'd you drink any?"
-Sociable!

Still he made me get out and follow his glowing thumb, in and out of my peripheral vision. Then he said, "Aw, you're just tired." Gave me my stuff. I drove the mile left to home.

Truth is, I think it's been a secret fantasy to have a sobriety test that I was sure to pass. I'd also like to have a chance to hold up heroically under vicious cross-examination in a court of law, someday. Preferably in Georgia.

I love being innocent.

I like to eat a vegeburger in my car and listen to NPR behind the Kwiki-mart, it's my thing that I do. But sometimes NPR is just too boring and I go to other AM stations. AM stations are furry and warm, feel like time travel, and I love them.

I listened to Dr. Laura Schlessinger today.

It's not so much that she's a horrid woman and severely misogynistic. It's these...poor bastards that keep calling in by the hundreds to get abused by her. These poor people.

She isn't going to let you ask your whole question, and she isn't going to be on your side. She's going to call you an idiot, a whore, a crybaby and then hang up on you. Every time. And everyone listening is chuckling to themselves about how you got what you deserved, you crybaby whore. You must know this, you poor people! Why do they call this nasty exo-skeleton of a harpie for her nasty mean advice?

So, it is with great pleasure and pride I post a link to famous naked photos of Dr. Laura Schlessinger, taken by the married man she was having an affair with, herself also married at the time. Many Dirty Dirty Pictures here, story on Wiki.

It wouldn't be such a big deal if she'd integrate this part of her history into her public persona, mention her mistake and hurdles, instead of pretending it never happened.

Any other woman, I'd say, lovely little boobies, nothing to be ashamed of here.

But to Dr. Laura Schlessinger. You dirty little whore.

I am developmentally arrested, at about 14. Junior High and early High School meant way too much to me, and their muck stuck too strongly to me.

Because everything started to slip and shake then. Suddenly being funny and smart and weird wasn't any good in a girl, not without sexual attractiveness and that particular burgeoning femininity that I just could not project.

No fair, no fair! I'm still shouting it. I still get nervous around a group of adolescent boys, frightened they'll make fun of me. I feel strange feeling of injustice around pretty young girls, jealous of the freedom they'll have because they're pretty.

So imagine how it is for Imez, yesterday, to settle in the sunken living room of the most popular girl in Junior High. Imagine the joy injected straight to that little piece of maladjusted brain.

Tirza is 30 now. She deserved to be popular. She was beautiful, model beautiful. And calm, and nice, and styled. All these things still.

She began dating the most popular senior boy, her freshman year. They're still married. Classy and successful. Two daughters. I said hello on her webpage and she invited me the surprisingly short distance to her house.

Truth is, I'd like to make a big deal of it. That some sort of healing took place, some sort of battle finally won. But, no. We talked about our kids, a couple memories. I had fun.

In this one little area, I have...somehow...become healthy. As a thirty year old, fat though I may be, career-less too, I'm a great conversationalist. Children relate to one another through a myriad of ways.

Adults relate primarily by having conversations.

And I'm....dammit, I'm just not to be outdone conversation-wise. Give me doctors, give me actors, give me professors. I can handle them all. I can talk.

Something I have that is good, already good. Wow. Look at that.

Jesus Christ, did I just write something good about myself?

I don't know what post-partum depression is. I did a in-depth report on it, in college. I'm not sure it means what they think it means.

It seems too simple to deserve a psychiatric term. It is unhappiness as the result of losing posession of your life and becoming the property of a demanding, thankless force. Of losing sleep and losing sexuality and feeling the twist and strain of your husband's love, and becoming the very thing most young women have spent their lives being at odds against, a mother.

Who wouldn't be depressed?

Well, lots of women aren't. Because their baby fits snuggly into their life plans, and they don't think like I do, and the PPD women do.

I won't go on anti-depressants now. Because it is the burning, that those pills smother, which makes me move, fight, crawl, away from the complacencies and compromises. And maybe those are the real reasons I'm unhappy. Not brain chemicals, not seratonin's violent re-uptake.

Of all the pills I've been given, and the mental wards I've been placed (voluntarily) in, no one ever measured those "chemicals," to see if they lacked, if they pumped strong or weak. No one ever suggested, maybe I've just been doing it wrong, my whole life. That I've chosen to be unhappy, over and over.

So now I have to shove through. Lift my head up from my failures and hatreds, the stuff I bleed all over this site, every now and then, long enough to crawl one step forward. I never crawled forwards on the pills.

If it doesn't work...if I achieve what I want and am still wretched, then, fuck it, give me all the pills.

But dammit not yet.



Besides, I think I might be pregnant.

Today Smudge wouldn't stop screaming. Her particular, pissy screams that are not caused by anything I can fix. She was just mad at me, mad at the world. But she did it in a restaurant, with my mother and sister watching. Just watching, silently, me and Smudge.

Mom said, "The best way to make her mind in public is to make her mind at home."

Oh.

Today I wrote out an escape plan, when I came home, soul-sick, and she wouldn't sleep and Sean snapped at me before leaving for work.

I wrote out that I closed my private account and went to the ocean. And I stayed in a dirty sweet motor inn I stayed at once when I was 17, with mismatched bedspreads and gray salt stained windows. I got graduate school applications from the computer at the library. I didn't care if they were low-residence or commuting distance. I applied in Pennsylvania and Boston and anywhere with cold autums and stone buildings. And I went back to my motel room and prepared for my future and was totally free.

I had a friend who did it, you know. Left her baby and her husband and...now it's art and Geneva and men and fashion and freedom. I have hated her for years, for doing it.

I stopped writing and cried on my bed.

I get so far gone sometimes. I get...blind. I shove reality. I can't bring myself to remember that this is good. This that I have is all good. Love and home and baby. And I'm the only thing in it that messes up. And that no escape short of an overdose would be complete, I'd always be there.

I was only a CNA for a couple of months, in fact I never even earned the 'C' in CNA. It's terrible work.

I kissed a patient once. That is not appropriate. The training book tries to teach you it is inappropriate to even use a term of endearment, 'Hon' or 'Dear' because it is demeaning.

She had Alzheimer's. A lot of them did, a whole ward. But she was so different. Anne. She was so pretty, so old. She had been an artist. Her hair was long and gray and she wore lovely knitted caps that her family provided her with.

She was the only Alzheimer's patient who, while not bedridden, was quiet. All the others, they were scared and in apparent pain. They wailed in fear from their beds, they wandered into the courtyard at night in their nightgowns and wet themselves, staying hidden in the bushes for fear and confusion. They were wild-eyed and their bodies were taut and wrenched.

But Anne sat never ever spoke, and never looked afraid. She sat through the days in a wheelchair, body relaxed, hand to cheek. I kissed her cheek in her room, because it was so smooth, and she was so beautiful. I thought it possible with her, that her Alzheimer's did not torture her but simply led her away. And that she lived every day somewhere else, in a memory or a dream. And I felt something like love or gratitude and kissed her.

I wonder if she knew it.

Why does comment moderation enrage me, and does it anyone else?

The "your comment has been saved and is awaiting approval."

No matter how cool the blog seemed to be, I see that and always picture this fearful, snively little person behind it, demanding an outrageous amount of control, scared invisible people might say mean things (which seldom happens on casual blogs). Why put your thoughts in a public forum at all? Make your blog private then, if other people aren't allowed to talk without your control.

I call it the "No Hurt Fweelings" filter.


Ah I'm bitter.

Tried to write before, about family, all comes out blah blah blah.

Sometimes I get to where I'm sick of me, and start craving your stories. Specific stories, though. Like I want to commission blog entries from all of you.

I want to know:

-Oral sex performed on us (women). Do we really like it, or are we just supposed to? I don't like it. That part of me, so layered and folded and meatish, and I can't be sure it's entirely presentable. They're called "privates," you know. Someone's face there, well that is as unprivate as it can possibly be.

-Were you in day-care as a kid? Did it mess you up in any discernible way? Feel any resentment?

-Do you miss being single? Do you fantasize about your own little house, done up inside with clean white paint and built-in bookshelves with nothing but time in the evenings for books and music and dinner with friends?

-Or, wow. Maybe you are single. And fantasizing about a stompy toddler shaking a tiny sticky finger at a long-suffering dog, and a husband stretched out in boxers on your couch, expounding on the psychology of Dr. Who. Is that possible? That somebody wants my life?

-What is the hardest thing you ever survived/conquered?

Pick one, or some.

If I could have some answers and stories, here, or on your own blogs, in your own good time, I'd just be so happy. My brain and heart are dried up tonight and I could use a good spritzing.

When I talk to a family member on the phone, weird thing happens. My voice goes all deep and monotone; words weighed down by physical weight. I cannot inject life into it.

I tried, last time. To sound interested, interesting. Concerned, happy. All those things I can do naturally with strangers and friends. The result was grotesque. Like a 9 year old reading a part in a play against their will. My voice not rising and falling but plodding upwards, stomping downwards.

And I thought, god, no wonder they don't like to talk to me.

But, if I let myself go into the conversation, if I turned off the automatic pilot, wow, then they'd really hate me. There is passion in me but it's more of the crucifixion kind.

Oh, I'm sliding back down that slope, that slippery casual-observation hill, that terminates in a rancid raging self-pitying gully.

Splash!

Next post, something good and truthful about...them.

Mignon said I make boredom sound so evil. And whoosh whoosh, those words have been going around my head for days, a slow powerful turbine.

Yes it's evil. It hurts. It shames. It needs to be eaten and televised and library booked away, until I'm numb enough. And I am definitely over-reacting. But why?

I think I cracked it today.

Let me ask you, to help with the cracking.

Did you choose to be where you are? Who you are? Or did life deposit you here?

And, do you burn at all? My friend who left the auditorium when a classmate got up to sing a song off her recently released Christian album at the reunion said, "I shouldn't have to listen to her wailing," actually, painfully obviously meaning "I should have an album, too." Or me, who threw a popular magazine across the room when I recognized a photo of a college classmate, accepted to an internship there. "She is NOT a better writer than me."

If you don't burn, tell me why.

My blood is on fire. Every day, most moments. It itches and scorches. I can't sit still and I can't hardly smile.

But I think this is a good sign.



*Awaiting answers, knowing my bloggies have a particular abhorrence of pat answers.