The Weird Kid

2009-12-30T20:53:00.001-08:00

Oh does fate send me here.

I write good here. The best I can, I think. I miss it. I lost the password, forgot the name of the site, and didn't know which of my throwaway addresses I'd attached this blog too. But here I am. Don't know don't know don't know.

Lets see. Lets see how this feels.

2009-02-01T21:06:00.000-08:00

I lost my first blog and blogger identity when I, being new to the game, let a distant friend read and he responded to an article I wrote about sex with a long detailed letter giving me advice on anal sex (which he'd never had...oddly).

I lost my second cuz I needed to not have it for awhile.

And this one is over now, too. If you get any posts in your comments that seem to have been left by a girl who loved Death of a Salesman...check her out.

I hope I find you all again.

2009-01-28T15:32:00.000-08:00

So.

Not sure what to do. A while ago I linked to my friend's website, "Marriage Forward" in my blog, in support.

Not understanding the internet at all, it was only recently I found out that the link revealed my blog to her.

I told her I was a little wigged out that my blog wasn't anonymous anymore. She said in an email, "It can't be that anonymous! You always have comments on there!"

But...they aren't people I've even met! I'm not real....nevermind.

I don't know what to do folks. I'm hobbled. I have been trying to write some stuff and I keep censoring.

I made need to start over again.

Fuck

2009-01-20T20:42:00.001-08:00

For two weeks I have responded to all questions regarding my 400 level writing class at the university with, "I have faith. I am keeping an open mind." Today, as the first swell of the perfect storm, my mind finally hinged shut. Shut tight.

The professor kept scrunching up her cute face and saying sweetly, "I really don't know what this class is about. I mean, what is style? So we talked about reality tv shows that she liked to watch, and blue jeans. The "peer review" of our first essay was jumbly and loud, students handing their half-done rough drafts (Imez, with her heart invested, had a fully completed final draft, begging for impurt) to two or three others. No critique offered, save my peer reviewer's suggesting I indent more. Then the professor began playing a youtube clip on the movie monitor. I asked, "Are we supposed to stop peer reviewing and watch this? (This loud, enormous thing) and she said, "Huh? No. This is just something I'm curious about at Rutgers."

Today when she announced our next writing project would be redesigning the University's Writing Courses webpage, which, she giggled, was actually her job but we were gonna do it instead, I pulled open my new laptop (Sean bought me especially to further my writing) and began playing Jewel Quest.

I am done. I wanted this class. I had....hope. I saw doors opening. I was wrong. If I quit now I get a little money back.

I drove home to Obama's swearing-in on AM radio, and I got teary. Partially hormonal, partially the grieving of my academic mis-step, and partially because I wanted to believe in my leader. At home, soon after my arrival, Sean called anyone emotionally moved by Obama and his pointless rhetoric a "sucker," at which point I began to cry very hard. Sean tried to apologize but his hands near me made me want to fling my arms around to get them away. He was then angry that he wasn't allowed to express a political opinion in his own house, that I stifle him with emotional manipulation. He has a point there, except I really can't agree it was malice-aforethought, my crying.

I put Smudge down to nap and left for awhile. I came back, desperate for activity as foreign as possible. So I sat on the cold cement in the back yard with the instruction booklet and taught myself to use our still-in-the-box electric chainsaw. We had an ice storm before Christmas, our trees lost limbs and branchs. I am from the mountains and had never even seen an electric chainsaw. I have also never handled any chainsaw.

I was so proud to have it going. To have even included the bar oil, a product which I never even new existed.

Within 8 minutes, I pushed the blade against the goddamn extension cord. I sawed the fucking extension cord.

I lost it. Black rage, screamed at Sean because who the fuck buys and ELECTRIC chainsaw. Screamed at how happy I imagined he was now, that I'd failed at one more thing. I was a failed writer, a politcal sucker, a failed student, a fatso, slovenly housekeeper, ugly, and now a failed fucking chainsaw operator.

He just stared, kept offering calming words that made me angrier and angrier. "I love you. I don't want to fight, I love you."

What happened between then and now I can't hardly remember. Except for watching different presidental inagriations on youtube and sobbing through all of them, even Harry Truman in a top hat. And that we had an awful awful day. And that it was really all my doing, just like Christmas.

Please, don't talk about Obama. I can't stand any more about Obama.

Trying, trying not to be a Plastic Fart Sniffer

2009-01-06T19:02:00.000-08:00

We just opened a late round of Christmas gifts from far off relatives. I removed a pack of plastic food from the gift box, all modeled on McDonald's fast-food, labeled for my daughter. I...I removed it all the way to the garage. I just can't. I can't I can't. I hate cheap plastic toys. I hate advertising for any company without being paid to do so. And I hate myself when I feed my daughter McDonald's food.

The first time I encountered the concept of trying to keep plastic out of your child's life, or at least her toy box, was in the sweet and savage periodical known as Mothering Magazine. I thought the idea brilliant, full of integrity. I remembered playing with Smudge's much more hip little cousins before she was born, and the broken plastic toys lay like shrapnel around their house. Single use toys. Like a kleenex, but so much sadder.

In Mothering Magazine I read the testimony of parents who strictly adhered to the rule. They wrote about the hard plastic, talking doll someone had given their daughter for her birthday, and what fun they had desecrating that symbol of commercialism and stringing it up as a scarecrow in their Peace Garden.

I came across the very same article four years later, after having Smudge, while shelving at the library. I sat down and reread it. Mostly. Actually I closed it, snorted at it, and put it back none to gently.

How did I miss it the first time? How did I miss...that attitude? That sanctimonious fart sniffing!!!

Someone loves that little girl in the article enough to give her a present. Someone walked the aisle of a store, held that child in their mind, and pictured her smiling and hugging a new doll. They paid for it, probably a lot, too, from the sound of it, wrapped it and delivered it. And that is worth precisely...shit? to the Mothering Magazine people. And I don't know what a "Peace Garden" is but just the sound of it sort of pisses me off.

The article is filled with indignant disappointment at family member's failure to purchase and deliver the correct gifts to the Mothering's mother's precious little snowflakes. I have felt that disappointment creeping into me...and that article made me ashamed of it.

Ah...but what about my precious little snowflake?

I am so terribly proud of the presents I got my daughter this Christmas. A Bozo clown, (plastic, but forgiven for being so wonderfully creepy) a cobbler's bench, drums, and a elegant, tiny little red piano. And, a Bilibo, completely plastic but with good reason.

And I love the person that sent the McDonald's pack. And dammit, I know they love Smudge so much. I also know they have a dozen people to buy Christmas for on a tight budget, and I know that, unlike me, their heads aren't shoved quite far enough up their butts to weigh libertarian integrities when buying a little baby a fun gift.

So they sent the McDonald's pack. It bothers me on near every level, as a toy for my daughter.

I don't want to be the Mothering Magazine fart sniffers.

I'm writing a thank you, and I mean it, thank you. Thank you for loving her, thank you for the effort. But I'm giving it to Goodwill, unopened.

That is my problem, my deal, not theirs.

2009-01-05T12:18:00.000-08:00

No, actually, my Christmas wasn't entirely good. The day, the actual day. I fucked it up a bit.

I don't know why. Sean said he would but didn't make his crepes, and it seemed such a blight on the happiness. Happiness just doesn't happen. Someone has to build and carry it. I carried it for weeks leading up to that day.

But that was just a tiny puncture through which 1000 pounds of pressure was seeking escape. Maybe I was going to melt down no matter what.

I spent a good portion of Christmas afternoon driving deep as I dared into the woods, then trespassing in fields of mud and snow crust. Screaming, crying, hating, all these things with no object. I came home and made a Christmas dinner, but it felt so pointless, the three of us, not talking around the table. I wasn't better till the next morning.

All this time later I still don't know what happened.

Tomorrow I'm taking a class. A 400 level composition class at the university Sean works at. It is not grad school, but it is real and it is progress and the universe handed it to me.

Ploppsy Killed a Drifter.....

2008-12-25T12:11:00.000-08:00

MERRY CHRISTMAS.

2008-12-24T21:40:00.000-08:00

It's Christmas Eve. I'm just so happy. I should write it to myself because it isn't going to be interesting or well written, it's just pouring out, but this is my writing medium now.

Everything has been right. My tree has decorations, and they're good, they're just right, I made them myself, all of them, from salt dough and Sculpy, I tied red and gold ribbon around the branches. Big fat lights, like they had when I was a kid. Sweet and good..the smell, the feel. I hauled the tree myself. Effort equals reward.

I made Smudge a bunny, knitted it from purple yarn. Sean says it looks like a rapist bunny, the kind of bunny that kills drifters. A little crazy eyed and Frankenstein stitched. I think it's so cool. She isn't interested in it now, but she'll take it to college with her when she leaves.

Tonight we furthered our tradition. So important to have solid, happy traditions, so we're making them. Such a luxury, to do the same safe warm thing every year. Handmade candycanes from the hippie store, coco, and Emmet Otter's JugBand Christmas. Smudge and I laid against Sean, against his broad chest and soft robe, Smudge swayed to the music and clapped after songs. She stood, and when Sean held out his hands for a hug, she grinned so wide and leapt onto his chest, into his arms, and he laughed and I started to tear up a little. This is so...happy.

I'll make turkey tomorrow for us, just us, and real potatoes. I'll watch more cozy winter Dr. Who and we'll all open presents that someone who loved us thought hard about us liking before buying.

I know this...I know how good this is. I know how special it is to have a good Christmas and not a survival Christmas. I've had so many years of those.

I'm so happy right now.

She meant nothin' baby, honest.

2008-12-23T15:15:00.000-08:00

Well, the torrid toxic lust for which I burned for Myspace is flushing out of me.

It doesn't happen in nature, you know. Sudden interaction with all those souls you already buried. It also isn't natural that you should have all those different people, your boss, your best friend from second grade, and the person you have sex with, all of them receiving the same witty line from you, every day.

Except, to some of them it isn't witty, they don't get a reference to Star Wars, and so you are dumb. That exhausts me. I need to be able to tilt a little toward the personality of whoever I'm facing.

But, check this out. Got to thank the popular boy who was nice to me in 7th grade for being cool. Got to talk to the mother of a friend, a woman I always wanted to know with an adult mind. Saw pictures, saw jobs saw babies. Saw, oddly, that no one looked particularly happier than me.

Saw epilogues.

And most important, got to have one more tiny string hooked between my fingers and the fingers of far away people I love. So what if it is pretty much them saying, "Jeez it's cold today!!!"? I'm glad to know it, in their case.

But still, not my blog where no one can compare my words to my face or my history or my house.

So pure here. I missed you.

2008-12-12T08:33:00.000-08:00

MySpace.

Avoided, so long...though...it was lame....now....can't stop. Last thing at night, first thing in morning...so lame...can't stop.

Be back when I grow up

Skillbility

2008-12-10T21:03:00.000-08:00

My under-editor at the paper said, "Imez, deadlines are important."

Madame, I disagree with your opinion, but as a journalist I shall fight to the death to protect it.

I don't think I'm being punished. She's moved me away from doing the "Theatre Notes," citing my struggle to meet the deadlines.

Listen, Under-Editor. You take the notes on, fine. You're about to find out how easy it is to chase down stage actors and directors for interviews. They're all way to busy ironing their black leotards and being marvelous fops to talk to me.

I didn't turn in any notes this month, as I told you, because the guy you sent me after was too busy basking in the refracting glow of his semi-regular appearances on "The O.C.," to talk with me about the show he was directing.

So she moved me laterally, to the "Book Notes," to see if I wouldn't perform better. Now I guess I will work with authors and publishers. I say guess, because she didn't bother to tell me. Just said, "have them by the 18th."

Yet I know booky things are infintely more my skillbility. It will put me in constant contact with people living out my dreams. This contact will either drive me to a very good, or very dangerous place. Either way it is movement.

Plus I still get to be the one to review all the plays in the city, because my reviews, as she complimented? me, "are solid."

So, let's here it for shirking responsibilities in a consequence free environment.

Super!

In a Net-fix

2008-12-08T14:05:00.000-08:00

What the old-man postal worker voice said to me over the phone.

"Ma'am, you're going to have to learn to take some responsibility for your errors."

What I said.

Nothing. And then, "Thank you for your time." Because you can't be rude to a person who is the link to your only option.

What I thought.

First of all, it was in no way my error. Sean put the wrong movie in the Netflix sleeve, not me. And the fact that it was the bootleg he'd just burned, proudly bearing the Sharpied title of the movie that was supposed to be in that sleeve, only makes this more urgent. I need those Netflix back or they might ban me when they see we're bootlegging them. I don't have television. All I have are those goddamn Netflix.

Second of all, I never asked to have my mailbox converted to that monstrous block uni-box with it's un-negotiable mail deposit slot that not even the bent coat hanger we tried to pry the movie out with can penetrate.

Third, of course I can't perfectly prove they are mine! My address was printed on the part of the envelope I ripped off to open it! Its very clever packaging and more efficient that way, dammit.

And lastly, that is a very rude, unnecessary way to answer the question, "What time does the postal carrier stop at my box?" And I only didn't tell you that (though, you horrid thing I have so many unvoiced screams seeking release), because you have something I desperately need, you nasty little blue minion.

I hope this ends well.

How do you People DO THIS????

2008-12-07T12:58:00.000-08:00

I have been cheerful on this blog for a really, really long time now.

This is the picture of it. Of me writing my blog now.

Head down alongside the keyboard, single finger morosely punching keys. "i....like....sushi...and...stuff."

Meanwhile emails to friends have become long and inflamed. Forty pages on Thanksgiving alone...with sentences like, "cats don't even EAT fucking OLIVES!!!" and "I didn't see that last pile of her filthy underwear until Smudge was already in it."

Therapist says, "You only accept your darkness. You need to let your light live!"

My light. My Light. MY LIGHT. Where is it?

Yes. Give my true lighted self the chance, and she shall pee rainbows.

Poop leprechauns.

Dammit.

How do you people DO THIS?

I will have completed my pledge to myself to be....cheerfuller... at the end of December. It is important to see it through.

So.

I wait.

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of January.

Just an Excuse to See The Doctor

2008-12-06T08:22:00.000-08:00

Things I Ended Up Liking When I Gave Them A Chance

1. Christian Boarding School

2. "Dr. Who" & "30 Rock"

3. Libraries

4. A Couple of Other People

5. California Rolls

Things That Were Still No Good After Trying

1. Christian University

2. "Heroes" & "Reba"

3. Danielle Steele, Nicholas Sparks, John Grisham, Nora Roberts, at the library.

4. A Couple of Other People

5. Sushi

Oh, they'll slip right through that.

2008-12-03T21:16:00.000-08:00

Reverend Lovejoy: "Get a divorce."
Marge Simpson: "But isn't that a sin?"
Reverend Lovejoy (holding a bible): "Marge, just about everything is a sin. Y'ever sat down and read this thing? Technically, we're not allowed to go to the bathroom."

Went to Kate's place and got to thinking. This video started me off.

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Okay, seen it? Now read what I havc to say about it.

Now, I used to embrace the sweet slippery flesh of Christian logic, so I would like to warn you. The "pick and choose" aspect of Christianity put forth in the video? That argument about shellfish and stoning your wife, wouldn't hold up when arguing with a Christian. All those wild crazy-beautiful rules were put forth in the Old Testament. Most Christians believe (for some damn reason) that Jesus did away with those thousands of rules upon his death, when the curtain of the Most Holy of Holies in the Temple was rent in twain.

Oh yes it was. Rent.

In twain.

(Side note...guess which side of Jesus's death the Ten Commandments sits on? OLD Testament? Jesus' death did away with the Ten Commandments? So I can have sex with my neighbor's wife after killing him while worshipping a golden goat and swearing all on the Sabbath Day? What, no? The Commandments weren't done away with but...everything else...was...and...oh but God you are a tricky devil.

Now, to be sure, Faggy-acity was condemned in both Old and New Testaments.

So, here. Better tuck this in your belt if ever you find yourself red-faced and desperately trying to shriek logic into someone's theology. This is from the New Testament, the one that apparently still applies.

"As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church." I Corinthians 14: 33-35

Shut-up bitch. Go fix me a Turkey Pot Pie.

Now, rather than admitting they or their good lady wife aren't allowed to speak in church, the Christian will then argue that the time the letter to the Corinthians was written must be considered, the context. Which will give you the lucky opportunity to say, because you, like me, are sharp and witty and oh so right, "I agree totally. I'm so happy homosexuality's time has come."

But you will not win the argument. Because facts, honestly, are hopeless in the face of faith.

Anyway this isn't about facts.

I would like to remove the pixilation...I really would but don't know how.

2008-12-02T20:56:00.000-08:00

So, I'm not a meme sort of girl. I mean it's a total honor to be tagged, but then it gets complicated with link backs and maybe the meme is a not-too-thoughtful questionnaire that asks my favorite toothpaste....So in fairness I can't tag others, though I really want to today.

So...just answer my kick-ass questions here. Unless you wanna do it at your place.

1. Have you ever been hit in anger by someone who about your same size?

2. Worst Grade School Memory?

3. First celebrity crush? (see above for Imez's, age 7.)

4. Some not in your family (and who didn't do abuse-level damage), that you have still never forgiven?

5. Someone you never said thank you to?

Never Leave The Imez Unattended

2008-12-01T16:52:00.000-08:00

The County Historical Museum is a very good one, and the volunteers who run it can't see all of it.

The crazy-quilt in the Oregon Trail section with "Mildred Lassiter 1901" embroidered sloppy on it has a laminated paper sign that says, "Don't Touch" and god help me, I know it really says, underneath, in special ink, "Everyone But Imez, Who is Very Careful."

How can I not TOUCH? The stitches, thousands, were pulled by a hand that never flushed a toilet. My hand is where her hand was. We've opened a hole in time together, with our hands. And that fabric. All that fabric. It came from wedding dresses and petticoats and wool farm pants and work shirts and Sunday dresses and the first bedspread in the trousseau. That fabric doesn't exist anymore, except in books and this quilt. If I don't touch it, if I don't smell it, it will crumble without me ever having it.

I touch everything. I wiggle the thin leather on the baby shoes and sit on the floor to lift up the Victorian travel dress and look under it. I sit at the school marm's desk and the chair creaks and I remember the average weight of an adult female in 1925 and I stand up quickly, but still flip the enormous pages in her grade-book and pinch a sheaf of wide lined children's penmanship paper. The phone operators console says don't touch and I connect a wire from Portland to some other hole. I can't creep inside the Model T because a volunteer sits in front of it, so I stick my head in smell the leather back, and then punch the tires on the side she can't see.

I am a terrible, selfish museum guest abusing the privilege rented with my $3. I can't think of an analogy to describe why I feel like this. All I can think of is how I was too tired to touch the medical equipment in the far corner or the old dolls in the toy room. I need to go back. It's like, I'm still hungry.

Hobby

2008-11-29T22:12:00.000-08:00

When my mother comes to believe a family member likes something, she will buy them different representations of that thing forever and ever. I cannot make her understand that I don't collect Winnie The Pooh anymore.

Besides the point.

My sister-in-law likes frogs. And she is a perfect match for my mother, because she is willing to accept frogs, forever and ever. As a result, many of my own birthday and Christmas gifts are frog-related, perfectly adequate gifts left over when my sister-in-law's stocking is full. Frog blankets and frog window chimes and frog candles and frog soaps and frog metal that twirls in the wind.

Besides the point, too.

My sister-in-law has taken a bathroom in Mom's house and filled it with her frogs. Oh, but you should see it. Frogs suspended on swings from the ceiling. Frogs curled up in the soap dish. Cannibal Frogs fishing off the sink and reclining on the back of the toilet, watching you and smiling so wide. They are all watching.

Honestly, still besides the point.

The point is these frogs inspired me. How unappealing they were in this bathroom...but how neat they'd look outside, scattered out in the woods surrounding my mother's house. How cool it would be for an 8 year old, 25 years from now, to be playing down the hill in the trees and find a ceramic frog hiding in the hollow of a tree.

I could not bring myself to steal my sister in law's frogs. But, I had no problem wandering around my mother's enormous house, a swirling vortex of knick-knack crappity whack, stuffing things in my coat pocket.

I wandered the four acres below the house. I tucked a small vase between a rock outcropping, hung a ceramic mask from as high into an oak as I could reach, and buried a nautical scene carved into a sea lion's tusk in a rotting stump.

The best part is, when I was done, I couldn't remember where I'd left anything.

I intend to keep doing this until I no longer have access to the property. She will never miss anything. I am removing some of the rotting albatross of junk from the house I will eventually have to clean out, while sending joy through time to the future.

Lovely.

I'm trying.

2008-11-25T21:44:00.001-08:00

The more escapism appeals to me as a viable life choice, the more I kept thinking about the movie "Trainspotting." To live a life where all that matters is heroin. There is nothing small or confusing in that life, just a blind drive to get more heroin. There is freedom in those chains.

Probably the first independent movie I ever watched. Helped me understand there was a world where a movie like this could be made, where grime was glory and selfish suffering was poetry. My world was built and waiting for me, I realized.

Anyway.

I keep a bootleg DVD of it, seldom watch it. I did tonight, after I put the baby down.

I swear this is not a depressing post. Though it will be if you click on this link. Don't click. I link it because it exists.

It was the scene that kicked me in my bland heart. It is a dead baby, a baby who spends the first half of the movie crawling, ignored, and sweetly babbling among heroin vials and needles. It will hurt.

I had not seen this movie since giving birth. I watched this scene, and felt the old appreciation, the hot beauty of showing things that shouldn't be shown, flush out of me.

I did something then, that I never ever do, because I am jealous of my time to myself. I opened Smudge's door, a half hour after putting her down. I didn't care if I woke her. Had to see her.

I don't talk about her much. Up lifts this perfect little round head, lush with remarkable hair for an almost 2-yr-old. Big sweet eyes reflected in the hall light. Big smile, like. "Ma! Fancy meetin' you here!"

I scooped her up, cuddled her, whispered to her. I love her and it aches it aches in my stomach so hard. Got her more juice water, tucked her back in. Laid a finger on her nose because that is how I kiss the final goodnight kiss, unable to lean over the height of the crib.

I love my kid. I don't know what it means that the love seems to come out of my body, not my head. Lines of gentle lightening under the skin and small pain and large need in my stomach. The only time my brain is quiet.

Ah me. Sure I can write an uplifting post...but I'm going to need footage of a baby dead in a drug den.

I'm trying!!!

Pithy, but peircingly insightful? No?

2008-11-24T19:50:00.000-08:00

Things I Ended Up Liking When I Gave Them A Chance

1. Christian Boarding School

2. "Dr. Who" & "30 Rock"

3. Libraries

4. A Couple of Other People

5. California Rolls

Things That Were Still No Good After Trying

1. Christian University

2. "Heroes" & "Rita"

3. Danielle Steele, Nicholas Sparks, John Grisham, Nora Roberts, at the library.

4. A Couple of Other People

5. Sushi

Imez's Pledge

2008-11-24T09:17:00.001-08:00

Hear ye.

Announcing.

Imez's Pledge.

From today until the New Year.

No depressing posts, no dark posts, no ridiculously personal posts.

Because I want to stretch myself, and spare myself, spell myself. And there is more to me than intricate self-loathing and exhausting self-analysis. Perhaps?

And it is Christmas. And Stuff.

Ho ho ho.

Something scarier than becoming your mother

2008-11-23T21:29:00.000-08:00

My sister called to ask me, haltingly, if I'd go out with her on her birthday, for a drink. If I had time, if I wanted to. I know it is mostly because there will be no one else, never is anyone else. And I want to gather her up and dust her off and give her a blanket but instead I keep shouting.

No lectures, she asked, referencing our last meal out, where I began shouting in front of the waitress that Mr. Pibb sits comfortably high on the List of Things Insulin Dependent Diabetics Cannot Have.
"You choke down cheap sugar-free chocolate but drink two glasses of sugar soda??? You don't even have to chew before the sugar goes into your blood! Are you just done with kidneys?"

Now she is sick, with a cold, gone to see Mom's doctor, and I shouted again. My mother's doctor is actually, very actually, 85 years old, and tired, and loves to give out all kinds of pills. But my sister said that her sickness shouldn't prevent us from coming to Mom's for Thanksgiving because she went on antibiotics the day she felt sick.

I shouted, "You're taking antibiotics for a head cold??? You're the reason antibiotic-resistant strains of disease are felling the lower classes!!"

My sister said, "You're a real joy to talk too," and sounded hurt. Our mother took the phone and told me it was heading for her chest. All colds that begin like my sister's head for the chest and end up needing antibiotics.

I said, "I'm sorry Mother, I've forgotten what medical school your degree is from. University of My Talking Makes It True? I haven't taken antibiotics for five years."

And I hung up disgusted.

And now, I write it all down and find out, holy shit. What a snotty bitch.

I'm the difficult relative. I'm the pain. I'm the one they are obligated to love despite the tension I create. And that tension? The tension that makes them stammer their words and sound defeated? That's ME? I made that?

It's how they talked to Dad. And did they think they were free, when he died?

The really bad part is my five year old self is standing with her hands on her hips and saying, "Teach you to push me around. In 25 years it'll just take a phone call from me will make you all feel small and judged. Shoulda been nicer when you had the chance."

Happy Holidays.

For Frequent Referral

2008-11-20T15:36:00.000-08:00

The old reasons don't have as much kick anymore.

I can't, just can't, cover the wall around my mirror with dozens of pictures of Drew Barrymore's Guess Jeans campaign and say to myself when, "This. This!" That was 15 years old. 28lbs lost.

Can't keep a box wrapped in blue Victorian wrapping paper full of women and articles I cut from Shape Magazine, bronzed muscles and bikinis, and say, "Oh god, please, this." 18 years old. 80lbs gained.

I can't sit in the computer room at the library sorting through web pages of clothes I could wear, girls I could become, if only, until my tail-bone ached. That was 23 years old. 40 lbs lost.

Can't keep a scrapbook of plus-sized models looking devastingly perfect and pictures of things I could do, positions I could recline in and lengths I could wear, if only. 26 years old. 15 lbs gained.

Head down, eyes and ears covered. 29 years old. 30 lbs gained.

Now I am thirty, and know, or feel, that being not fat won't fix/change/free me. It is a shruggable, resigned knowledge. I won't become a fascinating fiction, I won't become a still captured moment that is perfect. I'm not happy to know it.

Thinness equated every door in the world popping open. Now I know pretty well which doors I'm going through. Mother door. Wife door. All the regular doors.

But still. Still I must.

Now my only picture is the bathroom mirror. The only place in the house I see my face. The only reminder. "Not this. Not this." Don't let this fraud perpetuate. This is not you. You are pretty. Find you out.

30 years old. 3 lbs lost.

Free Martha Stewart

2008-11-17T20:18:00.000-08:00

Just an aside.

Does anyone know exactly what "insider trading" is?

Cuz, if it is what I think it is, I need someone to explain to me why it is illegal. I'll listen, I really will. I simply must be missing something.

I heard it defined on the radio today as "using information unavailable to the public to avoid losing lots of money."

And I'm thinking. If I were on a train track, and I saw a train bearing down on me....am I allowed to move?

I mean, even if the track is on a bridge, crammed full of people, hundreds, and they don't know the train is coming because holy shit, a train timetable just fluttered out of the wind into my hands, only I know it. Can't I get off the track?

I can't possibly save them all, there is too many. If I started screaming, the ensuing riot would prevent me and my family from a safe escape and in no way assure anyone else's safe escape. Can't I grab my friends and family and get out of the way of the train?

It's not my fault I have that train timetable.

Am I really required to stand there and get hit?

Really?

Stick to the Script

2008-11-16T21:57:00.000-08:00

For the most part, I still refuse to admit there isn't a camera on me. I swear to god I can occasionally hear the soundtrack swelling in the background, if I'm experiencing something especially poignant. And, you know I'm a poignant girl.

Life has always been chipping away at my narrative, trying to reassert itself as callously non-fiction. People not laughing at a punchline, people not feeling ashamed when I invite them to. I remember, this applies, when I went to France after my Senior year, to study French (badly, so badly) at a school there.

There was a Spaniard American gentleman there, also in the program. He was in his mid 70's, always dapper in a blazer, with a wig that I was willing to believe in. Because he was tidy and charming I decided he could be in the story.

He sucked at it. Truly. I was struggling that summer,( I simply must always struggle) with my inadequacies. One summer evening I sat with him on a park bench on the side of an Alp and poured my heart out. It wasn't easy because he kept wanting to talk about his ex-wives, but I was determined to have poetry in this moment. "I'm not a good person. I just don't try hard enough," I said. "I'm just so lazy."

He didn't have any wisdom, and no comfort. He spent the rest of the summer grinning conspiratorially at me and saying, "Here comes the lazy girl." "If I say, 'pass me the salt', will you be too lazy to do it?" "I can't invite you to sit with me. You're not a good person."

In the retelling it sounds like harmless teasing, but it pissed me off beyond all measure. The script was quite clear, "grandfather offers comfort," not "old man is inept bully."

Eventually he got lost on a trip to Paris, and the school's bus left him behind. He, not remembering how to contact the school, alerted both the American and Spanish embassies. He found his way back. My last memory is of him smiling and holding his wig down against the wind during the parting ceremony.

Now here the script reads, "Bloggers enjoy post immensely. All clap."

2008-11-12T14:14:00.000-08:00

My blog, it's just not the sort that gets comments, is it?

Ah well. Here.

This will make you feel good. Really good, no matter what.

Amanda

2008-11-12T12:27:00.000-08:00

Amanda and I both had babies at the apartment complex. But we didn't talk.

One day she walked up to where I sat with a tiny Smudge on a tiny square of grass outside my door. She had a baby slung under her arm. She said, looking at the ground at my feet, "Wassup. Amanda."

I didn't have any friends who use the term "Wassup" non-ironically before Amanda. I didn't have any friends that listened to rap except as a way to understand artistic urban motivations. And no friends that would think of using the word "hump" in place of "fuck" to protect little ears in the room. I needed a friend like that.

And now I'll tell you of a shit storm, and the woman who is surviving it.

I thought her daughter looked different. Her little head seemed asymmetrical. I learned she had tubing inserted in her skull to drain fluid, and she was cross-eyed. She had been born 3 months premature, (not due to any maternal misdoings).

Amanda and her boyfriend of 10 years spent 3 months at Ronald McDonald House in Portland, caring for their baby through an incubator. The baby came home to our dingy little apartments, healthy but for feeding tubes and soon-to-diagnosed Cerebral Palsy.

Amanda was happy, though. Her baby was alive, she would marry her boyfriend in August, he had a good job, her family was close to her but not so close that their bad habits affected her new life. She was done with parties, uninterested in drugs. Her apartment was spotless, her meals were healthy, and her walls covered in sweetly framed portraits and snapshots of her family.

I went with her one day in July, and we found a wedding dress. She seldom smiles, but she kept grinning at her reflection in the 3-way mirrors. She would buy it after she brought her mom to see it.

Her mom never say it. She died the next day. She collapsed in the shower from an epileptic seizure and never woke. She left 5 children, all teens except Amanda.

And Amanda's 2 year old baby sister.

In the misery of the aftermath, her boyfriend said the wrong thing to her, told her it was time to quit grieving and start taking care of him again. She slapped him. He moved out.

She has been asking forgiveness for 6 months. He still pays for half the apartment and takes the baby on weekends, and so I will not condemn him at a immature douche-bag dick. She loves him, only him, since they were 14. She sleeps with stuffed animals pressed into her back, to trick the emptiness.

She doesn't work, as there is no longer any family to leave her baby with. Her family disintegrated with her mother gone. Her father cannot recover, has no job, and walks around the house he may soon lose, like a ghost. He, in this state, is the main caregiver of the now 3 year old. Her teenage siblings have mostly drifted away. Her 16 year old sister remains in the house, angry, rebellious, incapable of helping.

Amanda is unusual because she is in an utter shit swamp, and none of it was her fault, unless you blame her for who she fell in love with. The slap? She shouldn't have. Although I believe forgiveness and empathy, in it's purest form, was created for a situation like that.

And she never complains. She never asks for anything. Doesn't compare herself to other people. She just keeps surviving. With no one to call for support, losing the two people she needed most within two weeks of each other, one to death and the other to weakness of character (his).

I'm no savior. The best I can do is spend time with her, and pay her to watch Smudge. But I'm no mother or sister or husband.

It has not escaped me, that this life of mine, the one I keep thrashing around in and kicking at and screaming, "MORE! Not enough! Not good enough!!" is everything, all, she ever wanted.

Imez has a political opinion

2008-11-11T21:07:00.000-08:00

Before the bridesmaid's dinner, or, drunken sex chat in Mexican restaurant, the bride was trying to remind us who Sarah, her only non-olden-days bridesmaid was. "Blond, pretty, lesbian? I mean, not wearing a sign on her chest or anything, but definitely a lesbian."

Sarah showed up last to the dinner, and was the only one not steeped in thick sick sweet Postum of a Seventh-Day-Adventist Idaho childhood. No matter. She was solid and pretty like a girl who loves horses, spoke with that Jodie Foster lilt I find so completely endearing. She sat right down and started in about Hillary verses Obama. I kept trying to talk about sex instead, cuz, come on, girls night. She deterred long enough from a Sarah Palin rant to efficiently list the ages of her virginity loss, to both genders, then returned to addressing her fears of Palin's RNP speech the night before. I really liked her.

Sarah was a table pounder, passionate, definitely belonged there in Washington DC. She works for a hated hated lobbying firm, the American Beverage something-or-other. Their job is to keep Americans drinking, at a low minimum wage, while enjoying lots of fatty foods. I fucking love that that firm exists. This is her talking about Lindsy Lohan on Fox News.

I will speak carefully and say I do not think she would like to stay at the American Beverage Something-or-other forever.

One day she will do something great, because the ability and burn to do so vibrates in every quick moment and solid step she takes.

This is the great thing she is doing now.

She has created this. I have reason to believe the people who read my blog would like to help her.

My husband's best friend at work makes less than him, even though she holds a higher position. It's because she has to pay for her wife's insurance, and Sean does not. They've been together as long as we have. Doesn't seem fair.

Click on the link, if it doesn't seem fair to you, either.

2008-11-09T20:22:00.000-08:00

I'm back, for what it is worth.

Back, and rambling.

Stuck a list to my fridge, "Happy Home Checklist," a daily checklist to fight the loathing. The suspicion that my lazy mothering will hurt Smudge. Checklists are silly. But silly trumps immovable. List includes, "Smudge eat a veggie," "cook 1 meal," "Brush."

I had convinced myself I'm too weak to apply to grad school, and that I am a failure because I won't apply. That failure burns inside, make me project painful wicked heat to everyone around me.

But I want a second baby, and the one I have isn't even two. It isn't wrong to stop and raise them. So why do I feel I've failed? This desperation should not hum in me, startling me awake. Why can't I just wait? Wait and NOT be miserable.

In my head, I asked Dr. Horrible Laura, what to do? And she told me to quit whining. Be a mother, like I chose. Be a grad student later. I hate Dr. Laura.

Let it go. Let the burning cool. Stop blowing the embers with fear and comparisons.

I have a list, you know.

A self help book asked me, "What do you want?"
And for years, no real answer besides, "ummm, be thin. And...um...happy?" Funny how deeply I have always hated women who list those weak lame things as their only goals. Mirror mirror.

Now I have a good list. Real. Some parts of it?
1. A house in the woods.
2. To be pretty
3. To be frequently published.

Other stuff, too. Then the self help book says..."what are you doing every day to make these things real?"

Oh, well, shit.

I'm starting Weight Watchers Wednesday, through no small effort of arrangements.

And I'll make lots of lists.

2008-11-06T16:02:00.000-08:00

I went into a mental ward when I was 18. Twice, two separate hospitals.

I wish my parents had come to see me, either time.

I recently asked Mom why they never came to see me, not even after I was discharged. After my final discharge a friend, the bride of the wedding I've written about, took me in. Dad sent her mom some money, though. I couldn't stay long. I was...I was too much for them, needed more help than those two kind women could provide.

Mom said, "Your dad had a thing about...mental...people who were...." and then repeated a sloppy version of a story dad used to tell, about trying to repair phone lines in a mental hospital, how claustrophobic and angry it made him to have all those fucking nutjobs staring at him, at his tool belt. I asked why she didn't come alone, then. She shrugged and said she was sorry.

But once, just this one time, when it was really bad and I'd come home cuz I had no where else to go, even though I knew they didn't want me. This one time, Dad hugged me on the balcony while I cried and he'd never ever done that before and never after and he said, very seriously, "Einstein, he had problems, too you know. What you've got is because you're so smart. Genius and crazy are very close together."

But the next day he screamed at me, called me a fucking little shit, because....I can't remember! I can't remember what I'd done!!!

But he held me that one time!!!!! i'm so grateful, fuck it! It's so stupid but I'm so fucking grateful!!!

2008-11-06T14:38:00.000-08:00

I'm failing.

Reason #eleventy-billion I have social problems.

2008-11-04T15:58:00.000-08:00

We took Smudge to Sean's library, that big beautiful college castle, to try and show off her Pretty Pirate Princess number, red skulls woven into cheap black lace, at their employee Halloween party. She hated her itchy dress and refused to sparkle for onlookers. She kept up the doleful howling, pulling the black-laced bodice away from her skin. She also refused to carry the battle ax we bought her. All in all she was a sorry excuse for The Teeny Queenie of Blood.

At the door we met Sean's favorite co-worker, who is a woman, but has the decency to be a lesbian so as to avoid any strained feelings. She had canceled their plans to have a beer last weekend. She was sick.

I inquired to her health. She said she was better and kept talking, saying things that were plenty appropriate and convivial. I assume. I don't remember. I just remember registering her feeling better as a good, comforting thing. Sean probably won't come home sick, then.

That is when I looked at the elevator and thought, "There is an elevator. I'm going to want to be on that." And started walking toward it.

She was still talking. Had been, facing me and everything. But I had gotten my answer. I was done. My brain quit of her. And I swear I even like her.

She gave a small startled reflex and turned to keep up with me as I walked away. I caught myself after only two steps, tried to play it off like I was chasing Smudge (who was securely in her father's arms....lord) but what is wrong with me? I often miss huge chunks of what people say to me because I decide it is extraneous. I'm such a selfish little frig!

Sometimes I feel like I'm a mind-reader, all the time I spend analyzing and prying at people. And I predict nothing more of value is going to come from an interaction, so, surely they're done too. Right? That's really assholic.

Anyway. Happy election day. I fucking hate politics. I'm done.

Tales of the Enchanted Ball Pit

2008-11-01T21:19:00.000-07:00

I am not in this picture. But please to note the staggering awesomeness of my television. THAT, my friends, is a genuine DVD player sitting beneath it. Don't be embarrassed if you haven't heard of it. It is a relatively new technology. Oh yeah.

Jesus God. Babies. Babies everywhere. The air thick with the breath of babies.

The trick, I have been told, to a successful party, is the guest list. Inviting people who will help their hostess by entertaining each other. This works well with toddlers. They stand face to face and scream laughter. "I see you have a nose. I also have a nose. NOSES!!!"

A ball pit helps, too.

Their parents, that complicates. I only know so many people with babies, and they don't much know each other. Despite mostly similar backgrounds and interests, they didn't talk much. I circulated among the parents, holding 8 loose conversations at once. I don't know if the parents had fun. But I like to believe I get credit for entertaining their babies as lavishly as I could afford (plastic balls in a kiddie pool, goldfish crackers, wine coolers).

I was grateful to my mother, who knows no such thing as social discomfort, projecting her perpetual cheer from my couch. Today, driving my mother toward her home, she was pinching and swirling the air looking for a word. "Your friends are...they're..." she exhaled, then mumbled a word.

I turned to her. "Did you just say, 'high-faluting'? Did you just call the parents at the party, 'high-faluting'?" And I laughed. Really, really hard, because I have never head that word used in earnest.

She didn't mean it insulting, just didn't know a good synonym for "librarians".

Ah but I was flattered. I have worked so hard, so long, to be considered at home in a high faluting crowd. My next goal is to personally achieve high faluting status, for myself.

I think my DVD player is a magnificent first step.

before Nov. 4th

2008-10-27T22:18:00.001-07:00

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.

Here I talk way too much about my questions

2008-10-27T21:22:00.000-07:00

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).

Your questions today

2008-10-26T21:04:00.000-07:00

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.

The mirror

2008-10-26T20:49:00.001-07:00

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?

When we relax it's like this

2008-10-23T14:14:00.001-07:00

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.

You are gonna judge me, I know it.

2008-10-22T20:32:00.001-07:00

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.

Who should I vote for?

2008-10-20T17:54:00.001-07:00

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.

Here I talk about my dog.

2008-10-16T14:17:00.001-07:00

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.

There it goes

2008-10-14T13:38:00.000-07:00

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?

Who, me?

2008-10-11T11:08:00.000-07:00

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.

For shame.

2008-10-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Let's chat

2008-10-08T21:39:00.001-07:00

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 stopped the pills months ago

2008-10-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-10-07T20:55:00.000-07:00

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.

Kiss

2008-10-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Blog cowards. Blowards?

2008-10-05T13:36:00.001-07:00

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.

Spritz me

2008-10-04T23:11:00.000-07:00

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.

The Passion of the Kid

2008-10-02T10:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Burn

2008-10-01T12:20:00.000-07:00

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.

Not cool, man

2008-09-30T12:01:00.000-07:00

I get nervous around people with any sort of affliction. I met a woman with a lazy eye two days ago and I panicked, slightly. And the neighborhood dwarf paralyzes me, not just because he is a dwarf but he's also kind of crazy, and walks through the Bi-Mart shouting that he's going into the bathroom to meet Greg Brady. In my head I can say, "And god speed to you, sir!" but face to face, I look frightened.

I freak out because of that moment. That second when they are watching me realize that they're different, and they're waiting to see my reaction. I flash on every lousy TV show from my childhood that had stupid characters being insensitive and prejudiced to the girl in the wheelchair, the boy with the stutter, and I am so desperate not to be a stupid character.

So I freeze. Then I try to get away.

Fantastic.

I'd rather just say, "I see you have no hands. But you work that cash register flawlessly. How'd you do it?"

But that's assholic in its own way.

An Idiot Holds Forth

2008-09-28T21:16:00.000-07:00

While we were dating, I told Sean, a political science BA, and I didn't care much about politics. This might have been our last conversation ever, because Sean, 26, fresh from his mother's basement at the time, (before he bloomed into the remarkable husband he is now, of course) responded by snorting over the phone, and saying "Did you know that the original meaning of the word "idiot" means 'one who is ignorant of politics?'"

I think a much more clever definition of idiot is "saying something stupid enough to give your wife ammunition against you for the rest of her life."

"Honey, I don't want to spend our 50th anniversary in Antarctica."
"Really? That's interesting. I guess I'm an idiot for suggesting it. Remember that time you called me an idiot?"

But today I have something of political import.

Why can't you just like your political candidate? Why are Americans in the grip of this pulsing blood-lust to make the opposing candidate look like an evil slobbering retard? Stop sending me hi-larious email forwards about how dumb Sarah Palin is or how crooked Obama is.

Fact is, I will not believe either is evil or either is stupid. Stop insisting one is. I don't care if Alaska has tiny population and she was only Governor for 20 months, you still can't get to that position by being a vacant retard. And if Obama says the country has turned him into their great beautiful hope, maybe he has a god complex but, well, his supporters..I've met them and they want to wash the man's feet with their hair. Have you seen all those posters?

And in the big picture, I don't think they're all that different. Neither one is going to do their damnedest to destroy our country, neither will end useless foreign wars, both will be at the mercy of many blessed checks and balances, and both are the slightly creepy kind of people who want to be in charge of other people.

So what's with all the anger and smugitude?

*And for the record, I'm still voting Ron Paul. He's different. Too different, I guess.

2008-09-28T07:04:00.000-07:00

I'm going to drog this morning, which is a word I made up. Drunk blogging, though I am not drunk, only sleep deprived and hepped out on cold medicine. And prescription tranquilizers but HEY, we all do what we need to get by.

I can not believe the QUALITY of the people who attend and comment on my blog. The realism running through you, the intelligence. Your comments are so...well you care about your world, the tiny place my thoughts have in it, and you think. It is so rare to find a pat little catch-all in my comment section, a LOL ur so funny! Thank you. You offer sensible, thought out advice and observations. I want you all to have my bone marrow should you need it.

Now I am the drunk girl at the party, weeping pouring her heart forth, "You guys, I love you sooooo much you guys....say we'll be friends after graduation?"

I can't talk to real people about this shit. I squeeze shut like when an old cartoon character accidentally drinks a bottle of alum. I don't talk, only write.

This post is ugly

2008-09-25T13:29:00.000-07:00

This post is ugly.
This post will be deleted, eventually. But, its at least four years before she can read, so, no hurry.

Listen.

I'm not having any fun. Seriously. I'm not enjoying being a mother. I'm bored, I'm put upon, I'm tired even though I do so very little.

"Oh....poor Imez! Being a mommy is work!? Well that's no fair! Oh! You have to stop doing every thing you want when you want it? You have to tend to the needs of a helpless baby that you brought into the world, on purpose? You don't get to be the baby anymore? Tsk tsk oh that's too bad."

I know.

I fully expected to not want my old life back. Motherhood a permanent drug, enlightened and delighted, forever. But no. I want my life back, still. Or a chance to build an even better one.

I spend the better part of every damn day waiting for the hours to pass. I sit on my couch and try to keep Smudge from screaming. That's my day, my whole day. And they are slipping away. Sometimes I'll come to, out of my own head, from staring out the window and realize Smudge has been holding her sippy out to me asking for a refill, ("Uhh? Uhh?). I'm dreading when she realizes, Mama is bored and trying to escape.

She's only sweet sometimes. When she's sweet, my head clears, and all I can see is her and she's all I want to see. But, it is only sometimes. And she's not often fun. Too little to talk to.

Sean, he's tired too. He says, "I'm happy to leave work every day, and I'm always a little surprised and disappointed to get home and realize it's no fun here." We bargain hours with each other. "Let me go on the computer and then I'll take her when I go on my walk." The person stuck watching, tired, relenting, "Fine. Whatever." Duty, all duty, very little joy.

Don't console me. Tell me, what are we doing wrong? I'm ready to hear it. I can feel it. I can read it in other blogs, how contented all the mommies are. I'm doing something wrong. Maybe expecting too much. Maybe not engaging her enough, my natural laziness.

She's going to wake up any minute, and then I'll have to be half-asleep again.

Fighting Words

2008-09-24T12:28:00.001-07:00

The last fight I had with my dad. And by last, I mean...well, he's dead. Which is why I can talk about him.

I was 21, I'm 30 now. It was after Christmas, the last Christmas Sean and I would spend unmarried. He spent it with his family, I with mine. My mother and I were going to drive out to the airport that day and pick him up.

I was acting girly and romantic, little dances and sing-songs. Mostly performing, I guess, though I was so excited to see Sean again. I announced I was going to sit in the back seat with Sean after we got him, the whole way back to our house.

And from the corner of the room my dad erupted. Rage I could never have predicted, hurting all the more because in the back of my head I thought I was pleasing my folks, having a nice man, getting married like a normal girl, not a being a weirdo.

He repeated my sentence nasty and whining with his tongue hanging out, making it as ugly and retarded as he could. "'I'm going to sit in the back, nyeah nyeah.' Is your mother your nigger? Huh?" I was shocked, like ice-water bath shock.

I have always been a cry-baby, (I call it, 'low emotional thresh-hold', but I know what it really is) so I started to cry. He walked half ways across the floor to me and bent down toward me, face all twisted up in anger, and spoke louder. "What? You gonna cry now? Gonna fucking cry?"

I went out into the snow. Mom was half-heartedly interceding as I went, Dad was shouting her down about how I deserved it, acting like she was my nigger. And I ended up not sitting in the back seat.

Two days later, as I drove away with Sean, I realized, this was likely the last. For the simple fact that Sean and I were going to get married. And Dad's twisted propriety would prevent him from fighting another man's wife, or at least make him more nervous about doing it.

I was right, it was the last time. But why do I think of them as "fights"?

I HATE PORN

2008-09-23T12:58:00.000-07:00

I remember, when I was 12, seeing a dirty magazine and feeling absolutely dizzy from the presence of sex. It was a good feeling.

As soon as I threw off the belief that sex and my desire for it was sinful, I proudly embraced pornography. This was necessary as I have only ever been with Sean and only want to be with Sean. Pornographies are travel brochures of places you won't go but still like to know about.

I have seen dirty movies from every decade since the 1920's. I have seen dirty photographs dating from the Civil War, have a collection of dirty Victorian books, and met my limit with the Marquis De Sade because pooping and dead children just aren't sexy. My husband set me up folders on the computer containing snippets of internet porn I selected. Group sex, gay sex, playful bondage, hairy retro porn. There was so much to see.

Yesterday I watched a video of a fat woman, looking confused, masturbating for the camera on her computer. She wasn't doing it to pleasure herself. She was doing it because someone told her to. And now hundreds of people were logging in to laugh at her every day. I felt so goddamn sorry for her. And that was it. I realized.

I hate porn.

I HATE PORN.

I have been looking for that same rush I got from the idea of sex, the same I felt when I was 15. So I kept searching and collecting. But....I just hate it.

-I hate semi-professional porn, with it's harsh lighting and shaved genitals marked with pimples and ingrown hairs.

-I hate the penis' that are stiff but still flop because the man had his tendon's cut.

- I hate close-ups of penetration. It is ugly and clinical.

-I hate how painful fake breasts look.

- I hate that smearing a girl with ejaculate is supposed to be the best part.

-I hate how BORING it all is.

-I hate amateur porn posted by exhibitionists; their wanting everyone to see takes away it's eroticism.

-I hate soft-core Cinemax porn, ugly bodies popped out of plastic mold, bumping around in an expensive bed. Nothing about that is entertaining.

-I hate I HATE that it is so obvious the women in porn aren't having fun. They're doing their job, or they're trying to make a man happy. And the men who make it and watch it, don't care. It doesn't turn men off, not even my own dear husband. They don't care that it's likely she's disgusted by a stranger's ejaculate on her face and in her mouth, or too doped up to mind.

How could this happen? What happened? When did my sex drive leave the arena it was so comfortable in?

So now what is sexy?

Self-abuse Causes Insanity.

2008-09-21T14:32:00.000-07:00

My therapist is a pretty lesbian, cute like an 11-year-old tomboy with a leather couch and $110-an-hour price on her time. I think she is brilliant, but I tend to deify.

I complain, I yank out the story of my trip, quoting my own blog liberally because it's much smoother in print. I say, I felt fat. I felt useless. I don't like my family. I'm a failure.

And she looks, undeniably, bored. For the first time in 2 years.

"Mez, are any of those thoughts helping? Or are you just addicted to, enjoying, feeling lousy?"

I slide down the couch to the floor, and press my head to the seat cushions. I knew this was coming. She and I have said all there is to say. Now she's just waiting for me to decide to stop. To decide the pain of change hurts less than the pain of still being me every day. I speak through my armpit to her.

"I'm emotionally masturbating, aren't I?"

She perks up. "What an excellent term for it!"

Thanks.

Clean Living

2008-09-20T21:30:00.000-07:00

I have chosen not to talk much about my family on this blog. Because, frankly, no one wants to hear it anymore. Not even me. As much as I want to tell it, by god, I don't want to hear it.

And so, suffice it to say, my mother and sister went with me, on my own invitation, to central Oregon, to camp on the river I grew up next to. I had asked them because I was intimidated to do it alone, in the woods with dog and baby. And I was a miserable companion, because I swallowed down all the things I wanted to say, or scream, at them, and the mess was a bubbly poison in my stomach. I looked for any reason to be angry, to feel mistreated, to bleed the poison out on little things that didn't matter since the real stuff wasn't going to come out. And if I could not find a reason to be mad, I fell silent, and glowered.

But it wasn't just them. I was so tired. Smudge, my baby...oh god she was terrible. We hadn't been home in over a week by that point, her dad was gone, driving his grandparent's Mercedes across the country, and she was a little messed up because I had left her for a week. She was suspicious of my mother and sister and wouldn't go two whining, screaming paces from my side, unless it was toward the river, fire, or road.

The nights were 35 degrees and there was no difference in temperature inside the tent or out. I could feel my dog shivering at my feet. I didn't sleep well; the ground was hard and full of tree roots and I was never content with Smudge's warmth, trying to sleep while holding blankets around her ever-moving little body, whining even in sleep.

My only break came when my sister's friends came to visit. Chaz is a normal guy, but his boyfriend Flip, he's a cartoon. A near perfect imitation of the Hank Azaria gay housekeeper character from "The Birdcage." I once pulled into my sister's driveway to find him doing yard-work in tiny green short-shorts and a yellow mesh tank top.

He and Smudge sat in Chaz's convertible, the one Flip will never drive because his license was revoked (simply glorious gobs of DUI's) for half an hour, pushing buttons and giggling together. Afterwards he skipped around chanting "Pinata, Pinata!" while encouraging Smudge to hit him with a stick. A forty-eight year old Mexican who leaves fire in this footsteps (I think Leon gave me that expression) and his kindred spirit, enclosed in a 21-month-old girl. I should have kissed Flip for the break he gave me.

I want to go back, though. My soul does, my brain doesn't. But they've been doing their own things for years now.

Aggrevation

2008-09-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

My neighbor cut my weeds behind my house and behind my back. They were aggravating her.

Not because they were hedging onto her property. Not because she has to look at them while she has her morning coffee. There is a low fence and a high hedge between her and the long grass of my side yard. She had her son cross the fence and hedge, with a weed-eater, and cut down all my grass.

The side yard is dominated by two enormous misplaced pine trees, so nothing will grow there but tawny field grass. I don't think of it as part of my lawn, but as sort of a small field beside my lawn.

Trying to ask her why she did it took effort, because she didn't want to talk about it. Her eyes swam around; she wanted to talk about why my car was gone two weeks, and why there was an old Mercedes with Pennsylvania plates parked in front of my house. This is the way of passive-aggression, even polite confrontation is uncomfortable.

Better to weed-wack under cover of night.

I prodded and her voice slipped from polite to a frustrated whining that revealed a real emotion. An 11-year-old's words and tone coming out of a stocky, middle-aged body. "Every time I go by there it aggravates me! You see how I keep my lawn! And I asked you if you wanted help! I offered to give you weed killer! But you didn't seem interested!"

I wasn't interested. So...it was up to her.

I want to be a good neighbor, and I told her so. I said it was more important to me than weeds. Then I asked her patience, that she would just have to wait it out with us, we're planning to re-sod and so forth in the spring. We've only been here a few months.

I don't know if I said everything right. I don't think it matters, because it will re-settle in her brain however she wants to re-settle it. In her memory I probably thanked her heartily, or screamed at her.

It's not that she cut weeds, that is bad. It's that now, I'm looking at the dirty dishes in my sink, and remembering that I need to change Smudge's crib sheet. Wondering what the neighbor would think if she saw those things. Wonder how much it would take for her to decide it was up to her, up to her to call the city, call child protective services.

How much aggrevation can she be expected to withstand?

Squanderings

2008-09-17T21:05:00.000-07:00

Okay. Back on the road.

They all became such fancy-pants. My old friends, the new ones I met in D.C. Alison and Sara, both spokespeople, one for a government bureau, one for an evil lobbying association. Kara, veterinarian. Leon, artist, dentist. Ron, showing me the two architectural magazines his designs are featured in this month. Andra, who is also a trained architect but changed lanes to open a doggy dress designer business in New Orleans. All under 35, some under 30.

After my speech at the wedding I disappeared. Leon said people came up and asked him about me, about what I did.

"I told them you were a huge literary critic for a major newspaper".
"But I'm not," I said, a little shocked. I'm a housewife. I've got a toddler. I write play reviews for a small paper in a small city.

With Leon, there is no point trying to make him feel sorry, trying to force an 80's family sitcom moment with him. No point in, "But Leon, don't you see? By lying, you're saying I'm not good enough just being me!"

It wouldn't work, because dear Leon would just be so happy that I'd finally gotten it.

"Yes! Jesus, thank you. You get it. Of course you're not good enough. Now stop squandering yourself and go be someone I can brag about without lying."

I wouldn't be telling the truth, anyway. I don't believe I'm okay just being me. This isn't me. I'm not supposed to be fat and confused and tense and unheard. I feel squandered.

Read tonight, "Nobody changes. They just get revealed."

So

2008-09-16T21:43:00.000-07:00

Lets all take a little break from my tireless self involvement (and boy howdy do I have more!).

Question.

If the Catholic church has so much money, why does their TV network suck so bad? With the kind of money they have, they could beam the love of Jesus directly into people's brains. Instead their shows are beige people talking in front of potted plants. Unless...that's what they want me to think.

Also- I wonder if the current pope took a vow of poverty. Does it still apply when you are pope? Or maybe because you are the Vicar of Christ you can pretty much like like...well, a god. Actually, the pope probably owns like, four things, that are really his. I wonder how good his dinners are.

And one more thing. I think it may be unconstitutional to make kids pay taxes. They can't vote as to what is to be done with their money, so it is taxation without representation. Also, they can't serve on a jury (which is good, but still) so it is impossible for them to be judged by a jury of their peers. The suffergettes went to prison for protesting that kind of treatment. Can children legally own land?

A Damn Bust Dam Burst

2008-09-16T07:11:00.001-07:00

I have now, maybe always, an emotional thresh-hold low enough for a mouse to trip over. Four days ago I was Absolutely. Gutted. By. Dumbo. I started crying a little when poor Mrs. Jumbo (sweet and pink-capped, not like those vicious feather-wearing elephant whores she shared a train car with) kept hoping one of the stork bundles falling from the sky were hers, by they weren't. And kept crying at various times all the way through, sobbing during the last scene, where Mrs. Jumbo has a sleek private caboose and her perfect little flying baby slides into her arms. My only real break came from the shuffle and jive crows, those racist caricatured darlings, god bless 'em.

I had to keep from crying at Alison's wedding ceremony. So I stood next to her but tried to ignore her completely. Because that's the stellar maid-of-honor performance you get when you have Imez on your team. When she handed her bouquet to me to hold so she could take her husband's hands the whole room watched me give her a "Wha...what the fuck, what do you want? What?" look. See, my secret to not crying in any indoor situation is to find a light bulb, stare at it, and tell myself The Aristocrats joke. Don't break my concentration.

It wasn't just the wedding. Start with the jet lag of a week prior, and the heat, and start removing an asphalt chunk from the soul dam for my kid gone, my husband gone, my weight, my lack of success, my friends who I haven't seen in a decade and won't see for more, and take a supporting beam for when I walked across the reception foyer with my dress in my underwear. Kara's father, who performed the ceremony, tackled me like a crazed lover and threw me against the wall, to save me further embarrassment.

Turned out it wasn't my own strength holding me together that day. Pure tension, the stress of having to give a bridal toast at dinner. A toast that had to be perfect, because it is the only kind of thing I do well. Everyone else has a smaller waist and a bigger income, but this, this I can be the best at. And it was perfect. I was proud. And I sat back down. And the tension supports were gone.

And...I couldn't get hold. Started to cry and couldn't stop. Ran out during Alison's spotlight dance with her dad. In the bathroom it was hopeless.

The woman who does the make-up for Fox News did the bridesmaid's faces, Alison had hired her during one of her TV appearances. I told that pushy little spitfire I had a crying problem, but she still went with the Nefertiti look. "I just want your eyes to POP!"

So I looked ridiculous, black eyed like a Lil Rascal's sketch involving trick binoculars. When I tried to collect my stuff from the table my friends tried to pull me onto the dance floor. I resisted playfully, but they wouldn't stop, so I yanked my hands away very nastily. I wasn't playing. I was done. I was gone. I was empty and overflowing. I had to get away.

I missed so much that night by not being able to control myself. My friends laughed and enjoyed in each other until four in the morning, hanging out together in the Hilton's Presidential Suite. I didn't even get to say goodbye to half of them, the ones that had an early flight. I cried in my room for over an hour, pouring and pouring.

My trip wasn't even half over and I was all used up.

The Brave Little Chub

2008-09-14T07:38:00.000-07:00

When it was just thin Leon in his $200 jeans, I was joking about being the only fattie on the eastern seaboard. I don't even know what exactly the eastern seaboard encompasses; I may not have even been on it. But wherever I was, there were no other fat people.

In Washington DC, where me met up with Alison and her/our other friends, I stopped laughing.

It wasn't just that Alison had wended and willowed her way out of high-school plain and chubby, and now looked like Grace Kelly. And that Kara had added beautiful and stylish to her thinness. That Andra had lost twenty pounds and dressed exclusively in crazy boutique styles, and that Sara, the plump one, had my own personal perfect figure, curved and solid and healthy.

The night of the bridal party/dinner. When Alison said, "It's about eight blocks. We can totally walk it."

The worst part wasn't that I couldn't keep up. That they were laughing and talking and I started to fall behind the group, pace by pace. After two blocks every step hurt, hurt all over. My under-wire began to bite a rash into my skin, and the material in the thighs of my jeans were chafing thinner with every rubbing step.

The worst was when they all noticed, though I guess was waiting for them to. I'm not such a brave little solider, you see. So they noticed that I was behind them. Stopped, concerned. Pretended they liked walking slow, that they needed to rest, too. Kept an eye on me, made sure I was making it ok. Reminded me of the rare days in grade school when we all decided to be nice to the special-ed kid.

Then I was in pain, sweating in the pre-tropical storm heat, and trying not to cry. Under the weight of their pity, my own self-pity.

It didn't get better, that part.

All-you-can-eat-sirloin $4.99

2008-09-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

I decided I did not need to see Gettysburg, because it was a field, and I can use my imagination on any field for much the same result. So Leon arranged a day for us, and was congenial when Sean called to thwart it. My plan had been to basically drop Smudge's accidentally-absconded bag off at a neutral spot, and not see my husband and daughter. I had been successfully ignoring the wound I had made by leaving them at the airport, and didn't want to look at it now.

Sean had been one day and night at his grandparents. One the phone,
"Hon, can we just, can we see each other and just, hang out a little? I mean I know you guys have plans but, could we?" He sounded desperate like thirst.

So Leon and I drove and hour north and Sean and Smudge drove an hour south and we met at a greasy spoon offering all-you-can-eat sirloin for $3.99. Leon refused to eat, and was horrified when the waitress put a free bucket of pickles in the center of the table. I ordered a dessert made of canned peaches and corn syrup, that I couldn't eat so much as marvel at. That cook must have balls of steel to call that a Peach Melba Delight.

Sean ate his hamburger quick and thoughtless, stress-eating.

"Everyone. Everyone in that house is dying. Literally. If any of them didn't wake up tomorrow I wouldn't be surprised. Grandma, Grandpa, Great Aunt Sukes and Aunt Rhonda. Cancer, diabetes, Grandma doesn't have a left hip!!"

His grandparent's house was the closest thing he had to a happy childhood home. Now it was neglected, hot and fetid with sickness and depression.

"They left a ham out to thaw on the counter for days! They keep saying, 'Don't you and Smudge want some ham?'" He shuddered and disappeared a handful of fries.

He did not feel he could leave Smudge under their attention for even a moment, timing his bowel moments with the baby's naps. Smudge wouldn't eat and had blistering diaper rash. And his family. Angry at each other when they thought he was out of earshot, giving him orders on how to attend his child when he was.

"It's like they're not even mine. They're like, something that happened to someone else, a long time ago."

I conceived a sloppy rescue plan for my husband. I tried to picture he and Smudge trailing me from Philadelphia to Washington DC, them sitting on the other side of the restaurant while I had the bridesmaid dinner, him trying to wrestle her quiet as I walked the aisle in my blue dress, reimbursing Leon for the halvsies I would no longer be paying.

In the end I didn't rescue him. I strapped the baby in the back of the car and hugged him again. They went back, and I went on.

I don't know if it was the right thing to do.

Flip Side

2008-09-12T20:07:00.001-07:00

I am a camel. I have filled my hump. Two weeks of experience to sustain me. But it is not a thorough analogy. Water refreshes a camel through a burning trek, and my life is not a hell like that. And I don't feel refreshed. I just feel filled up, heavy and sagging like a rotten biblical wineskin.

I have enough to blog myself into oblivion. Miserable stuff and incredible stuff that made my pupils dilate. Of course you're more likely to hear the miserable, because it needs telling more. For every whine, please understand there were three deep laughs and one "wow, this is amazing."

Jump right in.

Part the First "Imez leaves the Shire."

Smudge fell asleep 15 minutes before the plane landed in Pennsylvania, so I didn't have to see her questioning look dissolve into panic as I ran, truly ran, away from her. Sean walked beside me down the corridor, toward our different receptions, and because I knew I would not see him for 2 weeks I could not look at him then. I kissed my sleeping kid in her stroller, grabbed Sean's neck as a goodbye, and ran away with my bags. And Smudge's bag. Didn't find that out till about 80 miles later. Anyway.

My friendship with Leon is my deepest, and he may read this now, so you won't know all about him you might otherwise. That's just the way it is. He kept me for the first week of my journey. He goes to dental school, and lives in an apartment that is so perfect you won't see the like of it in movies. A set director would worry that the arched style and severe cleanliness would be inauthentic.

Leon builds strategic beauty around himself, a environment of stone and clean art. He had three red apples in his kitchen, sitting where they sat on purpose. They could be eaten, but that's not why they were put out. His bathroom shows no sign of messy, sweating life, nothing un-beautiful, nothing plastic but an electronic toothbrush, a tiny tower to future greatness.

The perfection, the heights in which he dwells, is a fortification. An irreproachability in a world that has spent every moment examining him for flaws and stabbing him where they were found. He unrolled what appeared to be an expensive micro-fiber faux-lambskin blanket for me the first night, from it's original packaging. Even his throw blankets were higher than necessary quality.

I said, "My god. Have you ever even been in a Wal-Mart?"
"Yes. I have. And it was awful."

Oh, look what I have poured out, already. I'll stop for tonight. But it's gotta come out sometime.

I will poop in the woods.

2008-08-31T12:08:00.000-07:00

Sean hasn't had a work vacation in two years, not counting the time off for Smudge's birth which, I'd like to say, wasn't at all vacationy. It was screamy and scary and overwhelming.

Anyway.

Tonight we start the first leg of an awful, awful family vacation which has to be. Sean and I will be apart for two weeks, Smudge will be away from us for one week each (we trade her off on Sunday, without even seeing each other). It's complicated. It involves weddings and duties to old friends and a couple different states and cars needing driving across the whole goddamn country.

So I'll be out for awhile.

I really hope that maid of honor dress fits. I quit all medication two months ago, and well...cookies helped the transition. Cookies and lying face down and accusing random people.

I really hope I don't see Smudge's face as I walk away from her in the airport. Fuck.

I really hope...no, forget that. I know, know I was a moron to organize a camping trip with my family (the one I came out of). I just...shouldn't have done that. Even if you're getting a stick shoved up your rear in the most bucolic setting, baby, you're still getting a stick up your rear.

I refuse to poop in those campground outhouses. They terrify me. The stench and the blackness under the filthy rim and sounds....what is down there? I will poop in the woods.

I hope nothing bad happens while waiting in the Greyhound hub in Philadelphia, or on the Greyhound. Never been.

I hope the wedding toast I give in front of 120 wealthy wasps in New England will be shimmering and everyone will chuckle and I won't shake while I do it, nor accidently mention the time the bride had a threesome in Italy.

There is more. But...see you on the flip side.

2008-08-29T19:31:00.001-07:00

Okay okay. I'm here.

Now, I think I just figured something out that just may ensure my marriage, and my contentedness with it. Forever on.

Get this. Name me an exception and I bet I can argue it.

All love songs. All romance stories, even the romances stories that are tiny diversions inside bigger stories. All romantic love on TV shows. All the love stories my friends have told me about in their lives. The oldest love poems written on lambskin in scriggly Latin.

One thing in common.

They. Are. ALL. Only about the beginning.

Love, as I have always understood it, as it has been shown to me, can only exist in the beginning.

I didn't know that.

If a movie has two characters that have been married for 17 years, it is not a love story. Unless they almost break up and have to start their love over again. That is why Beverly Hills 90210 was about the teen-agers, not their forever vegetable-chopping parents.

The love we had was unsustainable, and not because it was shakily built or inauthentic. And as I felt it shifting, shifting around Smudge and our aging bodies and libidos, our increased independence and our dwindling fears, I hated it. I wanted to have it back. I wanted to be drunk on him again, suicidal over him again, like I had been before. I thought, "This love is mellowing into a flat brown thing. We're doing something wrong."

But we aren't doing anything wrong. That first hot love, it will die. It must die if you have children, if you aren't manic-depressive, if you aren't co-dependent. And when it dies, you can only be miserable ("trapped in a loveless marriage"), flee, (have an affair, get a divorce) or embrace it. And look at your new love, the old kind, the kind that seldom burns with lust or imagined tragedy, the practical partnership, the marriage of brain and soul, the love held by flat characters in the back-ground of the novel.

And say, What do I have here?

Whatever you have, it's all you're going to get, unless you pick one of the other options. The other love is fireworks and fireworks burn hot and beautiful and very very fast.

The couple in their 80's, universally envied for their hand-holding on the porch, facing the sunset. They had to go through this, to get there.

Whaddya think?

Open Letter

2008-08-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

To The Guy Whose Tree is in my Backyard:

Not an act of God, you weasel. It was rotten! Your tennants told you it was rotten! Asked you to remove it before it hit their house. Now, come get your goddamn tree and fix my fence! That fence was younger than my BABY!! It never even had a chance.
And don't think by not answering my phone calls this is going to go away, chappie, even if Sean is ready to give up. I've been off meds for weeks now and you cannot fathom how pissy I feel.

To My Book Club:

Look, I can accept you didn't like Lolita. That you didn't read it, that you thought it was both exhaustively boring and obscenely pornographic, (and to manage those two things at once is a pretty damn impressive achievment). I know, well, I know now, that most of you have been sexually mistreated in your lives, except, ironically, for the one lady whose brother is serving time for child molesting. Okay. Fine. You coulda told me that before you all agreed to read it, I'm just saying.
But I don't want to read anything by a Sweet Potato Queen. She's not a real queen.

To My Baby:

You, you're okay. You can stay. But you cannot scream in indignant rage because the dog doesn't let you straddle and pee on her. She just isn't into that.

To Everyone From High School Who Didn't Think I Was Awesome:

I'm writing a book. You're all in it, and I'm going to make violent child pornographers look like Robin Hood compared to you. Afterwards, maybe we can hang out.

Cleopatra

2008-08-16T17:46:00.000-07:00

The problem with being told you suffer from denial is that you can't deny it.

Therapist says she hasn't been trying to make me feel like an asshole these past months, at least not for recreational purposes. She has been trying to pull me out of denial.

I immediatly think of my sister, how she blithely, humorlessly makes fun of fat women, unattractive people, losers. Things I couldn't do, at the very least, because I haven't earned the priviledge. And my sister...she's fatter than the fat women and less successful than the losers. But she won't see that. Absolutely can't.

She's in denial, not me. HA.

I demand Sean tell me I'm great, good, above average. That he doesn't want to be fed meals, that he's happy that the clothes are clean no matter that they are piled on the floor, that the house is so much cleaner than I've ever kept it, no matter what it really looks like. And that eating out doesn't count or cost if the get the food from a drive-thru window, and since I buy clothes from Goodwill I am frugal, deprived even.

And that's just the easy admissions. God knows what I haven't faced yet.

So I'm viciously kidding myself and forcing him along and I fucking hate the truth and fucking hate feeling like a loser. Sometimes my denial gets me out of bed in the morning, lets me love my kid, lets me go to sleep at night.

Eight years ago our wedding photos came in the mail. I cried and cried. I've thrown most of the two full print albums away. Saved some pictures of friend's and family. Not of me. I was 5ft2, weighed 230 pounds, but no one had told me I was fat.

I didn't know.

"Feel it, suffer it, or you won't fix it."

Oh fuck off.

Affirmation with toothbrushes and old rocks

2008-08-14T07:41:00.000-07:00

Toothbrushes are all ugly. As much pattern and texture as can possibly be incorporated into two colors on a stick. But what does it matter, it's just a toothbrush? Still I picked the only one, $.69, flat and solid-purple, that was nice. Because I'm going to be the kind of person that has a nice looking toothbrush in a nice bathroom.

I bought a piece of amber at a witchy-woman store, for $4. Not because I believe in it's metaphysical properties of cleansing and healing, but because it's beautiful and I can hold it and think about cleansing and healing. There is a difference. And I want to be the kind of woman who buys her lotions and metaphysically enchanted rocks at a witchy-woman store.

Then I faltered, at the lovely new playground with the rubber ground, built so kids can't hurt themselves, attractive to a certain kind of parent. I had first gone to the old one, with the wet wood-shavings and faded paint, but there was nothing there short and simple enough for Smudge to play on.

My faltering wasn't the thinking that I belonged at the old and tired playground, though I liked it there better, empty and green bushes and blackberries. My faltering was my increasing belief that the other parents, all thin, all young, all blonde, all pretty, all wealthy in appearance, were paying attention to me. Me in my over-sized smock of a shirt that I sweat in. Me in my dirty sandals. My hair and my double chin. And thinking...no they weren't thinking. Just aware of me, and that was enough.

And I'd tried that morning. I put mousse in my hair. I didn't know what to do once it was in there, though. It still eventually ended up in a bun on my head. I tried on three shirt, too, before settling on one that wouldn't show the shelf the jeans gave me. I guess I felt that "try" had resulted in "fail."

So keep trying!

I need more time. First toothbrushes, then people.

Built without Integrity

2008-08-11T07:34:00.000-07:00

My body is growing past my control.

I wore high heels the other day, because no matter that I bought my first 3x tops to try and look good, I was going to try and look good. They were wide, comfortable heels. It took them five hours to become unbearable, raw on the pinkie toe, aching to not have to support my weight anymore on those tiny pressure points. In the last store I hobbled down the aisles, supporting as much of me as possible on the cart.

When Smudge threw my purse out of the cart, I watched it go. I had to wait, to get ready, before I could bend down to get it. I had to prepare for the hurt in my back and legs, snaps and twinges that wouldn't be actual pain if they weren't all happening at the same time. I had to realize that maneuvering around the obstacle of my own stomach in a squat was going to be unpleasant. And worst, rising back up again with only the unstable cart to hold on to.

But I waited long enough doing this, and a thin woman in a red dress picked it up for me, smiling at my baby. I was. so. goddamned. grateful.

I have eaten with great purpose for the past year, with the same self-pitying and brutal intention I used to cut my skin with in college. I knew it was destroying my body and all I'd worked for to learn to like myself. I'd answer my own worry with a "Fuck off!" and a slap. "You'll worry about being fat when you don't want to stab your own eyes out anymore."

Every medication I took is gone from my body now, after one vicious month of withdrawl, dizzy sobs and loathing. A blister, a fever, broken finally.

I don't know what will happen now that I can see stuff.

But I'm going to throw out the rest of the ice cream.

Probably.

Find me the Friar's Magic Cowl

2008-08-05T12:53:00.000-07:00

Miserable stuff happens and I find myself hours from home last night, holding it together just long enough to go into Fred Meyer and buy wood and wieners.

I need these things because I'm planning on spending the night alone in a tent. That's how bad it became at home, all thanks to me.

I don't know where anything is in the store and I'm on the constant verge of a sob. I'm so raw I have fabricated telepathic connections with the other shoppers. Most of them are thinking how much they hate me, which is fair enough. I pass one girl in a tight soft blue shirt. She is curly-haired, and very fat, dimples in her elbows, cheekbones burying her eyes. I almost start to cry because I love her. I can see myself holding her in front of the bacon case, snuggling into her sad softness.

"Oh God!! You're fat! I'm so sorry you're fat. I'm fat too!! OH GOD I'm so sorry we're fat!!!"

I go to the most popular campground on the Oregon Coast because I feel safe there. They are full, of course, but I wait twenty minutes in the fog outside the ranger station to be given the special spot reserved for handicap people. After 7pm, they'll give it to non-wheelies.

And it's like I found a rip in reality, slipped through to a place that isn't tainted by myself. I am awake in that spot for three hours, and...I'm free of me for all three of them.

My fat girl in the blue shirt appears from a car, and walks into the yurt next to my site. She's angry at a drab young man who is barely there, "I don't see why I have to explain every little thing I do to you." Later she is joined by a little sister, practically a twin, but louder, and the three talk into the darkness about penises. How big the man's is compared to the hot dogs they are eating, what truly constitutes a "teeny weenie." Then the sisters begin a fart war, amplified by the hardness of the picnic benches. All in all I am glad I didn't hug her in the Fred Meyers. She probably wouldn't have offered much comfort.

On the other side of me a 16 year old with a fully formed man's voice has found driftwood that is a Magic Cudgel. He berrates his 9 year old brother throughout the night. "No, dumbass. You can't get me because I have the Immunity Gauntlet and you're going to need the Friar's Cowl to end the curse. Wait, no, okay now I'll be the Friar." He spins in a circle with his stick, driving into the dirt, "ENERGIZE! Prrrrurrrururu...okay now you're free." I think if ever someone needed to receive a cape for Christmas, it is this boy.

And I don't know what they're thinking of me. A woman who put up a tent and is eating wieners alone. Alone except for her fat dog who doesn't want to be there and keeps trying to jump back in the car. I think the reason I was so free last night is that I don't believe they were thinking much about me at all.

It's a tactic I need to try.

Sexy Naked Teen Photos

2008-08-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

I had three polaroids of teenage girls posing sexy. I didn't throw them away with the birthday cards and the letters from people I don't like anymore. I set them aside for Sean. I am the best wife ever, is why.

"Here, naked underage girls."

I don't remember who the girl with the punk shaved side-burns grinding the rose stem in her teeth was, she only went to the Academy for a couple months. But the girl clutching the leopard print pillow in front of her was Steph. She looked a little like Jodi Foster back then.

"So, what is she wearing under the pillow?" Sean asked.
"Underpants."
"Oh." He was disappointed.
"No, I'm sorry. Not underpants. Actually I couldn't describe what is was because it was vibrating too fast to see clearly." Best wife ever.

Steph was a junior my Freshman year. That was the year I had spent reading Drew Barrymore's autobiography, "Little Girl Lost" until the binding broke. At 14 I had never been inside a 7-11. So I was amazed by Steph, and her stories of life in the underworld.

She had told me that she, before coming to the arms of Christ, had been a member of The Tong.
"What's the Tong?" I asked
It was if I'd asked how to wipe myself.
"You don't know The Tong? The Japanese Mafia? They are an extremely deadly organization. Serious shit. I was with them for awhile. They were my family when I really needed one."

I thought that was weird because the Girl's Dean, Mrs. Lemon, had just recently shown me the kitty that Steph's mom had knitted for her couch, as a gift. Kitty-knitting moms didn't seem the sort to hand off the their daughters to crime syndicates.

But I believed it anyway. Steph was hardcore. She'd done sex and drugs and crime and given it all up to go to boarding school in a Nebraskan beet field and love Jesus. Oh, but Jesus couldn't contain her.

It was her idea to try and replicate Calvin Klein ads with my polaroid, she who immediatly stripped off her bra and bunched herself up in the closet. "No, wait. Wait, there's a shoe in my ass, goddammit. Wait. Let me hold it like it's part of the picture. Just dangling on a finger. Like 'wouldn't you like to know what I'm thinking about this shoe?'."

She didn't make it through her Junior year. Around January she started talking with a British accent.

"I've spent sew much time with my Anglish friends I just cahn't shake this dahm accent!" She bailed by March, back to a life of glamor and danger. Glanger.

I only saw her once more, the following fall, when she came to visit with her "fiance," an older blond man who appeared to be entirely composed of grease drippings and anger. They rode a Honda. She waited until I was watching and then French kissed him with pornographic gusto. "Ha ha!" she said, her accent now taking on a more Brooklyn lilt, "You don't get to do that!"

But by then I'd stop reading my Drew Barrymore autobiography and had gotten very involved with Anne of Green Gables. So I didn't really want to kiss him, anyway. What I really wanted at the time was a petticoat.

Sean chopped up the photos of Steph before throwing them away, that same night, less the garbage man get the wrong idea. I wish I'd kept them. Wherever Steph is now, I am sure her life isn't as good as it was then, when she was pretty and 17 and scrunched up in that closet with a shoe gouging her butt. But I've been wrong before.

When you scratch the Black Dog's belly

2008-08-02T12:47:00.000-07:00

In the bathroom my clothes felt like a cruel rough rope harness and so I left a trail of them down the hall to the bedroom. I stood in front of our broken closet, naked, looking for something with as few seams as possible to put on.

These are black dog days. My husband taught me that term yesterday, telling me that is what Winston Churchill referred to his darkly depressed days as.

But Sean does things to try and heal up the black. Like yesterday.

He came to the door of the room where I was naked, announced himself as Gate Security, and leapt on me, demanding to know where I was hiding the drugs.

Part all-consuming hug and part tickle and large part pure lascivious manhandle.

"Where are they lady!! Huh? What are you storing in these two? Cocaine? Are the drugs up here? Or up here? Huh? So you think you're gonna fly Delta Airlines do ya?

Just as he was threatening to extend his cavity probe, our daughter hooted and Ewok-babbled her way into the bedroom, slapping tiny hands on my butt to help Dad with whatever it was he was doing.

I was laughing. Not my normal one or two-note laughs, not the long punchy "HA!!!" from an offensive joke on South Park. Those are the laughters that are left over in us because we grew up and the world got less sweet and funny, so now we laugh so show we're able to, instead of complaining. Now to be swung round and round in an airplane ride would make us worry about nausea and how bad we're gonna feel this in the morning. It's near impossible to get that good laughter back.

The laughter Sean gave me, that particular kind, from teasing and tickling, speaks to my most simple brain, and returns to me my first understanding of what joy was. He time-traveled my brain. I needed it.

A break for the black dog.

Thirty. Tired. Urine.

2008-07-31T13:57:00.001-07:00

I am thirty years old and I am tired. I buy my husband's cream stout, and the electronic register beeps when the beer passes over it, reminding the check-out girl to make sure the sale is legal. She looks at me. I have my license all ready. I'm perversely proud of the photo on my license. The lady taking it said, "Oo, let's do this one again," when it came out on the computer screen. I looked like a Berke Breathed cartoon.

I said, "No! Nope, it's fine." Because I know the particles of this photograph will never align to form a Guess Jeans Girl, so let's all at least have a laugh.

Now the check-out girl looks at me, for only a second, and then continues scanning my groceries. My shoulders loosen and I quietly put away my license. The sign says, "If you look under 40, we will card you." Yeah, well. Lady, you may live the rest of your life without seeing my license photo. And it's pretty goddamn funny. That's on your head now.

Also, I smell urine. Everywhere in my house. I'm tired and everything smells of pee. Other people don't smell it, but dammit it's there. It must be. So many things pee inappropriately in the house. My baby and my easily frightened dog and my bland cat. Possibly myself, I don't know.

Yesterday I lucid-dreamed. I came to realize in Scarlett Johannson's double-wide that I was dreaming, that this couldn't be real. So I left my husband with Scarlett and her fat dog, took off my clothes, and went down the street. It was so sunny. I think I was looking for a place to pee. I lost lucidity then. But for that brief moment I'd never been so free.

Repellent

2008-07-29T20:54:00.000-07:00

I can tell you her name, Tina, and that she was anemic, with long dull red hair. Think Sissy Spacek in Carrie, but hollower-looking. Dressed country-western in the grunge era, blouses tucked into her Wranglers.

We sat next to each other during the first church service of our Freshman year at boarding school. I was anxious to make friends and had learned it was the shy kind of girl who might respond to me. Tina was nice to me. She was awkward, obsessed with movies, couldn't speak over a reedy whisper, and laughed, like a nervous tic, at absolutely everything I said. We fit together fairly well. I was her only friend until she dropped out Junior year.

But it was this one conversation, a whole year after we first met. The one where she confided in me that she was only ever nice to me because she wanted to meet my roommate, Veronica Vahn. Veronica got up at 5am to set her hot rollers, every day. She was attractive, but frightened and uncomfortable when other teens wouldn't let her be in charge of them. She left school four years later without a single friend, though she had managed to become engaged to the Dean of Boys by then. I think he let her be in charge.

Reading my shock and disappointment, Tina reached out an arm to comfort me.
"But it doesn't matter now! Now that I know you, it doesn't matter that you're fat, or that your hair is messy. At first, I found myself...repelled, by you. But now you're the best friend I've ever had!"

Repelled. I have never forgotten that word. That was the word. I was repellent to her, that first day, when she smiled at me.

I didn't get mad at her, forthrightly. I just went to do laundry, and slammed things while I did it. I was blindsided by the honesty. Not often do you get to know what someone is really thinking, and when you know it, well, it is nobody's fault.

So I finished my laundry, and then I lost thirty pounds and began to use a curling iron and hairspray. One point alloted to all the dicks of the world who say they make fun of fatties to help them change. It didn't last, of course. Nervous breakdown and all that, it will pack on the pounds and cause you to ignore your beauty routines.

Sean says he can't stand to hear me talk bad about myself. But this stuff, it gets in your head and helps you define yourself. Repellent. If it had just been the mean Junior High boys who said it, maybe I could compartmentalize better. Repellent. But this was one of the nice people, the ones who don't say what they think right off. Repellent.

My problem is, I see no reason to believe everyone isn't still thinking it. I'm better at ignoring it. Maybe.

Fear made flesh

2008-07-28T21:40:00.000-07:00

Panic attacks brought me to shameful, whimpering catatonia before and during my first pregnancy. But I learned that the attacks were my own doing, and to stop them. And they have been gone since about a week after Smudge's birth.

Two weeks ago I had the first dark tickle of the old terror. Lying in bed, post-sex, post-birth control. I lay there, and I thought, "What if it is happening right....right now?" What if that irrevocable decision is fusing to my body, attaching life to my life, right now? What am I doing, o god what if I want to stop?" And that swirl, that loss of control started to climb up me.

Our decision to have another child is the fulfillment of a duty, to our daughter and to our future selves. We believe it is the right thing to do. Two kids. Two kids is right and good. But somehow I have cognitively dissonanced "two kids" from "have another baby." I want the first but not the latter.

I have created a misery in my brain. I expect this. Two babies, ravenous and brutal for my attention. Pulling my ugly hair and struggling against their car seats. The screams. I hate screams. Up all night again, not sleeping with my husband in my big blue bed, instead finding myself attached to a dirty-feeling breast pump in the middle of the night. Having to readjust, that painful painful readjusting.

Yet our family isn't complete yet. We know we...we just need another.

I got my period today. Far from relieved, I just know now I have to keep trying, trying to create my love and my fears into flesh.

A short Conversation

2008-07-28T14:40:00.001-07:00

I don't want to write about my family in my new blog. "Family," meaning the one I came out of, not the one I am building now. Writing about them is the blogging equivalent of stuffing myself sick on cheap, stale candy. I don't think I can describe it better than that, even if it doesn't quite make sense.

So, I'll just relay this.

A Short Conversation with my sister-in-law.

"No, your Mom can't come to the phone right now cuz she's in the bathroom making deviled eggs."

Okay then.

But just let me say, hours later I saw the crusting, half-full cream cheese package behind the sink with my very own eyes. Just in case you thought it was a new scatological slang. No no.
Not at all.

Brucie is Fabulous!

2008-07-23T12:51:00.000-07:00

Brucie is 11 years old. The last time I saw him he was only 3. I remember him then, how he leaned against me languidly and asked, "Imez...can I do your hair?" His father Dan, now my adored friend, once my math teacher, let his eyes drift while his wife chuckled uneasy.
"Oh, he just loves hair. He plays with his sister's dolls and stuff...just because she's older, you know."
That scene, particularly the glazed look in Dan's eyes, became a private joke between me and Sean.

Two nights ago Brucie stepped up to me after an 11 hour drive, with a big grin and hugged me tight, no matter that I'd become a practical stranger. He was impressed by my decorating scheme. He saw the yarn on the couch I'm inexpertly trying to wrench into a purple octopus for Smudge.
"You knit!?"
With a huge grin he sat on my floor and opened his travel bag. He pulled out 5 inches of stockinette stitch resting on two long purple needles. "I LOVE knitting!"

The next morning Brucie did my daughter's hair in braids, then pig-tails, then cornrows, then buns, joyfully restyling them throughout the afternoon. He enthusiastically took over my pancakes, cooking each to a lovely golden brown, always remembering to butter the pan first. "I'm a great cook. But I still might want to design clothes when I grow up."

The kid is so cool. Not like any other little boy I've known. So...affable and cheerful. Kind and unwary. His parents are terribly in love with his older sister, as she is modestly beautiful, chaste, poetic and musical, with feisty sensibilities. A girl birthed right from the pages of Bethany House Christian novels that the family loves to read. Far from being jealous, he sits near her, skinny legs pulled into his chest, anxious to fill in all the good parts of the stories of her greatness. Never minding his own lack of stories.

That night in bed Sean observed, "Terrific kid. But I think Dan's already taking high doses of Homocil."

Dan is A Good Christian. That is how he defines himself. And of all the "good Christians" I have known, he has more right than most to consider himself one. So it isn't surprising that he disagreed when I told him I remember him not liking my sorta closeted gay best friend Leon in high school. But really, he didn't. And the only reason I can imagine, as Leon showed respect and excelled in math, is that Leon was gay.

Leon wrote me this about Brucie:

I wish I was there to take in the scene of a sweet, 11 year old Queen breezing through your home, goldening your pancakes, setting your hair, and laying down a blanket of domestic bliss. Lord knows if he were my child, I'd encourage it. Soccer? Heck no! We're going to cooking class! Dinner party? No problem, my son will crochet a table cloth! But, he's not my son, but Dan's. If I were a betting man and there was a line on this in Vegas, I'd put my chips down 10 to 1 that Dan's gonna be hard on his son and will resent him on some levels.

It would be so like Satan to throw a flamboyant wrench of this magnitude into their family's well-greased Christ-loving machinery. If Brucie was gay, the family would truly believe it their loving duty to try and help him fight it off, and Brucie, perhaps like Leon, would never entirely free himself of the shame.

Another of our teachers at the same Christian school, he was gay. Massively, la-la-la like Liza gay, but yet he married and had children and tried to be straight, as Christ would apparently have him do.

No one was fooled. Probably not even Jesus.

I gotta keep in touch with little Brucie.

The first time

2008-07-20T13:47:00.001-07:00

I am glad
I had
No Internet

Until I was around 18 years old, I had an intense, all absorbing fantasy life. I lived inside it as much as possible, whenever I was alone. Sometimes I think getting too old to enjoy it was one of the things that made my mind go bunky.

Anyways, I had, from about 13 on, and imaginary boyfriend. He morphed a little as the years changed. But he was always: full grown, unusually tall, quiet and contemplative, and attracted to me as if to an addiction. I was always my own age.

He and I lived in a number of isolated homes over the years. No one, honest to god, understood our love. We were very poor in a New York apartment when I was 14. We spent our days hunkered on the pull out couch, eating ice cream, having clutching, gasping sex, and watching television. That was my fantasy, friends. My fantasy involved unemployment and television.

Later he became ghastly wealthy, and we lived in an ancient Victorian, buried in vegetation on top of a mountain he owned. We spent our days re-enacting scenes from Calvin in Hobbes (I was Calvin) and Bloom County.

This is all a very round about way to get to my question. It occurs to me, if, at 14, I had a chance to find a real version of my quiet, misunderstood man, via the internet, I would have taken it and never looked back. Delivered myself to anyone who would take me. The fact that whatever man who would be attracted to me at 14 made him strange wouldn't have occurred to me, ever. I was weird and lonely, searching out he who'd understand.

But there was no internet.

This is my first memory of anybody mentioning something that was probably America Online: Some commercial, in the early early 1990's, of a family talking about how useful this computer service could be. All I really remember of the commercial is the father saying, "Does anyone else thing sports players and hugely overpaid?" indicating that if you did, you could write about it and find others like you on your computer.

The first time I used the internet I was a Junior in high school. 1995? It was a friend's account. I immediately started a chat with someone from The Netherlands. I called myself, "Cool Beans." And the whole time, adreneline was splashing through me; I felt drunk and nearly out of control. All I could think about, through the day, was getting another chance to go back on the computer and see if the men I talked to had left a message for me. It would be like a 17 year old boy suddenly stumbling across a Light Saber that worked. Fantasy to reality, holy shite.

Thank GOD I was 19 before I got my own connection. I was too tired and screwed up by then to run off with strangers. Although I did meet my husband via the internet when I was 20. Huh.

Round about? Oh yes.

It's just so weird in my own memory. It's like, I woke up, this incredible technology existed for every-day personal use. How did something as enormous and life altering as the Internet slip under my radar?

Now here's the question.

Can you remember the first time you used the internet? Can you remember the first time you heard about it? What was it like? Did it blow your mind or was it just another advancement, like your first car with power windows instead or roll ups?

The Three Little Bops

2008-07-18T20:44:00.000-07:00

The moral is sketchy: something along the lines of demons from hell play good trombones. Nonetheless, let me share with you my instant happy.

Gunts are not on Quality People

2008-07-17T14:21:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think I really am heading toward a gunt. That word, if you don't know, is a compilation of two words describing a fat woman's overhang, and one of those two words is "gut."

Gunts are not on quality people. That sentence got stuck in my brain at the book store yesterday. See, I had my fill of my lawn chair and staring at the Netflix envelopes on my table that perfectly matched the mood I was in when I queued them two months ago. "Modern Marvels: Candy!" So at 6:30 I drove thirty miles to town with my baby. I went to Borders.

I don't go to Borders. I don't go because I....I do not welcome myself there.

One Imez stands at the door with her arms crossed as I lug Smudge through the glass doors.

She says, "Hey, Tubby, smell that? All those books, brand new? And the music? See those pretty $6 ergonomic pens? Huh? NOT YOURS. HA!!"

Maybe if I didn't always go to the bathroom before I look around. Looking at displayed things makes me have to poop, I don't know why and I'm not proud of it. But there you are. So I always have to face the mirror.

And One Imez is there, "Jesus could you brush your hair once in awhile? Do you really think no one can see that grease spot on your shirt? The one you got while stuffing freezer taquitos in your hole?"

She continues outside, beside me while I shuffle around the discount shelves.

"Hey, Gunty. Look at all these people. Look. I want you to know, every single one of them is better than you, and they all think you have crawled out of some over-turned trailer to steal books for fuel to cook meth with. They can afford new books, cuz they have jobs. And they deserve new books, too. Because they don't shuffle around looking like a retarded hippo on welfare. NO. Put it BACK, you are not paying five dollars for a baby book. You hardly read to her anyway, Mother of the Year."

Gunts are not on quality people. So, under that sort of abuse you can imagine I rebelled last night. I went to the cheap shelves, proto-gunt be damned, like a starving squirrel with a stolen nut. I bought two $4 books for Smudge. I bought a 50% off tiny package of blueberry-pie body wash ("Yeah, like it's gonna help, little piggy.") for $5. And as a trembling middle-finger to One Imez, I bought a collection of Looney Toons for full price, $26. Looney Toons are worth their weight in gold. They completely arrest my daughter while resting me, and dammit if they aren't kinda funny, too.

I didn't bring the bags in till this morning, and Sean saw them. He was...well, mad. He and One Imez were mad.

He said, "This is why we don't get ahead." He had one hand on the two Goodwill shirts I bought the baby for $4 total. I said, "Hey! C'mon! What are you holding in your hand right there?" I mean, c'mon. Goodwill.

He held up the other hand. "A Border's bag." He recounted how much I spent yesterday, including gas and fast food. It was a lot. I had nothing to say.

It hadn't been a logical excursion, it never had been, not from the start.

Besides, buying stuff won't make One Imez go away. Or my gunt. It just gives me less reason to hold my head up, I guess.

My reflection dared

2008-07-16T13:58:00.000-07:00

In high school I had this friend that I usually hated.

I am a reluctant subscriber to the mirror-theory of hating people. That is, if dislike for someone really pounds you in the gut; you find yourself just wanting to shove them off things, it's because they're brazenly mirroring to you parts of yourself you hate.

Therefore when I hated Misty it was because she was me. I'd watch her interact with people more popular than her, I'd listen to the funny, wry things she said and see how she screwed her face up into just the right look of chubby-girl-knows-deeply-your-hurt. And I'd think, "Goddamn you that's my line. That's how I'm going to get into the popular group."

Well, consciously I'd think, "You stupid little faker, they'll never like you."

By the time I graduated I had decided she had a truly black soul and was gratified to find her, a year later, wallowing in a pointless life. She lived in Arkansas, in a rotting house with five lonely homely stoners, one of whom was her boyfriend. She worked in the office of a Dairy Council, had arrogantly changed her name to Carys and had taken to wearing what was either a pentacle or a Star of David around her neck, I can't remember which. But either was ridiculous for a ex-Seventh-Day-Adventist from Omaha. All to show off of course. Disgusting. Weird clothes and quoting Nietsche could not change the fact that she was starting a life-sentence of mediocrity. Just like me. So Ha Ha on you.

Two months ago I moved a box and the bottom broke open and Misty's yearbook fell out. She had ran out of money for the boarding school we went to and had left before getting the yearbook of her Senior year. Someone gave it to me to give to her next time I saw her.

Now, you see, I am sophisticated, and noble, and so I sought her out through a mutual friend, to send her the yearbook.

Ten years had past. I found her. Still named Carys. Except now she is archaeologist. In Hawaii.

I emailed her. A lot, trying to find out how the hell this did happen. How she come up out of that soft easy mire we both had lived in? She and I were unavoidable soul sisters in suffering at the hands of the stupid world around us. Our job was to avoid it and make fun of it. Not...enter it.

She was happy to tell me all about it in long meandering letters. There was this line.

"then one day it just struck me, that if I didn't do something this would be my life – forever…and it wasn't a particularly bad life really, all things considered you know, but I just knew I wanted more…"

I sat in my decomposing lawn chair for the better part of a week, after reading that. Watching a sprinkler nourish weeds and a naked baby and yeasty dog. How dare she not be me anymore. Or rather, how dare she be me and do something I couldn't. Work hard, yank on to a dream even though it wasn't easy to hold. Have adventure, restart a stalled life, instead of being scared and hoping to god today wouldn't bring pain.

I don't want her life. I want my life, because it is good. I love that damn sprinkler, weeds, baby and dog. I just want more, too. And how insulting to be shown that it is possible.

I'm really sorry, Stitchosauras.

2008-07-14T16:17:00.000-07:00

Today I kicked the dog. I told her to go outside and she instead tired to sneak off down the hall to the air conditioned bedroom. I screamed in this weird enraged cawing-bird voice (you do what I tell you! When I tell you to do something do it!!!!)and kicked her. She yelped, and I immediately felt like a total shit. She ran outside, curled up and started licking her tail.

For five seconds I was my dad or my brother or an angry 6 year old again bossing her imaginary friends around so she could have some power. What the hell? Pain finds tiny, sudden openings to crawl out of. And finds the easiest most helpless victim, that poor brown thrown-away mutt.

What a cowardly piece of shit to do that.

I will never kick the dog again.

The End

2008-07-13T14:56:00.000-07:00

Our nurse practitioner, Sandra keeps moving around the valley, and we follow because she is so nice and laughs at every joke we make like she had paid to hear them. In the last place she worked, her medical assistant was a neat plumpish girl who wore little rectangular frame glasses and was in love with Smudge. Named Wendy. She became pregnant about 9 months ago.

We were getting Smudge a check up half way through Wendy's pregnancy. She was four or five months along and showing. She looked sick. But still cheerful. She said it was weird that all of the sudden she'd started losing weight this far in. When she'd left the room Sandra said,

"This pregnancy mean so much to them. Did she ever tell you about her...first baby?"

She and her husband practiced co-sleeping with their baby. The baby was smothered. In her blankets, in bed with them one night. It was four months old, a boy.

We were shell-shocked the whole drive home. Thinking of that wonderful girl Wendy, thinking of waking up next to your baby's cold body. And how she got up every day now and went to work weighing sweet little naked babies on that grocery scale and putting Dora band-aids on their chubby legs after shots. The fortitude to pull yourself together and get back to your life.

And I said, "If Smudge died like that, it'd be over for us, wouldn't it? You'd never forgive me, even if it wasn't my fault." The thoughts weren't formed as I said them, they just came out, ready-made truths.

Sean was wordless, though he tried to talk. Eventually all he could say was, "I'm so sorry."

Like the time she pulled pepper spray out of my purse and sucked on it, burning her mouth. I was sobbing and immediately begging Sean for forgiveness. All he could say is, "Where were you?" I was there. I just didn't see it in time.

It'd be the end. I'd be on my own. The only thing Sean really asks of me is that I protect and love his daughter. For him, there are no extenuating circumstances.

We saw Sandra in her new office last week, I called to get directions from Wendy at the old office. I thought to ask after her baby but didn't. I just said it had been so nice having her in our life.

Sandra told us. When we'd seen Wendy all those months ago the baby was already dead inside her.

But Sandra said they're already ready to try again. It wasn't the end of them.

Catchy Title

2008-07-11T19:39:00.000-07:00

I muttered to Sean that I had a new blog going. I wouldn't tell him where it was, though. Not ready. He was unnerved and asked, "Is it the 'My Fat Fuck Husband and His Screaming Brat' Blog?"

Well, it hadn't been. But now I must consider.

Screaming Brat. Motherhood is hard on me. Ha ha! I know, that makes me incredibly unique, with a delicate and beautiful pain that runs much deeper than any of yours. I'm simply turgid with complexities, you know.

What I mean to say is, I think half of all known blogs are the recountings of the sweet mishaps of mothering. 'My kids are just nuts but man oh man do I love them.'

I just can't feel that coming out of me. And I feel, wary? of myself because I don't have it coming out of me. I waited for motherhood to switch me over. Take me out of myself, to shut off that bad piece of brain. But now I just have less time to be inside myself and it makes me lie on the couch and despair.

Today I gave my daughter, she is 19 months, a look that made her start to sob. She was reaching for me and screaming for no reason and I was just...sick of it. Just a look. Sean saw it. He said it was monstrous. Like I was looking at a creature completely alien to me, that the only thing I knew about it was that it was something to despise.

I felt terrible. Poor kid. Poor kid. I resolve never to let my baby feel like that again.

Sometimes I think I'm unraveling.

But I've never gotten wound.

Laziness > Snake

2008-07-10T16:15:00.000-07:00

You should know this.

If you take the dead snake, because your husband goddamn won't, and double wrap it in shopping plastic bags, tie them tightly, and put them in the bottom of the garbage can, well, honey, you're still gonna get yourself a barrel full of maggots. A hundred at least, if you wait a week.

I remember reading something in high school science about how people used to think that maggots spontaneously generated from dead meat. This was proven wrong at some point in science's glorious evolution.

But now I don't think they researched it carefully enough. I mean, there was a lot of maggots.

So, I'm not scared of snakes anymore. I passed one dead desicated one on the lawn today that my dog has laid there for safe-keeping, and almost sat on a live one as I lowered down onto the grass. And I thought, my goodness, this lawn is very snake-y.

Didn't scream. Didn't run fast back to the house, leaving the baby as a decoy. "Take her, Snake Overlord. She's not so smart yet, she won't mind!" Just sat and continued pinching dandelion heads off my lawn.

In a lifetime of so little internal growth, this one I'm proud of.

My feet

2008-07-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

When I was little I would look at my mom's feet a lot, since they were often off the ground in one way or another. She was most often in the recliner, on the sofa, sitting splay legged on the floor. I thought her feet were horrible.They were always dirty. Not just played in the mud dirty but an older, deeper dirt of neglect. And the skin around the heels and pads was white and cracked. I thought it looked very painful and disgusting. I'd look at my own pink little feet and feel very clear joy that they were mine.

Today my feet are like my mom's. I say today, because I just realized it. Dry and cracked and dirty because I never wear shoes and socks, only Stride-Rite sandals, because I don't have to bend over to put them on. And Smudge's feet are small and pink.

Smudge's feet have all the potential mine did.

High Time

2008-07-09T14:09:00.000-07:00

I think about drugs all the time. Every day.

I have never taken an illegal drug, and I have never been drunk.

I had my reasons. I was better than those who did, mainly. Then I tried to get drunk for the first time recently and found the journey there too unpleasant to continue. Terrible tasting alcohol making you feel hot and furry in your head, heavy and tired, not happy and sweet like I wanted.

Every page I turn, ever DVD I put in, someone is smoking pot and having a great time. I can feel it, floating up and up and above all the bullshit in your life and nothing matters. I want that. I want it so bad.

Sean tells me of new drugs becoming popular, one that starts with an "s"...Silva? No, something like that. It's still legal. You eat it and receive and intense, vivrant 10-minute acid trip before it leaves you. And we talk about how Extasy must feel, so warm and good all you want to do is rub the arm of the person next to you and smile.

I will not buy illegal drugs, because I am afraid of prison and more afraid my Smudge would be taken from me. Plus, I am a good mother and would not be if I were high.

My life is so good. I have a good solid life. I can't understand this yearning to gently escape it, every day.

Me

2008-07-09T13:37:00.000-07:00

I am drowning in my own skull.

I never considered myself "self-absorbed" because I thought that meant selfish. Plain, school yard, won't share my toys and want to talk about how pretty I am all the time, selfish. I was no more or less selfish than anyone else.

But self-absorption, that's different, isn't it? An inability to see the world except how you matter in it.

A friend answered my question, "what really pisses you off?" She said she was pissed off by women who try to artificially have babies past their fertile years and thinks it's awful for a woman to spend so much money just to replicate her own DNA. And she was also pissed off by people who were rude to service people.

But me, I'm only pissed off by things that directly relate to ME. Social trends and habits might irritate me. I think it's dumb that prostitution is illegal or that anyone cares about someone else's polygamy. But for it to truly matter...oh it's all me baby.

I get pissed off when people don't act like I want them too. I have a script in my head and I can't stand it when people don't say their lines right. I get pissed when people call me on my bullshit, as said bullshit is also part of the script. I get pissed off by my past and what I antic pate will happen in my future.

The only constant...

I piss me off.

Good, good.

2008-07-08T21:46:00.000-07:00

Here I go again. I say, "I'm going backwards to start another one." But he said...oh he said something terribly good. Perhaps he likened it to gardening? Like, even if your goal is to plant redwoods it's still okay to tend your little garden, just because you like it?

No, that isn't at all what he said. But he had a good reason that I could come back.

Because I need it.