24 October 2006

One is silver and the other's nonexistent

I had a conversation with a woman recently where she confessed that once a year, she gets together with her 20+ oldest friends, they all rent a house for a weekend and goof off and drink wine and play Pictionary and catch up and I thought, "you have 20 old friends?! I'm lucky if I have 20 numbers in my cell phone of people I call regularly." And by old friends, she means women that she's been close with -- on a yearly Christmas-card-sending, visiting-the-new-baby, call-you-on-your-birthday basis -- for several decades. Several decades, people.

To quote my oldish friend, Amanda, "Have matches, will travel," because I can't hold onto them. I know, without question, that it's me, through and through; I am a bridge burner of the most felonious caliber and I almost couldn't care less about it -- consciously.

I'm cranky. I'm judgemental. I'm critical and nitpicky and finicky about smells and foods and taste in music and political leanings; I'm hypersensitive when it comes to racism and sexism and homophobia and oppression and I rarely give a pass to people who cross those lines...I'm difficult.

Sure, they say I'm funny, they say I'm easy to talk to, they say that I am a font of knowledge and wisdom (okay, she said that last part, just one gal -- I liked it, it was flattering) but honestly I can assure you that I am really just passing through, that I am incapable of any long term commitment and this breaks my heart, knowing this about myself.

If I see you, ten years down the line, if I see you then and I loved you once, in any capacity, I will love you again with the same rush in my heart with which I loved you before but I will lose your phone number or get caught up in my own bullshit and forget, again, how good that love made me feel.

I told you from the start
Just how this would end
When I get what I want and
I never want it again.

18 October 2006

Freecycle is for...

...desperate scavengers chained to their computers. In less than five minutes, I had approximately eight emails from total strangers wanting to come to my house and pick up an old-ass printer that I'm giving away. Since I love you all (in the relative, cyber sense of things), I offered it on Freecycle 'cuz it ain't all that, but they want it! Bad!

I highly recommend using this method of recycling if you want someone to come and pick up your old shit. They'll do it, and how.

15 October 2006

A prude or...?

Yesterday, as I traversed the span between the bathroom and the bedroom after my morning shower, I stuck my head into the room where Fergus was playing and said, "whatcha doin, buddy?"

To which he replied, "Get away from me! And put your bra on!"

13 October 2006

Shards and shards and tears and $70 poorer...

Today, after I mistakenly indulged in an email exchange with a dear friend whose self-absorption with his daughter's conjunctivitis and his, um, life (the nerve!) was making me feel paranoid and ignored and brought up all the rage that I thought had dissipated with the severance from the preschool and the passing of the PMDD and the confidence that I've mustered from the fact that I KNOW I AM NOT BI-POLAR (?) or otherwise absent from my mental faculties, I slammed our 33-year-old back door and the glass shattered, in huge, 10-inch shards that could easily have dismembered a small gal or a smaller boy or killed one of them, even.

Brian came home, I blocked off the kitchen, glass was everywhere...it was a mess. No one was even nicked, we were so lucky, and after cleaning up all the small parts we went to work, both of us, Brian dismantling the rest of the door to fit it for new glass and me frantically phoning every specialist on speed dial and a few non-specialists, specifically my best friend, my boss and my mom, all of whom are equally cathartic but in no way therapeutic (in the professional sense). I spoke to a midwife, who wanted to consult with another midwife (who has lots of practice in the manipulation of hormones) and could not get back to me until Tuesday; I called my psychiatrist who's on holiday in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee and had sketchy reception but urged me, emphatically and with lots of static, to not check myself into a hospital -- I am not bipolar, after all, question mark or no. He would see me on Monday morning.

We are both convinced, after months of charting and the bible-sworn testimony of my ever-patient husband (whose sanity I'm beginning to question because hello? I broke a big glass door...little ol' me. Big.Glass.Door. Who stays with such a person?) that these events begin in a very timely fashion, same day every month, that their escalation is perfectly synchronized with the decline of my energy levels, optimism and hope; this is classic PMDD. My grandmother has it, my mother and her sister both have it, my sister has it; on the phone today with my-mother-who's-no-expert-at-nothing, she said, "Do you remember when I shattered a window?"

"Yes," I replied, sobbing, "I have the scars to prove it."
"Do you remember where we were?" she asked.
"Yes," still crying, "we were in Pop's driveway on El Dee Drive, and you and PS were fighting, and you got louder and louder and jumped out of the driver's seat and slammed the door so hard that the glass shattered. I was sitting behind you, covered with little cubes of auto glass, some of them stuck to my skin."

And more calmly than she's hardly ever has in her capacity, she described how PS kept yelling at her, even though she could see what she'd done to me but could see that I was actually okay and that Pop was getting me out of the car and brushing me off and my sister was crying but she was a baby and that's what they do...PS kept yelling and yelling, calling her a crazy bitch and telling her that she oughta be in a hospital, they oughta take her kids and Pop finally told him to shut the hell up. Grandmom came out with the vacuum and the extension cord they used for the lawn mower and vacuumed up the glass; I suspect we ate some poor-folks supper of cubed ham and egg noodles with canned tomatoes (we ate that a lot -- Pop told us it was Czech, his mother's recipe from the old country), drank some tea from a powdered mix and fell asleep in my grandparents' bed, which we did several nights a week while my mom and PS played pinochle with our grandparents in the club basement and drank Cutty Sark and Black Tower and chain smoked until the early AM, when they carried us to the car, laid us across the back seat and drove us the few miles home.

That night, we drove home in Pop's Buick; he returned my mother's Toyota the next day with a new window. I'm gonna tell this story again on Monday morning and I will demand a referral and I will refuse the meds because history doesn't lie and it almost certainly repeats without attention and love and a big fucking mouth

11 October 2006

We got a new trailer! Hooray!

Yeah, we got a new trailer; Dad & Wendy splurged (not really -- but I'll get to it) and bought a brand-new, double-wide grey mobile home with a big ol' picture window in the front and plenty of sleeping room for all of us... No fleas, neither... There were all kinds of, um, modernities like a new microwave with a rotating plate built into it (stop it -- you're so jealous), a duel cassette deck/receiver built into the wall with speakers throughout the house, some fancy-looking hanging cabinets with glass on both sides (so you could see the dishes from the living room, which we thought was important), two bathrooms (one was a master bath, naturally) and did I mention that there were no fleas?

I think my dad must have been doing well, sales-wise, at the time because those were relatively stress-free times, times when we got what we asked for for Christmas and there was always a full fridge and lots of Tab to drink... Wendy's car died but my dad got her a new one, a four-door white Oldsmobile sedan with plush interior and, once again, a cassette deck, which was considered very modern at the time; she was working two jobs, managing two retail stores (for the same owner in Ocean City in the off season, not a great feat but ethically admirable, nonetheless) and we enjoyed a small amount of luxury through her employee discount -- when my tiny feet finally grew to be a size five-and-a-half (where they remain to this day), I received my very first pair of Nikes that were shiny white nylon with purple swooshes... I slept in them, I loved them so much; I also got a pair of Guess? jeans.. and a couple of Forenza sweaters, plus this weird Generra (does anyone else remember this?) sweatshirt, pink, with a screenprint of a men's rugby team on the front... In the era of Flashdance, this was meant to be worn off the shoulder with a tank top underneath; my mother did not let me wear this getup to school...

Speaking of my mother, things were only getting more intense at my "real" home, the one where I lived the majority of the time with my younger sister, Polyester Suit and his two daughters who'd been sent to live with us presumably because, "their junkie mother doesn't want them anymore.".. I've never verified this story, mostly because I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to do so, but also because I practically couldn't care less... All I know is that PS's daughters were grits -- that is, they wore skin-tight jeans, high top British Knights sneakers and they feathered their hair long past the time that my peers considered it fashionable... They also both sported homemade tattoos on the middle fingers of their left hands of upside-down crosses; the older daughter was 15 and the younger one 13, the same as I was... My mom and PS took them on a shopping trip specifically in search of rings to cover up the tattoos before they were allowed to start school with us; no one bothered to buy them new clothes, though, and it wasn't long before they were more alienated than I was... I thought this to be an impossibility, to be sure.

The younger daughter, the one that is the same age as I am, attempted assimilation quickly:.. They had a rich grandmother that felt sorry for them (or embarrassed by her so-called junkie daughter -- again, whatever) and was willing to help them blend in as best as they could and took them shopping for clothes that would aid them in this journey, albeit not before they were casted out by most of the school; when Same Age returned from the mall with a wardrobe exactly similar to my own and with several pieces that I coveted but could never have by virtue of our virtual poverty, I was livid... It was then that I first heard the expression, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," but it was not the first time I'd called bullshit in my life -- my mother married a lying sociopath, remember?.. In any event, I am still seething, twentysomething years later, about that pair of white leather huaraches that she got and I didn't; the only saving grace was that I was small, curvy and had finally grown out of my geekiness by the blessings of affordable contact lenses and puberty and she was -- and remains to this day -- six feet tall at 13 with a giant ass, limp hair and size 10 feet, complete with bunions... Well, she's not 13 anymore, I guess...the older girl had a penchant for Wicca, non-conformity (I should have admired this but at the time I thought she was a freak -- turns out she is a freak but a little support from someone, anyone, at the time might have changed the course of her fate, which isn't the most stellar of outcomes) and an older boyfriend who had creepy feathered hair and came to pick her up for the prom looking like, "the Good Humor man, for chrissakes.".. He was wearing a white tuxedo with a pale pink ruffled shirt, a brighter pink tie and cummerbund and white patent leather shoes; PS practically refused to take their picture and I'm not sure Older Girl cared much, she was eager to get in his..Camaro in her burgundy strapless number and her updo so they could smoke cigarettes and make out... In retrospect, I should have been a bit jealous -- now, there's little I love more than driving around in a fancy outfit, smoking my brains out (the making out part is debatable) but at the time I was shooing them out the door in embarrassment...

Over time, Same Age and I would become good friends by sheer default; we shared a basement bedroom and I grew to enjoy sneaking out the ground-level window after hours and trolling Baltimore City, mostly hanging out at Cignal and smoking clove cigarettes and I needed her to cover for me in the event of necessity -- which only happened once, getting caught... My punishment was that I had to volunteer at the hospital for six months, where I took a [n unpaid] job at the gift shop and stole candy, costume jewelry and tabloid magazines, all of which I gleefully shared with Same Age... We got our licenses on the same day and we split the cost of a 1980 Toyota Corolla, royal blue, $1000 paid in cash to a friend of the family... Same Age, for a period, enjoyed a good deal more use out of this car than I did for my sister and I were still spending every other weekend with our dad, who drove faithfully every other Friday to pick us up after school, drove us to Ocean City for the weekend, then drove us back to Columbia on Sunday evening; the Corolla belonged solely to Same Age for 26 weekends per calendar year, which remains a big deal to this day in the realm of teendom...