And here's a hand, my trusty friend...

To all my friends, family, and faithful followers:

Best wishes for 2007 and have a safe and fun New Year's Eve!

And if you are staying in and watching Dick Clark, read this when you get bored. It's cool:

100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year

And if you are coming home from a night of revelry and you want to watch something while you eat your Fourthmeal, watch this:

Tea Partay


Thank you for being my friend in 2006. I'm very grateful for all of you.

Love,
Erin

The most desolate place in the history of the world must have been the H'ville Wal-Mart on December 27th at 9:30 pm. I went for emergency breakfast supplies, having returned to a quiet house and empty cupboards after Christmas with my family. I seemed to be nearly the only one shopping besides off-hours Wal-Mart employees, their smocks thrown over one shoulder as they shuffled with their carts through the aisles. I remember being that tired over the summer and wondering why I was wasting my 6.50 an hour when I was too exhausted to eat.

I found my breakfast; coffee, bananas, sensible cereal for the health conscious, New Year's me, and then I moved over to the other side to purchase the things I call Single Girl Staples in my head...things I really don't need but like to have to make me feel good, if only for a few minutes. Bubble bath. Lip Gloss. A fuzzy robe the light green hue of Easter basket grass that was on clearance and in exchange for the robe I received for Christmas and didn't like. A glossy magazine with some starlet promising me killer abs for 2007 on the cover.

A few high school kids were standing in groups near the front, laughing and looking earnestly ridiculous in the way only fifteen year olds can and I felt old, browsing the marked down business wear next to the jewelry. I noticed the "Winter Wonderland" that had taken up residence in the Garden Center back in late September had already been struck down, and rows and rows of Valentines and pink and red cardboard hearts lined the seasonal aisles where the candy canes and popcorn tins had been just yesterday. Life, at least in commerce, moves on without ever looking back.

In that sort of bleak little dip in the calendar between Christmas and New Year's I always start thinking about what's going to happen next. How January 1st could possibly herald in better fortune, more responsibility, a better me. It's such a naive way to look at our future...maybe the only great superstition that everyone wants to have faith in anymore...that magically at the stroke of midnight on New Year's we will have another chance to be special, to be better. That the man or woman we hastily kissed on the cheek when the ball drops will be the person we will kiss goodnight for the rest of our lives. That just because you stayed home on New Year's to watch Dick Clark in your pajamas doesn't mean the rest of 2007 will be the same way.

I don't know...I've always been sad on New Year's, even on the occasions when I've been surrounded by my friends and family. Even when I had a relationship, or the prospect of one. New Years always makes me feel so insignificant, because the realization that we hang our hopes on an arbitrary calendar date and time every year seems somewhat hopeless to me.

Maybe it's just a post-holiday lull for me, but every year I dread New Year's. I wish I could figure out why.

Love, Honestly

I just got done watching the movie Love, Actually. I think I've seen in three times in the same number of years, mostly because I have a weak spot for any movie that includes Hugh Grant or Alan Rickman or Colin Firth, and so the combination of the three into two and a half hours of a pleasantly lit, saccharine romantic comedy is too great a pleasure for me to turn down when the opportunity presents itself.

I remember crying the last two times I watched it. The first, in the theaters with The Husband in 2003, holding his hand and sniffling a little as all the plot threads worked together into the wholly unrealistic, but incredibly satisfying ending. The second time on the floor of my living room, a box of Kleenex on my knees and a cat on my lap, the picture of a sad, lonely, recently single girl with too much time and access to expanded cable television on the weekends.

This time, nearly six months removed from Le Separacion and in the comfort of my parents' Christmas Bedazzled den, I watched the movie with a sort of clinical detachment that surprised me. I smiled at the funny parts and I took note of the pithy aphorisms about love and relationships that one of the main characters, a ten year old boy, passed on to his recently widowed father, but on the whole I wasn't moved this time. I could blame my familiarity with the story arc and the late hour of the night, but truthfully, I think I saw it through a different pair of eyes, and I'm kind of relieved about that.

One of the main themes of the movie is that on Christmas, you absolutely must tell the truth. In this case, several of the main characters in the ensemble cast face their own reality about the state of their love lives, and whether that included storybook romance, a failing marriage, or the absence of romantic love in the wake of family or professional obligations. Ultimately (and I don't really consider this a plot spoiler because you can see the ending from a mile away but if you haven't seen the movie and still really want to, then skip the next sentence), every one of the characters ended up with the ones they loved the most on Christmas Eve.

I thought it was interesting what a dichotomy the movie painted between the "winners" and "losers" in love, though. The ones who found romantic love--or even just the prospect of getting laid--were absolutely triumphant at the movie's end...backed by a soundtrack of soaring strings and featured leaping into the arms of their significant other to applause and cheers from the crowds around them. The ones who had lost, according to the movie, were left alone, having chosen the needs of a family member over a potential relationship, or realizing that their unrequited love would never be, well, requited. In the end, those characters were essentially cut out of the plot resolution, left alone with their dinner for one on Christmas Eve, or reduced to extra status in the crowds, smiling wistfully as our heroes and heroines are reunited. By the end of the movie, the message was pretty straightforward: pursue romantic love at all costs, because if you don't (even if it means you did the right thing) you will lose out for another year. Act fast, tell the truth on Christmas, and make sure those strings are playing for you.

And as I watched that, and considered the overall lesson of the movie, a dawning sense of absolute relief washed over me as I realized I don't buy into this anymore! I think maybe the urge to grab a Kleenex and a pint of Ben and Jerry's over a movie like this used to be so overwhelming because I completely agreed with the idea of romantic love or being wanted or needed in that glorious Hollywood sense being the utter zenith of maintaining self-worth. That, above all else, it was more important to just be in some sort of romantic relationship and desired by someone...anyone at all...than to actually make myself into someone who could be alone and happy as well as not alone and happy, and I know that all of this is like Sally Jessie Raphael Self-Help 101 stuff and you're sitting there sort of cringing that I'm even having this epiphany and writing about it like no one else has ever had this epiphany in the world before, but I assure you I'm not. It just feels really good when you finally, finally get it. Does that make sense?

Anyway.

I don't think I would've made this realization if I hadn't been having two conversations simulataneously with two friends who I consider to be very wise. Within the same hour, one had reminded me that life cannot be lived as a sprint...that all the changes and improvements and transitions we inevitably must undergo cannot be accomplished quickly, or they will have to be fixed and redone over and over again. The other, listening to me complain about the surprising lack of fun and brand new friends and fabulous shoes in my newly single life, reminded me that this would be a good time to relax, take a break from my insta-resurrection of my social life, and fix the things about myself that were broken, but that I couldn't see for all the wreckage of my marriage that had been laying around for so long. Both fantastic ideas, and both tremendously helpful in the last two weeks as I took my little self-mandated breather and tried to figure out my next move.

So, if on Christmas...the most romantic holiday of the whole year...if I had to stage my own Hollywood moment of truth and run breathlessly into a room, or into an airport and stop in front of the people who have inspired crushes, or attraction, and maybe even love...if I had to use this one night to tell them each the truth, I would say these things:

I have no business being ready yet, but when I am ready, I would just like you to know that I have always liked you, and I respect you, and when I think about you I think "I admire him in a Victorian sense" and then I laugh because I know you would get why it's funny, too. And if you ever wanted to see a movie, or go to dinner, or do something that didn't end with both of us bolting for our cars at the end of the evening like two strangers, I'd really like that.

I really like that we're "special to one another", because I don't think I tell you how much I like you as often as you tell me. But I know that your attraction lies in who you think I could be if I'd just work hard enough, and not who I am now. And the truth is, I kind of like who I am now. I know I could be better, but I don't think that it's fair for you to discount me because of how I look. So I just wanted you to know that I like you just the way you are, and I wish you felt the same way.

I think you know you are my dearest friend in all the world, and there's nothing that can really numb that for me. That's why I can say ILYAIKWTM each and every day. So we're okay. Even when it hurts.

I guess I could say all those things. More even, to the people who have touched my life in smaller, less charged ways. Because the one truly valid point of that movie is that love doesn't have to always be big. Sometimes it's quiet, and sometimes it's just being kind to a stranger who won't even get the chance to reciprocate. But those above things...as nice as they would be to say to the right people at the right time would only foster the kind of love that makes you want to hold someone's hand if it were being splashed across a huge silver movie screen. In real life, though, I'm afraid that kind of honesty is just the stuff that would make another person cringe, because love can't happen in 104 minutes. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes the ridiculous cliched love of self to even begin to foster a healthy romance between two people.

But if I were going to be perfectly honest, Christmas honest even, to the rest of you? I'd have to say that the idea of someday far in the future getting to tell the truth to the great love of my life and seeing it returned in his eyes? I secretly still think that'd be pretty incredible.

Especially if Alan Rickman were somehow involved.

I am alone in my parents' house, evidently stranded in the wake of Christmas Eve Morning church attendance. I have a vague memory of being prodded awake by my mother at 8:30, but not being able to form sentences to explain why I couldn't lift my head from the pillow. The cold medicine I drank last night after our Christmas Eve Eve get together (the first in a string of four increasingly elaborate parties with my family) was so potent I succumbed nearly instantly and floated in a half-asleep daze for the next twelve hours, 'til now. I still can't keep my eyes open, though a tepid cup of coffee is bravely doing my part to lift the fog.

I got in to town last night after a solid week of adrenaline-fueled sleeplessness and outright, giddy exhaustion. We had double Christmas programs this week, and class parties, and potlucks every day and I had my first houseguest since J and I moved in two years ago even though I'm still in the middle of the World's Slowest Cleaning Project EVAR, and, and, and...

And so by the time I got to my parents' I was pretty much drained, and no amount of grande latte with nutmeg in the foam was going to cut it. I was just dog tired, boss.

When I get tired I have a tendency to be a bit more honest with my thoughts and feelings than usual. It's pretty much like being drunk, especially because I also tend to bump into low-lying objects and feel a burning, fundamental desire to belt out every Mariah or Celine or Whitney or Chaka or Melissa ballad that has ever been sung on American Idol because at that moment I just know exactly what they mean in that 7th-grade-girl-writing-in-my-Lisa-Frank-diary-with-the-brass-lock-with-my-glitter-pen-about-WHO-I-LUV-4F4-and-then-spraying-the-page-with-some-Exclamation-perfume-because-that-seals-it way and if I sing them to you, right up in your face, I just KNOW you'll know too, y'know?

Fortunately, since last night was a family dinner, there were no such recordings in the house of my 90 year old great aunt, so I was left with just a poor sense of balance and an especially candid tongue...a deadly combination in its own right. And I think I might've implored my family to stop being so sarcastic and mean to one another, and I think I might've used the phrase "it's Christmas, goddamnit" and I think I might've also open hand-slapped my brother on the shoulder and fell backwards against our van, laughing, when they all started snickering at me for demanding that everyone be nice on Christmas.

This all might've happened, but I can't remember because I drank cough syrup and fell asleep on the couch watching the Oxygen channel. And now I am in my parents' house alone on Christmas Eve, and they're either at church or have been raptured and so I can't work to instill the spirit of Christmas compassion and kindness into them for the remaining days of 2006. Because as I am reading about all the people who believe in the power of Christmas to bring each of us together, I have to tell you that the one thing in which I truly have rock solid faith is humanity's ability to be kind even when we don't want to be. That it's in everyone, but that sometimes it's too difficult to maintain because the rest of the world is just so nasty and mean and it's easy to succumb to all that. I've noticed it especially in my family, where every act of kindness is tempered with some sort of "don't want to get too close to the world" sarcasm or aloofness in the end. So I'm going to keep asking them to just stop with the pretense, to just be nice, to accept Christmas gifts with a thank you and not a comment about what they don't like, to enjoy family members for what they are and not worry about how annoying they can be. To just finally relax and understand that it is okay to be happy. That it's never okay to be hateful. This is my one Christmas wish and I feel very strongly about it, drunk or no.

I guess, though, if they're really Raptured and gone, they wouldn't mind me drinking some more cough syrup and cranking up a little X-tina on the stereo.

Have you seen the commercial where a young woman at a family Christmas party flashes a diamond engagement ring and everyone in the room starts whispering "He went to Jared"?

If you haven't, you are clearly not watching a lot of TV which means you are a better person than I, and you are also missing out on some fairly egregious holiday efftardery.

The point of the commercials are that the husband, or the fiance, or the boyfriend or whatever cared enough about his partner and his relationship to make the trip to one of the sixty clearly uber-exclusive locations to purchase the exact right stone and setting to profess how pure and devoted his love really is. As the news of the gift ring circulates through the living room or the restaurant, the phrase "He went to JARED" is uttered with a different inflection for each person. The elderly gentleman in the cardigan vest says it with a touch of paternal pride, the bitter older sister turns to her own husband and remarks, "HE went to Jared", because the last time she got a diamond from her spouse was the Christmas when she found the lipstick stained phone number of their son Payton's KinderMusik teacher in the pocket of his trench coat. Even a ten year old girl gets in on the fun, and utters "He went to JARED..." with such wistfulness and hope in her face that the viewer is left with the sense that every little girl should grow up understanding that true love is only ever about four little words: clarity, cut, color, and carat.

Whenever these commercials are over, I usually have to unclench my fist around whatever napkin or blanket or cat I decided to grab and shake out of disgust. I couldn't put my finger on why I was so irritated for a while, other than that a company using a first name...and not even a POSSESSIVE first name...is just sort of stupid. If it were a first name that could reasonably be a last name too, that might be different. Kyle Jewelers. Mitchell Jewelers. They sound stately and refined. But "Jared"? Not even "Jared's"? That's like giving morons the world over the right to call their businesses things like McKayla Scrap Metal or Chad Fresh Halibut. It just doesn't seem right.

Anyway.

Where did this belief that every woman expects a diamond and every man expects a car or a hideously expensive piece of technology come from? When did it get perpetuated and why did advertisers decide to turn it into such a nasty business? I saw another commercial recently with a woman's world-weary voice informing us that "Every Christmas, you swear to not exchange gifts this year, but every Christmas he knows you really mean 'Please get me a diamond.' So every year he gets the diamond, and every year he hides it in his underwear drawer. And every year when he's gone out for stocking stuffers, you take it for a test drive."

Um...I feel like Santa Claus just stopped being real all over again.

I won't get into the self-righteous soapbox speech about how spending thousands of dollars on an eternity necklace or the perfect pair of studs just seems so wrong, because I know that somehow there's a trickle down effect and a jeweler is able to provide for his or her family because of your purchase, and they provide money to someone else and so forth. I get capitalism, and I get that these pieces aren't just ornaments, but also investments for some people. But seriously? Women are supposed to expect a thousand dollar piece of jewelry every year? And they have the right to get offended if it doesn't materialize under the tree next to the husband's belt sander and surround sound system?

I've been spending a lot of time doing some minor grief counseling for several eight and nine year olds who also found out that Santa Claus isn't real this year. The first time it happened I was completely taken off guard, and I shooed the girl out of my room and told her to ask her parents about it, even though the parents were the ones who accidentally let her find Santa's stash of presents. After that I spent an afternoon thinking pretty hard about it, and the best explanation I could offer them was that no...Santa Claus the person isn't a real live guy anymore. That there was a St. Nicholas but he probably wasn't really a portly man with rosacea and a luxurious beard. Even so, people all over the world dress up like all different kinds of Santas to help remember the good things he did, so that's why we see Santas at malls and parades. And so to abate the disappointment that inevitably follows I tell them to think of how every time they do see someone dressed up as a Santa, there is always a sense of happiness and generosity around them, and that it makes us want to pass that sense of goodness on to other people. So, that in effect we can all be Santa Clauses ourselves, even without the beard and the suit, because we can pass the spirit of Christmas on to other people. Sometimes I don't convince them, and sometimes the kid has confused Santa Claus with Jesus Christ and I've effectively told the child that God is Dead! (irate parental phone call to follow), but mostly the message gets through and the kid can go home and appreciate that his gifts were an act of love, and ultimately a remembrance of the compassion we all desperately need in our lives.

So I have to wonder, if we go to such lengths to protect the magic and the intimacy of the Christmas season for our children, why are we so callous about it in our own lives? Maybe it's all just a metaphor for what's wrong with so many relationships today...we've been socialized to believe that an adversarial partnership is not only acceptable, but expected. The doofus husband and the demanding wife will continue to butt heads until a precious gem or a piece of technology brings them momentarily together on December 25th. That hearts are captured by the man with the biggest bank balance, and that women can bargain their time, attention, even tolerance away for possessions.

Whatever the reason, that Jared commercial has really made me stop and evaluate how what I expect out of my holidays and even kind of how I can be a better partner the next time I get involved in a serious relationship.

At the very least, the next time I need to buy some piece of crap, mass market jewelry by a company that insists upon using a stupid name, I will remember those commercials and point my car straight toward a Kay instead.

Five Unique Items

I'm purloining this meme topic from Dr. Andy, who inspired me to browse through my neglected CD collection and wind down memory lane in the process.

Name a CD you own that no other friend does.


Since the majority of my CDs are school-related items, and I run the risk of everyone who also took a jazz class or a Stravinsky class or who spent weekends listening and evaluating to horn audition excerpts and idly wondering why they didn't have a social life also having these recordings, I have to eliminate 90% of my collection out of hand. My mind first turned to a CD I got when I was 13 by a band named Gretchen (self-described as "Pearl Jam meets Gin Blossoms meets Carly Simon") because I KNOW no one has it because the band never got signed and I might've seen their farewell performance in a coffee house in Rolla, Missouri when I was 14, but that might be cheating. I've ended up with a CD called NBC Celebrity Christmas, because I'm pretty sure no one else in the world felt it was necessary to spend ten dollars to hear the cast of "Just Shoot Me" sing "Sleigh Ride", but I got it because Stockard Channing was on it and so was a version of the Coventry Carol and that's my favorite. Plus, it's been on rotation on my stereo at some of my more memorable Christmases, including the one where my roommates topped our tree with a cut out Victoria's Secret angel and we posed, in our pajamas, for a house Christmas card with our holiday message written on Sharpie marker across my white wife beater t-shirt.

Name a book you own that no one else on your friends list does.

I'm going to go with Elizabeth I: Collected Works which not only was a pretty fascinating read, but also is useful as it marks the divider between my Books I am Not Embarrassed to Admit I Own and my Paperbacks That Are Either Hot Pink Or Have a High Heel or a Cocktail On The Cover.

Name a movie you own on DVD/VHS/whatever that no one else on your friends list does.

Hm. This might be the hardest one, because my DVD collection is pretty small. I'm going to say "Waiting for Guffman" because it just makes me beyond happy to watch and quote, and anyone else who understands...who really GETS why this movie is so exactly dead on and perfect in every way is my BF-4F4.

Name a place that you have visited that no one else on your friends list has.

Backstage at the Verizon Wireless (then just Sandstone) Ampitheatre. In 1996, for my
mom's 40th birthday, her friends took her to see a Monkees concert and they made me tag along. Since I was a fifteen year old girl with little or no vested interest in the Monkees I spent a lot of time sulking and pacing between the general admission seats and the little vendor area at the top. During one of my laps, I found a VIP pass on the ground and decided to be adventurous. I put it on, and walked backstage with such little attention or questioning it was as if Jesus himself had ordained me to be there. I lied to a roadie and told them I won a radio contest to be a "Roadie for the Day" and spent the rest of the evening moving instruments in and out of a bus, sitting on amplifiers with groupies and eating M&Ms from a small candy dish in the green room. Also passed out water bottles and sweat rags to the Monkees, which finally sort of made me lose my sense of bershon about the evening.


Name a piece of technology or any sort of tool you own that you think no one else on your friends list has.

Wow...I got nuthin'. I'm not much of a technophile, and my "tools" consist of a hammer, a screwdriver, and a set of ratchets for which I have absolutely no use. I do have an antique mixer my grandma passed down on me that I absolutely love. It's cumbersome and hard to clean and weighs like 60 lbs. but it also has 10 speeds and it works better than any three hundred dollar KitchenAid mixer I've seen. Cooking and baking is an extremely important ritual for me, because it's not only an act of love for the people I'm serving, but it's also basic..therapeutic in its simple logic and procedures. Anyway, I wax rhapsodic about this mixer because when I take the time to get it out and actually use it, it unfailingly gives me the perfect building blocks to put together something really wonderful.

Apparently my soulmate lives in Cleveland

I have a girlcrush. I googled something I can't remember anymore and found this blog.

Midwest Grrl

Such guilty happiness. So many pictures of shoes. Sigh.

Two weeks ago, before I caught tonsil leprosy for the second time in as many months, I attempted to be industrious and healthy by going to the gym at 5:00 am every morning. I hate being one of Those People for whom the cliche "Is there life before coffee?" is applicable but unfortunately I am That Person. Very much so. So the fact I was voluntarily exposing my retinas to fluorescent light before I have had the chance to take myself and my 18 oz. stainless steel travel mug full of Breakfast Blend to our happy place was kind of a major step for me.

When I'm at a gym I generally keep my head down and find a piece of cardio equipment in the row that's reasonably far away enough from everyone else's in the room so there would be very little chance of my spandex-clad ass being in the direct line of someone else's sight. I also like to be cloistered off because when "SexyBack" comes up in the queue on my iPod I get a little excited and start bouncing. Same thing with "Toxic". Shitty music just makes me ecstatic.

So when I trudged in two weeks ago and looked up at the profile of my roommate from freshman year of college, someonewhom I hadn't actually seen since the May of that year, I stopped short and considered walking right back out. Valerie, my freshman roommate. Eight years and the only perceivable change was she had replaced the ribbons that held back her ponytails with a standard-issue ponytail holder. When we were standing in the middle of the Tate Museum in London during our 10-day blink and you'll miss it tour of the UK, our English literature professor described Valerie as a modern-day Botticelli angel, and he was pretty much right. She was pure in both countenance and deed, and the girl read her Bible and watched "Seventh Heaven" with the same sort of focused zealotry that I devote to "Laguna Beach" or waiting for the moment when one of my cats falls off the back of the couch while they sleep. It's the little things, you know?

I can honestly say my major contribution to Valerie's life during our year together was managing to spill an entire jar of salsa on her grandma's homemade quilt and also breaking every non-drinking, non-smoking, non-carousing rule we solemnly agreed to follow when we met for our pre-freshman year pizza dinner at the Mazzio's in Butler, Missouri. I'm not sure if Valerie hated me or not because she was such a sweet girl and I don't think she'd ever say anything bad about anyone, but I can't imagine that she liked me all that much, especially when I'd stretch out her tiny, tiny shirts when we played dress up with each other's clothes. I decided to make a graceful exit out of her life, mostly for her sake, so my sophomore year I took a dorm mentor position that came with a single room and spent the rest of my tenure at that particular college breaking up with my boyfriend and being dour and listening to a lot of Aimee Mann.

So, back to the gym. Valerie and her husband were pumping away on treadmills a couple stations down from mine and every morning I saw her I envisioned the awkward convesersations that might ensue were I to approach and confirm, it was in fact her. I wondered if she'd even recognize me in my rather matronly new state, so I put the idea out of my mind and kept my head down as usual. I watched her kiss her husband on the cheek as she left and he stayed to hit the weights, and I wished her well...another name to write in my history book and wonder about eight years hence.

This evening after school I was in dire need of one sugar cookie with green icing and sprinkles so I ran into Wal-Mart to inspect their baked goods when I passed Valerie on the way out. The conversation we had was so completely nonchalant and so devoid of any sort of pretense or surprise that we actually WERE talking in a Wal-Mart in the town in which we had both been unknowingly co-existing for two years that I felt like we were both eighteen, sitting on our single beds and curling our hair, and discussing who'd tape "Buffy" and "Seventh Heaven" while we were gone to our respective sorority meetings. I wanted to ask about her husband and her job and all the things that had made her eight years older and if she ever wore hair ribbons and if she had ever looked me up to see if I was all right like I had done with her, but I didn't want to ruin the moment.

So she invited me to aerobics at the gym on Thursday nights. She called it Ladies' Night and laughed before she walked out the swishing doors. I went off in search of my sugar cookie and was glad that not all of my friends are relegated to the annals of my memory.

Growing Pains

I realized, over the course of the weekend, that I'm just the teensiest bit addicted to the world of Instant Messaging. When most of my friends graduated college, or transferred, or dropped out, or just moved on in some other way, we all turned to IM to stay in touch. But as the years progressed, their old circles of friends were replaced by new ones and chatting with someone was more of a means of catching up, rather than a vital, daily part of their social life.

Not so for me, I guess. After everyone moved away I turned to The Husband, and that was the end of the going out, seeing people...you know the rest. So in my world, the conversations that transpired in the little white boxes on my computer weren't a supplement to social interaction, it WAS my social interaction.

I thought, somehow, that being single again would suddenly usher in a fabulous new world of Sex and The City-esque friends and adventures. I guess I expected to wake up the day after J finally moved out to find a closet full of Chanel dresses and Manolos and a phone address book full of colorful girlfriends and boyfriends and we'd all raise hell and I could make up for the last four years by being carefree and wild and 26 going on 22 for at a little while.

But right...of course...everyone else is 26 going on 27 now, and I hadn't considered that. I laughed over Thanksgiving break when I left messages for a couple of friends to see if they were going to attend the semi-all town get together at one of our city's three bars and they returned with "Um...no one really goes out anymore." Four years. I had forgotten. They grew up and got dogs and mortgages and settled down and I guess I'm still waiting for God to call my number in that respect.

So anyway, I exist in an Internet social world, and I really don't like that at all. I figured out where all this slow-burning anger is coming from, too, when I had my epiphany about the Internet thing. The anger isn't isolated to the one friend who wrote the blog; I'm angry at everyone. I'm furious at the world, and I loathe myself the most for feeling that way. I expect my friends to say the right thing, to extend friendship and comfort and companionship to me when I don't really have much to give back in return. Right now, I'm not the kind of girl people want to be friends with, or men would want to want. I get that. I need to change, and I can't expect that change to happen by osmosis through the dim light of a computer monitor.

As a start, I've decided to delete my all my messengers as an experiment to see if the time and the expectations and the anger I wasted there could be converted into something positive in my real life (such as it is). Maybe I'll reorganize my house, or practice my horn more, or take up a hobby (although the last time I decided to give up the whole Internet cold turkey, I freaked out with major withdrawal and decided to crochet an afghan and I ended up with 129 dusty rose-colored fleurchamps in a tupperware container and no earthly idea how to connect them into a blanket until I got back on the Internet to research it and ended up staying for four hours chatting after I reloaded MSN and Yahoo). Maybe I'll just spend a week dusting my baseboards and decide that's all I really needed to accomplish with my little period of isolation. In any case, I'll be sure to blog every second of my withdrawal bugs and mini-nervous breakdowns and annoying things I realize are rattling around in my head when I don't have someone else to blather to anymore.

And of course, I would still love to hear from all of you by email. Or cell phone. Or blog comment. Or Christmas card. Or messenger pigeon. And if someone DOES break down and decides to get their skank on at the Echoes this Christmas, you know where to find me.

The Don and Rene Show.

I'm just about to leave and travel the fifty miles of prairie moonscape to my parents' house for the weekend. I've been spending a lot of time there, partly to visit my grandma as often as I can before the year's up, and partly because even though I'm completely into this journey of defining myself as an upwardly mobile, dynamic person who looks and acts her best at all times, it's still nice to know I have someplace to go where I can wear the same pair of sweatpants pants three days in a row and no will notice. Or, at least won't judge me outright for it.

I used to absolutely dread coming home, even though the comfort of being there always outweighed any burgeoning spark of independence I had during my college years. It seemed like every visit was another opportunity to disappoint my parents; we would have a painful discussion about yet another apron string that needed severing and then, given whichever adult privilege or responsibility I asked for, I would return home and fail spectacularly at it. My learning curve at being an adult is apparently a very steep one, second only probably to my learning curve regarding the correct tweezing of eyebrows or ironing dress pants.

Coming home during the marriage was another source of tension on all its own. My parents, naturally, were curious why I would spend weekends with them sans a husband, and my own stress from dealing with such a craptacular relationship combined with the exhaustion of hiding how bad it was from everyone made me, well, a humongous bitch. I took it out on my family, and since I wouldn't tell them why, the tensions were never resolved until I finally came out with it last February. The whole situation embedded a deep and bitter resentment in my mother, who didn't understand why everything couldn't just stop being broken...why I couldn't muscle up and fix everything that was wrong with my marriage. It put a small rift between my brother and me, because his senior year of high school--the one that was supposed to form the bedrock of stability and small-pond confidence he needed to take to college with him the next year--was shattered because his fragile big sister had just broken down and needed all the attention. And I think it even made things weird between me and my dad, because his daughter had not only failed at working hard enough to keep her marriage together, but since my husband's infidelity and all sorts of other weird things were involved, she had been embarrassed, too, and that's not something you ever imagine for your little girl when she's playing on your knee.

But now I think that since the aftermath of all of this is finally coming to an end, every member of my family is sort of faced with the strange opportunity of figuring out who they are. I guess that's the result of having so much alone time. My brother, who has completed half of his freshman year at Yale is finding new ways every day to become a superstar, a Captain of Industry, a Local Boy Makes Good. My parents--empty nesters, and realizing they had personalities before they devoted them to children--are figuring out things that will finally make them feel alive again. My dad wants to golf. My mom quit smoking and is currently a notorious Internet muckraker for our city politics. They're getting cruise literature in the mail. The other day they tried spices on their grilled chicken, and they lived to tell about it. Life, if not exotic, is at least good for Don and Rene.

And me...well, I guess my path is the whole reason this blog exists. My path involves figuring out why I feel so screwed up and then finding ways to fix it so when I'm in my fifties, I'll be able to send my kid in college a postcard of Puerto Vallarta from the cruiseship. And I guess part of the whole me-fixing process is just giving up on being so angry with the past, and realizing I'm really okay with my family. I even like them a lot.

Even if they do still think H'ville counts as the city.

Reconsideration, in 12-point.

Every morning I reserve a few blissful moments before staggering to the shower to sit and drink a glass of orange juice and focus my eyes on the scrolling words of my computer as I check my email and the little circuit of websites I visit regularly. Nothing important…I save the news and the sports scores for my plan time because I really haven’t found much about my job that requires actual planning yet. Maybe that’s something I should ask about at some point.

A couple days ago, one of the bloggers I read regularly—a guy I know in real life—wrote an exquisite entry about a beautiful girl he’s encountered at his school, how he’s utterly drawn to her, how he’s flummoxed by his behavior around her, and how part of this immense attraction is his desire to connect…to acknowledge how striking she is, and then to beg her forgiveness for an intrusion upon her insecurities and pain. It was poignant and raw, perfectly composed, and of an emotional depth that I find rare in the world.

So I shocked myself when my first reaction was to hurl an expletive at the screen and hit my fist on the keyboard…a futile cyber-substitute for slamming a door on the face of an offensive person.

My day was ruined after that, and I arrived at school already on a mission to be a holy terror. I yelled at my classes, which made me doubly mad because I never, ever raise my voice with kids. I slumped at the lunch table and scowled at the Wisterias, my disdain for them practically a blinking neon sign over my head as I slammed forkfuls of rice into my mouth and glared at their yogurt cups and Diet Cokes. I tried checking his blog again to see if maybe it was a fluke, an aberration of instinct, but I had the same reaction the second time around, so I stomped out of the building with my jaw clenched and burst into tears the moment I hit my car. I came home, pulled my comforter over my head and hid there for a few hours, afraid to subject anyone else to my toxic anger.

While I was ensconced in my down feather and cotton igloo, I tried to make some sense of the absolute rage that blog entry had inspired. I’m in the middle of reading this book about Buddhist meditation and health philosophy that says the emotions that pass in and out of us each day are only harmful if we ruminate over them (duh) and that in order to attain the sort of peace we struggle for in our lives, we should allow the emotions to run their course, acknowledge them, and move on. Unfortunately, how to actually DO the latter part of that philosophy is in Chapter 8 and I’m only on, like, Chapter 4 so I still feel like I have a license to pick apart and overanalyze every weird feeling I have. Ergo, I obsessed.

I had to rule a few things that weren’t the cause before I could really get to the root of the problem. Was I offended by the quality of his writing? Absolutely not. In the world of amateur blogging, this one is definitely worth the bandwidth. Did I have some completely out-of-the-blue, latent feelings for this guy and so I was hurt by his florid writing about another girl? Nope. We have an easy acquaintanceship based around good discussions over Very Important Things and some not so important things, and if I had to pigeonhole our friendship, he would’ve been filed away in the “Buddy” section, along with my college housemates and Daryl, the guy who worked in electronics at Wal-Mart with me this summer.

What I finally figured out, after three hours of bedroom navel gazing, was that the writer essentially hit upon a subject that is basically my Achilles’ Heel: the subjects of physical attraction and the human need to be wanted.

I have been, during the days in which I wasn't able to bring myself to blog, taking yet another round of personal inventory following a conversation with one of my best friends. He declared me "overnice" and said he noticed I got pushed around a lot and didn't say much back in return. One morning...I think the morning before my last round of strep started simmering in the hot, steamy netherpoints of my tonsular region...I woke up and decided I was done being nice. Or at least done being so nice that I was afraid to speak my mind. So I started telling people things that needed to be said, and I felt better with every one.

So when I got angry by this post, I instantly decided I needed to talk about it so I could get over it and feel better, and you could understand maybe that I DO do more things than just smile and get out of people's way. When I realized this, my writer’s block was broken and I wrote. I wrote for two straight hours, filled up three and a half pages of a Word document, and even snuck it in in an attachment to my school email so I could write more during my plan time. And when I sat back, ready to copy and paste my mini-manifesto into the entry-starved white box on my Blogger homepage, I realized that none of this…absolutely none of it at all really resolved the situation. It didn’t help me feel better, and I decided that hashing out exactly why I felt such hostility for a friendly acquaintance who couldn’t even possibly know he had done anything wrong—who DIDN’T do anything wrong other than unwittingly write really coherently about something at which I’m an utter failure—would just plunge us both into a level of awkwardness into which even I would not dare go. I thought I would derive some sort of sweeping life lesson out of my printed screed…that if I could make my own feelings about the subject as tangible as his, then somehow saying the potentially hurtful things I wanted to say would’ve been acceptable.

So as I watched two of the three pages of words being consumed by my backspace button, I realized the inherent lesson in all of it was that sometimes actually, things are just better left unsaid.

I'm blogging it out. Because deep inside my throat. S'why my snow night sucks.

Got sent home with strep today for the second time in two months. I have officially used up 7.5 of my 8 sick days, which were designated back in August for quiet luxurious mornings in which I call in "sick" and spend the rest of the day watching 90210 reruns on the couch, but have now been depleted in my part-time job of actually being really freaking sick all the time. I'm thinking about calling up my ENT and giving myself a tonsillectomy for a Christmas present but considering my luck this year I will come back to school after break, bleed out and faceplant on my blue carpet next to the djembe because they couldn't find a substitute to relieve me fast enough.

In any case, here are some not very inspired haikus about being sick, during The Great Ice Storm of Ought-Six, and not having any food I can suck down through a straw.

They're not funny, but neither is my mood.


I will die alone
My eyes, eaten by housecats
'Cause they got no food.

Tonsils--red, turgid
Are dripping with infection
Twin pillars of death

Got sent home today
Officially a leper
Just one sick day left

I think it's funny
How easily one can snore
When one's tonsils touch

If I die tonight
Don't let Rene see the Cuervo
that's in the pantry

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

writer's block

SYLLABICATION: writ·er's block
PRONUNCIATION: rtrz
NOUN: A usually temporary psychological inability to begin or continue work on a piece of writing.

In silence grows the immortal mind..

My visit to the otolar otorhin ENT resulted in a situation that could be a lot better, but could be a lot worse. If I were giving myself a grade in healthy throatage, it'd be a D+ that can be raised with extra credit and correcting my test in the future. I gave myself a D+ only because the 8th grade me--the one who would've sprinted the bathroom and cried through fourth, fifth, and sixth period because a D means I will die, frigid and alone in my parents' house because no self-respecting boy would EVER date a girl with a D on her middle school report card and I might as well stop going to school now and just get a job at Sonic so I can at least work my way up to assistant manager by the time I'm thirty--well, that girl still lives inside my head so I just couldn't bear not to give her a passing grade.

Anyway, the doctor made me sing Sinatra with him for five minutes, frowned, shot some foul-tasting anesthesia down my nose and throat, and then stuck a long rubber tube down the same path before the Lidocaine actually kicked in. The pain was TOTALLY AWESOME, especially when he had to jab to turn corners through my "extremely crowded craniofacial anatomy", and especially awesome when the Lidocaine did finally kick in right in the middle of my Crunchwrap Supreme on the drive home and I nearly died right there on I-435, choking on a piece of tortilla my benumbed throat refused to swallow.

He's determined that my vocal cords have blisters on them, and that I'm prone to getting them, and if I don't do something soon I'll develop either inoperable callouses or cancerous growths or both (exciting!) so I've been put on a 7-10 day vocal rest and subsequent vocal therapy after that which my insurance may or may not decline. I do so love spinning the Roulette wheel of health care to determine whether I'll have to choose to pay my doctor bills or eat food with nutrients in them instead. I had to call the principal of my school and explain everything, and so now I'm either going to be given the week off with short-term disability, or I'll run through my sick days, or Human Resources is going to make me a custodian's aide at another school so they can pay me for my time.

So anyway, weekend plans having been canceled because I'm not allowed to utter polite social phrases anymore, I am here. Alone with cats and expanded basic cable and two-thirds of a jug of orange juice. Message me if you want to watch a movie or play charades, yo.

Zweie Ausgaben

1) Today I completed the first leg of the 2-Day Awkward Fest that is parent-teacher conferences. Our administration decided to schedule two 12-hour work days for us this week and gave us Friday off as compensation. I have very little to say about this other than it sucks to have to remember to sit like a lady in a skirt from 7:30 in the morning to 8:00 in the evening, especially when you accidentally tuck the back of the skirt into your tights after coming out of the bathroom and you stroll down the hall unaware of your right ass cheek's semi-exposure to the entire fourth grade wing until your students come in and the one girl who's more mature than all the others because she babysits and got her period early pulls you into a corner and shields you while you pluck the offending garment from your underpinnings and pray that the superintendent who gave you a thumbs-up in the hallway five minutes ago had sustained some sort of damage to his peripheral vision from a football injury or in a foreign war that prevented him from viewing your gluteus in all its half-shrouded glory. Also, one of the parents farted while I was talking about how her son had a lot of potential and I started stuttering because I was trying not to acknowledge that she had farted even though it was sort of a melodic fart because she shifted in her chair to hide it which made it sound exactly like the first two notes of "Here Comes the Bride" and the fact that she had farted a perfect Perfect 4th and I couldn't say anything about it made me die a little inside and I realized right there in that room that I will never, ever be mature enough to raise children. I should probably just be sterilized for the sake of humanity.

2) I have to go see an otorhinolarynologist on Friday morning. I like to write otorhinolarynologist instead of ENT because I like think it makes you respect me, or at least the possible disease I have. My medical issues are GRANDER than yours because my doctor has twenty letters in his title. That's some impressive shit, brah.

Basically, our instructional coach at my school is very worried that I might be developing callouses on my vocal cords because of all the muscle tension I have from sixteen years of horn playing and three years of kid wrangling and two years of living with the man who would eventually cause me to completely lose my shit. And I' m pretty scared myself, because if my voice doesn't heal I will permanently sound like a castmember of Laguna Beach and I'll also never be able to do my job successfully again.

I'd really like to get my voice back, because while sounding like Kirstie Alley all day long totally heightens my sex appeal with the Cheers demographic, I can only imagine how much more unattractive it makes me to my own peer group. At least next Halloween I'll be able to really make my students cry when I tell them bloody finger ghost stories.

Ch-ch-changes...

I apologize for the lapse in posts this week. A few of you left threatening emails that both flattered me for your interest in reading my drivel and also sort of disturbed me that you'd resort to violence to be able to read more. I guess if I ever need "a guy to do a thing" for me, I'll know who to call.

I've been sort of distracted this week by my new piece of technology, the LG C2000 camera phone. I like to make my brother refer to it as such because otherwise it's a pretty unremarkable phone, but calling it the LG C2000 makes it sound like I could cure cancer with it, or at least something like psoriasis. Cingular and I were in a fight for most of the summer but this month I passed them a note and a couple hundred dollars during social studies and now we're BFFs again and so they allowed me a new cell phone upgrade. I picked the free one, and I'm pretty pleased with what I got. It has speakerphone, which excites me immensely, and it also takes decent pictures like the one below. I felt very Thomas Hart Benton-esque, capturing the grimness of the rural heartland while pulling into the Casey's on the way home from work.



Anyway, my other source of distraction has been a kind of inventory of my life, professionally and personally and otherwise, and where I'd like to proceed from here. I think I gave an erroneous impression with my last post about depression, and so now I'm sort of cringing thinking about the people who are unnecessarily worried about me. I'm really not on the verge of offing myself, I swear. The post on depression was a reflective one and it's something I can write about only because I've pretty much made my peace with it and moved on. No need to hide the razor blades and the complimentary snack bowls of uppers while I'm at your house; I'm just fine. Also, I'm really not that lame of a pumpkin carver...I was just in a hurry.

The life inventory mostly has to do with where I'd like to be this time next year, and the dawning realization is that I'd really like to be back in school. I feel horribly guilty about this because I have a great job. The people I work with are wonderful, they pretty much let me do whatever, and so far nothing I've done is wrong. I'm in an incredible situation, and so the fact that the only way I could describe teaching when a friend asked me about it was "It's...easy" disheartened me immensely. Because that's pretty much what I think about my job; it's really really easy and also I get to wear jeans on Friday. I have extremely strong opinions on the education crisis in America (if there really is one), but I don't think that teaching 7 year olds how to sing "Shoo Fly" is really doing much to fix it. And truthfully, I feel really irresponsible in any job where I'm not completely head over heels in love with what I'm doing, or at least handsomely compensated and rewarded each December with junkets to Barbados.

So basically, I would really like to be back in school. I miss being a scholar, and researching and doing ridiculous statistics that I never quite understand no matter how many times I plug in the numbers. I miss the intensity of academia, because even in the Chucky Cheese gameroom that is the field of education, the people there are scientists. They may study jam-faced little nippers and whether blue or red crayons make them learn better, but in the field of post-secondary education research, that's SERIOUS BUSINESS and they attack those subjects with the zeal of a surgeon performing brain surgery. Also, (and this is horribly embarrassing to admit), I really can't handle waking up at 6:00 anymore and walking into a bright building with perky women wearing Charlie Brown shirts who say "Good morning!" like there is even a remote possibility that it actually COULD be a good morning before my first round of Folgers has adequately stimulated my nervous system. No one at college would dare wear Charlie Brown shirts, and for that I would be immensely grateful.

I need a challenge. I need to pull an all-nighter trying to finish a term paper. I need to sit for hours and hours in graduate seminars doodling on my dayplanner and wondering what the professor's talking about. I need to have conversations with people my own age who aren't "passionate about kindergarten" and married with twin girls named Peyton and Bailey and who have opinions on Very Important Things and maybe also not so important things that would still not involve who's bringing which enchilada casserole to the birthday luncheon and how much we should spend on our Secret Santa presents this year and if I have to attend one more meeting where I talk about my feelings or pass around a compliment jar or laugh knowingly about menopause or chocolate or anything at all that is representative of the female gender I will GO MOTHER EFFING INSANE.

Ahem.

So, I need a change. And suggestions. Preferably in career for next year, but if you happen to know of a killer yoga studio with competitive rates I'd totally be into that too.

Not very creative with the pumpkin carving this year

Where it hurts

Dooce wrote a post a few days ago about depression and what it feels like. It's strange to pass on second and third hand information through a peculiar ring of strangers connected only by the fact that they like to talk about themselves online, but the article she referenced and the psychologist the author of the article referenced too were both some of the most painfully eloquent accounts of what a life with depression looks like, feels like, sounds like. It's necessary reading for anyone who's ever suffered from depression or has someone in their life they're trying to help. At the very least it sheds light on a disease that seems so common, so easily curable but also so easily sucks out life and leaves a path of devastation in its wake.

I don't have a great deal to add to what's already been written; their words have far more clarity than mine and I believe the world only requires so many mental illness-aware bloggers in it. But there are a few things that, for me personally, make depression far more insidious than its name represents:

The first thing I can only describe as an inability and a disinterest in dealing. I use that phrase a lot because a large source of my personal humor comes from mocking shallowness and vanity and the characteristics of such afflictions. Several months ago at a restaurant with my brother and my friend I picked at a salad and made the comment, "I cannot even deal with how healthy I've been today." We all laughed because we each knew people who would've said that in seriousness. It's become a favorite in my lexicon of stupid things to say..."I could not deal with Grey's Anatomy tonight." "I cannot even deal with how much laundry I have to do this weekend." It's just something to say to make the mundane ridiculous, and so therefore enjoyable.

But when depression hits you, you actually stop being able to deal, especially if it's the symptom of something major and traumatic. Human beings are designed to let emotions pass through them, to experience grief and sadness and anger and then to let it process out of their hearts and minds and into some other part of the world so they can go on being normal again. For someone with depression, those emotions settle in a pool around their feet and while it doesn't necessarily devastate them immediately, it drags them down. Depression means feeling absolutely nothing at all while your brain is silently screaming in white hot rage. A friend of mine describes it as the ultimate torpor, and he's completely right. You just can't move.

And so because you cannot deal with what you're feeling, you begin not to be able to deal with the things that happen around you. Once, a napkin fell off my lap during dinner and floated to my kitchen floor. I stared at the napkin, fork in my hand and mouth half open ready to eat and suddenly the effort of bending over to pick the paper off the ground felt so monumental I just couldn't fathom the idea of actually doing it. The napkin stayed there one day, then two, then a week and soon the fact that I couldn't handle picking up the napkin made me so angry that I started not being able to handle anything else. Unloading the dishes from the dishwasher made absolutely no sense because there was a napkin dirtying my floor. The idea of taking a shower was preposterous when my kitchen was ruined by all the piled-up dishes. I didn't want to go to work early anymore because the likelihood that the normal adults would see my pale face and unwashed hair was completely unbearable. The author in Dooce's link described an afternoon where he waited at a gas station for all the other cars to leave so he could pump gas, but when he realized there was never going to be a break in the traffic he left with an empty tank because he just couldn't deal with seeing people. In both cases, there were major, huge, life-altering circumstances that we should've recognized as the real problem, but they were overshadowed by the hundreds of things in our lives that we just couldn't do anymore. Depression is a silent, vicious, underhanded disease that picks away at your ability to keep your head above water until there's absolutely nothing left worth convincing you to stay afloat and you are no longer a spouse or a friend or a coworker or a person at all. You're just a shell, unable and unwilling to fight the inertia of a slow death by lack of serotonin.

The other thing that I'm always surprised that depression writers don't mention is how desperate we become for a connection. When you expend most of your energy trying very hard not to betray that fact that you are slowly but surely losing your shit, it's difficult to work up the desire to talk to a loved one about it, and it's even harder for them to hear. So you spend afternoons at the hardware store or the post office wondering if maybe you could make eye contact with one person there, they might see how lost you are and would be willing to help. I am sometimes absolutely terrified that someone I know will ask me how I'm doing, or that they'll see the despair in my eyes and ask what's wrong because on the wrong day or at the wrong time, I might just actually tell them the whole truth. I'm scared to death someone will think I need a hug and they'll embrace me and then I'll never be able to let go of them. I have no desire to transfer the guilt and the rage and the fear that goes through my mind on a daily basis to another living person. No one who's depressed does. So we smile and say "Fine" when nothing at all is fine, and our eyes move past that friend, searching for the stranger who will ask the magic questions. The one who'll be strong enough to offer salvation. The one who won't hate us when we suck them dry.

The last thing, the biggest thing maybe for a lot of depression sufferers, is the guilt. If 20% of Americans are depressed, how bad could it really be? That's a disease statistic better relegated to something like toenail fungus or acid reflux, not mental illness. How in the world can 1 in 5 people feel the way I did...I do...and the world still keeps spinning? How can I possibly indulge in such enormous self-pity when nothing really truly bad has happened to me? At the school where I work there's the ubiquitous handful of kids who get carted off to our "padded room" at least once every day. They're the ones who go insane when they've been slighted in some way, the ones whose anger makes them shut down so completely they have to be carried out of the classrooms, and the ones who sob like infants and cling to your neck when you hug them and tell them they're going to be okay. These kids have been abused in horrific ways and they're the children of drug users and drunks and they have every right in the world not to be able to deal. How come I see so much of myself in their behavior? What right do I have to mistrust and hate and fear so much of the world when the world hasn't done me all that wrong? The wretched, overwhelming guilt I feel for not being a successful, happy person like every other individual around me appears to be is the most horrible part of my depression, and maybe it's ultimately the one that keeps me down, afraid to ask for help from the people who really want to give it. Because admitting there's a really huge problem in an otherwise great life isn't just whining, it almost seems sinful.

There is, of course, always a way out for anyone with depression, whether your path leads you to therapy and medication, or whether you simply choose not to deal with any of it anymore and you check out of life for good. I spent a little bit of this afternoon with my grandmother who is dying of lung cancer. She spent 17 years in a cloud of anger and depression after her husband died and the inertia that now challenges me bore down on her too. Strangely though, now that I've seen her in her bed, ravaged by a different disease that seems to be beating the shit out of her a little more each day, I can see that my grandma is trying to deal. They're giving her too many drugs and she's ill all the time and the chemo and the radiation is absolutely ruining her body, but we waited around long enough for her to be lucid again and when I looked down into her eyes I could see that the cloud that had been there for so many years had lifted. She was fighting to be able to eat, to talk, to stay conscious long enough to see her family. In the face of her own death she's chosen life, even if that life is measured only in months or weeks or days. I always assumed that when my grandma ever became seriously ill, she'd just let herself go. She's always said she was ready to die whenever God wanted to take her, but I think this final stubborness on her part isn't out of fear of death or spite or will, but because she actually wants to live out every precious second of the life available to her.

I didn't sit down with plans to write this entry. It's not something I've ever wanted to actually disclose about myself in detail, but after visiting my grandma I received two emails this evening. One was from a former colleague reporting the death of my teaching mentor who was also diagnosed with lung cancer, and another one was from a former student who had been rescued in the middle of a suicide attempt and wanted to let me know she was alive and getting help. One death and one near death, and while both were deplorable situations, I am furious that the latter could've been prevented by my friend or someone close to her. Depression is basically just another slow death until you discover the tools to help you deal, or you hasten your own journey to the end. So please, if you are depressed, know that there's a way out. If you love someone who's depressed, find out everything you can about the illness and remember that they don't always have to be this way.

Above all, no matter what your situation, choose to deal with it.

That's a Winner

One of the really good things my husband gave me while we were together was a rekindled love of baseball in general and a fervent adoration of the Cardinals in particular. I've long been one of those people who actually do believe in the church of baseball as was he, and as corny as it sounds, baseball was one of the few things that brought us close together during many terrible days in which we lived like strangers in one house.

J, I'm happy for you tonight. I hope you got to watch it with BaPa Harold.

Cold War

I'm in the middle of writing a rather arduous post about "What I Want to Be When I Grow Up". I had to decide between that topic and the equally compelling "What I Did Over my Summer Vacation" and since my summer mainly consisted of refolding towels with embroidered elk on them and drinking many, many bottles of six dollar wine, I decided the former would be a bit more appropriate in terms of me having something to say. Plus, you know, it's just better for the children.

But today the Productive Blogger part of my brain has been kind of roadblocked by a discussion I had with a friend today. Not a discussion so much as an argument actually, and made worse by the fact that I hardly ever fight with this friend. We usually have the kind of effortless friendship where you feel so good after spending time with that person, it effects your entire day in really fantastic way. In the few instances in which we did have conflict, it was resolved so quickly and with such good humor between us we both commented that our ability to get along should qualify us to write a New York Times Bestseller on relationship advice. We defended our respective genders to one another, we delved into music and politics and dating and marriage and why I shouldn't be driving a car with such a big engine, and we basically just had a superb time getting to know one another over the course of a year or so. He is one of those people in my life I count as truly valuable to me, and I feel extremely lucky for knowing him.

But, the fight: The particulars aren't important of who said what and how and with what motivation, but the bottom line was my feelings were hurt and he didn't understand why and didn't see the need for apologizing for something that was the truth to him, and so our friendship became strained which bothered me and the fact that it bothered me bothered him and it just got worse from there [horrific run-on sentence ends here]. So, clearly we're not quite ready to save the world, but at least the fact that it irritates me so much that this is even happening lets me know how much I value my friendship with him. At least there's that.

So my question is, how do you get past a mess like this and de-awkwardize the situation? I'm inclined at this point to just divorce myself of the relationship, not to teach him a lesson or to be spiteful or anything like that, but to get away from the anger. The fact that I can't get him to understand why I was hurt and how it still eats away at me, and the frustration of waiting for him to just say "I'm sorry"--even if he doesn't really mean it--it all just festers and grows and makes everything awful. I know we're both such stubborn idiots that if I declared a moratorium he would too and then the wall would just go higher and higher with each passing day.

Is it possible to effect a cooling down period for a month, three months, a year, and then just pop back into each other's life with a "Hey, friend" and a smile? Can one's pride ever be that pliant? I honestly don't know. Maybe this is an indicator of how strong or weak our frienship really is. Maybe we'll both figure something out about ourselves and how we interact with the people in our lives. Maybe he hasn't given it a second thought because it's really just NOT important to him, and so I'm worrying about something that isn't worth repairing anyway. Maybe it'll take an entire year for one of us to just sigh and break down and say "hey" and then we'll be off and running again and talking about music and who we're dating and who we're breaking up with and everything will be just fine.

And if we don't, I think I'll really miss it.

Verbal Diarrhea

I had a moment of cognitive dissonance today while in the bathroom of the Summit Woods Super Target. Since it was early on a Sunday morning, there weren't many people there and when I went into the restroom there was only one other person in a stall besides me. I went into my own stall, and I froze when I heard her voice talking loudly in the bathroom.

"Heeeyyyy....How are you?"

There's a lot of attention paid to the way guys panic and can't perform in restrooms when they're accosted by some gregarious individual at a urinal, but I think too little credence is given to the amount of effort a woman will put into muffling her own pee sounds, especially when she is trapped by a Bathroom Converser in the stall next to her. I'm pretty squeamish about bodily functions, so most of my life has been lived in a state of denial about possessing any sort of digestive system that actually results in waste being expelled in public areas. I have to achieve a Zen-like state of focus and concentration and acceptance of the fact that eventually I WILL have to pee in a Target in front of other women.

But when other women who happen to be complete strangers also sitting with their pants around their ankles and their hands folded in their laps and a prayer to God in their hearts asking please...please don't let anyone hear me pee...when those ladies decide they want to talk to ME? Well, that business just utterly freaks me the hell out. I mean, I kind of get it. Maybe if we all engage in nervous, loud conversation we can work together to achieve sort of a group-abnegation of our collective digestive systems. It's an admirable idea in theory, but it never, ever works that way.

So when this lady started talking to me, my bladder gave up any notion of ever being relieved, and mind went out of my happy place and into the dark barren land of WTF AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? A strangled sound akin to the sound a fox must make when it realizes its leg is caught in a trap and a man with a gun is smiling benevolently down at him escaped from my throat, and I managed to half-whisper, half-croak the words, "Are you saying hi to me?"

And for a brief second I was blissfully, radiantly happy when she didn't answer back. Strangely, though, she just kept talking so I peeked under the row of stalls to look for a third set of feet. Nothing. Just her scuffed blue Sketchers in the unit next to mine and no one else. And then, burgeoning in me was a slow, indelible sense of horror and outrage as I realized two very important facts about our situation:

1)The woman in the stall next to me in the public restroom of a retail store was on her cellphone

2)There was clear audible evidence that the woman WAS NOT IN THE RESTROOM JUST TO PEE

People, I am completely permissive of all sorts suspect behavior. Feel free to wear rubber clogs in the winter with wool socks. I will not judge. Put 1,200 dollar spinners on your 7,000 dollar car and Turtle Wax its exterior every Wednesday afternoon while you smoke Swischer Sweets and check out the 12 year old girls sitting on the curb because you don't have a job. You're skeevy, but still above my censure.

But there are just some things I will not stand for in this society. You should never beat your children in the petfood aisle of a Wal-Mart. You should never be rude to waiters and waitresses. If you are a man, you should never cross your knees and then loop your foot around your stationary leg. And you should never, ever, ever in any circumstances HOLD A CELL PHONE CONVERSATION WHILE YOU ARE TAKING A CRAP IN PUBLIC.

So as I was leaving the restroom, I decided to exact some sort of passive-aggressive revenge and went back to my stall and flushed the toilet three very loud, lengthy times, so at least the person on the other end of the phone could figure out what was going on and would be as disgusted and outraged as I was. As I was washing my hands and pushing open the door I heard the woman titter and say "Sounds like the girl next must have had some tummy troubles today."

Urgh.

Abundant Sunshine

I was reading the forecast on the Weather Channel page and they called for "abundant sunshine" on Sunday. I like that. Someone there must have a touch of a poet's soul.

Last night I attended to an orchestra concert, mainly for two reasons: I wanted to see a friend who performed with the ensemble, and also because I was in desperate need of hearing music that didn't involve farmers and dells or old brass wagons or scary ghosts and jolly pumpkins or any possible affiliation with Disney's High School Musical (Zac Efron's apparently a tween McDreamy).

I stayed late at school and worked that day and drove straight up, so I didn't have a great deal of time to think about the evening before I actually got there, but while I was driving I started considering whether or not actually going to this concert was a very good idea...whether I should just turn around and go home and claim car trouble or lingering illness and just watch Grey's Anatomy in my sweatpants instead.

It's a deplorable reality, but for people who've gone through some sort of major depression, everything has to be approached in terms of "Will this be a good or bad thing for me?" It's a bit mindblowing to find out how incredibly fragile one can become after a bunch of really bad things get to them. Two descriptions of me over the course of the separation and its aftermath really bothered me: when a therapist at the time said I had symptoms of suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from a combination of everything being so bad for so long, and then having the really, really bad things hit hard and fast during the course of the summer; and when a close friend described me in an email as having a "haunted, sad look when she thought no one was watching." Neither of them seemed accurate, because in my own mind I'm usually fairly cheerful, except when I'm not. If I'm quiet, it's because I'm thinking about whether I need to buy cat food or where the last place I saw my cell phone was, or whether I should tape The Office on Thursday. I didn't realize I was still damaged.

But I guess part of being that damaged is that you don't really get to know your own mind; you have to have someone else diagnose it for you, at least at first. I don't think it should be any surprise that I emerged on the other side of this marriage a changed person, but at the same time I had no idea how translucently fragile I came across to everyone else. It's a pathetic reality, being hyper-conscious of your own emotional shortcomings, but it's also kind of essential.

My shrink stressed at every session that before I do anything...however trivial, I need to assess whether it's going to be good for me, or whether it'll plunge me back down into some sort of spiral. So something as simple as a Hot Pocket for lunch can become an ordeal, and I have to stop and ask the same ridiculous questions: Are there any particularly happy moments attached to the preparing and eating of a Hot Pocket that will make you feel lonely and empty right now? Did a Hot Pocket ever get thrown at your head during an argument? (one of the reasons I avoid cranberry juice now) It's incredibly tedious to have to do this--to walk on eggshells around your own self--but I've been to Crazyville, and I'll do just about whatever it takes not to go back.

Since, I left straight for last night's orchestra concert from work, I really didn't think through the "Will it be good for me?" questions until I was on my way up there. Immediately I started getting nervous, because the last live concert I attended was the very last one I ever played. It was Bruckner in the second half...it went well and I got pats on the back for my solo playing. When I went home, there was a fight waiting for me. It was arrogant, and maybe even sinful to pursue a career in performance, he said. I'd never be able to support us on a freelance salary, and I wasn't all that talented anyway. And since I had absolutely no idea who I was at that point, I gave in to make the arguing stop. I just nodded...yes, yes, yes...I'll be done with it. I dropped out of ensembles and focused entirely on getting a teaching job with a decent salary. We never spoke of it again, but the quiet screaming in my head whenever I thought about it was evidence that I had cut something incredibly vital out of my life.

So coming to this concert, I wasn't really sure what to expect of myself. Bitterness? Tears? More inconsolable rage that could only be mitigated with a bottle of tequila? I sat nervously in my seat and folded my program into a bastardized origami swan over and over, waiting for some sort of insanity to start creeping into my brain.

Strangely, nothing happened. I don't know if it was because my friend was generous enough to hang with me after the concert and we both sank into a very comfortable, sugar-high fueled conversation and I got to laugh more than I had in months, or if maybe somehow I've become a whole person again. I really don't know. I just know that I was okay when I didn't think I would be and knowing that is a really, really good feeling.

Abundant sunshine. I really like that.

That's just super.

I think it is a safe and accurate assertion when I write that no one in my family is a cosmopolitan individual. Minx, judge not...and I know, but I also make such claims while sitting in my quadplex in the absolutely armpit of the Midwest between my neighbor the juvenile justice officer who seems to collect delinquents and apparently recently met her 20 year-old rapper boyfriend (his Dodge Neon has spinners!) through her fostered teenage boys and the ladies who evicted the assisted living residents on the other side of me and are now living in their apartment for the same subsidized rent their clients were paying. Way to put your GEDs to good use, gals.

So basically, we done up and caught the redneck, ya'll.

I didn't get to accompany my brother and the parents to Connecticut to drop him off for his freshman year of Yale, but thanks to my generous text messaging and daytime minute plan I got a play-by-play of every single minute. I was in teacher meetings at the time, and I could hear my phone buzzing like a Mexican jumping bean in my purse, so I snuck it out and checked my messages during a particulary scintillating lecture on prose/poetry workshops in the high school classroom (made EVEN BETTER by the fact that most of us were elementary teachers). My family was at a meet and greet for my brother's dorm and they had stood in line for the cocktails next to the Denzel Washingtons, my brother had best befriended the son of the man who wrote "Man of La Mancha" and who subsequently retired in his 5th Avenue apartment to count his millions, and the next day at freshman convocation my mother saw Steven Spielberg take a picture with his son on the quad and washed her hands in the restroom next to Kate Capshaw.

Thrilling events, indeed, and they certainly replaced me and my 1995 backstage encounter with three members of the Monkees (I handed Peter Tork a water bottle...swoon!) in the H. Family Hall of Fame for "Best Celebrity Sighting". Denzel was declared to be even more handsome in person, and Mr. Spielberg had "a great deal of hair." I saved those text messages in my phone, if only to hold on to the feeling of crushing, unadulterated bitterness I felt for my family as I sat with my colleagues and our two inch thick pile of medical forms during our "MetLife and Philly Cheese Steak Luncheon".

Since September, my brother has become fairly blase about celebrity sightings, because apparently Yale just gets 'em by the dozen each week. So this evening, when he spent three hours watching the Cards beat the Mets in NLCS game 7 with his suitemate Tsega and their freshman mentor and his girlfriend Sarah...when my brother told Sarah that there had been a package for Sarah Pettigrew in the mailroom for three weeks and she needed to pick it up...when Sarah told him her name wasn't Sarah Pettigrew, but Sarah Hughes...

...when my brother's brain worked like this over the course of fifteen minutes:

Sarah Hughes.

Sarah Hughes.

Sarah Hughes?

Sarah Hughes.

SARAH HUGHES!

He was just the tiniest bit embarrassed. She was really gracious about it and said that most people were weird to her because of her Olympic fame and he apologized for being awkward in a completely opposite way. Then he called me and I Wikipedia'd her and found out she was a Mets fan, so that was too bad for her and then we cackled a bit about how he had laid on a bed watching TV with an Olympic gold medalist for three hours and didn't know. And then we realized we were both kind of ridiculous.

I'm still proud of touching Peter Tork's water bottle, though.

And that's the way it is.

I just spent the last hour looking at burlesque dancers and fetish models.

I have this friend who, when he asks me what I'm doing, invariably gets answers like "I'm reading about polyamory" or "I'm searching the Kinsey Reports for the words 'rubber chicken.'" It's not that I'm an excessively prurient individual; I think he just has uncannily weird timing when he clicks my IM avatar to see what's up.

Today was no exception, and when he asked I fessed up and told him what I was doing. Fortunately, he's used to this by now and even suggested a few corset models for me to check out. I was pleased he and I had reached a point in our relationship where we could both look at semi-pornographic photos together in reasonable comfort. I really think that's what we should all be striving for, yes?

The reason I had these burlesque chicks on the brain started with Carmen Electra at lunch today. I eat with a group of teachers I secretly call the Wisteria Lane set, because they don't seem to like people who don't own that one Tiffany bracelet and they definitely don't like that I dare to eat an entire veggie wrap AND edamame while they pick at their Yoplait cups and talk over their stomachs growling. The ringleader of the Wisteria Lane set, a 30 year old mother and wife and and part-time aerobics instructor and first grade teacher (her four most important priorities in order, she says) has admitted she has five pounds to lose before her husband says she's the right size again. Apparently, in the course of the lardbusting initiative in their household, he's purchased a treadmill, a Gazelle, and a Bowflex for her to use IN FRONT OF HIM WHILE HE WATCHES. It's usually at this point I spit my Propel water onto my shirt and one of the Wisterias hands me a napkin with a slender, perfectly French manicured hand.

This afternoon the ringleader told me her husband had surprised her with the Carmen Electra Aerobic Striptease video so she could "shape up her paunch while he enjoyed". How sweet...he seems like the kind of guy who'd get her liposuction for their 10th anniversary as a present to both of them. Anyway, the discussion meandered around all things Carmen Electra and stripping until one of the two male members of our faculty walked in and we quickly started talking about school picture day on Friday.

When I got home from work, my curiousity about exactly how my colleague would be gyrating her paunch away was raised enough that I googled Carmen Electra and her eponymous video. From there, I discovered a bunch of links for the Pussycat Dolls, then for burlesque performers like Dita von Teese and Catherine D'lish, and then finally the grand dame of the burlesque world, Bettie Page. Someone told me the other day my new haircut made me look like Bettie Page, so I was thrilled to see that her hair was not overwhelmingly Prince Valiant-esque, as I feared mine was.

What I noticed, while looking at all these people, is how very much more appealing they were to my eyes than the porn starlets who were featured in the little ad columns on either side of their websites. There was something completely charming about the retro corsets, the great big cheerful smiles even while they vamped nearly naked for the camera, and they way everything about them seemed so clean cut and healthy and innocent despite the fact they were clearly sex models. When my eyes glanced over to the "traditional" porn models, I saw pouts and grimaces and dirty blonde hair and bodies shaped like those long flat pencil erasers we had in fourth grade topped by two big huge (sometimes off-kilter) Milk Duds in the front.

This entry is not going to be one of those "Why can't men just accept real women?" screeds. I think the world's every bit as tired of that argument as they are of capri pants and Paris Hilton. Biology is why men prefer hot women to average or unattractive ones, and that's never going to change. If scientists can travel to the deepest, darkest depths of the rainforest and get tribal elders to point to the silhouette of the 50's era Playboy bunny as their ideal body type, then there's clearly something bigger than advertising or MTV at work here. I'm all for the "Love the Skin You're In" message and I admire the hell out of Dove for their initiative to rectify body image issues in young girls, but at the same time, the 49% of the population who has "things and you knows" instead of "hoohahs" (I learned those terms during 4th grade bathroom break last week) is going to want to put their thing in the hoohah of a woman who looks like they're biologically fit for raising incredibly healthy children, and the hotties win in that regard.

So the idea that we've evolved to the hourglass figure as our ideal body shape makes sense. I think the world tends to strive for symmetry in pretty much everything unless you're my mother who recently declared decorating symmetry passe but spelled it "passay" in her email, so it's natural that men would want a body that flares out at the hips and cuts in at the waist to flare out again at the chest. That totally makes sense. What doesn't quite jibe with me is how we've managed to move beyond the hourglass body and now we've made a 40 billion dollar industry out of watching stick insects with boyish hips, no waists, and ginormous breasts grimace and pant for a grainy videocamera. It's all just so unbalanced and grotesque and not at all a natural boday shape. How did we lose the beauty in porn? Where did it go? Why I am lamenting the lack of aestheticism in the adult entertainment industry? What should I have for dinner? I'm just so troubled right now.

Being the intrepid wannabe Carrie Bradshaw that I am, I inquired with a couple male friends about their thoughts on porn today and why they'd much rather see a Jenna Jameson than a Dita von Teese on their computer. What it basically boiled down to is nudity. Men just aren't turned on by a hint of sex. They don't want women to imply they have breasts, they want them to prove they have them, preferably amidst scenery found in beaches or barns or jungles, because that's where women are most often struck with the urge to take off their shirts. Likewise, if a woman is going to pose with the whips and the chains and the chickens (holla back, Professor Badger!) my male friends reported they wanted to see interesting and shocking things done with, or to, those particular instruments of hedonism. They both enthusiastically agreed that they'd rather see the slightly more ample burlesque girls any time they were given a choice, but only if those girls stopped posing and decided to do real porn.

So I guess I'm somewhat relieved that all is still in order between the sexes. Women still eat yogurt cups and watch Dirty Dancing because it hints at sex without showing it, and billions and billions of men around the world will sit in the eerie blue glow of their computer and watch women who are 12-year old boys from the waist down and Coast Guard-approved flotation devices from the waist up contort their completely naked bodies in a variety of interesting and enlightening positions because that's just they way we like it.

It's kind of comforting and old-fashioned in a way. Like something out of Lake Wobegone, except with a lot more silicone.