Seriously, they aren't.
I realize that's counter to both culture and my actual life, which includes dogs. Dogs who, without fail, are cute. I have a Boston Terrier who is named after a character in a Shakespearean tragedy, and I have a larger dog who is a festive mix of collie, greyhound, and lurcher. They are cute both together and individually which you would think might make them ideal scenery, draped around the furniture and across the floor with perhaps some brightly-colored toy from Ikea meant for a toddler. Yes, my dogs are the dogs of fashion and wouldn't bat an eyelash at having to go without their underthings in a Jordache magazine ad- but my god, sometimes I can't stand them.
I spend far too much time with them, is my guess. I'm home most of the day and that requires a certain amount of attention to dogs- all dogs would be perfectly content to sleep on someone's favorite something (doesn't matter what it is, as long as it will retain Dog Smell after they've woken up and moved on) but if you're in the house all that is right out. Now it's suddenly, and extensively, Dog Time. To wit:
Big Dog: Love you. I love you so much. Please give me your face.
Me: Oh, look how sweet you are. Oh, you want to give me a kiss? (Begins to bend down)
Big Dog: Love! (Puts entire mouth around my face. I don't move, because of teeth.) Love! (sticks tongue up my nose with vigor.)
Little Dog: Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Heyheyheyheyheyhey! (Pause.) SERIOUSLY, HEY! HEY! HEY!
Me: Little Dog, shut the hell up.
Little Dog: What? Were you talking to me? I have to protect the- (suddenly looks out window, one ear cocked upward.) HEY MOTHERFUCKER! YEAH, I SEE YOU OVER THERE! OR AT LEAST HEAR YOU! I WILL SO KILL YOU AND THEN MY BIG FRIEND HERE WILL LICK THE INSIDE OF YOUR NOSE FOR YOU! MAYBE I'LL LET HIM DO THAT FIRST! HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY!!
Me: THERE'S NO ONE OUT THERE. There's no one, Little Dog. I repeat: shut the hell up. Damn.
Big Dog: He can't shut up because we're barking now! WOOOO! I love barking time! It goes great with chasing time! (chases Little Dog.)
Little Dog: Get off me you gigantic freak creature! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod get off me giant dog! I refuse to worship you! You are a barking, eating three-seater sofa! GET OFF ME OR I WILL RIP YOUR EYEBALLS OUT OF YOUR HUMONGOUS REPTILE HEAD! HEYHEYHEY THAT'S MY NECK- YOU WILL PAY FOR THIS-
At that point I decide to risk the damage to my kneecaps and wade in to separate them. It's not peaceful, and I wonder how anyone who has dogs gets anything done; I certainly can't. My most tranquil activity for the day is Salad Time. I make salad and my dogs sit patiently at my feet, almost a hundred percent barkless, waiting for me to throw them little pieces of raw vegetables. When I first began doing this, the dogs were confused, especially the Little One.
Me: Here, Little Dog! (throws piece of carrot to him, he snatches it by chomping it out of midair as if it were an attack canary.)
Little Dog: Yeah! (chews carrot, becomes concerned.) Hey! This is something that's not meat- there's no meat on this anywhere- What the hell, woman?! (spits carrot molecules all over kitchen floor section.)
Big Dog: Me me me me mememe I waaaaantt it can I haaaaave it? Can I have it can I have it can I have it- (I slip him a piece of carrot, he chews; after watching Little Dog's behavior he decides it's best if he spits molecules of carrot around his section.) Look, I made them too. I made them! I made them! I'd like to sing about the bits I made- RweeeeeOOOOOOOOOOOrrrrrrrrrrrrraoowwwrrr!
Little Dog: (looks at Big Dog with contempt.)
But little by little, the dogs have learned that it's OK to swallow the things I flick at them from the cutting board. I had no intention of training them to like salad but they have decided to like cucumber and carrot and snap pea pieces, mostly because that means I keep throwing things at them. It's a kind of attention, which everyone knows is better than no attention; and so I keep doing it, which makes me abusive. I'm an abusive dog owner, forcing my dogs to pluck (or in Big Dog's case, lick) vegetable chunks from the air for my enjoyment. Perhaps I'm not being fair to myself: they sit there, looking at me with their cute eyes and their accidentally matching pelts, and I start throwing salad at them instead of cookbooks or Dutch ovens. We've met each other halfway.
In the meantime, there's always old age to look forward to. There will be far too much napping and pudding-slurping to worry about noises from outside the building or just the living room, for that matter. To be frank, I don't really care which one of us gets there first, the dogs or me: I just plan to enjoy it.
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Thursday, July 16, 2015
The Consequence of Being Good
|Norma had spent her entire life being good, or trying to be good. She was a volunteer at a basket-full of charities, some more seriously than others. She tended to be more attracted to charities that didn't mean much to people, like helping to clean coastal rock formations of the collected bird poo and beer cans that built during the year; no one really warmed to that when she mentioned it. Another one was scanning pictures of unidentified seeds for a local county college. The seed pictures would go into an archive of seed pictures, never to be seen again but for the teacher who had received the grant that paid for the time spent scanning the seeds. He would smile at her in a more real way, but it was a distracted smile and he was the only one doing it.
Her reason for volunteering so much was unclear. She had money so she didn't need to work. She'd inherited her parents sizable retirement funds when they both died in a car crash the same year she graduated from college. Just when she was to be shooed out into the world, expensive piece of paper in hand and higher-than-was-realistic expectations in her head, she was given all the time in the world to grieve. She was told to take all the time in the world, in fact, by just about everyone she met, even those she had barely any knowledge of, like the recycling guy who came every two weeks to pick up her empty wine bottles and stacked newspapers.
"You're so young, it's a pity. It's always a pity when it happens, it always is. Just take as long as you need, sweetheart." He was standing there in her driveway, holding her emptied bin in his gloved hand, looking at her face with a generic tenderness. After a time she thanked him.
A year later she hadn't looked for work but had instead found a boyfriend, who became a husband. He was nice. He died after their two year anniversary from a brain aneurism, a small explosion in his head that was about as big a shock as Norma could imagine. He had taken out a life insurance policy for no reason other than it was very cheap, given his age and health. And because he was nice. So, again, Norma was told to grieve, was given permission to take all the time she could possibly want and then some (the woman who ran the support group for young widows and widowers told her that: "You should take all the time you want, then take more time. Take as much time as you can get." She said it like it was a refund of sorts, and it might be taken away or run out at some point.) The amount of money she had, what with her parent's retirement money, made it reasonable for Norma to never work.
Her reasons for volunteering were mucky, or too sharp, or messy or messed-up, or wavy like heat waves coming off of hot asphalt on the horizon...that was how she described it to herself when she thought about it in the shower or buying some groceries, when she was doing her daily chores and didn't want to derail and end up staring at her middle, actually gazing at her navel. She'd done that far too many times. So she brushed off her need to examine the unexamined altruism. When she was almost asleep, though, her denied consciousness would tell her why she was doing it in pictures: there were dreams, light dreams that came on in the beginning or at the end of sleep, that were about becoming an amorphous cloud or a sheep that is stuck in briars, or being chewing gum. The chewing gum one was just funny, but the cloud and the sheep meant something about something. Norma tried not to think of losing herself, losing bits of herself to thorns or breezes, and it mostly worked. She just volunteered at more places, and that made her tired which made her forget about the whole stupid kittenish game her mind would play with her.
This went on for years. She dated, she took up ice skating and never gave it up. She had a breast cancer scare that turned out to be nothing. She donated her time and not inconsiderate soup- or cookie-making skills to homes or parties or sales. She made friends. She had many friends, most of them older than she and all but one of them was a shut-in. This was just how it worked out, there was no one to blame for her circle of pathologically shy friends unless you wanted to count the friends themselves, which she did not. Three of her housebound friends were on some charity's roster of people to visit, but the other four were not. Norma visited the four non-roster friends as if they were part of a job anyway- that way she was being fair, she felt. She always brought something of hers along to each one of them, usually part of a batch of something she'd baked- she was never empty-handed. Never.
After a while- a good long while- she became less. She was less of herself, somehow, though in the physical realm she was more (she had her own buttery fingers to blame for that if she'd thought of it. She didn't.) Despite her larger size, and despite her muscles that were strong beneath the extra padding because of her regular ice-skating, she was diminishing somehow. She was harder to get going- she had to jolly and wheedle and boss herself out of the house sometimes, as if she were her own sleep-deprived teenager. While at her job/visits, she would occasionally stare into space while her friend talked about the view outside that day or their nephew who was going to call but then didn't . She fell asleep at her oldest friend's house, sitting on the sofa and snoring delicately while her mouth hung open and her friend sat and watched her. It was a weird thing to do- both the sleeping and the staring- and when Norma woke up after about twenty minutes, she nearly broke her neck apologizing; Beth Anne did the same.
-
"I'm so so so sorry-" began Norma but Beth Anne cut her off at the pass.
"No more sorry than I am, love; I shouldn't have thrown that grape in your mouth. That was so terrible, I don't know what possessed me." Beth Anne looked down while she said this: they both knew what had possessed her. She was in self-imposed isolation because she had profound impulse control issues, and couldn't trust herself to not run out into traffic or worse, such as what had just happened (in Beth Anne's mind, the grape was worse than the traffic-dashing.)
"I don't know where-" Norma began, then stopped. She was about to finish with "- I'm going" but that's not what she meant. She meant she didn't know where the bits of her were going- she hadn't explained about the bits, the wisps of self that she couldn't account for. "I don't know what's wrong with me." She thought that was close enough.
Beth Anne thought she knew- she said she'd seen it before, that it happened to people who came around. After a while they simply evaporated, she explained. It was a slow process. Beth Anne counselled Norma to lighten her schedule, to drop a few roster friends or to bake less (there was more than one reason to deny themselves some of Norma's cookies, she said, smiling ruefully at her own commendable lap.)
Norma thought that was a terrible idea. She couldn't give up the rounds: those were her friends, they were friends now, despite their original entry into her life as names on a list. She looked up different recipes to make: meringues, and muffins made with low-fat yogurt and applesauce for sugar. They were good, and Beth Anne relaxed some and her other friends didn't notice or if they did they didn't say anything, just thanked her. She was with a friend (a roster name, though no one was counting any more) when Norma felt the first scrap of her physical self fall or slough off (she could never be sure: it was a judgement call, and the difference between a falling or a sloughing was so fine she would vacillate between those descriptives when she did try to really describe it. It probably goes without saying that she only tried describing the event to herself. )
It was a fingernail. A whole one- a whole pinky nail, from her left hand. It dropped rather than drifted to the ground just outside her friend's door as she was leaving. There was no blood as there had been no banging or catching: it was just her fingernail, falling. The bed was pink and very sensitive all of a sudden, feeling the mild breeze as no regular skin could feel, but otherwise it was fine. There had been a little tug, and Norma looked down, and...fingernail. It should have been gross. Instead it was alarming, and she felt another bit of herself loosen and drift:
"Fuck a duck." Norma slipped some fingers atop her lips as if that would take it back. No one had heard her, thank goodness. Cursing- profanity, she thought of it as profanity though she didn't go to church and didn't know what generally constituted the profane- wasn't something Norma ever did. She had the vocabulary, but she didn't use it. She judged those who did as being a little weak or careless; those users of profanity in the everyday were basically children and therefore prone to impetuousness, she felt. So the vocabulary lurked, placid in her brain, never too close to the front of it. She couldn't remember the last time she had cursed, or if she ever had.
Norma picked up her fingernail and dropped it in the next bin she saw. She decided, with a patted-down firmness, that she wouldn't curse again. She got home and eventually went to bed, then got up and made something else to eat and brought it to the home of the woman who was organizing a charity sale for something, some sport-thing. A charity bake sale to raise funds for some new pool equipment, so that disabled people could get into the pool more easily...a motorized lift-seat for the pool, that was it. Norma repeated that fact to herself five times before she got to the house of the woman, but it never came up. She handed the cake over, smiling, already thinking about an alternate route home due to road closures she'd encountered on the ride over, and as the woman took her cake there was another tug. Same finger- the nail-free finger, the left pinky. A big tug, it turned out, because the woman had clasped it along with Norma's cake and when the exchange was made the finger came off of Norma's hand.
Norma looked where the tug had been, the pull or tearing or whatever it had been, and saw the stump. There was some blood- enough to cover the area, enough to convey that there had been flesh and it had been damaged- but really, it was no worse than a skinned knee. She looked at the organizer woman and felt tugging from her brain, or in her brain, right behind the forehead.
"Fucking ass hellish butt-luck, lady. Just the finger-stealing bitch time, eh?"
The organizer woman looked at Norma and looked down at the finger. "Are you all right?" she asked, with an expression that mostly said she didn't want to know the answer. She held the finger out to Norma, as if it were a tissue Norma needed just then. Norma took it gently, mortified: she'd lost her finger. She'd lost words that she didn't necessarily count among the words she knew. They had tugged off of her. Norma left without answering, which given the situation wasn't even that rude.
The week continued like that. There were pieces of Norma falling everywhere: there were more fingers, and there were the fingernails before them like white flags; there were toenails that she alone saw with horror; there were a few weird chunks of hair. Her temples were pocked with white scalp, shiny as if she'd been shaved for surgery. And the words, which were so much worse to Norma: terrible droppings of crass syllables, laden with meaning and intended to shock, she realized. The words were meant to call attention to her calamity. She couldn't abide it but she couldn't make it stop. Some of the things she'd said that other people heard (or overheard):
"Some cuntly piece of shitside work right here" when her other pinky came off, in front of a man who was taking her money for the milk she was buying.
"Balls and dicks and a pretty gash, that's some fucking horsegut" to one of her roster-friends, who was taking the cake plate from her when her first chunk of hair fell out.
"Fuckity fuckity fuckity fuck-bait with a fuck on the side" to her doctor, who managed to get her right pinky to fall into his hand just by gently holding it in a pincer grip.
This doctor sighed. There was very little to do, since there was no blood and no pain and no damage to any major body area. There was a lot of wait-and-seeing advice circling the room, and some more sighing and a rake of a hand in the rumple of hair.
"Is this shit bonafide? Are you licking my clit, that's all you fucking have to say you shitwad?" said Norma. She'd felt the tug before this came from her mouth, but along with the mortification there was a feeling of lightness. There was a springy focus in her mind after she said that. It was the best feeling she'd had in a week and a half.
"Uh." said the doctor. "Well...uh." He raked the hand through the hair again. "Sorry, I just don't know. Normally there's some sign of trauma, some regular sign like damage to the skin and there's bone and there's the tendon, just..." His volume slipped down, then off. He shrugged, then said he was ordering lots of tests- "Just lots of them" he'd said- and sent her with instructions to wait and see. He asked the receptionist to make an appointment for Norma for the following week ("So that's what you have to do to get an appointment in less than two months! Hoopty-fuckin-do!" Norma said, which, relative to the other things she'd been saying, was only mildly perturbing. "Ha ha" said the receptionist, who was looking for an obscure phone number that Norma was to call if there were anything else that she shed before the appointment.) Norma went home, with one less digit and one more piece of business card in her purse.
Norma thought at home. There were so many words, so many, and so few of them were nasty little pieces; yet those were the words that flew around her skull like CGI ghosts in a horror movie, threatening (no, promising) to gout onto her tongue so that she might spit them out at some horrible moment soon, soon. And the prospect was not bad but dire, because the thing was she wanted them out! She wanted them free, she wanted to say those words and others as if she were saying "what a delightful cheesecake, not too heavy, I must get the recipe"! She could only hope to contain the potential social mayhem by containing the agent of volatility. Norma altered her schedule- it was the only way.
She went to work first thing the next morning, calling everyone on her visitation schedule, roster or no, and telling them that she'd only be coming in every third week (it seemed like a reasonable assumption that she'd be able to hold the words in if she only needed to every third week.) She made sure she was home at 2:00 every day, and drew the curtains gently but firmly so that she could nap. She took the nap. None of it was as big a help as she needed it to be. She looked forward to seeing the doctor, since it was something to look forward to.
The day came: an appointment with a doctor, some other doctor who knew what they were doing. She wasn't told that the new doctor was more competent. Norma assumed this because it was a reasonable thing to assume: she pictured someone with a tool belt over their white jacket, holding her pinky- which was labeled and telling in it's scientist's jar- and squinting. It was the knowledgeable squint that made the fantasy seem more than what was happening. Norma felt her head was liquid inside, all of the words she had known were moving about like eels and making her giddy. She knew enough to dread what was coming, but she also couldn't help the pull of the unthinkable words that she was thinking. She smiled on her way to the office.
The doctor- or rather the Doctor- did a great deal of verbalizing herself. "We don't understand the pathology yet, Norma, but that's not because we can't understand it; it's really because we haven't identified which system we should be concentrating on yet. There's the obvious ones, like the mechanical systems of muscle, tendon, bone. There's also the CNS, and your endocrine systems, which would normally have no significance in your shedding-" and blah blah blah.
"Blah blah blah" Norma said. She beamed right after she said it, despite being very embarassed.
"It is a lot of talking I'm doing, I know. You'd be amazed how much doctoring comes down to just talking. Or not talking." The doctor was testing the reflexes in her hand. Norma looked at her bent head, knocking her knees with one of those little dopey hammers. She was a dark-haired woman and she was using one of those hammers on Norma's knee, so she said something.
"You're a fucking Kike, right? Am I right? A Kike? I'm not sure what a Kike is. I was thinking while you were talking that you could teach me about jewishness. I could pay you for your fuckin' trouble, I know the Heebs like their gold" Norma said.
There was a hush that descended, and it was so deep it seemed that the patients in the other rooms with their doctors had heard the insults and were quiet so they didn't get blamed for anything. Norma COULD NOT BELIEVE she'd just said that, yet there it was: the wide-eyed stare from the Doctor, her eyes like giant coins on her face, and the silence. The words themselves were practically visible, swishing around in lazy circles above their heads. Norma thought to giggle- it was what she wanted to do- and immediately clenched every muscle she could isolate so that she didn't. Except, holy crap, there was more-
"Anyway, you don't look like a Kike unless you're a Kraut Kike, which is funny if you think about it. It's hilarious, am I right? I'm saying that you don't look like a regular Jew, you look like one of the Jews that Hitler might have missed because your eyes are blue and you didn't go to temple much. So your name didn't appear on any lists, and you lied and gave away families that you knew from years back so that you would appear a Kraut to the captains that mattered. Like that. You look like a Nazi Jew is what I'm saying." Norma literally could not stop the words coming out of her mouth: she tried to lift her hand up to clap it against her awful traitor of a mouth. The hand, a part of her body that obeyed her every command except the implicit one that normally kept the fingers attached, wouldn't budge past her sternum. She sat there spouting hateful Nazi-centric bits with her hands fluttering around her chest, neither getting to her mouth to stop the abuse. She was giddy enough to worry that she might faint.
There was that silence again. The Doctor stared at her again, and the whole building was hushed while it waited for her response to the vitriol. She opened her mouth and said "Give me your foot." She held out her hand for it and waited. Norma didn't know what to do other than give her her heel. She put her left foot in the Doctor's hand, expecting the scalpel, expecting the scapula, exultant in her fear of what was to happen, which she was sure would involve vivisection. She expected it so hard that it became wanting it, but again, the surprises: this alleged Nazi Jew just held her foot and gently pulled on each toe in turn. Of the four that were left she got two. The doctor put her foot back down on the floor, so gently, and held Norma's toes in her own palm, playing with them, switching them back and forth like they were Ben-Wa balls. Norma felt nakeder than before even though technically she was less naked.
"Are the outbursts part of what's going on? Do you feel upset or overwhelmed when you talk?"
Norma stared at the toes in the doctor's hands going around in little circles. "What the fuckity fuck do you think, assdick? Am I the only one here who can extrapolate that shit?" Norma felt herself shift away from the whole conversation. She listened to herself insult and berate the doctor at every question and at every blank spot in the talking, and it was not pleasant but at the same time it was. It was ever so pleasant. Norma spent the remaining time listening to herself with gleeful horror and then was sent home with her toes in a small plastic bag that was just the right size, as if purpose-built for two human toes. When she got home she sat down with a cup of tea. She took a deep breath and spoke, deliberately:
"Holy fuck-damn shitty ass cunt, cuntly gash dick-ass hole runny gummed up pissing cum-mouth. Fucking fuckity shit damn fornicating curly headed cunt-hats, with some puny soft pus-filled dick-shits. Merry fucking cunt hell, with a ho ho ho and a nasty tit-job that's all fucked to hell with yours truly the most fucked of all the fucking hellish bitchy shit-stains every to fart her way through some bullshit life with not the least fucking clue about how to fuck this shit when it shitstorms around in a helatious fuck-fire and can't suck the tits off anything, not even her own stupid cunt-ass self."
Norma looked at herself in a mirror after this- she looked carefully. Nothing appeared any different. She pulled a small handful of hair, quick and hard, and it fell off into her hand. The diatribe of nasty words had done nothing- if anything she could feel them swirling around in there, more of the same, ready for someone to pull a bit of her away or just for someone else to be present. After a solid hour of this, she put the mirror down and headed to bed.
The next day she got up and brushed her teeth, then put a scarf around her head to hide the now-remarkable loss of hairline. She drove to Beth Anne's and rang the bell.
"Hiya." Beth Anne was still in her pyjamas. Norma had brought hers along, hoping for an invite. "You're not supposed to come today- you were just here the other day. Day before yesterday."
Norma smiled, and felt the words shiver in her skull. "Hey Beth-Anne, do you have a problem with cursing?" she said.
Beth Anne smiled. "Fuck no" she said. Norma smiled back. It felt like the first time she'd smiled- or rather it felt like the first time she had felt like smiling since her pinky nail had fallen floorward.
Her reason for volunteering so much was unclear. She had money so she didn't need to work. She'd inherited her parents sizable retirement funds when they both died in a car crash the same year she graduated from college. Just when she was to be shooed out into the world, expensive piece of paper in hand and higher-than-was-realistic expectations in her head, she was given all the time in the world to grieve. She was told to take all the time in the world, in fact, by just about everyone she met, even those she had barely any knowledge of, like the recycling guy who came every two weeks to pick up her empty wine bottles and stacked newspapers.
"You're so young, it's a pity. It's always a pity when it happens, it always is. Just take as long as you need, sweetheart." He was standing there in her driveway, holding her emptied bin in his gloved hand, looking at her face with a generic tenderness. After a time she thanked him.
A year later she hadn't looked for work but had instead found a boyfriend, who became a husband. He was nice. He died after their two year anniversary from a brain aneurism, a small explosion in his head that was about as big a shock as Norma could imagine. He had taken out a life insurance policy for no reason other than it was very cheap, given his age and health. And because he was nice. So, again, Norma was told to grieve, was given permission to take all the time she could possibly want and then some (the woman who ran the support group for young widows and widowers told her that: "You should take all the time you want, then take more time. Take as much time as you can get." She said it like it was a refund of sorts, and it might be taken away or run out at some point.) The amount of money she had, what with her parent's retirement money, made it reasonable for Norma to never work.
Her reasons for volunteering were mucky, or too sharp, or messy or messed-up, or wavy like heat waves coming off of hot asphalt on the horizon...that was how she described it to herself when she thought about it in the shower or buying some groceries, when she was doing her daily chores and didn't want to derail and end up staring at her middle, actually gazing at her navel. She'd done that far too many times. So she brushed off her need to examine the unexamined altruism. When she was almost asleep, though, her denied consciousness would tell her why she was doing it in pictures: there were dreams, light dreams that came on in the beginning or at the end of sleep, that were about becoming an amorphous cloud or a sheep that is stuck in briars, or being chewing gum. The chewing gum one was just funny, but the cloud and the sheep meant something about something. Norma tried not to think of losing herself, losing bits of herself to thorns or breezes, and it mostly worked. She just volunteered at more places, and that made her tired which made her forget about the whole stupid kittenish game her mind would play with her.
This went on for years. She dated, she took up ice skating and never gave it up. She had a breast cancer scare that turned out to be nothing. She donated her time and not inconsiderate soup- or cookie-making skills to homes or parties or sales. She made friends. She had many friends, most of them older than she and all but one of them was a shut-in. This was just how it worked out, there was no one to blame for her circle of pathologically shy friends unless you wanted to count the friends themselves, which she did not. Three of her housebound friends were on some charity's roster of people to visit, but the other four were not. Norma visited the four non-roster friends as if they were part of a job anyway- that way she was being fair, she felt. She always brought something of hers along to each one of them, usually part of a batch of something she'd baked- she was never empty-handed. Never.
After a while- a good long while- she became less. She was less of herself, somehow, though in the physical realm she was more (she had her own buttery fingers to blame for that if she'd thought of it. She didn't.) Despite her larger size, and despite her muscles that were strong beneath the extra padding because of her regular ice-skating, she was diminishing somehow. She was harder to get going- she had to jolly and wheedle and boss herself out of the house sometimes, as if she were her own sleep-deprived teenager. While at her job/visits, she would occasionally stare into space while her friend talked about the view outside that day or their nephew who was going to call but then didn't . She fell asleep at her oldest friend's house, sitting on the sofa and snoring delicately while her mouth hung open and her friend sat and watched her. It was a weird thing to do- both the sleeping and the staring- and when Norma woke up after about twenty minutes, she nearly broke her neck apologizing; Beth Anne did the same.
-
"I'm so so so sorry-" began Norma but Beth Anne cut her off at the pass.
"No more sorry than I am, love; I shouldn't have thrown that grape in your mouth. That was so terrible, I don't know what possessed me." Beth Anne looked down while she said this: they both knew what had possessed her. She was in self-imposed isolation because she had profound impulse control issues, and couldn't trust herself to not run out into traffic or worse, such as what had just happened (in Beth Anne's mind, the grape was worse than the traffic-dashing.)
"I don't know where-" Norma began, then stopped. She was about to finish with "- I'm going" but that's not what she meant. She meant she didn't know where the bits of her were going- she hadn't explained about the bits, the wisps of self that she couldn't account for. "I don't know what's wrong with me." She thought that was close enough.
Beth Anne thought she knew- she said she'd seen it before, that it happened to people who came around. After a while they simply evaporated, she explained. It was a slow process. Beth Anne counselled Norma to lighten her schedule, to drop a few roster friends or to bake less (there was more than one reason to deny themselves some of Norma's cookies, she said, smiling ruefully at her own commendable lap.)
Norma thought that was a terrible idea. She couldn't give up the rounds: those were her friends, they were friends now, despite their original entry into her life as names on a list. She looked up different recipes to make: meringues, and muffins made with low-fat yogurt and applesauce for sugar. They were good, and Beth Anne relaxed some and her other friends didn't notice or if they did they didn't say anything, just thanked her. She was with a friend (a roster name, though no one was counting any more) when Norma felt the first scrap of her physical self fall or slough off (she could never be sure: it was a judgement call, and the difference between a falling or a sloughing was so fine she would vacillate between those descriptives when she did try to really describe it. It probably goes without saying that she only tried describing the event to herself. )
It was a fingernail. A whole one- a whole pinky nail, from her left hand. It dropped rather than drifted to the ground just outside her friend's door as she was leaving. There was no blood as there had been no banging or catching: it was just her fingernail, falling. The bed was pink and very sensitive all of a sudden, feeling the mild breeze as no regular skin could feel, but otherwise it was fine. There had been a little tug, and Norma looked down, and...fingernail. It should have been gross. Instead it was alarming, and she felt another bit of herself loosen and drift:
"Fuck a duck." Norma slipped some fingers atop her lips as if that would take it back. No one had heard her, thank goodness. Cursing- profanity, she thought of it as profanity though she didn't go to church and didn't know what generally constituted the profane- wasn't something Norma ever did. She had the vocabulary, but she didn't use it. She judged those who did as being a little weak or careless; those users of profanity in the everyday were basically children and therefore prone to impetuousness, she felt. So the vocabulary lurked, placid in her brain, never too close to the front of it. She couldn't remember the last time she had cursed, or if she ever had.
Norma picked up her fingernail and dropped it in the next bin she saw. She decided, with a patted-down firmness, that she wouldn't curse again. She got home and eventually went to bed, then got up and made something else to eat and brought it to the home of the woman who was organizing a charity sale for something, some sport-thing. A charity bake sale to raise funds for some new pool equipment, so that disabled people could get into the pool more easily...a motorized lift-seat for the pool, that was it. Norma repeated that fact to herself five times before she got to the house of the woman, but it never came up. She handed the cake over, smiling, already thinking about an alternate route home due to road closures she'd encountered on the ride over, and as the woman took her cake there was another tug. Same finger- the nail-free finger, the left pinky. A big tug, it turned out, because the woman had clasped it along with Norma's cake and when the exchange was made the finger came off of Norma's hand.
Norma looked where the tug had been, the pull or tearing or whatever it had been, and saw the stump. There was some blood- enough to cover the area, enough to convey that there had been flesh and it had been damaged- but really, it was no worse than a skinned knee. She looked at the organizer woman and felt tugging from her brain, or in her brain, right behind the forehead.
"Fucking ass hellish butt-luck, lady. Just the finger-stealing bitch time, eh?"
The organizer woman looked at Norma and looked down at the finger. "Are you all right?" she asked, with an expression that mostly said she didn't want to know the answer. She held the finger out to Norma, as if it were a tissue Norma needed just then. Norma took it gently, mortified: she'd lost her finger. She'd lost words that she didn't necessarily count among the words she knew. They had tugged off of her. Norma left without answering, which given the situation wasn't even that rude.
The week continued like that. There were pieces of Norma falling everywhere: there were more fingers, and there were the fingernails before them like white flags; there were toenails that she alone saw with horror; there were a few weird chunks of hair. Her temples were pocked with white scalp, shiny as if she'd been shaved for surgery. And the words, which were so much worse to Norma: terrible droppings of crass syllables, laden with meaning and intended to shock, she realized. The words were meant to call attention to her calamity. She couldn't abide it but she couldn't make it stop. Some of the things she'd said that other people heard (or overheard):
"Some cuntly piece of shitside work right here" when her other pinky came off, in front of a man who was taking her money for the milk she was buying.
"Balls and dicks and a pretty gash, that's some fucking horsegut" to one of her roster-friends, who was taking the cake plate from her when her first chunk of hair fell out.
"Fuckity fuckity fuckity fuck-bait with a fuck on the side" to her doctor, who managed to get her right pinky to fall into his hand just by gently holding it in a pincer grip.
This doctor sighed. There was very little to do, since there was no blood and no pain and no damage to any major body area. There was a lot of wait-and-seeing advice circling the room, and some more sighing and a rake of a hand in the rumple of hair.
"Is this shit bonafide? Are you licking my clit, that's all you fucking have to say you shitwad?" said Norma. She'd felt the tug before this came from her mouth, but along with the mortification there was a feeling of lightness. There was a springy focus in her mind after she said that. It was the best feeling she'd had in a week and a half.
"Uh." said the doctor. "Well...uh." He raked the hand through the hair again. "Sorry, I just don't know. Normally there's some sign of trauma, some regular sign like damage to the skin and there's bone and there's the tendon, just..." His volume slipped down, then off. He shrugged, then said he was ordering lots of tests- "Just lots of them" he'd said- and sent her with instructions to wait and see. He asked the receptionist to make an appointment for Norma for the following week ("So that's what you have to do to get an appointment in less than two months! Hoopty-fuckin-do!" Norma said, which, relative to the other things she'd been saying, was only mildly perturbing. "Ha ha" said the receptionist, who was looking for an obscure phone number that Norma was to call if there were anything else that she shed before the appointment.) Norma went home, with one less digit and one more piece of business card in her purse.
Norma thought at home. There were so many words, so many, and so few of them were nasty little pieces; yet those were the words that flew around her skull like CGI ghosts in a horror movie, threatening (no, promising) to gout onto her tongue so that she might spit them out at some horrible moment soon, soon. And the prospect was not bad but dire, because the thing was she wanted them out! She wanted them free, she wanted to say those words and others as if she were saying "what a delightful cheesecake, not too heavy, I must get the recipe"! She could only hope to contain the potential social mayhem by containing the agent of volatility. Norma altered her schedule- it was the only way.
She went to work first thing the next morning, calling everyone on her visitation schedule, roster or no, and telling them that she'd only be coming in every third week (it seemed like a reasonable assumption that she'd be able to hold the words in if she only needed to every third week.) She made sure she was home at 2:00 every day, and drew the curtains gently but firmly so that she could nap. She took the nap. None of it was as big a help as she needed it to be. She looked forward to seeing the doctor, since it was something to look forward to.
The day came: an appointment with a doctor, some other doctor who knew what they were doing. She wasn't told that the new doctor was more competent. Norma assumed this because it was a reasonable thing to assume: she pictured someone with a tool belt over their white jacket, holding her pinky- which was labeled and telling in it's scientist's jar- and squinting. It was the knowledgeable squint that made the fantasy seem more than what was happening. Norma felt her head was liquid inside, all of the words she had known were moving about like eels and making her giddy. She knew enough to dread what was coming, but she also couldn't help the pull of the unthinkable words that she was thinking. She smiled on her way to the office.
The doctor- or rather the Doctor- did a great deal of verbalizing herself. "We don't understand the pathology yet, Norma, but that's not because we can't understand it; it's really because we haven't identified which system we should be concentrating on yet. There's the obvious ones, like the mechanical systems of muscle, tendon, bone. There's also the CNS, and your endocrine systems, which would normally have no significance in your shedding-" and blah blah blah.
"Blah blah blah" Norma said. She beamed right after she said it, despite being very embarassed.
"It is a lot of talking I'm doing, I know. You'd be amazed how much doctoring comes down to just talking. Or not talking." The doctor was testing the reflexes in her hand. Norma looked at her bent head, knocking her knees with one of those little dopey hammers. She was a dark-haired woman and she was using one of those hammers on Norma's knee, so she said something.
"You're a fucking Kike, right? Am I right? A Kike? I'm not sure what a Kike is. I was thinking while you were talking that you could teach me about jewishness. I could pay you for your fuckin' trouble, I know the Heebs like their gold" Norma said.
There was a hush that descended, and it was so deep it seemed that the patients in the other rooms with their doctors had heard the insults and were quiet so they didn't get blamed for anything. Norma COULD NOT BELIEVE she'd just said that, yet there it was: the wide-eyed stare from the Doctor, her eyes like giant coins on her face, and the silence. The words themselves were practically visible, swishing around in lazy circles above their heads. Norma thought to giggle- it was what she wanted to do- and immediately clenched every muscle she could isolate so that she didn't. Except, holy crap, there was more-
"Anyway, you don't look like a Kike unless you're a Kraut Kike, which is funny if you think about it. It's hilarious, am I right? I'm saying that you don't look like a regular Jew, you look like one of the Jews that Hitler might have missed because your eyes are blue and you didn't go to temple much. So your name didn't appear on any lists, and you lied and gave away families that you knew from years back so that you would appear a Kraut to the captains that mattered. Like that. You look like a Nazi Jew is what I'm saying." Norma literally could not stop the words coming out of her mouth: she tried to lift her hand up to clap it against her awful traitor of a mouth. The hand, a part of her body that obeyed her every command except the implicit one that normally kept the fingers attached, wouldn't budge past her sternum. She sat there spouting hateful Nazi-centric bits with her hands fluttering around her chest, neither getting to her mouth to stop the abuse. She was giddy enough to worry that she might faint.
There was that silence again. The Doctor stared at her again, and the whole building was hushed while it waited for her response to the vitriol. She opened her mouth and said "Give me your foot." She held out her hand for it and waited. Norma didn't know what to do other than give her her heel. She put her left foot in the Doctor's hand, expecting the scalpel, expecting the scapula, exultant in her fear of what was to happen, which she was sure would involve vivisection. She expected it so hard that it became wanting it, but again, the surprises: this alleged Nazi Jew just held her foot and gently pulled on each toe in turn. Of the four that were left she got two. The doctor put her foot back down on the floor, so gently, and held Norma's toes in her own palm, playing with them, switching them back and forth like they were Ben-Wa balls. Norma felt nakeder than before even though technically she was less naked.
"Are the outbursts part of what's going on? Do you feel upset or overwhelmed when you talk?"
Norma stared at the toes in the doctor's hands going around in little circles. "What the fuckity fuck do you think, assdick? Am I the only one here who can extrapolate that shit?" Norma felt herself shift away from the whole conversation. She listened to herself insult and berate the doctor at every question and at every blank spot in the talking, and it was not pleasant but at the same time it was. It was ever so pleasant. Norma spent the remaining time listening to herself with gleeful horror and then was sent home with her toes in a small plastic bag that was just the right size, as if purpose-built for two human toes. When she got home she sat down with a cup of tea. She took a deep breath and spoke, deliberately:
"Holy fuck-damn shitty ass cunt, cuntly gash dick-ass hole runny gummed up pissing cum-mouth. Fucking fuckity shit damn fornicating curly headed cunt-hats, with some puny soft pus-filled dick-shits. Merry fucking cunt hell, with a ho ho ho and a nasty tit-job that's all fucked to hell with yours truly the most fucked of all the fucking hellish bitchy shit-stains every to fart her way through some bullshit life with not the least fucking clue about how to fuck this shit when it shitstorms around in a helatious fuck-fire and can't suck the tits off anything, not even her own stupid cunt-ass self."
Norma looked at herself in a mirror after this- she looked carefully. Nothing appeared any different. She pulled a small handful of hair, quick and hard, and it fell off into her hand. The diatribe of nasty words had done nothing- if anything she could feel them swirling around in there, more of the same, ready for someone to pull a bit of her away or just for someone else to be present. After a solid hour of this, she put the mirror down and headed to bed.
The next day she got up and brushed her teeth, then put a scarf around her head to hide the now-remarkable loss of hairline. She drove to Beth Anne's and rang the bell.
"Hiya." Beth Anne was still in her pyjamas. Norma had brought hers along, hoping for an invite. "You're not supposed to come today- you were just here the other day. Day before yesterday."
Norma smiled, and felt the words shiver in her skull. "Hey Beth-Anne, do you have a problem with cursing?" she said.
Beth Anne smiled. "Fuck no" she said. Norma smiled back. It felt like the first time she'd smiled- or rather it felt like the first time she had felt like smiling since her pinky nail had fallen floorward.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
It's Better Than the Alternative
When my father was still alive, still very alive despite having prostate cancer that had, at long last, moved into his bones, he was mildly explosive with his insights: he would have a lot to say, and it would come out of him in a minor torrent. Usually they were about his life. After one particularly harrowing visit with his oncologist who had given him some really high numbers relating to some really lousy test results, he walked up to me in my condominium and told me that being with Mom was amazing. "What a ride" he'd said about his life with her (and since he was from a different time and place when he aquired his slang, it meant that it had been an adventure to be married to her. The possibility that he might be using some double entendre about his wife to his child never occured to him.)
"Dad, you're not dead yet! Stop talking like that" I said, or something like it. I had the self-awareness to say it gently, at least, but when I think of it I wince at the selfishness of my poor stupid younger self, trying to get away from those implications. As if it were about me. Fortunately, Dad would not be put off: he was trying to talk about my mother, his wife of many years, his soul mate. He talked about how she wouldn't have much truck with romance and flowery talk, how she didn't care at all about how she looked, not really, but how much he saw her beauty anyway. It was a pretty fantastic moment, and I'd gladly lose a limb to have him around to tell me- for too long, of course, because he was an old dude and that's what old dudes do- but I'd happily sit there, minus an arm or leg, massaging the place where it used to be and listening to him go on about my mother.
This is something that he would say a lot during that last two or three years: he'd tell me his latest PSA count (Prostate Specific Antogen) was over 1,000. "What?" I'd always say. "How are you still standing?" And he'd explain that he'd just go on, or try a new medication, or sleep during the day. "Besides, it's better than the alternative." This was his sum-up: all of that was still better than being dead. And lately that sentiment has been seeping into all sorts of situations, just like I was the heroine of a long-standing situation comedy and that sentiment was my precocious niece who'd dressed as a boy and gotten herself locked in the linen cabinet right by the master bedroom in the haunted hotel we're staying in....Yeah, like that. Pretty much.
I'm prone to anxiety (well, "prone to" might be a bit of misrepresentation- it's more like I'm "forced to experience" anxiety.) Anything can become fraught when you're afraid of doing things wrong, such as making phone calls to someone who answers phones for your dentist or shopping for garden supplies. I was in a garden center yeseterday, a big one that also sells shoes and coffees and hot tubs, and it was a miracle that I made it out alive- I start to sputter and wander ineffectively when I'm around that much vegetative choice. My mother was an excellent gardener, and I want to be a gardener at least, so I go to garden centers. I leave after an hour and a half of rambling around, usually empty handed or perhaps with another toy for my dogs, who need toys just like I need additonal fat stores. I can't handle the choice, I can't handle the responsibility, I don't know when to put a cloche on a tomato plant. The spirit of the The Gardeer tsk's me under her breath, which should prove to me that it's not really my mother it's that unwanted precocious niece, wreaking her havoc. It's what anxiety does.
And just lately that saying has come to me, like the incongruously helpful concierge in my personal sitcom, reminding me in a steady and calming voice that being out and choosing something is better than the alternative. In that circumstance, the alternative is staying at home to feel un-challenged, un-stimulated, and therefore not moving forward. Not trying anything new, or just not trying at all. I'd never have thought of myself this way: as someone who is in any danger of stagnation, as someone who has a clear path to the non-stop panic of the shut-in or partial shut-in. In my twenties I was clear about my priorities, and when I thought about the dangers of staying alive they would be images of staying up too late and messing up my skin, or not meeting the right person to marry. I thought about being famous and the perils of becoming famous- which to my mind were non-issues, and so I barely thought about them.
But that disregard was way before the stupid realities of continuing to breathe here on Earth poked their stupid heads in my glorious imaginings (seriously: fame? What for?) It was certainly before I did find the right person to marry, and have a child with him, and go to the doctor to find out what was the deal with all the pain all the time and all the sleeplessness. It was before the diagnosis of a lifetime of said pain, sorry about that, and it was before the death of three people I loved, two of whom were my parents. My beautiful, frustrating, idiosyncratic, hopeful parents are gone. I have to be my own parent now, in addition to being a parent to a beautiful, idiosyncratic, demanding, special needs child. So it's no fucking wonder, really, that it's hard to make a move now, since making moves can make things change, and change has been a very bad neighbor of mine for the past thirteen years...but: when I'm scared of whatever it is- buying the wrong plant, for example- I'm remembering that buying the wrong plant is better than the alternative.
I could be the shut-in or partial shut-in, I suppose; however, I have better things to do. There's travel to plan and fruit to forage in the summer, and subsequently there's jam to make. There are plants to buy and then kill, or not (hopefully not.) There's home to go to and home to visit. There's languages to learn how to speak, in support of the travel that needs to happen. Did I mention my husband? He has amazing laugh lines, and I have to watch them open and close when he's just seen or heard something really funny. As he gets older they get better. So: there are a great many reasons to fight the squeezy hand of worry, and the fighting is in itself much, much better than the alternative.
"Dad, you're not dead yet! Stop talking like that" I said, or something like it. I had the self-awareness to say it gently, at least, but when I think of it I wince at the selfishness of my poor stupid younger self, trying to get away from those implications. As if it were about me. Fortunately, Dad would not be put off: he was trying to talk about my mother, his wife of many years, his soul mate. He talked about how she wouldn't have much truck with romance and flowery talk, how she didn't care at all about how she looked, not really, but how much he saw her beauty anyway. It was a pretty fantastic moment, and I'd gladly lose a limb to have him around to tell me- for too long, of course, because he was an old dude and that's what old dudes do- but I'd happily sit there, minus an arm or leg, massaging the place where it used to be and listening to him go on about my mother.
This is something that he would say a lot during that last two or three years: he'd tell me his latest PSA count (Prostate Specific Antogen) was over 1,000. "What?" I'd always say. "How are you still standing?" And he'd explain that he'd just go on, or try a new medication, or sleep during the day. "Besides, it's better than the alternative." This was his sum-up: all of that was still better than being dead. And lately that sentiment has been seeping into all sorts of situations, just like I was the heroine of a long-standing situation comedy and that sentiment was my precocious niece who'd dressed as a boy and gotten herself locked in the linen cabinet right by the master bedroom in the haunted hotel we're staying in....Yeah, like that. Pretty much.
I'm prone to anxiety (well, "prone to" might be a bit of misrepresentation- it's more like I'm "forced to experience" anxiety.) Anything can become fraught when you're afraid of doing things wrong, such as making phone calls to someone who answers phones for your dentist or shopping for garden supplies. I was in a garden center yeseterday, a big one that also sells shoes and coffees and hot tubs, and it was a miracle that I made it out alive- I start to sputter and wander ineffectively when I'm around that much vegetative choice. My mother was an excellent gardener, and I want to be a gardener at least, so I go to garden centers. I leave after an hour and a half of rambling around, usually empty handed or perhaps with another toy for my dogs, who need toys just like I need additonal fat stores. I can't handle the choice, I can't handle the responsibility, I don't know when to put a cloche on a tomato plant. The spirit of the The Gardeer tsk's me under her breath, which should prove to me that it's not really my mother it's that unwanted precocious niece, wreaking her havoc. It's what anxiety does.
And just lately that saying has come to me, like the incongruously helpful concierge in my personal sitcom, reminding me in a steady and calming voice that being out and choosing something is better than the alternative. In that circumstance, the alternative is staying at home to feel un-challenged, un-stimulated, and therefore not moving forward. Not trying anything new, or just not trying at all. I'd never have thought of myself this way: as someone who is in any danger of stagnation, as someone who has a clear path to the non-stop panic of the shut-in or partial shut-in. In my twenties I was clear about my priorities, and when I thought about the dangers of staying alive they would be images of staying up too late and messing up my skin, or not meeting the right person to marry. I thought about being famous and the perils of becoming famous- which to my mind were non-issues, and so I barely thought about them.
But that disregard was way before the stupid realities of continuing to breathe here on Earth poked their stupid heads in my glorious imaginings (seriously: fame? What for?) It was certainly before I did find the right person to marry, and have a child with him, and go to the doctor to find out what was the deal with all the pain all the time and all the sleeplessness. It was before the diagnosis of a lifetime of said pain, sorry about that, and it was before the death of three people I loved, two of whom were my parents. My beautiful, frustrating, idiosyncratic, hopeful parents are gone. I have to be my own parent now, in addition to being a parent to a beautiful, idiosyncratic, demanding, special needs child. So it's no fucking wonder, really, that it's hard to make a move now, since making moves can make things change, and change has been a very bad neighbor of mine for the past thirteen years...but: when I'm scared of whatever it is- buying the wrong plant, for example- I'm remembering that buying the wrong plant is better than the alternative.
I could be the shut-in or partial shut-in, I suppose; however, I have better things to do. There's travel to plan and fruit to forage in the summer, and subsequently there's jam to make. There are plants to buy and then kill, or not (hopefully not.) There's home to go to and home to visit. There's languages to learn how to speak, in support of the travel that needs to happen. Did I mention my husband? He has amazing laugh lines, and I have to watch them open and close when he's just seen or heard something really funny. As he gets older they get better. So: there are a great many reasons to fight the squeezy hand of worry, and the fighting is in itself much, much better than the alternative.
Monday, March 30, 2015
History of Touches
Benhie stood in the line, and it didn't have the usual people in in because she wasn't on her usual schedule: she had a late meeting at work the following day, and so she wouldn't be able to make her usual post-work grieving. So today instead, and it was only Day 4, mid-week, instead of Day 5, which she didn't suppose would make any difference, except that she was wrong.
The usual people in her queue were a mom with her four-year-old, who could have been in Childing but wasn't and so had to spend all of her time joshing the youngster into quiet (it was a personal choice to spend your time joshing youngsters or not- Benhie saw no sense in doing it while you were queuing to grieve, but to each their own;) There was a man who had what appeared to be the exact same copy of his word puzzle every week, a giant one that he had to lay out on the floor like a map and shuffle forward every time the line moved; there was another woman who looked remarkably like her- mid-forties, light brown hair, purple contacts, very big handbag. Today's line had a father with a teenager, and it was obvious that the father was showing his son the task ahead, or he intended to when it was his turn. There was another mother who had two infants with her, the maximum for birthing or minding in their country (the places that didn't enforce a strict population control were considered little better- no, worse!- than penal colonies) and there was another woman who should have looked like her, given the age and the time of day, but didn't. Still, everyone was there for a grieving and because of that there was a parallel feeling from her Day 5 line to this Day 4 line. Benhie looked at eyes as they met hers and smiled a bit and watched the bit of smile she got from the others. It was familiar as it could be.
She moved, slowly but inevitably, to the front, and when it was her turn she walked to the booth with the lit-up number above it. It was her favorite booth, because the robot who'd be serving her was new and in great shape, so she wouldn't have to enunciate to make herself understandable to aging sensors and she wouldn't have to touch one of its' long, many-jointed arms when they got stuck moving one of her slabs. She breathed in the booth, taking in the sad air of everyone who'd gone before her that day- to Benhie, the air in a grieving booth was always sadder than regular air, even though it was reclaimed by the same ventilator as in the vestibule or the hallways. Sad air, she thought as she put in her memory request: it tangs. It smells sour like milk and long-ago burned meals. It was a description that she never told anyone, not even the Talkee that she was mandated to see bi-weekly, for her continued well being. Being a bi-weekly was pretty acceptable. It was hard when it was three times per week: once they learned of it, most people couldn't look her in the eye.
Her memory came up. It was on a screen and it was projected, too, so that she was watching the video of her departed partner while she stood inside the image. Guy was shirtless in bed, but had his pyjama pants on, because this memory wasn't from their beginning. Benhie smelled the sheets around her and she felt instantly exhausted, as she had been on that night. It was a fighting night. She wondered why, of all her bad Guy memories, she'd picked this one: it was just a non-descript repeating argument, the kind that tired you immensely but that you couldn't quantify the next day. She supposed she was a fucking masochist. Anyway, anyway...Guy was talking, and he was exhausted too- there were crusts around his eyes and his hair was shiny on one side where he'd pulled his hand through it, over and over, in frustration.
"I don't know how many times we have to talk about it. I have to- we need to synchronise our feelings-" He said this disjointedly. Poor Guy, she thought.
"I don't think it's possible to do that. I don't think people can synchronise- that's really the thing you're holding out for? Don't you think that's not possible?" Benhie wasn't sure she felt one way or another about it, she remembered: she was just arguing the point to keep his attention.
"You've read the same things I have, you've seen the same Talkee- I didn't think that was a great thing, a great idea I mean, but we did that. I can't not talk to you when..." He sighed, he pulled his hand through his hair. It was the right side, she noticed. Out of nowhere there was this vertiginous feeling of being in the middle of every night like this with Guy, as if she'd requested every slab of nighttime memories she had all at once.
The air was still spoiled milk, but there was sweat from the unclean sheets and a tang of red wine and the smell of vapor liquid, because she had taken up vaping out of desperation during the end of things- she needed it for her hands, she told herself. She needed to hold something while she had these ridiculous conversations with him, these threads of thought that became the kind of snakes that ate their own tails. There were sounds of night in their bedroom, thickened by the layering of memory so that birds became flocks and cars became trains, practically. The conversations themselves became dense snatches of repeated phrases, "You can't open-" and "I want you to but every-" and "Well that's something I don't know, again-". There were others. Benhie felt her hand clench her vaping wand too hard, and the shirt she was folding too fiercely, and her own hair because she'd tried Guy's method of running her hands through it. She felt all that at once, and it was, predictably, too much.
She moaned first. It seemed the right thing to do it felt right, so she moaned some more. Hologram Guy went on saying something about her appointments because he'd always believed that the answer to any ennui was to talk at your Talkee, and he said it many times at once in the booth. The walls practically tremored with his views on her stubbornness. She got angry, just angry, with nothing to bring her anger too ("Your Talkee" said Guy, in multiples, as if the hologrammed men had been listening to her thoughts) and no living person to witness it. She was so mad, and just hummed with fury (literally: she'd moved on from moaning) which grew to hissing which grew to a shout, and she turned inside the projected Guys in her air, from the smells and the confusion and the alarming sensation of touching more than two things at once, as if she had tentacles. She tried to stomp out but was stopped by the door, which locked from the inside when you closed it. She felt how unfair it was to be overwhelmed like this and then be disallowed the ability to stomp out of the space, and how it was the most unfair part of the whole experience.
The line people had changed, gotten their own grieving booths. Now there was an older woman who stood straight as a stick, and a couple who both had glassy, uncaring eyes, and someone young, probably not yet out of Choose school. They looked at her almost sympathetically, as if they thought they should be apologizing for something. She wanted to stomp but felt that would be rude, so she walked back out to the street and to her apartment. When she got there, she stomped all around her studio, marking the floor in one spot and making a racket- sometimes humming, sometimes not- until her downstairs neighbor came to her door to ask her to stop. When he went away mollified, she sat and the anger drained from her. She tried the CogThink that her Talkee had taught her: she told herself it was just a glitch, she replayed the session in her head and modified the effect (just a little- that was the trick to it, you only changed how things had happened just a bit, to keep it "authentique" as her Talkee smilingly put it.) She breathed the non-sad air. It was a good thing that she'd just changed the scent cartridge in her ventilator- her studio air smelled like coconuts, or what she assumed were coconuts since she'd never smelled a real coconut. It was calming.
Her next grieving session was her regular day the following week, Day 5. It had been too long since that terrible glitchy session on Day 4 of the following week, and her Not-Boss at work had noticed a fall in her productivity. Benhie hadn't noticed, which was the most alarming thing about it: she was a real fan of productivity, she was at the assemblies right in the front row mouthing the slogans and catchphrases ("We're all part of the Hive" was one, though no one knew what a hive was anymore; also "Can you yes you can can you yes you can can you yes you can can you YES WE CAN" with clapping.) She normally felt that anything that increased productivity, on an individual or a group scale, was ultimately a good thing. It was the reason for the Grieving and the Talkees in the first place: when you managed your SAD! (for Start Altering Despondency!,) you became the most efficient version of yourself possible.
Except since her breakup with Guy, she'd felt less that way. Except that when she was being honest with herself, which she was doing more and more lately (unintentionally, but there it was,) she had lost sight of productivity as a golden mean since before she broke up with Guy. It was the reason she'd been made a tri-weekly Talker.
The line was as it should have been, with all the regulars. The woman who looked so much like Benhie had changed her hair. It was a different color, but not different enough to erase the likeness between them. Benhie smiled brightly at the woman, who smiled back in the practiced way. Benhie was in a good mind for this session. 8 days was too long to wait for your turn to have negative emotions. She'd picked a memory slab that had something good for her, she hoped. It was the slab with the "I love you's" and the face touches and the waking in the middle of the night just to make love. She intended to shed a tear, wipe it with a new handkerchief she'd brought for the occasion, and go back to herself. She was looking forward to the after.
The sad air was the same, and she handed over the slab with some enthusiasm. She felt hungry for it, and the memory was going to be a steak to her, full of fortifiers. The arm took her slab and popped it in: Guy was there, naked under the covers, smiling. Guy was all around her, smiling. She smiled back. Then, just in that nice pre-crying moment, Guy was everywhere at once: naked, half-naked, clothed, packed even. For some reason the glitch from last week had reproduced asexually, and now she was faced with all of the crying of Guy and all the loving of Guy at the same time. The sheet smell was asphyxiating. Guys hair was shined and not-shined from his hand going through it on the right side, or not. She was in the center of every memory at once, every stupid fight and stupider fit of giggles, she heard Guy's voice talk about her beautiful mouth and her lack of laundry skills and how stubborn she was, and how he was done. He said it like that: "I'm done." She felt the derision for the phrase- he's done, he's like a meatburger that way- and she felt the melting edges of herself when he mentioned her mouth.
Benhie screamed and ran at the robot. It was a robot arm, really, since there wasn't any other piece of a robot in the booth, and she ran at it, her handkerchief still tucked in her fist. She shoved at it and it rolled away, designed for this, indulgent even. So she picked up the chair that was provided in every booth and brought it over her head, much higher than she would have guessed she could, and brought it down on the thing. That helped: there was a nasty clang, so she kept doing it until the robot arm, not designed for this, snapped at one of its' fragile joints and the front piece of it fell to the ground. Benhie put the chair down and sat on it. She was exhausted! The memories that she'd not requested swam around in her head, and despite the fact that the holograms weren't there any more she lived in a miasma of her previous couplehood for twenty minutes. She just sat and breathed while it went away. She wasn't thinking of anything. It was a tremendous relief.
When she left the Grieving both, the line with her usual people had already been served and were in their boxes or gone. Benhie slinked past the current liners. If anyone was looking at her strangely she didn't notice. She went straight to her apartment and thought about things...truthfully she thought about Things, such as why she was not charmed by her own drive for efficiency any more and why Guy hadn't just come out and said what needed to be said. She might have saved herself so much trouble, and they might have stayed together, though she doubted it. He was GAtoGA (Going Along to Get Along) and that right there was the crux of their problem. She Thought more. She was not going to be a production slave any more, not because she was opposed to the idea but because she knew that if she went into another Grieving booth, she would go fully mad. Everything could work perfectly but now she had another memory to Down/Up, but it was a memory of every other memory. She had broken the robot arm but she hadn't broken anything else. She didn't feel like confessing; she didn't feel like making the appointment with another piece of robot (the head, she supposed) to record what had happened, sitting very still for twenty minutes while the sheet of light crossed and re-crossed her eyes, making another slab for her. She didn't feel like having an Apology Event at work, despite the fact that she'd be "encouraged" to bring cake, which meant that she could choose the flavor. She felt like...running. Running? She wasn't sure what that meant exactly, but she thought it meant leaving and staying gone somehow.
Her apartment was a fine place but she had to leave it and she did, taking only a few things that she thought she would really need, such as underwear and money and anything that could be categorized as a snack. She'd just gotten her weekly delivery of groceries so the bag she was using was full of snacks, thank goodness. Benhie looked around, unsure of herself again, but when she thought it out it was the best option for her. It was the option with the least amount of Grieving in it. She went to a Lodge that was right down the street from her and stayed there for two days, nibbling on her snacks, getting off the bed to stretch and walk around the room but otherwise staying put. The TV was on the whole time, including when she slept which was an example of terrible Sleepytime Nopes that she normally abhorred. She was a stickler for Sleepytime Yups and shunned the Nopes, but this was an exception.
On the second day she was rewarded (if that's what you can call it) by the news playing something about her: there was an entreaty for her return. "She's just so Productive normally, and we miss that at work. Benhie, if you're watching this, please come back. The arm at the Grieving center can be paid for- " she blushed when her Not Boss said this, it was the truth for anyone viewing to deconstruct as they liked- "but you have to come back, we all miss you. It's not as terrible as it sounds." Her Not Boss finished with a beautiful smile for someone, but Benhie didn't think it was for her. None of that was very terrifying, but it wasn't soothing and it didn't change her motivation one bit. She had no doubt that she could pay for the arm and go back to being the one who got a Well Done Hoversticker above her head every Day 6 for all of her colleagues to see, but she wasn't done with whatever she was doing yet. She moved to another Lodge and stayed there for three days.
It was confusing: what did she want? This was the question she asked herself every day she was holed away, and every time she saw the begging for her return on the television that she was fully addicted to now. There were people besides her Not Boss asking her to come back, people from work and her sister, whom she hadn't seen in many Ages, who looked pleased at the attention. No one said anything that changed her mind, though she always watched with as open a heart as she could manage. What did she want? She moved around, she used the Lodges that were the least expensive since she knew her money wouldn't last, she bought food out of machines in the lobbies of the Lodges or little stores that were right up the block. She knew she'd have to change something permenantly but she didn't know what it was, and she was beginning to resent her mind for taking her on this pointless walkabout.
At Lodge #4 she was thinking it while she was sitting on the pot, and the small bit of glass shelving that was above her head, big enough to hold two hand towels and one washcloth but nothing else, came unscrewed or unmoored or unconnected to the wall and fell on her, nicking her neck and then clattering to the side, whole. It was a shock: she'd been so deep in contemplation, and who checks the screws on an above-head shelf every time they sit? So it was a shock, like getting hit in the back of the head with a sports ball you didn't see coming, and Benhie burst into tears. The crying felt so immediately good, like having an orgasm or finally emptying your bladder or reaching the perfect point of fullness in your belly, that she smiled while she did it.
Thank You she thought to no one.
The usual people in her queue were a mom with her four-year-old, who could have been in Childing but wasn't and so had to spend all of her time joshing the youngster into quiet (it was a personal choice to spend your time joshing youngsters or not- Benhie saw no sense in doing it while you were queuing to grieve, but to each their own;) There was a man who had what appeared to be the exact same copy of his word puzzle every week, a giant one that he had to lay out on the floor like a map and shuffle forward every time the line moved; there was another woman who looked remarkably like her- mid-forties, light brown hair, purple contacts, very big handbag. Today's line had a father with a teenager, and it was obvious that the father was showing his son the task ahead, or he intended to when it was his turn. There was another mother who had two infants with her, the maximum for birthing or minding in their country (the places that didn't enforce a strict population control were considered little better- no, worse!- than penal colonies) and there was another woman who should have looked like her, given the age and the time of day, but didn't. Still, everyone was there for a grieving and because of that there was a parallel feeling from her Day 5 line to this Day 4 line. Benhie looked at eyes as they met hers and smiled a bit and watched the bit of smile she got from the others. It was familiar as it could be.
She moved, slowly but inevitably, to the front, and when it was her turn she walked to the booth with the lit-up number above it. It was her favorite booth, because the robot who'd be serving her was new and in great shape, so she wouldn't have to enunciate to make herself understandable to aging sensors and she wouldn't have to touch one of its' long, many-jointed arms when they got stuck moving one of her slabs. She breathed in the booth, taking in the sad air of everyone who'd gone before her that day- to Benhie, the air in a grieving booth was always sadder than regular air, even though it was reclaimed by the same ventilator as in the vestibule or the hallways. Sad air, she thought as she put in her memory request: it tangs. It smells sour like milk and long-ago burned meals. It was a description that she never told anyone, not even the Talkee that she was mandated to see bi-weekly, for her continued well being. Being a bi-weekly was pretty acceptable. It was hard when it was three times per week: once they learned of it, most people couldn't look her in the eye.
Her memory came up. It was on a screen and it was projected, too, so that she was watching the video of her departed partner while she stood inside the image. Guy was shirtless in bed, but had his pyjama pants on, because this memory wasn't from their beginning. Benhie smelled the sheets around her and she felt instantly exhausted, as she had been on that night. It was a fighting night. She wondered why, of all her bad Guy memories, she'd picked this one: it was just a non-descript repeating argument, the kind that tired you immensely but that you couldn't quantify the next day. She supposed she was a fucking masochist. Anyway, anyway...Guy was talking, and he was exhausted too- there were crusts around his eyes and his hair was shiny on one side where he'd pulled his hand through it, over and over, in frustration.
"I don't know how many times we have to talk about it. I have to- we need to synchronise our feelings-" He said this disjointedly. Poor Guy, she thought.
"I don't think it's possible to do that. I don't think people can synchronise- that's really the thing you're holding out for? Don't you think that's not possible?" Benhie wasn't sure she felt one way or another about it, she remembered: she was just arguing the point to keep his attention.
"You've read the same things I have, you've seen the same Talkee- I didn't think that was a great thing, a great idea I mean, but we did that. I can't not talk to you when..." He sighed, he pulled his hand through his hair. It was the right side, she noticed. Out of nowhere there was this vertiginous feeling of being in the middle of every night like this with Guy, as if she'd requested every slab of nighttime memories she had all at once.
The air was still spoiled milk, but there was sweat from the unclean sheets and a tang of red wine and the smell of vapor liquid, because she had taken up vaping out of desperation during the end of things- she needed it for her hands, she told herself. She needed to hold something while she had these ridiculous conversations with him, these threads of thought that became the kind of snakes that ate their own tails. There were sounds of night in their bedroom, thickened by the layering of memory so that birds became flocks and cars became trains, practically. The conversations themselves became dense snatches of repeated phrases, "You can't open-" and "I want you to but every-" and "Well that's something I don't know, again-". There were others. Benhie felt her hand clench her vaping wand too hard, and the shirt she was folding too fiercely, and her own hair because she'd tried Guy's method of running her hands through it. She felt all that at once, and it was, predictably, too much.
She moaned first. It seemed the right thing to do it felt right, so she moaned some more. Hologram Guy went on saying something about her appointments because he'd always believed that the answer to any ennui was to talk at your Talkee, and he said it many times at once in the booth. The walls practically tremored with his views on her stubbornness. She got angry, just angry, with nothing to bring her anger too ("Your Talkee" said Guy, in multiples, as if the hologrammed men had been listening to her thoughts) and no living person to witness it. She was so mad, and just hummed with fury (literally: she'd moved on from moaning) which grew to hissing which grew to a shout, and she turned inside the projected Guys in her air, from the smells and the confusion and the alarming sensation of touching more than two things at once, as if she had tentacles. She tried to stomp out but was stopped by the door, which locked from the inside when you closed it. She felt how unfair it was to be overwhelmed like this and then be disallowed the ability to stomp out of the space, and how it was the most unfair part of the whole experience.
The line people had changed, gotten their own grieving booths. Now there was an older woman who stood straight as a stick, and a couple who both had glassy, uncaring eyes, and someone young, probably not yet out of Choose school. They looked at her almost sympathetically, as if they thought they should be apologizing for something. She wanted to stomp but felt that would be rude, so she walked back out to the street and to her apartment. When she got there, she stomped all around her studio, marking the floor in one spot and making a racket- sometimes humming, sometimes not- until her downstairs neighbor came to her door to ask her to stop. When he went away mollified, she sat and the anger drained from her. She tried the CogThink that her Talkee had taught her: she told herself it was just a glitch, she replayed the session in her head and modified the effect (just a little- that was the trick to it, you only changed how things had happened just a bit, to keep it "authentique" as her Talkee smilingly put it.) She breathed the non-sad air. It was a good thing that she'd just changed the scent cartridge in her ventilator- her studio air smelled like coconuts, or what she assumed were coconuts since she'd never smelled a real coconut. It was calming.
Her next grieving session was her regular day the following week, Day 5. It had been too long since that terrible glitchy session on Day 4 of the following week, and her Not-Boss at work had noticed a fall in her productivity. Benhie hadn't noticed, which was the most alarming thing about it: she was a real fan of productivity, she was at the assemblies right in the front row mouthing the slogans and catchphrases ("We're all part of the Hive" was one, though no one knew what a hive was anymore; also "Can you yes you can can you yes you can can you yes you can can you YES WE CAN" with clapping.) She normally felt that anything that increased productivity, on an individual or a group scale, was ultimately a good thing. It was the reason for the Grieving and the Talkees in the first place: when you managed your SAD! (for Start Altering Despondency!,) you became the most efficient version of yourself possible.
Except since her breakup with Guy, she'd felt less that way. Except that when she was being honest with herself, which she was doing more and more lately (unintentionally, but there it was,) she had lost sight of productivity as a golden mean since before she broke up with Guy. It was the reason she'd been made a tri-weekly Talker.
The line was as it should have been, with all the regulars. The woman who looked so much like Benhie had changed her hair. It was a different color, but not different enough to erase the likeness between them. Benhie smiled brightly at the woman, who smiled back in the practiced way. Benhie was in a good mind for this session. 8 days was too long to wait for your turn to have negative emotions. She'd picked a memory slab that had something good for her, she hoped. It was the slab with the "I love you's" and the face touches and the waking in the middle of the night just to make love. She intended to shed a tear, wipe it with a new handkerchief she'd brought for the occasion, and go back to herself. She was looking forward to the after.
The sad air was the same, and she handed over the slab with some enthusiasm. She felt hungry for it, and the memory was going to be a steak to her, full of fortifiers. The arm took her slab and popped it in: Guy was there, naked under the covers, smiling. Guy was all around her, smiling. She smiled back. Then, just in that nice pre-crying moment, Guy was everywhere at once: naked, half-naked, clothed, packed even. For some reason the glitch from last week had reproduced asexually, and now she was faced with all of the crying of Guy and all the loving of Guy at the same time. The sheet smell was asphyxiating. Guys hair was shined and not-shined from his hand going through it on the right side, or not. She was in the center of every memory at once, every stupid fight and stupider fit of giggles, she heard Guy's voice talk about her beautiful mouth and her lack of laundry skills and how stubborn she was, and how he was done. He said it like that: "I'm done." She felt the derision for the phrase- he's done, he's like a meatburger that way- and she felt the melting edges of herself when he mentioned her mouth.
Benhie screamed and ran at the robot. It was a robot arm, really, since there wasn't any other piece of a robot in the booth, and she ran at it, her handkerchief still tucked in her fist. She shoved at it and it rolled away, designed for this, indulgent even. So she picked up the chair that was provided in every booth and brought it over her head, much higher than she would have guessed she could, and brought it down on the thing. That helped: there was a nasty clang, so she kept doing it until the robot arm, not designed for this, snapped at one of its' fragile joints and the front piece of it fell to the ground. Benhie put the chair down and sat on it. She was exhausted! The memories that she'd not requested swam around in her head, and despite the fact that the holograms weren't there any more she lived in a miasma of her previous couplehood for twenty minutes. She just sat and breathed while it went away. She wasn't thinking of anything. It was a tremendous relief.
When she left the Grieving both, the line with her usual people had already been served and were in their boxes or gone. Benhie slinked past the current liners. If anyone was looking at her strangely she didn't notice. She went straight to her apartment and thought about things...truthfully she thought about Things, such as why she was not charmed by her own drive for efficiency any more and why Guy hadn't just come out and said what needed to be said. She might have saved herself so much trouble, and they might have stayed together, though she doubted it. He was GAtoGA (Going Along to Get Along) and that right there was the crux of their problem. She Thought more. She was not going to be a production slave any more, not because she was opposed to the idea but because she knew that if she went into another Grieving booth, she would go fully mad. Everything could work perfectly but now she had another memory to Down/Up, but it was a memory of every other memory. She had broken the robot arm but she hadn't broken anything else. She didn't feel like confessing; she didn't feel like making the appointment with another piece of robot (the head, she supposed) to record what had happened, sitting very still for twenty minutes while the sheet of light crossed and re-crossed her eyes, making another slab for her. She didn't feel like having an Apology Event at work, despite the fact that she'd be "encouraged" to bring cake, which meant that she could choose the flavor. She felt like...running. Running? She wasn't sure what that meant exactly, but she thought it meant leaving and staying gone somehow.
Her apartment was a fine place but she had to leave it and she did, taking only a few things that she thought she would really need, such as underwear and money and anything that could be categorized as a snack. She'd just gotten her weekly delivery of groceries so the bag she was using was full of snacks, thank goodness. Benhie looked around, unsure of herself again, but when she thought it out it was the best option for her. It was the option with the least amount of Grieving in it. She went to a Lodge that was right down the street from her and stayed there for two days, nibbling on her snacks, getting off the bed to stretch and walk around the room but otherwise staying put. The TV was on the whole time, including when she slept which was an example of terrible Sleepytime Nopes that she normally abhorred. She was a stickler for Sleepytime Yups and shunned the Nopes, but this was an exception.
On the second day she was rewarded (if that's what you can call it) by the news playing something about her: there was an entreaty for her return. "She's just so Productive normally, and we miss that at work. Benhie, if you're watching this, please come back. The arm at the Grieving center can be paid for- " she blushed when her Not Boss said this, it was the truth for anyone viewing to deconstruct as they liked- "but you have to come back, we all miss you. It's not as terrible as it sounds." Her Not Boss finished with a beautiful smile for someone, but Benhie didn't think it was for her. None of that was very terrifying, but it wasn't soothing and it didn't change her motivation one bit. She had no doubt that she could pay for the arm and go back to being the one who got a Well Done Hoversticker above her head every Day 6 for all of her colleagues to see, but she wasn't done with whatever she was doing yet. She moved to another Lodge and stayed there for three days.
It was confusing: what did she want? This was the question she asked herself every day she was holed away, and every time she saw the begging for her return on the television that she was fully addicted to now. There were people besides her Not Boss asking her to come back, people from work and her sister, whom she hadn't seen in many Ages, who looked pleased at the attention. No one said anything that changed her mind, though she always watched with as open a heart as she could manage. What did she want? She moved around, she used the Lodges that were the least expensive since she knew her money wouldn't last, she bought food out of machines in the lobbies of the Lodges or little stores that were right up the block. She knew she'd have to change something permenantly but she didn't know what it was, and she was beginning to resent her mind for taking her on this pointless walkabout.
At Lodge #4 she was thinking it while she was sitting on the pot, and the small bit of glass shelving that was above her head, big enough to hold two hand towels and one washcloth but nothing else, came unscrewed or unmoored or unconnected to the wall and fell on her, nicking her neck and then clattering to the side, whole. It was a shock: she'd been so deep in contemplation, and who checks the screws on an above-head shelf every time they sit? So it was a shock, like getting hit in the back of the head with a sports ball you didn't see coming, and Benhie burst into tears. The crying felt so immediately good, like having an orgasm or finally emptying your bladder or reaching the perfect point of fullness in your belly, that she smiled while she did it.
Thank You she thought to no one.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Perpetual Dissatisfaction as a Lifestyle Choice
There was a point in time when I thought I knew what I was going to do with the rest of my life. The Acting: oh, how much was I in love? So much so that I was willing, eager, to look forward to the Oscars every year, the Actor's Roshashana, notebook in hand so that I might make lists about vulgarities such as which character actor was being ignored for the Best Supporting award over some Hollywood newbie and what awkwardly glamorous updo worked best on a long face (I have a long face. Gathering data about hairstyles is important when you're twenty and In Love.) I was going to be Helen Mirren- no offense intended, Helen (Dame Mirren and I are old friends [clearly that is a lie.]) I was going to be big, a Big Stah, so that I could work with the other Big Stahs that made my heart flutter when I watched their hearts flutter onscreen. It was sympathy fluttering: we were all a-flutter, and I was convinced to my marrow that this was because I was destined to become one of Them, contorting my face in just the right way for the close-ups, stomping my foot on the boards during breaks in filming future classics like Out of Africa Two: Showers Save Water, doing interviews for magazines. Because magazines featured in my dreaming, because I'm old.
Well, I'm old enough. For what, you ask? That's an excellent question, and I'm glad you asked!...what I seem to be really good at- in such a way that I barely recognize I'm doing it- is being dissatisfied. I live in England so I'm in some good company: 60 million of we Brits (or Non-British Residents, or Immigrant Scum according to EUKIP, Great Britain's counter to America's Tea Party, whom I would call a bunch of twats if it weren't an insult to vaginas) enjoy nothing more than a good bout of complaining. Besides everything being too expensive and the world being run by a bunch of lying beaurocrats who are in danger of being overthrown by a bunch of crazed "God is our Cannon" despots, I personally have a good deal to complain about. Blah blah pain blah acting gone, blah paperwork blah blah Fibrofog which is just like chemofog or fiftieth-hangover-in-a-rowfog blah homesick. I periodically try to cut through all the blah by finding some direction, something that will be simple enough so that I can get my marmalade-thick thoughts around it and will be flexible so that when I'm done tending to my special needs genius child and my special needs genius husband and my ADHD young dog and my aggressive shithead old dog I can whiz through it. But whiz through what? There are so many things to consider!
I could:
- become a librarian. I'd be surrounded by books all the friggin' time, and I love to read! Reading is awesome, so awesome that's it's fundamental (TM)!...Except: to get hired you have to get a masters in Library Science, and then you'd be making some ridiculous pittance so that you could travel around in a non-company car (meaning Your Own, or perhaps Some Bus, and good luck with that) to different underfunded libraries so that you can do their paperwork. And the student loans would affect you and your child and your children's children, on to the seventh generation (maybe THAT is what Sitting Bull was talking about: he saw the future of student financing and was trying to warn us. It wasn't about the environment at all! Or maybe it was! Either way, we really screwed the pooch on that one.)
-teach Acting. Being honest here- and not in a shithead sort of way- I was good at acting. There are people who said I was great at it, and the fact that they were my paid teachers had nothing to do with how their opinions were formed. So it would be gratifying to pass along my sacred knowledge, to teach the youngsters what it means to compare pictures of your own face with others pictures of their own faces FOR HOURS, and to create endless and meaningless Improv games where everyone has to learn how to wander around the room like seaweed. Hey, someone did that to me, so it's just PAYBACK...Ok, I think I see the problem here.
-go to School, to Learn Stuff. Learning is amazing and really the reason we're all here on the planet; the fact that the majority of us in the developed world choose to learn about Kim and Kanye's Million-Dollar Malibu Barbie Dream Brothel with Hydrolic-Lift Rotating Champagne Room for their l'il baby is not the point: there are those who learn well, who learn how to speak French or Mardarin, who learn how to chop wood and install solar arrays and molecular biology so that they can stop the seven-strains-from-now virus that causes Ebola Extreme (although I just can't imagine Ebola any extremer. Also I don't want to. Just show me where to donate, OK? Then let me get back to what Anne Hathaway isn't eating this year.) And, and, and- in theory, I could be one of those Learners, the kind that might do some good with the knowledge. But:...well, the obvious thing is that it costs money, and I hate that. The other is, I suppose, self-doubt. What would I study? French? Mandarin? Psychology, which would be fascinating? And what the hell would I do with a degree when I was done- get a job? Please. People whose undying aspiration was to counsel disturbed French-speaking Chinese nationals, and who studied with fervor and discipline, cannot get a job slinging hash. Or ludes. Nothing, with the exception of crystal meth, and we all know where that leads because we've all seen Breaking Bad. Yikes. Besides, I believe I also have ADHD. And Marfan Syndrome, a deficiency of the connective tissues, which I already have but Marfan is that to the second degree and is therefore somehow that much more interesting. Plus POTS, which stands for PostCradial Orthopeodic Tum-Tum Systemcism, also a problem with the connective tissues but more localized to the left and sometimes right hemerfemurs. I have way too much to learn about my weird body and why it might or might not do a thing, thank you very much.
-Raise Money for Charity. This is a big thing in England- BIG. If you're not raising money for charity, some charity, even something as silly as The Northwest Canine Feel-Goodery Faction (money to help get underprivileged dogs aromatherapy massages) or as banal as HanddOip! (Buckinghamshire's program to provide esteem-raising workshops in handshaking for homeless persons,) then you are effectively a Wanker, no matter how much good you do in your actual life. Don't get me wrong, I am all for some fund-raising and have done a bit of it myself in the past, but the Brits are just bonkers about it. If some news weather presenter isn't daily killing herself a little bit by running so long and kayaking so hard that she pees out a fraction of her own liver, then the People of Great Britain just don't feel as good about themselves. They are ashamed, because being ashamed of themselves is something they do quite well (I expect that comes with having once been a gigantic Empire and subsequently having learned that in becoming said Empire you were quite a bunch of assholes. Not that, as an American, I'd have any idea what that felt like.)
Snarkiness aside, I have to say that the national mania for funraising is pretty cool. It may even provide some direction for me, finally and hoo-frickin'-ray! To that end I might as well announce that I intend to have a fund-raiser of my very own, inspired by my Aunt Julie (who is in much the same sort of situation I am in, physically, and who came up with the idea) and by my lack of athletic ability (self-explanatory.) On the weekend May 31st I'm going to have a one-woman Read-a-Thon, in honor of my parents, Clem and Kathy Biddle. The money raised will go to the McMillan Cancer Group. There, I said it.
Now to load up on some books!
Well, I'm old enough. For what, you ask? That's an excellent question, and I'm glad you asked!...what I seem to be really good at- in such a way that I barely recognize I'm doing it- is being dissatisfied. I live in England so I'm in some good company: 60 million of we Brits (or Non-British Residents, or Immigrant Scum according to EUKIP, Great Britain's counter to America's Tea Party, whom I would call a bunch of twats if it weren't an insult to vaginas) enjoy nothing more than a good bout of complaining. Besides everything being too expensive and the world being run by a bunch of lying beaurocrats who are in danger of being overthrown by a bunch of crazed "God is our Cannon" despots, I personally have a good deal to complain about. Blah blah pain blah acting gone, blah paperwork blah blah Fibrofog which is just like chemofog or fiftieth-hangover-in-a-rowfog blah homesick. I periodically try to cut through all the blah by finding some direction, something that will be simple enough so that I can get my marmalade-thick thoughts around it and will be flexible so that when I'm done tending to my special needs genius child and my special needs genius husband and my ADHD young dog and my aggressive shithead old dog I can whiz through it. But whiz through what? There are so many things to consider!
I could:
- become a librarian. I'd be surrounded by books all the friggin' time, and I love to read! Reading is awesome, so awesome that's it's fundamental (TM)!...Except: to get hired you have to get a masters in Library Science, and then you'd be making some ridiculous pittance so that you could travel around in a non-company car (meaning Your Own, or perhaps Some Bus, and good luck with that) to different underfunded libraries so that you can do their paperwork. And the student loans would affect you and your child and your children's children, on to the seventh generation (maybe THAT is what Sitting Bull was talking about: he saw the future of student financing and was trying to warn us. It wasn't about the environment at all! Or maybe it was! Either way, we really screwed the pooch on that one.)
-teach Acting. Being honest here- and not in a shithead sort of way- I was good at acting. There are people who said I was great at it, and the fact that they were my paid teachers had nothing to do with how their opinions were formed. So it would be gratifying to pass along my sacred knowledge, to teach the youngsters what it means to compare pictures of your own face with others pictures of their own faces FOR HOURS, and to create endless and meaningless Improv games where everyone has to learn how to wander around the room like seaweed. Hey, someone did that to me, so it's just PAYBACK...Ok, I think I see the problem here.
-go to School, to Learn Stuff. Learning is amazing and really the reason we're all here on the planet; the fact that the majority of us in the developed world choose to learn about Kim and Kanye's Million-Dollar Malibu Barbie Dream Brothel with Hydrolic-Lift Rotating Champagne Room for their l'il baby is not the point: there are those who learn well, who learn how to speak French or Mardarin, who learn how to chop wood and install solar arrays and molecular biology so that they can stop the seven-strains-from-now virus that causes Ebola Extreme (although I just can't imagine Ebola any extremer. Also I don't want to. Just show me where to donate, OK? Then let me get back to what Anne Hathaway isn't eating this year.) And, and, and- in theory, I could be one of those Learners, the kind that might do some good with the knowledge. But:...well, the obvious thing is that it costs money, and I hate that. The other is, I suppose, self-doubt. What would I study? French? Mandarin? Psychology, which would be fascinating? And what the hell would I do with a degree when I was done- get a job? Please. People whose undying aspiration was to counsel disturbed French-speaking Chinese nationals, and who studied with fervor and discipline, cannot get a job slinging hash. Or ludes. Nothing, with the exception of crystal meth, and we all know where that leads because we've all seen Breaking Bad. Yikes. Besides, I believe I also have ADHD. And Marfan Syndrome, a deficiency of the connective tissues, which I already have but Marfan is that to the second degree and is therefore somehow that much more interesting. Plus POTS, which stands for PostCradial Orthopeodic Tum-Tum Systemcism, also a problem with the connective tissues but more localized to the left and sometimes right hemerfemurs. I have way too much to learn about my weird body and why it might or might not do a thing, thank you very much.
-Raise Money for Charity. This is a big thing in England- BIG. If you're not raising money for charity, some charity, even something as silly as The Northwest Canine Feel-Goodery Faction (money to help get underprivileged dogs aromatherapy massages) or as banal as HanddOip! (Buckinghamshire's program to provide esteem-raising workshops in handshaking for homeless persons,) then you are effectively a Wanker, no matter how much good you do in your actual life. Don't get me wrong, I am all for some fund-raising and have done a bit of it myself in the past, but the Brits are just bonkers about it. If some news weather presenter isn't daily killing herself a little bit by running so long and kayaking so hard that she pees out a fraction of her own liver, then the People of Great Britain just don't feel as good about themselves. They are ashamed, because being ashamed of themselves is something they do quite well (I expect that comes with having once been a gigantic Empire and subsequently having learned that in becoming said Empire you were quite a bunch of assholes. Not that, as an American, I'd have any idea what that felt like.)
Snarkiness aside, I have to say that the national mania for funraising is pretty cool. It may even provide some direction for me, finally and hoo-frickin'-ray! To that end I might as well announce that I intend to have a fund-raiser of my very own, inspired by my Aunt Julie (who is in much the same sort of situation I am in, physically, and who came up with the idea) and by my lack of athletic ability (self-explanatory.) On the weekend May 31st I'm going to have a one-woman Read-a-Thon, in honor of my parents, Clem and Kathy Biddle. The money raised will go to the McMillan Cancer Group. There, I said it.
Now to load up on some books!
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