bad mad

Self absorbed, self deceiving non-ownership taking self pitying man.

lowest common abominator

At the end of the day – a really good day even – those depressives can still suck the wind out of any sails, spin the smallest setback into fullblown catastrophe, infect others with their endless wetblanketry, and be a really big dickhead.  At the ends of those days I strongly urge the effing pill that makes him stfu.  Sorry for the potty mouth.

Mrs. Steven S.

Sitting in the uncomfortable salon chair today, neck painfully cradled in the comfy u of porcelain, incongruously getting a great scalp massage, I overheard The Bride in the seat beside me, rhapsodizing about how crazy in love he is with her.  How sweet he looks — or rather, how sweet she solicited the stylist, motherly russian hottie, to assure her he looks.  How she knew I couldn’t say – turning your head so much as an inch in one of those things could result in unplanned death by cranial hemorrage.  And on she went.  Rehearsal dinner in 3 hours.  The rain forcast for tomorrow, the shampoo boy earnestly telling her rain is good luck, the I can’t believe I’m getting married!  The I’ll be married, actually married! I’ll be an old woman!

“I just have to see this old woman,” i said to the shampoo boy, risking said hemorrage. Less than 25.  Her mother in law thinks it looks orange, her hair.  And tomorrow at this time she’ll be Mrs. Steven S!  Wife of Dr. Stephen S., that is, last name withheld.  Salon coincidence dictated we end up in adjacent seats again.  Occasionally the frothy excitement sustained by the sylist subsided, and she, shamelessly entitled, continued wtih a renewed breathy “I can’t believe I’m getting married tomorrow,” followed that I could see, this time, by rueful mugging, as though on set of a sitcom in which she starred as the never-thought-she-had-it-in-her protagonist.  At this point questions arose, such as rehearsal dinner in just over 2 hours?  Her blowdry/style revealed that her highlights started down about 4 inches from her head, and were of such an icy shade mingled in with the warmer tones that I kind of saw what the mother in law was talking about.  Like a shameless little princess mooning about her ruby slippers and pink fuzzy tiara, the Bride carnivorously paraded her Mrs. Stephen S. and I can’t believe i’m going to be married, slipping in the odd question of what she should do if he doesn’t call her tonight!  Oh no!  Should she call him?  At this point i wondered by the middle aged stylist was the only one walking this girl through her rehearsal dinner preparations.  I wonder if he will call her tonight… I wonder if he knows preventative medicine fora  frail ego seeking to define herself with his identity, name and all.  I’m sure she called first.

sugar crash

The big boy told my little boy there is no santa, that grownups buy you the presents.  I had hoped he’d one day — maybe in 6 months — let on, but the little boy found out on Christmas Eve, and didn’t know what to do with it- he still has not spoken of it.  He spoke his worries that he was not good enough to get presents.  I wouldn’t have thought this, but I’m tremendously sad to see his small doubt was turned into certainty this year — why?  He’s such a good little soul, and so full of love and magic, it’s unbearable to think of him knowing better.  His fate, it seems, is to be sadder and wiser.  His yesterday’s shell-shock is gone, but his face is not smiling.

led

Being freaked out makes for an interesting dynamic at home, what with the imminent heart attack fears and all.  I went away for a weekend, and re-entry semi-sucked, as it always does (except that the darling man vacuumed up a whole house! several times, after the squirrel trashed so much).  Coming back down to some else’s anxiety and OCD… someone else’s unexpected lab results and resulting fears, to doctors actually activated to alert status, tinkering with medicines.  But wow, again, that year of intensive outpatient treatment has not yet met its match.  Skills are deployed, waters calmed, oversized christmas tree procured.  l.e.d.s are cold.  this christmas is cold so far.  Here’s the strained analogy: l.e.d.s look like lights — the ones with warmth and memories, but feel like a cheap stand-in for real light.  like this on-the-surface happy family, with the darkness waiting to jump out of the cake.  But no complaints, really.  Everyone is finding new ways to deal with old troubles, and I am trying to look away from the l.e.d.

good

I’m not sad anymore, like last year.  He’s not manic anymore, like last year.  He never stopped being sweet since coming home from the hospital.  It shouldn’t be enough, the absence of drama and animosity, but it is.  I can’t shake the habit of assuming the worst first….. not that I fault myself for that — seems like good planning in this case.  Still, calm, normal.  Things are kind again.  Separation unseparated for the most part and now we’re back at square 1, plus almost of year of cognitive behavioral therapy every day.  Sq1+CBT is a good place to be.

flaxen waxen

When will the nightmare end…. everywhere you look, old, old pasty fleshtone lips.  I like lipstick.

You get dropped down into the 18th century — what on earth — don’t they see how stupid those wigs look?  Can’t the see that dirty horsehair and powder and sweat aren’t pretty?  I look around now, and see everyone (increasingly men, too) in the grip of a belief that they can’t have grey hair.  Brownier browns and brassier tones than nature intended, up to but often not including the root, on everyone regardless of age.   They look sad and desperate, like the promise of shopping at Forever 21 will really come through for them.  Hard to know how to look at 43, when there is no person currently alive in this country in this increasingly desperately highlighted decade who looks 43. Take home message: 43 is bad? Grey hair bad? But pasty lips good?

the road less… no not that road! The other one!

I want to go on vacation.  There must be much driving — enough to feel stultified, to get to that point at which a modest 2 star AA rated motel with old, old decor but a murkish pool in the parking lot fenced area feels like decadence.  I want to swim under the stars in Montana, and giggle at running horse paintings in Wyoming and stop at every brown roadside sign and avoid mcdonalds in every state and listen to dozens of books on tape and just look at everything they way they want us to see it.  I want to time travel, to a place where a kid is excited by this prospect, rather than blunting it by his indifference and cushy lifestyle.  He is a little bossy with me lately, so that also blunts the prospect of joy.  I want to toss a tent and an air mattress and some pillows and swim gear and extra notebooks and books and books on tape into a car, crammed full, load it with apples and good intentions and a camera and see where we end up.  But we live so damn far from anything that it seems like 2 days until we’d come to a starting point.  I am losing steam at the prospect of Monday’s as-yet unplanned vacation and the prospects of severe irritation and dustiness and swollen tonsils and bored child.

I am not without punitive secret weapons — the trip one is forced to take because one did not take an active-enough interest in the charms of the Mitchell Corn Palace: there is always…..Walden Pond!

eeew

First there were egg yolks.  No, steak.  I liked it, I think, but then I saw one (at eye level) on a table, running red juice and was seized by revulsion.  Also, the muscle fibers. 

Then there were egg yolks.  I loved sunny side up eggs, dipping toast into the mess, until one split second when all my understanding of egg yold rearranged itself in my mind and again, revulsion set in, never to diminish.

Liver=revulsion, inability to swallow, hours-long gag reflex practice.

Then there were adult things to suddenly realize I disliked: Rick, for instance.  Nice enough boyfriend for those three months, but then one day, during a petulant display (his), revulsion set in.  Never did see him again.

And semi-boyfriend Johnny, too, come to think of that, back in the 90s.  Changing my mind about him was more about the revelation of his cocaine habit.  It scared me and I disembarked.  Same too with husband.  Easy to leave when things are ugly+dangerous like that.  Weird when they morph back into your long lost whatever.  For him, detox+five months+ death threats from sad junkies= revulsion. 

Indigo-by-Clark’s shoes.  What a mix: must have styling on 90% of the shoe, frequently botched up a bit by an understyled toe.  Ruined by an unfinished bit, much as the loathed PT Cruiser is ruined by the hood or that 10 years-back Corvette was by the uncarved, bar-of-soap shape of its backside.  Still: I’ve had my share of pairs and sadly… they feel wonderful for an hour, until the wallowing of your arch (because it is too “sensible” on the inside) causes massive foot cramps.

And Keens.  I just can’t look down on oversized, dipped-in-rubber feet anymore. 

And my school.  I was very patriotic until they did not cooperate with my summer plans — this, technically, is known as a “snit.”

I can politely eat red meat in social situations where I have to.  I will not eat egg yolks.  I will not probably buys Keens, but will probably get more Indigos until someone somewhere invents something nonwallowey.  I will not date drug dealing boys from martial arts class, will not look back dumping petulant investment brokers, and will never, under any circumstance, have liver.

those voices in your head

In no particular order.

Martha Stewart: (from 1990s K-Mart commercials) “Make your bed, EVERY day…”   And the funny thing is, I have.  I certainly didn’t learn that from my mother.  All it took was one dictatorial good hostess, and I found myself, despite evening falling, rectifying my perhaps once-a-year nonbedmaking gaffe.  I made it, and slept better for it.

My Mother: “Who do you think you are?”  Which is the point, really, of growing up — learning that.  Heard too many times to count.  She has been dead, officially, for 19 years and one day.  Long enough technically for her to have had a great grandchild, had she survived and I been more lax prophylactically.  

Polymorphous Catholic Inner Voices (we’ll call her Polly for short): You will burn in hell for all eternity — or maybe not;  just offer it  up to the poor souls in purgatory. 

My Mother: (extrapolated rather than voiced) – I will burn in hell for all eternity.  Or maybe not, maybe I’ll just go to church again.  The crime:  birth control.  The punishment: another sibling.  And burning in hell for all eternity.

Sister Dorothy:  Don’t touch yourself there!  The thing is, I am now Sr. D. (whose other accomplishment was teaching me to read clock faces), but only to one child, and nothing to do with a probable urinary track infection.  I have learned good tricks to influence students to do things they don’t want to do, all except that one child.  She digs in her heels and refuses to spite me, incapable of seeing who she is really spiting.  My head-shaking sorrowful “I certainly wish you have chosen to finish this project this year.  It is such a shame to not have it done”  — the pluperfect disapproval obviously scraping the bottom of the reactionary barrel, and was received in precisely the same manner in which I heard Sr. Dorothy effectively accuse me of masturbation that day I went for the itch, at age 7 or so.  There was shame.  This girl is 100% solid self defence and perfect resilience, restructuring the event in her retelling to show off wanting her project to be different from everybody else’s (if you can call half-finished a variation on a theme).  There was only that one wavering moment of recognizing that on that deepest level, I disapproved….and then it was gone.  Why, then, did I never develop an adequate defense for Sr. D’s inappropriate misconstruction of my intentions?  She branded me on the forehead that day with a giant M to signify out-of-control-pervert-masturbator.  This kid is a mess, but far happier than I ever was, reframing her unpleasant experience into an individualistic stylistic choice.   I wish I didn’t, in that one moment, make myself her Sister Dorothy, whom she will remember until she dies for reasons of discomfort.

Fr. Martin: (to a whole class)  Don’t look at dirty pictures of naked ladies!

Julia Roberts:  (from Pretty Woman)… “I say who…I say when……I say who.”  When taken out of solo-prostitute vs. pimped girl as a lifestyle choice defense, she makes a good point.  Ladies, don’t let anyone choose for you.

Disturbing phrase read yesterday: Amish puppy mill. 

Disturbing occurrence: almost considered getting dog (and lifetime supply of claritin and asthma drugs).

Disturbing change in habit — now willing to flush stinkbugs, due to the plague and all.  I hate to kill.

Disturbing plan for the day: work, work, work, then work.