Pictures! From a telephone!
My life is lived through Flickr lately. Last night, I drank a Shasta cola/vodka combination and made people tell me their deep inner fears and insecurities and got lost in a mansion-type place owned by the Totino’s Pizza empire. And I really need to stop excitedly telling people how often I don’t get out. Maybe they’ll just believe that I do this all the time if I shut up about it for three seconds. I fell asleep on a red couch and woke up in someone else’s shirt. My head feels like it’s been trapped inside a screaming ape.
. . .
Best sitcom moment of the night:
ME: Look at the old phone over there. Doesn’t it look out of place in a mansion?
MARY: Yeah, it looks like a grandma phone.
SOMEONE: Did I overhear that there’s a grammaphone?
MARY: No, I said ‘grandma phone.’
PARTY HOST: Actually, if you look behind you, there is a grammaphone.
MARY: Oh, but we were talking about grandma phones.
PARTY HOST: Didn’t someone say ‘grammaphone’? Because there’s a real one right here.
. . .
Chris is still in Vietnam. He’s having a blast, but when I crawled in bed this morning, dazed and headachy from an impending hangover, I kept trying to push my back up against someone that wasn’t there.
I think all my best stories get stowed in other secret web spaces because I feel too exposed here. I wonder if it’s to my benefit to be a little less sterile in these parts?
I do a lot of things that feel like passing time. Quiet things, like stirring honey into tea and kicking snow off my shoes. I do these things slowly, though not out of an urge to savor details. More from anticipation of the stretch of empty time set in front of me, something of which I’m normally unafraid, but then there’s this weekend.
An admissions counselor for one of the schools I applied for told me her life story, nervously, sloppily, in 10 minutes. She ended it with, “…and then I go home and turn on all the lights and sit in my living room. I just sort of rock back and forth in my chair until I think enough time has gone by, and then I go to bed. I’ve been doing this for ten years.” There’s nothing good to say to this. No instinctual words of empathy, just a round bubble of fear in the sternum.
That isn’t how I feel. I’ve spent many hours alone my entire life. I thrive on being alone. But the truth is — I’ve always had people surrounding me. Even if I holed in my room with the door closed and the music cranked for hours, I knew someone was in the kitchen or watching TV. I wonder what it’s like to have no one surrounding you. This seems to be a common theme lately. I always think I need to be prepared for the extreme, just in case. I need to be able to deal with complete and utter blankness and a silent house.
I do this thing every night before I lock the doors. I open the back door and I stick my head out for a second, to get a feel for the cold. I imagine having to live in the snow with no heat or food, and then I pull myself back inside to feel the dry warmth of the house. This sounds like some sort of liberal bullshit and in a way, it is, because I don’t necessarily feel comforted when I step back in. I feel insulated and sheltered. I always know exactly how many steps it is to my bedroom. My hands shake a little when I take the bus. My risk of the day last week was driving three miles out of my way to go to a different grocery store. In my head, I spend hours preparing for scenarios that never occur. I live a fancy life, alone, in this bedroom, while people weave like ribbon on the ice outside.
And to think the only thing in my head right now is, “I should’ve been in bed three hours ago.”
For those interested, I set up a page for excerpts from Chris’s e-mails while he’s in Vietnam. You can find that here. Also, Minh posted some photos on Flickr, and you can see those here. There’s a lot of pictures of people gnawing the shit out of some snails.
The author as a young tragic fountain figure
Today is Zosia Blue Choose-Your-Own-Adventure!
Perhaps you’re in the mood for a small anecdote. Is this true? Then the first option is for you. Need a reflection about swollen throats and the art of being weird, one you’ve perhaps read elsewhere if you and I know each in other distant internet lands? Then the option under “more” is yours.
Small Anecdote
We’ve nicknamed all the clerks at the local Cub Foods, but the most notable one is Slowest Guy in the World. This isn’t a casual moniker. This man, really and truly, is the slowest person in the entire universe. He’s like a robot with near-dead batteries. He’s an oiless tin-man. Someone poured honey into his ears and berry-picked key cells needed for motion. I don’t know what the deal is.
As he scans groceries, he picks up each item and fondles it lovingly, examining all possible edges. He looks up at you with a wide, vacant grin and comments on your purchase. Then he scans it as if initiating an elegant, long-winded ballet. His speech is so slow I feel hypnotized. It’s not slow in, say, a person-with-stroke way; it’s like he’s savoring and discovering each word as it leaves his mouth. This might be inspirational were it not completely and utterly bafflingly irritating. Are you ready for the punch line? I know you are. He’s always, inevitably, working the express lane, and his register is always empty. I forget his malady each time I go in there, and run straight towards the empty line. His eyes light up in much the same speed as Pangea splitting into continents, and I cry inside.
Read More »
For the past week, each evening at midnight I’ve received spam from someone named Vivian. The spam only says one thing, which is: “Before use read help.” There’s an attached file, which I’ve never downloaded, of course — though I’m tempted to do so, now that Vivian and I have formed a relationship. I haven’t been sleeping, (though not because of a blue funk; I’m quite well, thanks for asking) and when I do, I just lie on my back and think of things I need to do at work, so I wait up for Vivian. Vivian is always on time. Her message comes, and I ponder the existence of the universe and the zenness of “before use read help.” Vivian is ubiquitous, or she should be.
Tonight, Vivian didn’t write. It’s past midnight now, so I waited up for her a bit. I’m a little disappointed. I wonder if I did something, like inadvertently unsubscribe from a spam mailing list. I wonder how I get her back. It’s really quiet and small here. For the first time today, though I was happy and humming under my breath in the grocery store, I felt a weird swatch of ache in the back of my head. It was new, something I’ve never noticed before. I wish Vivian would write so I could tell her I think I just figured out what it means to be lonely. And maybe a little lame.
I slept upstairs last night, badly. I don’t like sleeping in the basement when Chris is gone. In fact, the whole bedroom feels eerie and freezing, like the absence of its main occupant for one day sucked the lifeforce dry. I had to get up much earlier this morning than usual, so I knew I was in a for a rough night, but good grief, I slept an hour total, if that. First, I couldn’t stop thinking about two of my touchiest subjects, stories so dicey to me that I’m physically unable to entertain them for more than 30 seconds. Two memories, really, that make my neck grow hot and my heart shrink whenever I try to replay them. Sometimes I think if I was ever able to write out these memories or at least say them aloud, if even to an empty room or a cat, some issues I have would instantly disappear. Or maybe that’s the flimsiness behind “talk therapy.”
When I was finally about to fall asleep, the cats began picking at a near-empty cereal bowl on my desk. The noise was loud and grating and like cat tongue on Cheerios, which, I suppose, it was. Then around quarter of 5, Andrew’s alarm went off so loudly I banged my head against the wall which effectively made me sleepy. And then an hour later, my alarm went off, and I spent the day in haze, seeing animals and colors in the corners of my eyes.
Chris called from Singapore, his layover before he reaches Ho Chi Minh City. We talked for 8 minutes and it cost $92. He said the city was very clean.
I was drunk this weekend, all because of one very full gorgonzola martini. Minh was trying to teach Chris Vietnamese, so as I skipped with cheese martini glee, I began shouting Vietnamese phrases much louder than I meant to. In my head, they sounded soft and rounded, words bored kids would whisper in a temple. Chris grabbed my elbow and told me I sounded like I was screaming for help. I said, “I am loving the world in Vietnamese!”
I took a few pictures, but nothing spectacular. I made my first Flickr group, which is medium spectacular. Chris is gone for three weeks, which is low on the spectacular side. I feel very strange. I’m not devastated or weepy or lost; instead, I feel a little disoriented, like I misplaced something important and I can’t retrace my steps. I had a dream once in which he died and I kept repeating over and over, “But we had so much more to say to each other.” I have all my stories from the day saved up and no where to put them. I wonder if he feels the same.
I keep mourning for things that haven’t happened yet. I just put two slices of cheese bread in the oven, and suddenly, I felt a little punch of sadness. My Dad always made me cheese toast on weekend mornings. He’d set them on a clear plate and we’d sit at the kitchen table and drink tea. But today, I didn’t feel the regret of childhood lost; I actually felt sad as if he had died, which he hasn’t. I thought — when he does die, this will always remind me of him. I’m sure I won’t be able to make cheese toast for months or even years after he’s gone.
But it’s so dangerous to predict things like this because you never know. In my high school relationship, I decided when or if he and I broke up, a certain Sarah McLachlan CD would remind me most of him. It would be the one CD I wouldn’t be able to listen to without crying or feeling lost. When we did break up, however, the truth was I couldn’t listen to any music, not on CD, not on the radio, not even on movie trailers. And the things I had assumed would remind me of him didn’t hurt as much as the things I hadn’t even imagined.
I don’t know why I’m always intent on preparing for future emotions. These preparations are neither useful or accurate, but, instead, just feed a need to control the world.
I got this at the thrift store for 29 cents. If you can’t tell, the neighborhood milkman is about to get demolished by a wolverine in a wooden box. Inside the card it says: “Sorry about your predicament.”
If I have your address, the next time you have a predicament, guess what.
Thought of another one. I’m not sure why most of these are vulgar, but so it goes.
1. Male pubic hair: when I was 10, my family hosted a Danish exchange student who was obsessed with New Kids on the Block and penpals. She would send slap books back and forth between her friends with questions that ranged from, “If you would do Jordan Knight, write your name here,” and “Which New Kid has the best ass?” She would never let me see them, however, citing my age, so, of course, I stole one when she was gone. I didn’t know much about sex and sexual anatomy in general, but I did know women had pubic hair, as I was starting to, uh, develop myself.
But one of the questions I read in the slap book absolutely nailed me: “Would you floss with Donnie Wahlberg’s pubic hair?” I didn’t really understand the crassness of the question, but I was absolutely floored by the concept of male pubic hair. I think I had previously pictured all guys as smooth and skinned over down there, like an androgynous statue. And so, every time I think or deal with pubic hair, I think of the Danish exchange student and flossing with Donnie’s pubic hair. It’s the type of image I wish I could purge from my brain.
In other news, Chris leaves for Vietnam and Thailand for three weeks on Monday. We haven’t spent a lot of time apart before, so the house will feel very quiet without him. There’s also that small tug of, “Fuck! He’s so far away! What if he gets maimed and/or beaten and/or bitten and/or malariaed?” Since communication will be questionable while he’s there, I’m not sure how much we’ll get to talk. My hope is I’ll get writing done, but eh, I’ll probably watch a lot of movies and eat things straight from pans, which is what I do when I’m alone, among other things. (I don’t really walk around naked when I’m by myself in the house, but I do wear this really ugly red robe and matching ugly shirt, two items no one likes but me.)
I guess death is something you get used to, like anything, but I’m new to it. I’ve known people who have died, including classmates, ex-boyfriends and distant relatives, but as silly as it might sound, my dog was the first close death I’ve experienced. I was close to those who died before, but not in recent times, or not at all, but Lady feels like a first. I’m sure there’s a lot of “death of childhood” issues tangled in here, as well, but, really, I just miss my puppy.
I feel a little stupid about how I feel — I have friends who are going through parent and grandparent deaths right now — but I can’t deny this little continuing ache in my ribs. Strangely enough, I’ve only felt this way in two other instances, both involving the break-up of a long-term relationship. I think it’s the idea of desperately wanting a person (or a dog), and knowing with full certainty there’s no way to have them, no matter how deeply you wish.
I remember, too, thinking at the beginning of this year how I was coming to the end of many things. My dogs — all old — couldn’t live forever. There was the unthinkable idea of my parents, also getting older (especially my father, 71 this year). My last six months living in a college-style house with a band in the basement and someone always in the living room. The end of terminal unemployment, which, while a good thing, is disconcerting in a strange way. But, to be honest, I mostly thought of my dogs, how I felt this year might be it for them, especially for Lady, who had always been a little sickly. I don’t think it’s any type of prophecy, but more of an uneasy acceptance for which I didn’t know I was ready.
Last night, I had horrible dreams involving Chris dying and my parents dying and, basically, everyone I knew dying in some dangerous fashion. I woke completely drained and tired and heartachy, but I went to work, anyway, and while I felt like shit, I stayed and was focused. I only mention this because I think this is the death of my irresponsibility. I would’ve taken a week off if my dog died. Now, I have bills to pay, so I go. This is sad, too, for some childish reason.
Thanks for all your nice comments. You’re such good people.
My Mom called to let me know one of my dogs, Lady, died last night. We got her when I was 12, and out of the three dogs we have, she was the one who took to me. I spent many angsty teenage nights crying into her fur, proclaiming she was the only one who cared about me. She loved treats and the sun and would roll on her back and kick her legs spastically when she was happy. This was sort of expected, but my heart is more than a little broken.