I fainted on an airplane today, which combined two of my greatest fears of all time: something scary happening on an airplane and having a medical emergency. I was overtired, so I was sleeping against the window with my legs pulled up to my chest. Suddenly, my stomach started to get all twisty and I thought I was having some anxiety about flying, which, while I hadn’t even been thinking about flying and was half-asleep, wouldn’t have been completely out of the question. I took a few deep breaths, but then broke into a draining cold sweat, and realized I probably needed to puke, like, immediately. I half-stood up to motion to my seatmate that I needed to get out and then, voila, my face was in the man’s crotch. Vaguely, I could feel the guy shaking me, and I heard him call the flight attendant.
I kept trying to sit up, but I was too woozy, so I sort of hovered on the seat, making weak, horrible jokes about falling in the guy’s lap, much to the chagrin of his wife and four children who were in the surrounding seats. The flight attendant brought over some orange juice and an oxygen tank, and when I still didn’t respond quickly enough, she went to the front and asked cheerfully over the loudspeaker, “IS THERE A DOCTOR ON BOARD?” They actually say these things! Apparently, there were no doctors on board, if evidenced by the stunned silence that followed her announcement.
The oxygen and the orange juice helped, so I was able to sit up without attaching my face to the floor. The very sweet Texan flight attendant asked me several times if I thought we needed to land the plane, and I told her no, no, I was fine. Immediately, she clicked back on the loudspeaker and announced, “HEY EVERYONE! THE GIRL IS FINE! NO NEED TO LAND THE PLANE!” By this time, I was conscious enough to realize that a plane full of people were getting a play-by-play of my life. The scenario would’ve been brought to its climax if everyone had clapped and cheered and threw flowers at me when she made the announcement. Sadly, the rest of the flight continued quietly, with me moved to the front with my oxygen tank so the attendant could keep an eye on me. She told me I might pass out again on the descent because of the pressure change, which is the worst thing to tell a raging, panicky hypochondriac like myself, so I chugged the oxygen the whole way down, and I survived without dying.
They somehow radioed to Chris to have him bypass security and meet me at the front gate, only telling him that I had gone into “diabetic shock,” which wasn’t necessarily true and turned him into a basketcase. I wobbled out of the gate, peeked around the hallway, and saw Chris running down the hallway like a Colin Farrell movie, crying and panicking. And then he immediately bench-pressed 250 pounds. (”Can I write that you cried?” “Only if you say I then ate a bloody raw steak with a screwdriver or something equally masculine.”) I was feeling delirious about the whole thing, so I started laughing uncontrollably and the flight attendant stared at me like I was batshit and Chris was hugging me and yelling, “It’s not funny! It’s not funny!” There was a wheelchair waiting for me, but I declined and then proceeded to run into everyone on my flight, who were all very nice and asked if I was okay, which was rather mortifying and I was tempted to make up a great story, like, “Yes, I think I accidentally swallowed a scorpion, but I’m okay now.” ?? I don’t know. My wit was low.
I went to the doctor right when I got home, and my blood pressure and blood sugar were in the lower range, but since I’ve never passed out before, I’m going back for a physical later in the week.
This was almost like snakes on a plane, except it was girl fainting in a crotch on a plane. I feel like I need to sleep for six thousand hours, but I’m sure I’ll panic about this in morning. I asked the flight attendant if this happens often and she thought about it for about a minute, then replied, “Nope! It doesn’t.” I wanted to hear, “YES! People are fainting, like, every five seconds on the plane. No worries!”
Like the true interneter I am, while I was face-down in the seat next to me, the thought of, “Someone should take a picture so I can have a visual when I write about this!” went through my head. “Okay, I’m going to reenact what happened, and then you, ma’am, take the picture from the back angle, and you, sir, get it from the ground up and I’ll do a slow motion thing here with my face so we can get the exact expression as I make contact with the crotch.”
I wanted to tell you this in a super funny way, but I feel like all my bones have turned to dead eels and that a sharp thing is living in the back of my neck. So no laughing until I take a nap.
Oops, I forgot I’ve already talked about my zen plane thing before.
Happy everything, you. My eve was low-key and lovely, and I feel decidely cheerier than I have the past few days. The true crime novel spree continues, however, so every light gets flipped on as I walk through the house.
I had a hallmark moment with my next-door neighbor. My hometown neighborhood is your average middle-class suburb, with cutesy matching street names and an association that decides things like what color you can paint your fence. My family has always been the strange ones on the block, mostly because we’re anti-social and have three huge dogs that render answering the doorbell impossible. (My boyfriends always had to meet me outside the garage, lest they be barked into deafness.) My neighbors next door have always seemed like your perfect 2.5 family, with the mini-van and the treehouse and the sparkly holiday decorations. I used to babysit for their kids (who are now 18 and 20, Jesus Christ), but I always got the feeling they thought we were giant scary weirdos, which I suppose we are. Without fail, however, the Mom of the family makes a Christmas treat (gingerbread, a cheeseball — it changes each year) and brings it over with a card on Christmas Eve. She’s done this for 12 years, and this year, I met her at the garage, took the gingerbread and I suddenly felt like apologizing for being strange.
“I’m sorry we didn’t talk much while I lived here,” was how I put it.
She smiled, then said, “I couldn’t imagine this place without your family, acutally,” and walked next door.
Back-handed compliment, maybe, but made me feel the spirit and such. Every time I’m home, I come back with a few more clues about my roots and my own habits. This year has been an especially meaningful fact-finding mission, and I feel like I have a better understanding of a lot of things I was unsure of over the years. I feel deeply and strangely about my family — we’re dysfunctional in quiet ways, but we’re gypsies, too, consistently restless and unable to be content in one place. Curse of the Irish or some such generalization.
In other news, the weather was nice enough to practically sunbathe. Instead, I crunched through dead leaves in the forest behind our house, looking for the pumpkin patch I planted when I was 12. I found the old sign, leaning against a tree that had fallen during the hurricane a few years back. It said: “HERE IS THE 100 ACRE WOOD AND PUMPS THAT ARE FULL OF KINS.” Sweet.
I’m in Virginia. I had all these things to say, but now it’s late and I’ve been reading a biography on Ted Bundy and I’m freaked. You’d think growing up in a household spilling over with true crime novels would have anesthetized me to this kind of fear, but no. I’m making all three dogs sleep with me.
On the plane ride over, I had all these life-affirming thoughts, as usual. I’ve never smoked pot, but I’ve been around enough people who have, and I’m pretty sure the things I think on a plane are similar to those of someone high. I’m terrified hours leading up to the flight, so I smuggle vodka in a 7UP bottle and have an overpriced 7&7 at the airport bar and by the time I get on the plane, my body and mind are on a cottony pillow of non-doom. I can look out the window and think, “This is it and this is it and this is it. Nothing can be done now.” And it’s the only instance in my life that being out of control of my mortal soul feels freeing. I astral project to the wing of the plane and dangle my feet over the smoke and the tiny lights. It’s cool. It’s okay. I always have my headphones on, too, so this time around, John Hermanson was wailing about something or other, and I was watching Chicago and Milwaukee and Baltimore sing past me. Whatever. You know.
But the minute the plane landed; the moment I exhaled and stepped on the jetway, everything felt fucked all over again. Maybe it’s a generational thing, the constant doom. Maybe it’s a liberal thing. I don’t know. But in the backseat of my parents’ car, the next day’s hangover creeping in my temples, watching my hometown and all its ugliness and all its familiarity gloss by in the window — well, whatever. I never have an answer for this type of introspection. It cuts closer when I’m in my old bedroom, feeling ancient, but also like nothing’s changed.
I think my 25th year should include less of the vague, starry panic. I think there should be more doing, less analyzing. 25 has also been the year I thought everything would tie itself together. Maybe so?
I think I’ve officially been sick on the holidays for three years running now. I would like to say, what gives? But I don’t know who I’d be asking that question, unless it would be my own stupid propensity for drinking whiskey at the onset of a cold. Which means I would be asking the propensity. Which means my brain is zinging on cold medicine, so much that I had to leave work two hours early because I suddenly couldn’t remember the exact words to that “B I NGO, B I NGO, BI NGO, Bingo was his, etc.” song and it was suddenly crucially live-or-die important that I do so.
Here’s what’s happening this week: tonight, I was going to a show, and it stings my little scenester heart that I can’t because I haven’t been to a show in a week or so, but the mucous will go on. So, there will be packing of clothing; there will be buying of last-minute gifts; there will be organizing of desks, and tomorrow, there will be more work and then flying to the East Coast and then sitting in my parents’ kitchen, eating the grilled cheese my mother will sweetly and inevitably make for me, while sneaking small bites to the puppies.
And then Christmas, and then back to Minnesota, and then more work, and then no work, and then it’s back to school full-time, which means learning the bus and learning to fit in as a student, adapting the philosophy-class strut, the astronomy-chin, the heavy-bookbag lurch. It’s okay to start over, or finish up, as it is, at 25, yes? It’s so fun to tell people that I’ll end up graduating with a philosophy major. Everyone laughs, everyone pats my back, gives the ol’ 1-2 punch, but, okay. In the end, the middle won’t matter.
Back to the couch and my vinegar/honey tea combo that gags the cat and burns my tonsils.
I think the one thing I’ll appreciate about looking older is that when I lose my wallet, which I inevitably do twice a year, I won’t be turned away at shows where people aren’t convinced that I’m older than 17.
For an earlier, sentimental story about losing wallets, go here. I broke the cycle of that particular curse when earlier this year, I lost a wallet Chris gave me and nothing terrible happened because of it.
There’s nothing like being all dressed up with good hair and ending up at Perkins for the night. It was fun in its own right, so wallet be damned. I guess. (I better find my spare ID before tomorrow night, however.)
BAD
Songs that make me think my phone is ringing
WORSE
Songs that make me think my phone is ringing when I’m on my third apartment-cleaning-motivating beer, and I trip over the cat’s scratching post and chip my chin on the edge of the coffee table, which is, incidentally, shaped as a chess board.
BAD
Times I typed “cheese” instead of “chess”: six
GOOD
What this weekend’s going to be, what with the good music and the red lipstick and the raised eyebrow I just now perfected.
The most disappointing result occuring from finally changing my out-of-state license plates will be that people will no longer excuse my horribly slow and twisty Winter driving. Now, drivers take notice of my Southern state plates and stay six feet behind me while I slip and creep my way to work. But soon! It’ll be all honking and middle fingers and Lutefisk angrily thrown from windows, or whatever it is Minnesotans do.
Next month, I’ll have lived here six years. I moved in the middle of January 2000, wearing the puffiest, North Pole-ready Winter coat my parents could find. They were terrified I would die or lose limbs within three minutes of being exposed to Minnesota. Today, I went to work wearing a light sweater and one glove! I think this speaks more to my forgetfulness than it does to my Minnesotan heritage, but still. My “As” are nasally and elongated. I have to think twice before asking for a carbonated beverage with syrup. (SODA, you fools.) The word “hotdish” isn’t all that funny anymore.
I’m pretty sure this means it’s time to move again, but for now, I seem to be stuck, weaving my way through the snowy civilization, not quite a stranger anymore, but also not completely assimilated. It’s the small curse of being an Army brat, I think. You roll around covered in honey — cultures, bits of accents and customs sticking in odd places. But home is somewhere else, some glittery elusive fiction. I don’t yearn for it, exactly, but I have inkling I might be restless until I find it.
This is going to come as no surprise to anyone who’s been reading for a while, but my favorite thing about the whole music writing thing isn’t the music itself. Of course, I’m a music lover — not as much as I should be to write as a genuine music critic, but I have the heart for the music, for sure, even if it’s not as deeply ground as most in this arena.
But my favorite part is, of course, the people watching. I spend half my time staring in the crowd or eliciting stories from musicians and scenesters and watching drama unfold in each smoky-no-more nook. I like being cornered by a fast talker next to an old jukebox or shivering in the cold, smoking, but not inhaling and being a sociological detective. I like to hear the staticky vocals and tinny drums in the bar while I stand by the door, scrutinizing what’s being said and not said, falling in love a million times, looking down when the subject turns to me, and touching jacket lapels when I ask endless questions about anything, scars, firsts, eye colors, gossip. I absorb all of this, and store it, either to fictionalize later or to love the person I’m studying. Sometimes both.
Sometimes I come home and write about it, and sometimes I just keep it in my skin, walking up my apartment building steps, wobbling on my feet and thinking of nothing but red lips and glasses and fidgets and tattoos and boys in torn-off shirts leaning into microphones. It’s hard for me to do this more than a few times a week because I want every detail. I don’t want to miss anything. I grit my teeth and listen, hard, because I think my story is somewhere in their stories; because I think they’re so fucking interesting and they don’t even know it. People say, “Oh, this is boring, tell me about you,” but I refuse, because they’re the stars. Rubbing a cold whiskey glass on the side of my cheek, inhaling unlit tobacco, squeezing past girls with black shaggy hair, determining who’s flirting and who’s schmoozing — it’s my real entertainment. If only I could make a real living being this kind of compassionate and secret spy.
Watch this space for something different. I don’t know what that different thing will be, but it will be different. I think. I’m going back to school full-time next semester, which means a) hair reinvention and b) fright. I’ll be a 25-year-old philosophy (I KNOW) major and a part-time music writer, which makes me feel strange and like I’m some sort of astral projection. Yesterday, I decorated a Christmas stocking for my cat. Next week, I’m having a party for which I’m cooking things and buying tea lights. Three weeks from now, I’m dying my hair pink. Today, I had to move my car to the street because the snow was messing up the parking lot. I used to be able to make a feast out of the mundane, but now it seems like the mundane is too mundane to talk about. Everything keeps pacing along. For me, it’s either: nervous breakdown because I start trying to picture the earth wobbling on an axis, or coma because the office is out of paperclips.