I ate salmon over the weekend. I haven’t eaten any sort of meat in six years, but I figured I should try to see if it makes a difference in my health. I couldn’t do it, however. I sort of picked at my plate for twenty minutes and then ate six tiny bites before I gave up. Too creepy and too sad, even though I recited a rambling “thank you, salmon” prayer to the oven while it was baking, and even though I contradict myself with the cheese and the butter and the occasional hard-boiled egg.
I went vegetarian after I read Fast Food Nation, though it was something I’d wanted to do since high school. My roommate at the time - wacky, changeable, environmentalist, pink-haired Beth - was already vegetarian, so the transition wasn’t too hard. In fact, I don’t remember there being any difficulty, save for that year’s Thanksgiving dinner at my then-boyfriend’s house, when his Mom served me a heaping plate of meatloaf and I was too shy to refuse. I never got the guff it seems a lot of vegetarians do - my Southern-fried parents were baffled, of course and there were also a few, “MMM LOOK AT THIS DELICIOUS HOT DOG DON’T YOU WANT IT” at parties (ew), but it’s been an easy ride, even easier when I learned to cook a year or so after turning vegetarian/Japanese.
Another thing! I don’t seem to drink anymore, and when I do, it’s never beyond a drink and a half. Of course, the drink’s usually straight whiskey, but one straight whiskey has never done much to me. I’ve never been a huge drinker, beyond cheap vodka college binges, but it’s still strange because I like drinking, and always wanted to be some what of a whiskey connoisseur. But now that I’m writing this, I forgot that I drank until I puked in a parking lot on my birthday.
And that story: I just wasn’t in a good mood on my birthday. Like I said before, I’m dealing with some pretty intense depression/anxiety issues this year (or, more specifically, dealing with the residue of years worth of clinical depression and severe anxiety), and turning 26 didn’t help this. Mortality! Death! Republicans! Things like that. So I had a birthday dinner planned with some friends at a nice restaurant, and I canceled because I didn’t feel like dressing up or seeing people and speaking in complete sentences. But at the last minute, I decided I did want to go, but, being too embarrassed to call on the friends again, Chris and I went ourselves. I got dressed up in this tight black thing I never wear and my wedding shoes, which have four-inch heels and make me faceplant on icy sidewalks.
We got lost, and walked all over downtown in 2 degree weather, taking a minute here and there to shiver in doorways. Once there, the host took my coat and told me I “looked nice this evening,” which was amazing since the type of restaurants Chris and I frequent usually involve hosts throwing menus at us and then spilling trays of Cokes in our laps. I ordered a whiskey, some pumpkin gnocchi, several martinis and then proceeded to have a two-hour conversation about fake breasts and the philosophy of suicide. (Not my own, on either account. No worries.) Our waiter was a 50ish man with missing teeth who was charmed by us at first, and then began circling the table nervously by the third hour, asking if we were OK and did the lady need some water? Maybe some tea? And then a free piece of chocolate cake was involved - my birthday! Ah, I’d forgotten. And then my stomach began to rumble, and I went to the bathroom, but there were people there, and I couldn’t barf, so I wobbled back to the table, and was caught by the waiter stuffing several dinner napkins into my purse, which I reasoned were for future puking purposes.
And then Chris - very sober and chaste after one beer - directed me to the car, and that’s when I had the grand idea of hurling into the dinner napkin, which held about an ounce before it spilled all over my dress and my blue wool coat and the side of Chris’s car. Once home, I flung the dress and the WOOL coat into a bath tub full of cold water and fell asleep in the dining room. Sadly, the coat was too far gone and began growing red mold, so it was summarily stuffed in a plastic bag and thrown in the dumpster. Goodbye, $5 coat from Ragstock.
I’m hoping for the day/year that this is funny because while throwing up in a parking lot on your 26th birthday is certainly memorable, I don’t know how funny it is yet. I don’t think I’ll be going back to that restaurant any time soon, though Chris was convinced no one saw me loudly slurp my third (straight-up!) martini and proclaim that I had the best goddamn jugs in the house. Oh, God.
All of this to tell you I ate some salmon.
Whatever, here’s a new theme. It has a tree.
A notable Twin Cities writer was fired from his job at the paper, and someone mentioned they were glad he was gone because his columns were too sentimental. Did you know, it never occurred to me that people don’t want to read stories like that? What else do you write, is my question. I guess - if you’re not writing about politics or recipes or something - you write about what’s going on with you in the present, but I can’t write about that. Either nothing interesting is happening or I’m too chickenshit to actually tell you what’s going on, even if it’s interesting, even if it would make a great story. I’m slowly writing up to the present, but this mostly has to be things that don’t sting anymore. That’s okay, isn’t it? In November, this site will be 10 years old. 10 years old! Jesus Christ.
Anyway, I was thinking about a Christmas five or six years back. I was living in the Duluth house, with the ex-boyfriend and the sometimes-vicious roommates, though not all of them were vicious and the vicious ones were only sometimes-vicious. I was dating Chris by then; the boyfriend was dating his now-wife. I spent a lot of crazy mopey hours wanting the boyfriend, but I comforted myself with the fact that we were better off because we were too different. Or, how it went in my head, I was perfect for him, but he wasn’t perfect for me. Too many things lacking! I needed someone more intellectual, less gropey in public, someone who knew how to give a hug without snapping your spine. (He was a friendly guy, but never knew his own considerable size.) I knew he had loved me just how I was, but I didn’t love him that way, so I would get over it. Was the consolation.
My bedroom was across the hall from his makeshift recording studio. We’d be broken up three or four or five months by December, and sometimes we handled it okay, though most times we did not. We were doing okay that day. He was setting up microphones and called me in to help with something. On the blue couch in the room were three wrapped presents, complete with kicky ribbons and silver bows. I started laughing a little because, really, this guy didn’t wrap presents. It’s something we sort of had in common, our butterfingers and inablity to be delicate. But another thing was that we didn’t do presents. It was my thing, really. Somewhere along the line I decided presents were stupid, and that it was a waste of time to to race around a mall on the day before a holiday. If we had a present in mind, sure. But if we didn’t, what was the point? I didn’t want him to feel pressured to find me The Perfect Gift two days before my birthday. I didn’t want the pressure, either. So I said from the beginning: no gifts. We gave gifts, here and there, but mostly not and I thought it was a genius policy. I thought he thought it was a genius policy.
So the presents on the couch. I asked him about them, figuring they were from his parents. But he said, no, they were for his girlfriend. And I said, “Um, really? What are they?” And they were candles, a bunch of candles in different sizes. He’d gone to the mall and bought them. And I stood in the doorway, still laughing, but it was turning into one of those sinking laughs, like, all of a sudden, I wanted him to immediately give me several candles in small boxes and why hadn’t he before? And I asked him if he got them wrapped at the mall. And his head was in the soundbooth, fiddling with the mics, but I heard him, he said, “I wrapped them myself.” And from the doorway, I could see the imperfections in the job - bunched-up tape, a wonky half-tied ribbon. A box showing through the silver. But he of the ham-fisted had wrapped them himself. For his girlfriend.
Then he asked me to look up something on his laptop. I stopped talking about the presents and sat down. His Outlook was open - maybe this was on purpose because we were fairly vile to each other then - and the highlighted folder in his mailbox was labeled “Princess,” and the content in the folder was e-mails from his girlfriend, whose name was not Princess.
The summer after we started dating, we were at a music camping festival in southern Wisconsin. We were covered in mud and hadn’t showered for four days. I hadn’t brushed my hair in two years. I’d cultivated this pretty tomboy thing, and the truth was, I wasn’t a tomboy in the purest sense because I didn’t really like the outdoors and I never climbed a tree and I didn’t rollerblade up Mount Everest with the Hell’s Angels or anything. But I didn’t care if I was dirty and I didn’t really do make-up and my nails were short and grimy and I was barefoot 98% of the day and I spilled things and ripped my clothing, and would walk without thinking into a shallow pool of creepy-crawlies. But we were at this festival, too drunk to move from the mud and I turned to him and said - I can hear it so clearly! - I said, “Aren’t you glad you have a girl who will sleep in the mud with you? Aren’t you glad that you don’t have to call me some stupid nickname like ‘Princess’?”
So this folder. Had to be a joke. I yelled over my shoulder, past the silver presents. I couldn’t help myself. I said, “Princess? Really?!?” And he shot out of the soundbooth and closed down Outlook so fast my chair spun around. And he sat on the blue couch (the couch I would encounter six years later in the basement of the Varsity Theater - my ex-couch, I would call it), next to the candles of all sizes, and said, “Yeah, okay. Princess. Because she is one to me.”
And after I finished barfing all over myself, I went back into my bedroom and closed the door and laughed. Ha ha ha. He was dating some girl who wanted to be called Princess. Whew! Glad I missed that frilly pink train. But. In my chest there was a frilly pink silver candle gaping hole, so intense and fresh-cut raw that I stopped laughing and held very still instead.
And I remembered our first Christmas together, several years before. We’d been sitting in the hallway outside of my apartment after a party, half-asleep. We were chugging water from his Nalgene, and eating Saltines, letting the crumbs grind into the carpet. He was rubbing my feet and he asked me, “So, what do you want for Christmas?” And I sat up really quickly and dumped half the Nalgene down my shirt, which, whatever, I’d already spilled whiskey down my pants earlier in the night, so maybe the water would get rid of that. I said, “Listen, don’t get me anything. I don’t want you to get me anything. Let’s not do this present shit, okay?” And I explained my policy, positive that he was going to feel a huge rush of relief. This girl doesn’t need jewelry or any other stupid sparkly shit! She doesn’t want anything! When we went to bed that night, he undressed me and we snuggled in. He said, “But what if I want to give you something?” And I snort-laughed like a bitch and said, “Just don’t.”
The first thing I said to him the night we broke up was, “You don’t know anything about me, and you never did, and you never cared.”
Who knew.
Thanks to Aaron for alerting me that my RSS feed was wonked. Should be fixed now, so welcome back, RSS readers.
Yeah, here’s a new template. I think it’ll stay for a bit, unless someone finds it offensive. The colors will be tweaked, and the god-awful “blog” word will be eradicated at some point from the navigation. Not that I’m a snob about that sort of thing. Okay, I am. Listen: I’m not a snob about anything else. I love shitty music, shitty food, the occasional shitty movie and book, and the occasional shitty person. But I can’t abide the word “blog” for some reason. It pains me to see it stamped on my page, mocking me. But I can’t find the section to delete it at the moment, so it stays. Mocking me. (EDIT: Fixed!)
Anyway, I added a mailing list. I don’t know what I’ll use it for, but I like to have one, just in case. In case of what. I don’t know. But feel free to sign up! Sign up with a secret e-mail if you want to anonymously receive the letters. Sign up your boss. Sign up your grandma!
Also, I have a heavy spam-filter on my comments, so don’t fret if your comment doesn’t show up right away. It will eventually, unless you’re waxing on free blackjack xxx.
Ah, February. My brother ships off to boot camp this month. My mother turns 60. Last night, I dropped my car keys so deep in the snow that I didn’t even bother to look for them. Typical. I’m spending most of my time writing stuff off-site and buying cookbooks from the thrift store. The shortest month, but I like it because I’m impatient.
I’m not feeling nostalgia for old lovers (for once!), but I like this poem. Reminds me of my favorite part of new relationships, which is the literariness of them and all the letters and e-mails that stack up. I have all my old love letters (e-mails, mostly), save for one stack which I deleted before things were even over. I’ve never regretted it. It was a relationship that began to feel like chewing something with an unattractive texture, like mushrooms or shrimps with veins.
From a Journal
Louise Gluck
I had a lover once,
I had a lover twice,
easily three times I loved.
And in between
my heart reconstructed itself perfectly
like a worm.
And my dreams also reconstructed themselves.
After a time, I realized I was living
a completely idiotic life.
Idiotic, wasted-
And sometime later, you and I
began to correspond, inventing
an entirely new form.
Deep intimacy over great distance!
Keats to Fanny Brawne, Dante to Beatrice-
One cannot invent
a new form in
an old character. The letters I sent remained
immaculately ironic, aloof
yet forthright. Menawhile, I was writing
different letters in my head,
some of which became poems.
So much genuine feeling!
So many fierce declarations
of passionate longing!
I loved once, I loved twice,
and suddenly
the form collapsed: I was
unable to sustain ignorance.
How sad to have lost you, to have lost
any chance of actually knowing you
or remembering you over time
as a real person, as someone I could have grown
deepy attached to, maybe
the brother I never had.
And how sad to think
of dying before finding out
anything. And to realize
how ignorant we all are most of the time,
seeing things
only from the one vantage, like a sniper.
And there were so many things
I never got to tell you about myself,
things which might have swayed you.
And the photo I never sent, taken
the night I looked almost splendid.
I wanted you to fall in love. But the arrow
kept hitting the mirror and coming back.
And the letters kept dividing themselves
with neither half totally true.
And sadly, you never figured out
any of this, though you always wrote back
so promptly, always the same elusive letter.
I loved once, I loved twice,
and even though in our case
things never got off the ground,
it was a good thing to have tried.
And I still have the letters, of course.
Sometimes I will take a few years’ worth
to reread in the garden,
with a glass of ice tea.
And I feel, sometimes, part of something
very great, wholly profound and sweeping.
I loved once, I loved twice,
easily three times I loved.