Tag: sick

Evaporate

Not dead yet.

Seeing in violent color.

Because my lungs hurt and contract into themselves with force when I try to breath.

My mother told me “The State Within” was excellent.  I asked her if the main character was good looking.  Jesus.  As though I need a beefcake to enjoy myself.  My rules for attraction are not Fabio-centric.  No, and they don’t tend towards six packs and lush lips.  Uh uh.  I don’t care for long haired men with pecks as inflated as stiff breasts.  No tans necessary.  Straight teeth are not a requirement.  I can’t say what it is.

Which is fine, really, because obviously the main point is that I’m shallow.

My shallowness is at least not sexist.  I want my lead lady to be good looking too.  Which means not looking like Angelina Jolie with those popping veins, pillow lips, and sinewy hard limbs.  Uh uh.  Blond is only acceptable if not insipid.  Snub noses need not apply.  Pale.  Pale.  I like pale people.

Unless they are naturally dark.  Dark skin is beautiful when it’s what a person is born with.  Dark to the point of black, dusky, cocoa, olive – anything but artificially or sun tanned.

Freckles.

I hated them when I was a kid.  Because I had them, lots of them, not just a sweet sun-sprinkle of them across my nose.  All over my face and shoulders.  People made fun of me.  But something happened when I got older.  Not only did I accept them but my vision cleared so that I found them beautiful on other people.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I guess I always found them attractive on others, just not on myself.  From third grade to sixth grade I was as near as in love with a boy as a girl that age can be with a red-headed boy covered in freckles.  Plus, he was short.

I think freckles are attractive enough that I made Cricket covered in them.  Not just a sunny sprinkle across a pert Southern Californian nose.  She’s really freckled.  I love that about her.  You may not, and I accept that we all have different tastes, but isn’t it about time that freckles were raised up as a possible point of beauty in a heroine who also happens to punch men like a demon and has the most beautiful hands on earth?

I didn’t mean to write a treatise about my shallow need to see people eye-candy.  C’est la vie.  I go with the moment.  It’s been a long sick day.  I am only up at the crack of dawn because I needed to watch the whole “The State Within” series.  I had to know what happened.

I am sicker today than I was yesterday or the day before.  My mother made me sage tea this morning and it was just like when I was a little girl.  Except better because I hated being a little girl.

I started reading “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” and suddenly hated myself as a writer.  I am in a serious crisis now.  It will pass.  I’m sure.  But reading good literature right now might not be the most genius prescription for my predicament.

(Which is: oh my god I’m a crap writer what the hell am I doing and who the hell will want to read my stories when they aren’t charming and warm but are dark and unevenly irreverent and hell hath no fury like a crap writer…etc)

It’s a very good book.  Pisses me off how good it is.  I am all at sea.

It will pass.

Given time.

I meant to nap and read most of the day away but ended up spending most of it cooking.

I wonder why so often when I see really tall men I superimpose myself in their bones.

In spite of this, I am all woman.

I really miss Kung Fu.  I can’t breath well enough to do it.  Can’t go to class and can’t practice at home.  Because I’m so tired.  I’ve been so tired for over a week.  I know staying up this late doesn’t help.  I’m not sleepy.  Just tired.  My body feels leaden and a little disconnected.

While taking a little forced break from Cricket and Grey (the third draft), due to writing crisis, I suddenly find myself fixating on how I can make Jane Doe a real novel.  The plot difficulties are so clear now and I find myself buzzing with ideas.  Where my first draft went wrong is obvious.  But again, I see that my writing style is full of contradictions and I’m not sure how that will work.

Oh my god, Jane Doe is so heavy I am breathless thinking about it.  Yet, it is not without light.  Vibrant light.

This reminds me of my boyfriend Tristan telling me that I was so “heavy”.

Which reminds me of the surreal night of fighting we had at O’Leary’s pub where it started out about how his idea of monogamy was quite different than mine and how angry I was because I would have willingly dated him with no strings attached but he insisted we be exclusive.  Which left me hurting hurting hurting because his idea of exclusive included giving all attractive females back rubs and some attractive females a great big snog.  Right in the middle of our heated and somewhat agitated discussion I saw him.  I really saw him.

Suddenly I didn’t exist.  Not in an important way.  I simply saw him.  I saw how he was wasting himself.  How his needs didn’t match mine but how his passions and needs were important and valid and that he needed to be true to himself and if it meant sleeping with every goddamn girl he met it really wasn’t for me to stop him or concern myself with it.  I needed to fade into the ether, leave him so he could be who he was meant to become.  I was like a corridor to himself.  A beacon light.

I was very much in love with him.

Sitting there across from him in the smarmy pub lighting I saw him as he really was.  I saw inside him and I knew I didn’t fit there.  I wasn’t appropriate for him.  Me with my Gothic notions of faithfulness and attachment.  The hairs on my arms rose and then I could no longer feel my body, I simply saw his spirit and what it needed and what it could become.  I saw his whole potential in front of me and it was beautiful and I wasn’t the person who could nurture it.  I told him he needed to fly.  He needed to photograph naked women, he needed to photograph whatever interested him because he had amazing talent with a camera, he needed to spread his wings and just fucking do what he was driven to do and I wasn’t part of it.  I knew it.  I told him.  It was so strange to see him hurt at being told he should fly.

I see into people often, but rarely do I see them so clearly that I become disembodied completely.  I couldn’t feel my flesh any more.  Who I was didn’t matter, my claims on this man didn’t matter, all that mattered was to guide this spirit forward.  To step aside and let him shine.  He was incandescent, but not for me.  I was nothing but a medium.  I was an interim for him.  I was nothing more than an interlude, a moment, a second, and I’d be shocked to know if he even remembered me at all.

I am heavy because I suck up everyone’s light and save it for them.

I am heavy because I carry all the sorrow of mankind in my chest.

Which makes bronchitis a specious bitch.

I trusted myself that night at the pub.  I have felt similar charges in spirit since then, but never with such sacrifice as knowing that I had to let a person go for their own good.  Walk away.  Evaporate.

The question came up the other night “Have you ever broken anyone’s heart?” and I’m not sure how that came up but Philip can definitely say yes, but me?  Someone told me I broke Tristan’s heart but when I think about who he really was I am sure that I didn’t have that power.  When I think of all the people I’ve gone out with I don’t think I’ve ever broken a single one of their hearts.

I’d like to believe I had.  Just one.  Somehow it seems cold and hard to have never dented another person enough to have broken their heart.  What kind of icicle does that make me?

Then Philip reminded me of a penpal I had for a while who seemed to have developed a tendre for me even though he knew I was married.  I had completely forgotten.  Maybe because that correspondence occurred at the same time that my biological father was writing things to me  like how I am related to a celebrated Norwegian poet.  How I’m actually a quarter Polish, which I hadn’t previously known.  The penpal paled.

I don’t think I broke his heart either.

Every person has some kind of power.

That’s not one of mine.

I must go to bed now.  I’m still not tired.  I’m not tired.  How can I be so un-tired?  I can sleep in.  That won’t solve my writing crisis.  Only soldiering on can do that.

I part with this caution: wash your hands often, take your vitamins, get exercise (but don’t pull a goddamned muscle), eat well, drink a shitload of beer, and get some sleep.

Your Light is Equal to Your Dark

This broadcast is brought to you completely by chance and my inability to go to sleep now that Philip is back from New York and I’m perfectly free to go to sleep and not be a sick single parent.   This physique and brain are perverse and as soon as I am off duty I can’t calm down, sleep, relax, or shut the brain faucet off.

Philip has been in New York Since Saturday night and returned in the wee hours last night.  I’ve gotten up for four mornings in a row and navigated the crabby child through his ablutions (rituals) while swallowing knives and gasping for air because I have the delightful seasonal disease whose flavor is:

chest cold with hard acceleration to bronchitis

shortness of breath

tightness of chest

earache

sore throat (the knives!)

Anyway, I say this every single time, I’ll say it again: single parenting SUCKS and I take my hat off to all you amazing people who have done it successfully.

In addition to the usual joys of raising a kid who has a difficult relationship with food and the world, this week has seen Max landed in the principal’s office for singing a verse or two of the Weird Al Yankovic song about being fat to a couple of kids who (apparently) are a little on the largish side.

Plus he had the flat out audacity to deny that I am myself fat and might take offense at having a Weird Al song directed at my corpulence.

This was a hard sell since I could barely keep a straight face in trying to take this whole thing seriously.  I mean, what he did was NOT NICE but hardly constitutes more than an insensitive barb being thrown at a couple of kids.  And it was WEIRD AL YANKOVIC.

I am so fixated on the fact that my kid is into Weird Al that there is no way I could take offense at having his fat song sung right in my face.

And this is why my kid is going to end up in jail and be a very bad person.  Because I fail to take this as seriously as the principal did.

Please believe that I did have a very long and serious talk with Max about how his actions must have made the largish kids feel.

It used to take throwing punches to get sent to the principal’s office when I was a kid.  You know what kids do?  They tease each other and hurt each other’s feelings.  You know who’s kids have never done that?

The number is too small to even record.  EVERY KID DOES THIS AT SOME POINT OR ANOTHER.  EVERY KID.

I have much more serious problems to worry about with my kid than him being insensitive via Weird Al.  So excuse me if I have a hard time feeling as horrified as I should.  It’s kind of like when Max comes home and tells me that a kid called him an idiot.  I say “Well, are you an idiot?” and Max tells me he’s not an idiot, he’s smart.  So I ask him what difference it makes to him if some kid tells him he’s an idiot if Max knows for himself that he’s not?  The point is that the kid has stuck him with a barb meant to hurt him and it worked but it is nothing more and there are two things Max can ask himself in any similar situation:

Is the insult true?  If so, perhaps it indicates something he can work on.  If it isn’t then it’s nothing.  Max must let it go.  Max must know his own worth.

Then I tell him his worth because that’s my job.  And because I love him.

I’m having a little writing crisis.  I just started the third draft and am not sure if my first chapter is even necessary.  Three damnable people have mentioned “taking a break” and I rail and scream and pound the walls because I’m on fire with this goal, with the mountain being half climbed, with being closer to realizing my life’s potential than I have ever been before and I don’t want to take a step back.  I want to work.  I want to blaze through it.

What I want is someone else’s perspective but everyone I know who could give me the kind of perspective I need is too busy to read right now.  So Philip (one of the damnable people) has asked if he can read the second draft.  I have to say I’m a little scared to let him read it.  He’s actually an amazing editor but I don’t need an editor yet.  There’s also this terror that he won’t like it, that he’ll think it’s crap.  After eighteen years of being married to him I still want him to be impressed with what I can do.  Aside from my awesome ability to get fat and alienate people.  Letting someone read your second draft is like-

You know, I can’t finish that sentence because at this hour the only expressions that come to mind are all coarse and inappropriate in one way or another.

Raw.  A second draft is still raw.  Not as much as the first one.  Once you get this far it isn’t daunting to do another draft.  Once you get this far you are so invested in your work it’s a matter of great pride to make the work of so many hours better than you thought you could make it.  I feel the push in myself to make it count because I might die of this pestilent new year.  Pulled muscles, strep throat, bronchitis, fatigue, and more of the same muscle getting pulled again and again- I’m not so robust this year.

It’s okay.  The main thing is to get a better version of this novel written before I kick it.

I haven’t even gotten to mention the scary-strong garlic and greens soup my mother made for us.  A truly healing soup (it tasted like medicine) because she’s had bronchitis for a month.  Plus vertigo.

Plus my dog wants to kill her cats.

Her dog wants to eat our house.

It’s all going to be fine.  I feel almost certain that I won’t die until I’ve taken my novel past the raw stage.

Thank god for child psychologists.

The kid is going to the pediatrician to discuss medications.  Not for the ADD but for the OCD.  Yes, it’s come to this.  I know how a lot of people feel about medicating children for anything mental.  If my kid had diabetes no one would suggest I withhold insulin from him but these brain issues scare the crap out of people.  Lots of people don’t even believe they’re real.

There are a lot of people who still think ADD is a euphemism for a rowdy child who just needs a firm hand and a parent who isn’t too lazy to keep them “under control”.  I am feeling a lot of anger at such people lately.  There is no longer any excuse for people to “not believe” in mental illness and mental disorders.  Pictures of the brain are proving a lot of things psychologists and neurologists and doctors have been theorizing about for years.

Max’s psychologist told us that strep throat makes OCD symptoms much worse and sometimes makes previously undiagnosed OCD present itself.  Why?  How strange!  How improbable!  He says that strep throat affects the part of the brain that controls the same functions that are affected by OCD.  It’s too bad I can’t explain it like he did.  It’s totally fascinating.  He says they’ve got images of brain activity during strep infections that prove this.

I’m going to have to deal with my anger over the rampant ignorance about mental disorders in some way.  I imagine I’ll hash it out here, like I always do.

My heros are all the people who have mental disorders and have no shame, discuss it openly, let it be a part of their everyday story, who share out loud and foster understanding and brave ridicule and censure to bring light into the still medieval views so many people have about brain function.  My heros are all the people who live with mental illness, who get through each day so that they can help others through the turgid waters of mental dysfunction to find their gifts.

There is a median for everything, a spectrum for normalcy that includes a median along which most people lie, but which has infinite variation.  We all fit on there somewhere.  Not normal is on either end of the spectrum with the averages falling closest to the middle.  No matter who wants to believe there is no such thing as “normal” or “abnormal”, there is.  But it doesn’t have to be a negative thing.

Those who daily have to struggle through a quagmire of inefficient brain function, often rendering their experience (and therefore their expression of) the world dark and dangerous, have in them the ability to effervesce with a corresponding light.

However dark your darkness, your light is equal.