You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February, 2007.
I’m getting incredibly sick of my job. I go through phases where I absolutely hate work, and right now if someone were to firebomb the place, I’d be pleased as punch. I find myself, while listening to my voicemail, telling people “shut up and just give me your email address already”, or repeating “blah, blah, blah” and waving my hand while I roll my eyes. I’m sure people walking by are impressed by my professional behavior. I was typing something up and there was a note on the order “AJ (one of the ladies I work with) will attach receipt to invoice”, and I said to myself, “AJ can suck my dick”. That’s when I know I’ve had it up to here and beyond, when I’m thinking nasty things about the nice ladies I work with, nasty things that don’t even make any sense. This is also when I get dooced and have to find a new jobby-job. I’ve been here for 3 years, the longest I’ve ever been at any job. Unless you count elementary school, where I stayed for the 8 years from kindergarten to 8th grade (yes, 8, I skipped a grade, la-di-da). But at least then I got to change desks every year, and I never had to share my locker.
In other news, my stupidity knows no bounds. I am in near-hysterics because midterms are fast approaching and I should have a portfolio of prints and negatives for photography class next week, yet have not darkened the darkroom door. (Oh! Oh, the wit of that! How it is unintentional and yet so witty! FYI, I’m kind of tired and worn out, so bear with my weirdness tonight.) Anyway, not only that but I also think I accidentally gave CVS my B&W film to develop instead of color, and CVS ruined my film. The film containing several homework assignments for photography class. Assignments due next week in the midterm portfolio. I’m kicking myself for not quadruple-checking what I gave to them, and imagining kicking the dumbass at CVS who just tossed the film in the developer without even looking at it. If she’d noticed, at least I’d still have the negatives and could make prints, even if I didn’t develop the negatives myself.
We went to Boston on Sunday with my mom and met up with my brother, who lives there, for lunch and a visit to Chinatown, where they were having a New Year’s celebration. (Is that a run-on sentence? I think it is, or at least very awkward.) Every time I go to Boston I get depressed that I don’t live there. I love, love, love cities, especially Boston. I started my ultra-long college career at Lesley University (née College) in Cambridge, and so I have a total soft spot for Boston, largely because I feel comfortable there. I look around now and wonder how the hell I got stuck living in exurbia when I had great plans for my life being lived in a brownstone somewhere where I could walk to work.
I have a confession to make, and if I can’t do it on the internet in full view of the world while pretending to be anonymous, where can I make it? So… last night I ate a whole pan of brownies. Granted, it was a small pan, and they were low-fat and whole-grain, and I’ve been craving brownies for a week; but it was A WHOLE PAN. I ate it standing up, hands smeared in chocolate, at 3 in the morning, and thought to myself the whole time “This is disgusting. Ridiculous, disgusting behavior. I shouldn’t be doing this. Just put the pan down and go to bed.” But I didn’t, I scraped off the nasty frosting and shoved in chunks of brownie and felt terrible about myself, my mouth almost hurting from the sweetness. Then I went to bed.
The problem with this is it’s not a momentary aberration.
I have had life-long issues with food. I grew up in a house (like many houses, I guess) where food equalled family and love and comfort, where we once had a Thanksgiving with 8 people and 10 pies, where if I fell down and scraped my knee or got an A+ on a really hard test or was just having a really boring day, we got ice cream to comfort/celebrate/entertain. We went to my grandmother’s for dinner every weekend and she, who had lived through the war in Germany and had known the reality of not having enough to eat, filled her basement with canned goods (some from the 1960’s) and always told us to “Manga, manga!” (Italian for eat – my grandfather was Italian). We were expected to clear our plates, and I always did, and then I usually spent 15 minutes in the bathroom later, feeling sick and queasy and vowing that next weekend I would eat less. But in the face of her joy at being able to feed us, to fill us up and nurture us with good food, how could I say no? She’s in a nursing home now, and whenever we visit she loads my son up with bad generic cookies and oranges she’s saved for him, handfuls of cheap sugary starlite mints, bruised apples. Food, for her, is how she tells us that she loves us.
When I was a teenager, I stopped eating. I was 14, and I was fat and suddenly I just stopped being hungry. I would choke down a cracker, or even a half a cracker, or maybe a little grapefruit, in the morning before school, and that would be it for the day. I lost a lot of weight and I lost quite a bit of my hair, and boys started to notice me and I started to feel really good about myself. I was hot shit. I had cute clothes of the Kinderwhore variety (only less ripped and no makeup, and I always wore sneakers) and, looking back, I realize how much a new world opened up for me. A world where I got flirted with in German class, and once people came up to my locker and told me I should be a model (still the nicest compliment I’ve ever received, one I pull out and look at again and again when I feel low), and people were nicer to me, the gas station attendant gave me his T-shirt (Mighty Mouse) right off his back when I coveted it, men would stare at my chest as I walked through the mall.
Of course later I got fat again, got pregnant, got married, got fatter. I am now the largest I’ve ever been and I feel almost like I’m wearing a fat suit most of the time. My body doesn’t fit in the dimensions I imagine it should and I’m constantly surprised by it and by myself when I see a picture or a mirror. Who is that fat girl? I’ve read about people who have gastric bypass surgery and feel like imposters when they get thin, but I feel the opposite- I am the imposter me now, the real me is buried under a layer of blubber, crying to get out. Which begs the question, why not just lose weight? And as any woman (pretty much) knows, that question is not as easy as it seems. It’s loaded with the implications of years of conditioning about how women should look, loaded with Twinkies and gym hatred and body issues and embarassment and shame. I joined a gym two years ago, and went for spurts of a month at a time, or a week at a time, and then stopped again. According to everything I’ve read, once I’d gone for a month, it should have become habit. It shouldn’t have been so easy to stop. But it was easy, so easy to slip back into not exercising and using that time for something that felt easier and more fun. So I sit here, weighing more than my husband (literally, and how that pains me) and I’m at a loss. I cannot stop myself from the brownie gorging. I cannot seem to make myself, no matter how much I hate my thighs or my stomach, get up and just MOVE. I’m in this static, inert place, not only literally not moving but also mentally, like the thin me is just trapped inside what I’ve become and she has no way to escape, she’s slowly suffocating under my skin.
Oh, internets, it has been a ROUGH few days here. There has been the vomiting and the diarrhea (cha-cha-cha) and just general yuckiness. Even the cat is throwing up his cat food more vigorously than usual (and needs to go to the vet, because I don’t think normal cats puke every day). I have a massive coffee-withdrawal headache today, because my poor stomach couldn’t handle the blessed, life-giving coffee (TM) and so I’ve had to make do with tea and a Coke and a caffeine pill and some generic Aleve, all of which have not made up for the lack of blessed, life-giving coffee (TM). I really had it in mind to post about… something… but apparently when you puke enough, you puke up bits of your brain, the bits that hold things you really meant to remember for your blog. And the bits that remind you “clean out the FRIDGE, it smells like a DUMPSTER in here”, and the bits that help you in selecting good movies for your sick-in-bed days, not Jersey Girl and some other movie that Tim Burton directed and your husband is teasing you mercilessly for reading. The good thing about today is that over at dooce there are hilarious, hilarious pictures of early 90’s hair that bring me back to the days of huge bangs and hairspray, and also the glasses I had in 6th grade, which were bright blue and covered approximately 3/4 of my face beneath my towering bangs (I thought of them as “Malibu Barbie” bangs, somewhat inexplicably since my google image search didn’t turn up any Malibu Barbie with bangs like mine. Mine were more like this.). So that’s a good way to get yourself feeling better on a post-pukefest Saturday.
I feel like I need to post but my brain is empty, empty, empty. I wish I’d started this blog back in the beginning of blogs, in 1998 or something. Maybe I was more interesting in 1998. I had more sex then. (Thinking back, that was a crazy year, the year of my own personal Sexual Revolution, actually. The Year Of The Boy With Two Tongue Rings, which led to it also being The Year of Five Orgasms In A Row….) But I think if it was 1998, this blog would largely read “smoked a bowl. smoked another bowl. skipped class. smoked a bowl.” etc. I think I spent a five-year period there pretty much baked out of my mind. Anyway, since I can’t think of anything, this will be a listy sort of post.
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what I’m listening to: Moon Pix by Cat Power (great album, one of my very favorites. Cat Power was Boyo’s first concert, in utero, and I’ve talked to her a few times, too. She seems nice, if kind of messed up… though I gather she’s got her shit together more now)
what I’m reading: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (and yes, I’m aware it’s a children’s book. I just never read it as a kid and now I’m asking myself why – it’s really good.)
Things that weird me out
1. The undersides of ferns – you know, where their little brown seed thingies are? They make me feel itchy and queasy.
2. Cell phones. You’d think I’d be over it, but the idea that I can call someone from my car still just thrills me and sort of scares me.
3. Spit. The smell of spit is just disgusting and I can’t stand it.
4. Instrumental music. Only sometimes, but I’ll listen to it and it’ll make my head feel strange. I don’t know how to explain it, except that it’s a bizarre floating sort of feeling. Yeah, I’m definitely still crazy.
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Today Boyo woke up at about, oh, 6 a.m.? Maybe? I’m not 100% sure, but I know that when I looked at the clock it wasn’t 7 yet. This would be fine if I didn’t get home from work at 1:30 in the freaking morning. I told him to go play, but he hates playing by himself. He needs an audience. So I’ve felt like a zombie all day long and I keep wanting to doze off on my keyboard. Can that be my excuse for this post being crappy? Yeah, I thought not. A girl can try, though, right?
I’ve spent the morning reading craft blogs and sighing dramatically into my coffee. Why can’t I sew? Why? I wish that I was a fabric-collecting sort of person. Someone who whips up a purse with those little round plastic handles before lunch, then a few cute stuffed toys during naptime, and ends the day with a bobbly-topped hat and mitten set. I think I could do it if I could just find a class or something to help me get started. It’s weird that for someone so impatient and messy I love crafty things so much, even though I’m not really good at them I just keep trying (so unlike me, the giver-upper extraordinaire). Every few weeks I google “sewing classes Connecticut” and come up with a big fat zippo nothingo and sigh some more into one of my endless coffee cups. I’m desperate, desperate, desperate to make a purse – just look at this, certainly not to be found in stores. I need one of these!! I also found…
I started this post a while ago, and now I wonder, what did I find? What am I missing out on that had me so entranced then? I don’t know, but Etsy is like a sort of depressing porn for me. Oh, look how cute! I bet I could make that! ….Only, no, that’s a lie. I’m totally lying to myself. I couldn’t make anything close to that. But this! This is cute! I could… no, never mind, I couldn’t. It’s a good thing I can do easy stuff like felt monsters.
P.S. I see you reading me, internets. At least one or two of you. Would you comment if I did first, to make it more inviting?
Tonight I’m feeling vaguely dissatisfied with my life. Blargh. Probably that makes for bad blogging, but I have that flat feeling – you know, where yeah, things are okay, but they’re boring. That kind of feeling. The one where I think if I have to type “QC test and inspect” about another microphone, I think I’ll scream. I don’t hate my job, but it’s definitely not my life’s ambition and it’s definitely not scintillating or world-changing or anything. Microphones are not about to make me feel like I’ve done something really great or give me that warmed cockles of my heart feeling. Plus yesterday E called from work asking for directions to my old high school and the idea that I live so close to where I went to high school, so close to where I grew up, etc etc, just makes me feel like I haven’t grown up and moved on with my life. I feel like I’m incubating here, just waiting for something to come along and change everything. How utterly teenage romance-novel-ish of me.
In other news: do you smoke? Have you heard of the product Smoke Away? Thanks to bedtime radio, Boy-o can tell you all about Smoke Away. Did you know that every cigarette shortens your life by 7-11 minutes? Did you know that Smoke Away is available at Wal*Mart and other fine stores? No? Can you guess who does? And who quoted it to me several times over the last few days?
It’s so funny that we get rid of cable yet again, therefore reducing the influence of evil advertising, but it still sneaks in through the cracks in our forcefield of pseudo-hippie-ish parenting.
What a week- TGIF. It is, technically, right? Yeah. THe Boy-o has been home sick from school almost all week, so I haven’t had a minute to myself to get schoolwork done, let alone blogging and blog reading (okay, fine, I managed to find time for that. And for a little light reading. Schoolwork and my own blog fall lower on the to-do list. I’m lazy like that). Anyhow, in awesome news of very awesomeness, the Huz had a show of his prints that started last night, and he sold four prints at the opening! His last show sold a big whole round zero, for some dumb reason, so that was very, very exciting. There was also an article about him in the newspaper, which is always cool. It’s crazy being married to a quasi-celebrity, especially since he’s a pretty big quasi-celeb on Flickr. My page there has had over 1000 views just because he’s my husband! Weirdness.
You know, I had something I wanted to say but I’ve totally lost track of it, so this can be a short and useless post. Sorry, internets, I promise something better tomorrow. Maybe.
Lalala, should be doing schoolwork, lalala, I’ve been reading blogs instead…. Oh, I’m bad. I took the whole weekend off from school stuff and now Monday is not making me happy. I have to read about Soil Resources and about focusing my camera and f-stops, my sink is FULL OF DISHES (because I get to make dinner on the weekends! Because I don’t have to work all night! So I go crazy and fill my sink and counters and table with dishes and end up with not a single clean spoon or cup come Monday morning.), and I have to go to work today. Boo-hoo.
Okay, pity party over. I have a confession to make. I’ve been driving around with this prepaid FedEx package in my car for a week now. It’s for this survey thing I did that I’m supposed to get $5o for, but probably won’t now because of not having sent it back. I don’t know why I haven’t mailed it, since there’s a FedEx drop box at the post office and there’s a FedEx dropoff store down the road and, like I said, it’s prepaid so it’s not costing me anything. But I just haven’t gotten around to it. Sometimes with things like that, things I know I will have to do eventually, I start to feel immobile, stuck, unable to move. I end up lying down and reading or going online or something. I don’t know if it’s depression trying to show its ugly face behind the mask of medication (which works v. v. well, thanks for asking – I love my drugs), or if it’s fear (of what, though??), or just laziness. See, I would vote for laziness except that I have this feeling behind it that has come when I’m very depressed and everything seems scary and daunting, and I wonder if it is some vestiges of depression. I suppose medication doesn’t entirely “fix” everything, but I wonder so much about what is me and what is depression and where do the two end… Especially having a husband who is bipolar. Bipolar is terribly hard to live with, and it’s so hard to say “well, that’s just how you are, but the other thing – yes, that’s not your fault or your personality, it’s the bipolar”. It’s never cut and dried and it’s disconcerting to think “Well, I did this but only because I’m depressed. Or not. Maybe, left to my own devices, even 100% jolly and happy, I would continue to lie in bed and sob for days on end. Or at least lie in bed for days on end. Maybe it’s just my personality.” You start to wonder what of yourself is real and what is just some chemical function gone awry, whether you really even know who you are at all. Plus, I think I was more interesting when I was really depressed and crazy. I would scream and cry and flail, I would drive off in a huff threatening to kill myself. Once I ran away and walked 2 miles to the beach and swam with all my clothes on and then fell asleep on the beach for hours, then walked back still soaking wet and all salty. Once E called the police because I drove off saying I was going to kill myself. Once I hit myself in the head over and over and over again until I had bruises on either side of my face for days. So I wasn’t a better wife or a better mother, but sometimes I think I was more alive, too. More in touch with my emotions. Then I think that there’s just a certain caché to being crazy – there’s a feeling that you’re a sort of minor celebrity in your world because people need to be careful around you and cater to you a little, and you get to do obnoxious and irritating things because, really, it’s not your fault. I guess it all boils down to me being sort of a jerk, sick or healthy, sad or not.
Okay, first, I have to admit this embarassing fact: I read about celebrities. I used to laugh at people who did that, because how dumb to be so interested in other people’s lives just because they’re rich and famous. And how kind of brown-nose-y and how time-wasting and… you get the picture. But the thing is, there is a sick fascination in all of it, watching how the other half lives and all that. Anyway, all this to lead up to me getting my daily dose of celebrity gossip and reading this piece about Liv Tyler being in Glamour magazine. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against Liv Tyler. I think she seems like she might be a pretty cool, down-to-earth person for a celebrity. But I read this and it made my blood boil: “Liv on changing gears from full-time mom to actress: “I feel so bless that I have a job where I can spend long periods of time with my family. Most moms don’t have that choice. But wearing so many hats — mother, wife, actress — does take hard work; you always have to be thinking about your family’s best interests.”
Reading that made me feel like she’s saying that she works harder than most people, or that her work is more challenging. And it pissed me off. We should all be so lucky that our jobs involve playing dress-up in front of a camera for a few months out of the year (okay, I know, that’s infantile and it’s simplifying things a lot, but that’s how I feel right now…), and then you get paid astronomical sums. I make diddly-squat working full-time, 5 days a week. I don’t get to pick and choose what parts of my job sound good, or take off for 2 years to be home with my son (granted she does admit that she’s lucky for that). I have to work so that my family can eat. She wants to try juggling some freaking hats? She can come to my house and figure out whether it’s more important to buy groceries or pay the electric bill, because it’s a tight month and there’s not enough for both. That’s hard work and having to think about your families best interests. I think all celebrities should be forced to live real life for a few years after getting famous, or go on real-life retreats every once in a while – just so they don’t completely take their wealth for granted.
**Well, that was a bitchy judgemental little blurb and I hate when I do that, and probably Ms. Tyler didn’t mean that the way I took it. So take me with a grain of salt. I am tired beyond belief and so ready for the weekend, and I also couldn’t for the life of me think of a post for today. I wasn’t even going to post but I promised myself to do it every day for a week (a workweek, but a week nonetheless – no way will I get on here on weekends. There is an E-shaped lump in our computer chair all weekend long which is pretty much impossible to shift out of the way.). So here’s my last post for one whole week’s blogging. Too bad it’s a crappy one.
I’m listening to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and it just brings me back to being a teenager so much, which strikes me as hilarious since I was a teenager in the ’90s. At the time, though, I had this huge stack of records that used to be my dad’s and my uncle’s, and I spent hours in my room listening to scratchy Doors and Pink Floyd and Beatles records and feeling all moody and teenagery, and also very very cool because I was listening to records, and really did anyone even do that anymore? I had some awesome records. I actually had a copy of the song They’re Coming To Take Me Away Ha-Haaa that played the song on one side and then the song BACKWARDS on the other side. I mean, how cool is that? Of course, my room was so messy that I ended up cracking it at some point. But the fact that I once possessed that record sends shivers of envy down E’s spine.
It’s funny how music can take you to a certain time so quickly – just a note or a lyric and immediately you can remember the time when the song was imprinted on your brain. Right now I can still feel the scratchy beige wool of my ratty-ass sweater I stole from my dad (come to think of it, not only were my records and my sweaters in high school my dad’s, but a lot of my jeans were, too, and a lot of my T-shirts… my dad was apparently a high school fashion trendsetter).
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So anyway, to modern music – I just got the new (so new it’s not even out yet) Andrew Bird album, Armchair Apocrypha, and it’s awesome. I really love it. I’m so happy to have some new music, because I had overplayed so many of my MP3s and was getting bored, bored, bored. And I was scared that I’d overplay the new Shins album and never be able to enjoy it again, since I’ve listened to it roughly 6000 times since I got it in December. I wasn’t sure about how it was going to be, since Andrew Bird can be hit or miss (though the last album was wonderful, too), but now I’m loving it so much I’m wondering if E would forgive me if I had sex with Andrew Bird. Not that he’s asked me or anything, but it’s good to be prepared. You know, just in case. And doesn’t everyone have that list of people who are famous who it’d be okay to have sex with even if you’re married? Like, E could have Claire Danes (though I think he’d only want her back in the My So-Called Life days) and Kate Winslet and whoever else, and I could have Sufjan Stevens (mmmmm….. Sufjan….) and Jake Gyllenhaal and maybe now Andrew Bird because his new album is so good. And he also appears to like coffee, which is good. You have to be prepared for the day when celebrities suddenly come out of the woodwork wanting you and you can’t reach your husband to make sure it’s okay that you indulge the celebrities. It happens all the time, you know.
