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My son and I are reading The Subtle Knife right now, the second of the “His Dark Materials” books by Philip Pullman. There’s a lot about different worlds, alternate realities, the reality you would live in if you change your actions. Now I’ve been thinking about my alternate realities, my different lives. I was lying in bed at 10:00 the other night, imagining other mes in other worlds – the me who said no to that jerk guy, the me who stayed in college and became a teacher, the me who was out dancing on a table at a bar. The me sitting at home eating Thai takeout and watching HBO. The me with a boyfriend, the me without a boyfriend, the me with roommates and parties every weekend, the me with 3 kids and a dog and a minivan. The me with her pierced tongue and pink hair, smoking pot and drinking cheap beer. The me with Manolo Blahniks and blown-out hair and a cushy job at some fancy-schmancy office.
The thing about all those mes is that I want to be all of them at once. I want the great shoes and the pierced tongue and the parties and the 3 kids and all the different jobs and friendships all those mes have. I don’t know if it’s that I want to be someone besides who I am, that I want another life, or that I just regret all the lives I never got to lead. I lay in bed and realized that much as I’ve wanted to get my tongue pierced for more than 10 years now, I’m never going to do it. I’m almost 30. It would be a stupid, irresponsible choice. It made me so freaking sad, and c’mon, it’s a dumb piercing, why should that depress me? But it feels like a letting go of myself, or one of my selves; like I’m giving up on something that was once important to me, like I’m making myself grow up and become someone I’m not sure I want to be.
I don’t hate my life now. There are great things about it. My husband is handsome and funny and can be so sweet, my son is smart and hilarious and so much fun, my job is easy and I’m damn good at it, my family is a lot of fun. Sure, there are things I wish I had – a better job to be damn good at, more money, a close circle of girlfriends, an apartment in a city or at least a cute suburban house. But all in all it’s not a bad life. It’s just not what I ever imagined for myself – and I guess because it’s what is real, it doesn’t have the cachet of those imagined realities. I’m sure in any of them I’d crave something better, or at least something different, something to take my mind off reality.
I guess I just wish I could be satisfied with reality, or change it enough to satisfy myself. I need to make some choices and move forward with all the things I’m scared to do, make the changes I’m too scared to make, stop dragging my feet and pretending that everything is fine, fine, fine, that nothing needs to change. Stop pretending that all those alternate realities are unattainable, stop pretending that fantasy is good enough, or that reality is good enough. Figure out what the hell I want and then make it happen.
So, this week is the first week of day shift. Half over. It’s not been as bad as I thought, though getting up in the dark because of gloomy weather is certainly no picnic, and getting to sleep at a “normal” hour is somewhat of a challenge. There are good things and bad things about the whole deal – I like coming home after work, the day is over, my family is here waiting for me. It’s so 1950s-feeling – dinner together, homework (well, if kindergarten had homework), all that good stuff.
I’ve always wanted that sort of family – a lot like the family I grew up in, only with a different dad. Not that my dad is awful – he is a great guy and loves his kids – but he was always at work or not involved in what we were doing most of the time. He’s big into TV and yard work. My dream family, though, my own family that I would have someday, was the sort where we all made dinner together, mom stirring and dad chopping and the kids setting the table. Then we did something dorky, like a puzzle or Parcheesi, or we all sat around and read books and then talked about them. I loved the days when my mom and sisters and brother and I would gather around and play Balderdash and drink cocoa and laugh our heads off. I love holidays, when the house is full of my relatives, we all cook dinner together and then play cards and eat too much pie. I wanted that for my own family. Somehow, during the day, you don’t have that as much, but the past few days? My son helped me peel apples, he set the table, we went for a walk and saw ants and an egret and a dead bluejay. We worked on a puzzle last night, all three of us, and watched Charlie and Lola together, and somehow it just feels different now. I don’t know if it’s the newness of it all, but I kind of like it so far. The bite-sized family life we have now, instead of the day stretching out before W and I, endlessly, needing to be filled before I went to work.
Work is different now, too. It feels less urgent, more purposeful – which is odd, because two years ago I spent one month on days and hated it because it was so stressed and made me harried and crazy and irritable. Partly it’s that I sit in a different location, away from the people in my department – who are (mainly) nice, but also a little too overzealous about their jobs, and tend to make mountains out of molehills. The kind of people who stay late of their own free will every freaking day while at the same time complaining about needing to go home. It’s also because I feel less relied-upon. Before I came in and did everything they didn’t “have time for” (couldn’t be bothered to do) during the day. Now? I do what they do. I don’t have to be all fantastic day-saving Melanie. I get to be just another office drone. I like it. I get up, I make tea, I do less paperwork than I did before but I answer the phone more, there is a window behind me and the sun shines in. I hope the good feeling, the sense of accomplishment, all that stuff lasts, because it’s nice.
I put on my wedding ring again yesterday, for the first time in a few years. Firstly because I went through all my makeup and jewelry and happened to find it (and also some eyeshadows and shit I forgot I had, and all my earrings, so I’m wearing earrings and eyeliner now, too) and secondly because I thought maybe it would make me feel closer to my husband, because right now he is not happy with me and so I’m not happy with him, and it’s a soup of yuck. It’s weird how comfortable it felt right away. I don’t normally wear it because a) we have matching star tattoos on the backs of our necks, which are like rings only permanent and prettier; b) he doesn’t wear his because he hates rings, and I feel weird being the only one with a ring on; and c) the one that is “mine” doesn’t fit anymore, because I was thinner when we got married, but the one that is “his” does fit, and that is weird and I don’t like it. But now I’m wearing it.
I took it off when I went to bed, though, because lying there it suddenly started feeling like a shackle or something, like a symbol of me trying harder at our marriage than he is. Which isn’t strictly true, we both try in our own ways. Just mine are more wedding-ring-wearing ways, and then I get resentful and want his ways to be the same as mine. Also for him to get over shit he won’t get over, and to accept my olive branches. Olive branches are pretty, see? You could put them in a jar! They would like nice on your mental coffee table! Then we could talk about innocuous stuff without all the land mines that are cluttering our conversations right now. Aren’t you sick of land mines? I really am. I am holding my tongue all the time now and it is hurting my tongue, plus my hand is getting tired. Pretty olive branch! Here, just take it. You’ll like it once you get used to it.
1. What will you do with the money your dead body generates?
Well, I’ll be dead. So I won’t get to do much with it. Also, it isn’t that much money. I am a cheap corpse. So I assume my husband will use it to pay for my funeral or something. Wait…. if you sell your body to science, do you have a funeral? If not, then he will use it to travel someplace awesome without me. I hope he wears black and maybe one of those lace mourning veils to show how sad he is that I’m gone and he’s traveling ON MY CORPSE.
2. Can using Britishisms or maybe Canadianisms in spelling etc actually begin to turn your cells into belonging to that country? In other words, can you declare citizenship of a particular country after speaking like one of its residents for a certain period of time?
This is an awesome idea that I am subscribing to immediately. Cheerio, chaps! From now on, every English phrase I use brings me one step closer to my citizenship. I think it will take about 12 million or so of them to gain it.
3. The bathrooms in Denver’s airport are actually quite awesome, and the bathrooms in Chicago’s airport have self-cleaning toilet seats. What could Minnesota do to its airport bathrooms to make them worthy of being arrested in?
Video cameras! So that I could watch my arrest over and over again on closed-circuit television while eating Ben & Jerry’s and sobbing over the injustice of it all.
4. If you had to go a day without books, what would you do instead of read?
Die of boredom. Or else I’d probably spend a LOT of time surfing the internet, trying to pretend I didn’t miss books. And I’d read cereal boxes over and over again. “12 vitamins and minerals? Don’t mind if I do!” Maybe I’d finally get cable, too, to stave off the boredom.
5. How do you take your coffee?
Cream and sugar, but not so much sugar anymore. I used to like it really sweet, and now I can’t handle that because I am old, and my sweet tooth has had some sort of weird accident, rendering it far more sensitive than it once was.
As ordered to do by my interviewer and her interviewer before her and so on:
If you’d like to be interviewed by! me!, this is what you need to do:
1. Leave me a comment saying “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with a post containing your the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
I really need to utilize the goodness of Ms. Maggie Mason’s book here, and I also have some questions to answer, and today I talked to my Oma (German for Grandma) and she told me some amazing-ass stories I want to get down.
However, today was also The First Day of Kindergarten, and I still can’t wrap my head around that. That little boy, with the size 1 shoes (huge) and the backpack and the lunchbox (Transformers, Transformers, and Spiderman, because we are good consumers), is my little boy? Are you quite sure?
All told it went well, and since I took Oma to the doctor and all, I didn’t spend all day dwelling on the fact that my baby is 5 and in real school and was gone all day, eating lunch in a strange cafeteria and all that sort of thing. However, I’m finding myself obsessed with said lunch. I keep trying to think of cool things to pack, and I’ve already made two trips to the grocery store, wandering the aisles, fondling weird little foodstuffs I hadn’t realized existed in single-serve sizes, reading ingredient lists (to avoid the high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils), and generally looking like I was about to pull a large, flea-bitten cat out of my purse and start yelling about my newspaper collection taking over my house. I even had bright red Crocs and a Sesame Street T-shirt on today, to add to my manic crazy woman allure.
These are my last days working evenings and I’m feeling all sad and woe-is-me about it, because I have worked some variation of this 4-1-ish shift since I was a casino employee 3+ years ago. And switching to giving up my sun-filled days to sit at a computer? That somehow doesn’t appeal to me. Also when will I blog? I can’t blog from my own home, there’s no hard-core Blog Bitch cachet to that! I need to be an at-work blogger, and I will 100% for sure get fired if I try that at my new location. Which, apparently, will be in Party Central – every time I mention my new desk, I hear about how loud’n'crazy they are over there. Coming from having the whole building to myself (and two other guys on the other side of the wall, but who’s counting?) to Party Central? If I end up in the psych ward, the internet will know why. But at least we’ll have family dinner together and E will stop buying Red Baron frozen pizzas as if they’re going out of style and he owns stock in the company and (insert another swell cliche here, I can’t think of any).
Tomorrow? Tomorrow I will think hard and do my questions like a good girl. And the next day, hopefully, a little about being a teenager in Berlin in the 1940s and so on. Interesting shit.
