I've got one hand in my pocket and the other one is smashing my neighbor's stereo

So, you guys didn't really believe it was going to be 30 songs in 30 consecutive days, did you? Come on, cut me some slack - I can barely remember how to type a sentence.

Day 2: Your least favorite song


1995 was not a good year for me.

I graduated from high school in spring and was due to start college in the fall. I didn't know why I wanted to go to college. I only knew that it sounded slightly better than working at Dairy Queen and I had heard that this was what successful people did, so I went with it. I had no real aspirations of what to study and minimal interest in anything other than trying to look cool and listen to music that I though affiliated me with cool. The more obscure the band, the more attractive I thought I became to people with this particular brand of cool, but the shit couldn't be too obscure, otherwise I would lose touch with the whole coolness barometer altogether. By the time I graduated from high school I had a good, trained grasp of the fact that anything liked by the masses, with a few exceptions, was automatically suspect, even though I knew very little about what really made music good.

I was heading to a state school. My parents had lacked the cultural capital required to know what went in to exploring a college education for their kids. There were no trips to the nearby PAC-10 schools or out east for interviews or campus visits. I was never encouraged to do things that might look good on a college application. My parents didn't know the first thing about looking into scholarship options. The only time I ever remember my mother talking to me about college was to say that her dream for me was to go off to college and marry an older boy that was about to graduate which would apparently secure me a worry-free future sustained by a college boy salary. Great vote of confidence to get me started at college, eh?

I thumbed through the housing options catalogs and was sold on the idea of 'getting the most out of an authentic college life experience' where I would have an 'important networking opportunity' and would likely establish relationships that would be memorable to me throughout my life.

This was a golden opportunity to try out new versions of myself. I had a clean slate and was heretofore unpigeonholed. I could change my hair, my clothes, my interests, and my taste in music. I could redefine the coolness barometer altogether to fit with the real me. The trouble was, I wasn't comfortable enough with myself to determine what it was I really liked and felt lost without a reference to see how I measured up. I looked around me and was overwhelmed with trying to determine where I belonged.

In high school I had barely been within the margins of the cool crowd. I didn't get asked on dates or to dances a lot, but I got invited to parties and was generally good at tethering myself to people that were well accepted. I was carefully perceptive about what kind of belts were being worn at the time, just how worn my levies should be, and the minimum acceptable number of earring holes required to be part of the crowd. So even though I was a few notches down on the pretty scale compared to the girls I most admired, I fit in with the scenery and didn't draw too much attention to the fact that I had no business being there or anywhere really.

But in the college dorm environment, I couldn't clearly identify the alternatively cool anti-mainstream crowd I had elbowed my way into in high school and I was suddenly surrounded by hundreds of stunningly beautiful, rich women in their prime that were rushing for sororities, whose parents had shipped them off to sunny Arizona from the east coast. I looked around and knew that being on the margins of cool wasn't going to cut the mustard. But I didn't have the confidence to attempt to be accepted at the sorority level. So I duly linked greek life to the claim that it was all just a bunch of bullshit and that I hated it, while I secretly browsed the catalogs of the sorority houses and imagined what it would be like to live in one of them.

I was lonely as fuck at a time when I was unable to appreciate aloneness. I became friends with some of the girls that weren't really into the sorority thing. They were nerdy and smart and knew things like that U of A had a top notch medical school and what your GPA had to be to get into law school. They were all so sure of what they were studying and spent hours at it, while I wandered around bored, with my books barely cracked open. I hung out downstairs on the cement benches where people with obscure t-shirts that seemed integrated and happy and cool smoked cigarettes, but I was too shot down in my loneliness to approach them, only able to muster up occasional eye contact in the hopes that someone would come talk to me. The few fleeting relationships I managed to form made no impressionable impact on me. I don't remember a single person's name of the people I shared months living alongside.

This Alanis Morissette song was popular at the time and the girls in the room in front of mine blasted it multiple times a day with their door wide open for the entire first semester. Every young 18 year woman - nerdy, hippy, alternative type, sorority sister - sang this song from the top of their lungs while clutching their hearts or wrapping their arms around other like-minded women and they all felt like it was written just for them. They were all high but grounded, sane but overwhelmed, lost but hopeful, baby. They knew it was all gonna be fine fine fine. I guess they all had one hand in their pockets and the other giving a high five and I hated them all for their camaraderie and their college life experience that I felt so disconnected with.

Besides, the song is just dumb. Who puts one hand in their pocket while the other one is playing the piano? Please.

I left U of A after one semester.

StumbleIt

Don't stop kicking, okay?

I've been meaning to write about you.

Really I have.

Because when you're older you'll probably think I didn't care at all about what was happening to you, that you had now grown to the whopping size of a red bell pepper, that you were now doing somersaults inside me. I had written so passionately about other things, other people I loved, people I barely knew even, but not you. I was even able to write about the lack of you. But not you.

But see, I write when I'm conflicted, troubled, mixed and jumbled up inside and in need of pulling everything into focus somehow, to probe and dissect innards by way of word hunting. With you, I hadn't felt any of these things. Everything had felt just the way it ought to. There had been scaly monsters inside me locking horns like there usually are for other things. I hadn't felt fear or uncertainty or guilt or absolute weakness.

But this week that changed.

This week I remembered how my cousin lost his baby boy five years ago and my stomach sank like a stone inside, you must have felt it too. Tiny Jordan wasn't as tiny as you, but as humans go, he was pretty small at only 18 months. This perfectly healthy boy suddenly lost control over his left eyelid, causing it to droop down and not blink properly. Then it was discovered that he was developing cataracts. To add more worry to his devastated parents, whose baby was going blind, he refused to eat and anything that made its way inside was promptly spat up. The doctors decided to perform an endoscopy. It was an outpatient procedure, but one that required general anesthesia. Little Jordan went to sleep so the doctors could find out what was wrong and help him get better, but he never woke up again. He was killed by diagnostic medicine.

Those two people managed to pick up the shattered pieces of their family life. I don't know how they did it. Your kicks and somersaults and racing heartbeat confirm to me that I Would. Not. Make. It. I can only assume this process took them years to recover from, if indeed they ever really did. I know that Jordan's older brother Stevie must have suffered too. Stevie was developmentally disabled but he understood things. Stevie is sweet and smart and even then at only 5 years old knew that his parents were hurting. At some point he knew not to ask about Baby Jordan anymore.

Today 10-year-old Stevie is hanging on to his little frail life by a string. His parents, terrified I'm sure by all things medical, took him in to the hospital when he began to lose his balance and his head began to bop from side to side. The doctors wanted to sedate him and perform an MRI. During the MRI, they discovered he had a spot on his brain, which would require further testing, a spinal tap, another MRI, all of which have had unexpected complications and problems breathing, which then required an induced coma and a ventilator. Little Stevie went to sleep so the doctors could find out what was wrong and help him get better. They are now trying to release him from the coma, by injecting him with medications that are causing him to go into seizures. The doctors do not believe he is not going to make it. They want a complete blood transfusion now and a heart biopsy.

His parents are, were, will twice-forever be, eternally, redundantly broken. They were finally limping around trying to hold each other up, sometimes being too much weight for the other to bear with his or her own limp to manage. They were finally making a life again. I don't think they really ever imagined such a shattering blow would fly out of the god-clouds so unfairly soon, while they were still so fucking injured. I don't think they ever imagined that another one of their boys might lose his life in another rare medical diagnostic tragedy.

In the meantime, you kick. Through my tears over breakfast, you kick. Through the floods of memories that hurricane over me of the childhood I shared with my cousin, the one where he got the shit life of shoes that were too small and a drunk stepfather passed out on the couch and 7-11 hamburgers for dinner, and I got the good life, you kick, kick, kick.

And your kicks remind me that you are living and healthy and safe inside me. And you also remind me of how weak and fragile you are: now, when you are born, when you are 18 months, when you are 10 years old, and probably for the rest of the time we share the world together. Your weakness and fragility translates into my own weakness and fragility. And your little kicks remind me that if all the humans on earth stood in a line and shit-lives and medical fuck ups on tiny loved ones were rationed out based on who deserved them, there's a small chance that I might end up with one, and my cousin definitely, definitely wouldn't.

I love you my little red bell pepper. Please don't stop kicking.

StumbleIt

Titles are crap. Do you require a title if we're just sitting there? No.

So can we just act like we're hanging out having a coffee? And can I just say straight away that I'm not fucking using my thesaurus today because when people have coffee together they don't whip out their thesaurus to try to express themselves just so. And don't expect even so much as a spellcheck out of me today. If we're having coffee together, I assume you are interested in me and even if you can't identify with my predicament, you don't require that I spin you round a wordy flying saucer adventure, do you? I just have to talk and I don't even care at this point how it comes out.

Because through all of this shit I'm going through, I forgot that I need my friends, and more than any of my real friends, I need my internet friends: you. And them.

So, remember that one thing where I do that really animal thing but then for some reason no little homo sapiens appear? Well my doctor just told me that Luisito and I are the equivalent of a dog humping a stuffed animal on the living room floor, the uncooperative stuffed animal with the missing ear being me. Well, that’s not exactly the case. I’m actually more like a stuffed animal with a tiny pathetic pulse that makes the dog so crazy he chases his own tail in between humpings: I have ‘diminished fertility’. I gather that means I get to listen to approximately 108 more enlightened individuals tell me that I just need to ‘relax’. Believe me f-tards, I couldn’t be more relaxed if I were stuffed with latex.

Stupid font bullshit I don't care.

The scare tactics, which I'm fully aware were scare tactics, of the fertility clinic have worked on me and we've signed our infertile asses up for full in vitro and yes I feel conflicted about the whole damn thing to the point where I'm unable to even write about the conflicting feelings, but there they are and this is where I stop the post because this is just so fucking inadequate as far as posts go.

Can we do this another day?

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Maybe I explain myself better here.

StumbleIt

A package from Mom

I walk in the front door and see what is sitting on the dining room table and instantly feel the gratification of a child that was able to jump out of the pool and run dripping wet into the street and catch the ice cream truck in time.

A Box.

Just for me.

From home.

Holy fuck it's exciting. I can't decide whether to clap or rub my hands together like Gargamel.

In a frenzy I would be embarrassed if anyone saw, I attempt to pick the tape off, tear it, gnaw it off with my teeth and exasperatedly grab my keys to try to sever the bitch open so I can get my prize.

The box flaps open and reveals some mauve colored tissue paper and an envelope with my name on it on top. Ignoring my instincts to toss it aside and bite my way through the tissue paper all the way to the Reese's peanut butter chips I know are in there, I carefully open the envelope and pull out a piece of flawlessly folded notebook paper and my little heart sinks and my conniptional joy wanes and a dumb lump takes over my throat and a coup is declared over my tear ducts cause I know what I'm going to see.

Not the words or the message in the letter but the handwriting parachutes off the page and glides over me and I suddenly recall all of the things I had seen with this exact penmanship in a turbulence of affection and anamnesis: birthday cards, lists of chores, checks to cover my rent, notes on the fridge of things needed from the grocery store, the pages of the journal she kept when she first got married to my dad that I had found that one day while I was snooping through her shit, letters to a small child that lived too damned far away from her mother, letters to Spain that tried to hide a heartsickness and hope that this wouldn't go on for much longer.

She had upright letters that were a series of perfect arches that stood tall and bold, large and confident, so perfectly aligned with the horizontal page lines it was almost scientific, reminding me of how brutally intentional she was, how you could never accuse her of not wishing to do things exactly right, how her only failure was in the actual execution of the things she had in mind to do, but never in the fervency with which she penned them, with which she had in her mind to do them. The perfection of the print of this letter informed me that my mother had sat down with several pieces of paper, had written some things, didn't like the way they looked, crossed them out, frowned at the strikethrough, then started the letter again, then accidentally placed her coffee mug on the page, cursed herself and then started a new page, blemish free after getting another cup of coffee. I had seen her do it before. She was a perfectionist printer with nothing to do except send care packages to her daughter in Spain that needed packed brown sugar and Midol P.M.and the thrill of getting something in the mail to make it through life.

I had given her a list of things I needed but she always sends some extra things in there too: a new skirt, bobby pins, a DVD for Luis. I imagined her carefully crossing things off an impeccably composed list with her perfectly precise handwriting, a list perfected after many inferior lists had been discarded, smiling inside at the forgiveness inherent in a deliciously blank sheet of paper. I know this because I do it. It's not the shit that gets done that's important, it's the zeal with which the list itself is created and the thought that goes in to each and every item: in what order it will be listed, what the item will be called, what information if any will follow it in brackets, what items should be included in a sublist of any one listed item. If I could only fucking consummate the shit that gets immaculately committed to paper, well, I'd just have all my shit together now wouldn't I?

This is the day to day I don't see of her anymore, her lists, her post it notes everywhere, always signed with a perfect little heart. And then I look around at notebooks I have lying everywhere, grocery lists and scraps of reminders and half literate paragraphs of potential blog posts. And I realize she is in my day to day. I notice my letters arch with the same bold intention to do shit right and I know I just fall short in the executing of life part. I know that my hand curls over the pen just like hers does. I step out of myself and know I even have the same expression on my face right now. She's always right here with me. I just look down at my hands and see her. When I scrawl my name on a credit card slip, it's her, with the same curly, flowery ambition.

And then I slowly and calmly open the tissue paper and my fingers lightly kiss the items that she had touched several days before and damn do I ever miss her.

StumbleIt

Tips for the discerned lady traveler

As a seasoned lady traveler, I thought I'd share some tips with you, still fresh in my mind from my recent week of leisure in Northern Spain.

1). Opt for the most luxurious accommodations your pocket book can afford you. Being a more adventurous traveler, I often find myself far away from my many summer estates, which often requires adapting to more bourgeois living arrangements, with a staff that is unaccustomed to my rigid requirements. When selecting such accommodations, consider the calibre of the fellow lodgers, as the inevitable exchange of pleasantries may be required, and you'll want to find yourself amongst the gentility of your peerage. I usually find the fellow lodgers at the Ritz hotels to be of a tolerable cultivation, and it is hence a suitable compromise when I find myself on the road. If this is not feasible, a lady like myself may just have to deal with the beer filled fuckers flying the pirate flag at the next tent over.



2). Upon making your reservations, insist on ocean views when seaside. I highly recommend requesting a suite with a wet bar stocked with the finest imported beverages, a grand piano for nightly entertaining and separate sleeping quarters featuring a king-sized mattress of the highest orthopedic advancements. But if need be, you can always just chuck all your shit into a two sleeper and pump the air back into your mattress in the middle of the night in the pouring rain.



3). Be sure to select among your staff the chauffeur with the most experience in mechanics for untimely roadside repairs. Remember your rank and resist the temptation to get out of the car to help. You may, however, bark orders from behind the windshield and act like a pissy bitch tapping on the glass and pointing out what he's doing wrong.




4). If local giants move in on you and make attempts at intimidation, use your wit and charm to gain their confidence.



Failing that, throw those bitches down with your weak ass trembling quadriceps, but remember, your knees will actually come in handy afterward, when you need to run to the outhouse in the middle of the night.



5). Have your staff pack your trunks lightly. You would be surprised at how a simple pair of black Jimmy Choo pumps can transition perfectly from a daytime stroll of fine shopping to the nightly entertainment offered at cocktail hour. A T-shirt can also easily substitute for a turban, should the scalp scorching sun require it, like if you decide to hike 12 kilometres up a horseshit mountain at high noon.



6). When making a wine selection, opt for a Le Montrachet DRC 1978, served only in the finest hand blown Venetian crystal goblets. If you find this superb choice unavailable, a Carlos Serres 2005 will also do, or as my travel companion likes to refer to it, "the best shit at the camp store", served in a plastic cup.



7). Being away from your culinary staff may require intestinal adjustments, but do try the local delicacies if you can muster it. If you are an especially delicate eater, consider preshipping your capricious preferences such as caviar and baby eel ahead of time to await you upon your arrival. If this is not feasible, a slab of meat the size of your head should get your shitter functioning again, quick like.



8). Ensure that the personal chef assigned to you is skilled in both classical and modern gastronomy, maintaining a synergy between sweet and savory, and is capable of creating culinary harmony through elaborate preparation, emphasizing the visual spectacle and employing irony as a fundamental ingredient. Actually, you know what? Fuck it. Throw those vegetables that have been sitting in a pool of melted ice in your cooler for days now over the fire and then pick the black gunk off of them after you scorch the living shit out of them. Gracefully pretend to enjoy burnt onions.



9). Choose a resort with a saltwater infinity pool, which are quite fashionable nowadays. If your resort of choice has more antiquated playgrounds, a traditional salt water pool such as this one should do quite nicely:



10). A swim up bar may seem very passe and even low class, but even a lady while on holiday will let her guard down and welcome a little pool time horseplay. If you are not fortunate enough to enjoy a swim up bar, you can always bribe your traveling companion with the promise of awkward tent sex if he gets up and buys you a beer from the ice-cream truck looking thing.



11). Do make time for a spa treatment while on holiday. Caviar facials will do wonders for your fine lines and an Evian bath will get your body rehydrated. For the feet, opt for a diamond peel microdermabrasion treatment. Or you can try one of these organic scrub treatments to make your fugly cracked heels look less like horse's hooves.



Remember to pop the blisters you got hiking with your Swiss army knife before indulging in this luxurious treatment.



I hope these travel tips do come in handy while you are out living the life of leisure you have earned this summer. Don't forget to send me a postcard my darlings.

Muaaaaa!!!

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Photos:
all ours except the pirate flag one and the feet one.

I’m fine, really, I just needed to go for a jog and to say the fuck-word ten hundred times

I step into the elevator and stare in the mirror at what can only be described as a thirty-something, American dork giving me the stink eye. She’s wearing these dumb blue running shorts she’s had for like 15 years which act as some ridiculous cake topper for the hairy and mole-ridden legs that haven’t seen the sun in 9 months and that are probably about to get rocked into a melanoma frenzy by the hot Seville sun.

There are tits somewhere under this sports bra that is so tight that I become forcefully acquainted with the previously unknown phenomenon called ‘back fat’, which I just quickly add to the list of body parts I would like exchanged for something else. The hidden, smashed up tits are stupid, inadequate blobs of uselessness though because they’ve never once served either one of their real purposes. I’d be better off with mosquito bites, or cancerous moles or watermelon jelly beans for tits.

My workout clothes are out of style and too small for me because I refuse to spend more money on shit that's gonna rot in my closet from lack of use. And by 'refuse to spend money on' I mean 'can't buy because pretty soon I’m gonna be unemployed'. But whatever, I'm not talking about money and my stupidly precarious job situation, okay, I'm talking about the fact that my boobs are idle, ineffectual flesh quagmires and that I never fucking exercise because I have problems with self-discipline.

Today's different though. Today I'm going running. Yeah, like, with my ipod and all my stupid gear and shit. And I look like a total dork but I don't care. Because my body parts are stupid anyway and they go with my dumb outfit.

Today I want to smash pavement with my heels, until my head turns a scary shade of red with a rush of the opiate of endorphins, no matter how much the impact pulverizes my whiny little bitch of a sacrum that, while I'm at it, should be added to the list of body parts that need to be exchanged.

I raise my lip slightly exposing my teeth in disapproval at my reflection. Stupid elevator mirrors. I should have taken the stairs. I decide that I don’t care if my sacrum shatters into a million pieces. It’s not like I’m pregnant and I need to be careful. It’s not like I’m “healthy” anyway. Nature already decided that my kind are to die out, so what’s the diff? Ha! The pavement is going to feel what I want to do to people’s faces. People like my doctor with his stupid 25 thousand million dollar scheme he has cooked up to make me a sci-fi baby in a petri dish because I apparently require weird lab equipment and a million dollars to have a family. He'll only do this after stabbing me for scary blood tests and looking in at all my rotted organs and after cutting out a chunk of my husband’s balls and after making him jack off on demand. Bam! How does that feel, stupid pavement face? What up with your science now, bitch? The pavement also gets to be all the stupid people that have pestered us to have kids because my god, it’s so goddamn simple, you just lay down and deposit your cum and voila!- you have a vomiting woman and a positive pregnancy test and truckloads of like hope and excitement and shit and, you know, a future that doesn't resemble the fucked up one that's in my mind right now.

I blast the music on my ipod and hope people hear it and know I’m not interested in humanly high fives, chit chat, eye contact, sharing the universe with them, offering them a drop of water if they were dying of thirst, or being a member of their stupid society with their stupid ideas and their seeds they spread like a germ diaspora while my shit never gets fertilized because it sucks. Them, with their perfectly functioning ovaries and sperm, with their abilities to bust out their junk at any given moment and create the seedlings of a human, statistically speaking, with nearly anyone that just happens to walk by. Them, with, you know things like property in their name and, oh I don’t know, a steady income so that they could adopt a little baby if they wanted to, a little baby that needed a mommy and daddy and that's out there and that needs me. I know I only live in a rental apartment and I might not have a job soon, but I'm gonna make it and so fuck you for not letting me have a family until I'm fucking old and gray and too decrepit to have one.

I don’t belong in that society. I guess I’ll just hang back here with the a-holes that think breast milk in a sealed container in a fridge at work is offensive and that say they don’t want kids simply because they don’t like what it would do to their beautiful bodies as if gravity ain’t gonna fuck that shit up anyway. We'll just hang out here with our dogs and talk about furminators and about how great life is without kids and how people with kids fucking suck.

By the time I get back home, my head is clear and I don’t hate everyone anymore, and science and society are cool as shit again, and I'm gonna survive, I guess. But my face is red for the next three hours and my back really fucking hurts.

Stupid sacrum.

StumbleIt

Stepdad

I stared blankly at him from across the table and examined his giant orange peel nose, his melanoma-speckled forehead, massive and red - the shore of his baldness which had morphed at some point from athletic-type buzz cut into old man head. Years of golfing weekly with no sunscreen and hair loss can do a number on a good looking man.

As usual, he wore a tie-dye collared sports shirt, one of his shirts -- the ones he'd been dyeing and selling for 20 some years, having started his business in our garage with our own washing machine. Together with his shorts and runners, his whole ensemble perfectly represented both pot-smoking hippie and jock that had molotoved him into one hot conservative Republican mess. He was on his third tequila sunrise (requested in a tumbler lest he be mistaken for a ‘faggot’) and we hadn’t even had our appetizers yet. His green eyes peered through sagged eyelids that appeared to droop down so low they almost folded over themselves and nearly touched his eyeballs while a few still remaining eyelashes pointed almost downward, emphasizing the tired, pigeon feeder Grandpa look about him. His squarish fingers were spread out as he monologued, his thumb naturally in a position of hyperextension.

I suppressed eye-rolling, groaning, or feigning an epileptic fit. We were, after all, in a restaurant for god's sake. I drifted in and out of listening to avoid the worn shoe of confrontation.

"...So anyway, we was the kinda kids that would break anyone's ass that got in our way. I mean it..."

Jesus Christ he’s old, I thought, and at 56 he’s still talking the same shit about growing up in Wisconsin. Maybe he read my mind because he stopped, turned his head ever so slightly, smiled goofily, and sweetly uttered one of the many nicknames he had for me. His cracked tooth that had greeted my giggling face so many times over the last 25 years reminded me of the beautiful man behind the worrisome sun spots, the political diatribes, and the days of old before he was a joy-sucked middle-aged adult whose better days were far behind him and who watched way too damned much Fox News.

".....I dated Margie back then -- she had the biggest tits. But anyway, that's not the point..."

I pretended to be intensely interested in the wine list and buried my head in it, while I breathed in my mother's tangible, thick embarrassment. A familiar parcel of family dinner failure was about to arrive without warning. But she only scoffed and then shoved a vodka tonic into her face.

"...Those fucking people. They don't know how to work. All they know how to do is cash their welfare checks and use their food stamps. And I'm gonna work my ass off and pay for their health insurance? Uh uh..."

Food stamps, I thought, and had a faint recollection of using a food stamp for postage to a letter to Santa Claus. This is the man that rescued my mother from standing in line for blocks of government cheese when I was eight years old. Maybe his politics were more nuanced back then.

"...Fine. I'll shut up. Can I get another tequila sunrise please?"

From my eight year old point of view, he was like a large freckled child – unlike any other adult I had ever met. He was a massive muscular man testifying to the hours he spent boxing, wrestling, running, and in general trying to maintain the youthful body that would eventually escape him. His patience for kid hyperactivity was inexhaustible. He would chase me around the couch until I fell to the floor in utter euphoric exhaustion where I would be doomed to a tickling session until I cried out for my mom gasping for air through my roaring upheavals of laughter. Then, fully clothed, I would get tossed into the pool as I squealed in a mix of terror and delight, but mostly delight. On occasion, he would then pretend to walk casually and step fully clothed into the swimming pool, as if just walking about. La di da, he would hum, for my amusement. He would take out his wallet soaked and ruined and pull out the sopping wet money and pretend to pay for something while I doubled over in pre-adolescent hilarity.

When he wasn’t acting silly for the sole benefit of getting me to snort and snicker and squeal, he was working himself to the bone, reinventing some way to keep the wad of Benjamins he always carried in full supply. He couldn't go back on a rescue attempt. He knew my sisters and I would be needing synchronized swimming lessons and Guess Jeans and trips to Disneyland and trampolines and cars insured for 16 year old garage mishaps.

"...We're losing our house..."

I snapped back from my rescued childhood, replete with everything I had ever wanted and more and stared at the man that now had an IRS freeze on his checking account.

No, no, no, no. You got it all wrong. You are the one with the piles of cash everywhere and the Christmas presents that fill an entire room, see? You're the one that knows about mortgages and investments and the stock exchange and interest rates and how to check the oil in my car and how to file my fucking income tax return, and how to interview for a job at Dairy Queen. You're the one with all the answers who knows how to solve everything. I'm the one that needs a girl scout uniform and flute lessons and braces for my gnarled teeth and someone to pay for my college tuition. I'm the one that needs help paying my rent and that can't afford to get my wisdom teeth pulled. I'm the one that crashed my car and can't afford the $2000 repair job. Remember me? You're the one that went into a trance and punched the fuck out of a punching bag in the garage. But I'm the one that has always needed you punching. You're not defeated. You can't be.

My eyes flashed between his sad eyes and my mother's uneaten plate of pasta and I wrestled myself from the ridiculous grips of self pity and the selfish solitude of realizing that there was no one left to hold my life together if I were to fuck it up. I allowed myself to grasp, however superficially, his disappointment, loss and sense of years wasted - his own personal Waterloo. How much graver and more psychologically destructive is it to, at 56, lose everything you've ever worked for than to, at 33, watch your childhood superhero become merely a man?



I flagged down the waiter and ordered another margarita while I calculated if I had enough money in my checking account to pay for dinner.

StumbleIt

XOXO

I´m in love again.

With the internet, that is.

I used to have a school girl crush on this blogger, and now I think I´m full on in love once again. She pointed me towards a new obsession and now I want to be a photographer.

(Insert forehead scrunching)

I want to be a lot of things. Like a person that does more than stare out a window smoking cigarettes with my swivel ashtray in my free time (shut up, can we talk about it later? Moving was stressful).

Little by little I´m catching up with my many other crushes and long time loves. I´ve missed you a lot. I´ve thought about you daily.

Besides having a really cool window to stare out and a whole damn city needing to be spied on with binoculars and cigarettes that need to be smoked, the thing is, I read really boring-ass shit all day until my eyeballs feel like the Sahara desert. I have even developed a "benign growth of the conjunctiva" which means that I'm some sort of a vampire because it presumably comes from too much sunlight, although I know damn well comes from reading about electrostatic precipitators in eight hour stretches.

Fucking eye growths. What did I do to deserve this? My dad had one too and eventually he had to get it removed. If you guys knew how I felt about getting shots or even stepping foot in a hospital to visit someone, you might be able to deduce how I might feel about someone holding back my eyelids with clamps and poking at my eyeball with scalpels and shit.

Besides that, I´m supposed to be learning how to edit professionally (and I have a long damn way to go), since in one year´s time I have to take an exam in order to keep my position at work and apparently, oops, I need to learn French within that year too, because the goddamn exam is in French. Don´t ask me how an exam for an English proofreader in Spain can be in French cause I haven´t got the foggiest idea. But apparently I need to figure this shit out or my career is going to turn into trace gas and my income is going to become nanomaterial. (Did you just hear that? Did I just say career? It may be the first time in my life I´ve thought in those terms.) Does anyone know how the eff I´m supposed to learn French while living in Spain, with a full time job and blogs to read and neighbors that need to be spied on with vampire eyes that need to be dealt with?

So I´ve neglected you a lot. And I don´t read books anymore or newspapers and my brain is going to expire soon and start rotting if I don´t start inputting and outputting some goodness.

I´m making an effort. But I always thought you deserved more than my crossed out and haphazardly scribbled brain upchucks and so I stay silent for ages. Why do I want to dazzle you so? Maybe because I like you a whole lot. This rut, it's hard to get out of and the only way I can do it is by posting words I haven't previously massaged and french kissed and marinated in butter overnight (I said something along those lines when I started this blog, but this time it´s fer reals and I might even post a bullet point list next of shit in my closet, or shit that my neighbors are doing, even though you deserve much better).

So there.

Because it makes me happy to just talk to you.

Because

I.

Love.

You.

<3>

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Old doll, old wall, new window

“This rug tape won’t come off.”

I stopped what I was doing and gave him the please-for-the-love-of-god-figure-it-out look. “Put some more paint thinner on it,” I offered. “Use a razor blade” and then I mumbled from the other room, “Or just leave it there. Let the next tenant deal with it.”

I rushed about the place, as we were already late in turning the keys in. Violent arm and leg movements hurriedly slammed cupboards, tied trash bags shut, kicked a random screw under those horrible sofas that the furnished rental had come with, wiped the cheap faux wood table down one last time where we’d had countless meals.

This was it. These were the remains of our valuables, the only hints of the five years we’d spent in this flat: a shriveled plant on the windowsill reminding me of my inability to accept responsibility for anything, some old cleaning rags and a bottle of Don Limpio that got the place sparkling to a state that contrasted sharply with how it had looked while we lived there, a couple of old winter coats that didn’t make their way to the suitcases we’d stuffed to breaking point, a half a dozen unidentifiable gadget pieces we weren’t sure if we should throw away or if they would end up being the secret essential pieces we would need to get our vacuum cleaner or coffee pot to work again when they break. Everything went into the last crate.

He took the crate from me and started down the stairs to the car. “Vamos.”

“I’ll be down in a sec, I just have to grab the mop and stuff.”

I just needed one last look. I’m a glutton for this I guess. I suppose I had seen my dad do it on his countless relocations. This was what I did when I moved. I just needed to do some final mind engraving, some psychological mapping, some primitive photography. I took it all in. It was just so. The sofas were over there just like that; we had sat just right there, with the TV over there and right there was the window where he had stood. I can't forget.

I shouldn't.

Those walls. It was the walls that needed to get in one last finger shaking at me and they called me back in for one last talking to, as if I were in my late teens moving out of my parents home for the first time, getting one final scolding on not meeting curfew the night before my move.

You know the kind off walls that are out of style nowadays but that everyone had when we were younger? The ones with the drywall spray texture that created all sorts of camouflaged eyes and pointing fingers, hidden demons and genitals that turn into clowns? Now they angrily pulsed and swirled until my cheeks finally became wet and then they stood still again.

I had snagged on these walls, they had pulled at my weak loose strings and had latched on until I had unraveled completely, until all my innards of spongy stuffing had spilled out before them, right here on these cheap sofas. They had seen that, contrary to popular belief, I was not actually stuffed with diamonds and rose petals. I was stuffed with possibly-toxic synthetic material. They were so judgmental, these walls. They loomed over me and forever scolded me and never ever forgave. I guess these particular walls didn’t have the chance to see much of the good parts of me.

He had picked up my stuffing and pushed it back inside me carefully. He had sewn me back together slowly, trying not to damage my original form along the way, remembering what I had looked like brand new on the store shelf, the smell of sweet plastic, unopened. Once he had put me back together again, he scrubbed my face clean and combed back my stringy hair, and straightened my tattered dress. I wasn't the same, but he wasn't one to throw imperfect things away.



Those walls had been witness to all that goodness too.

He finally placed me in the crate to take down to the car. He was taking me away where the walls could no longer get at me.

I dried my eyes and closed the door for the last time.

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I suppose my new walls are in a state of shock from the Ecru #C2B280 they were so generously coated with, intended to erase their memories of the previous dwellers.

These walls and I are still in the getting-to-know-each-other phase and actually I’m quite agreeable initially. I have the kind of face that looks attractive the first few times you see it. You have to look at me awhile before you begin to notice that one eyebrow is actually higher up than the other, that one eyelid droops down slightly, that my forehead is always either frowning or raising my eyebrows up to exhaustion, that my mouth is unusually small and that my thumbs belong on a member of some mythical diminutive race. I’m actually quite funny at first too. I can be witty. I let out little jabs so one will know what kind of cultured individual they are dealing with. To those walls, I must look like a brand new doll; that sweet smell of strawberry plastic.

But I’m not afraid of them here. They don’t have the hidden genital clowns embedded in them. They are smooth and stainless and they don’t have any opinions yet. And there aren’t as many of them to gang up on me unexpectedly like before.

Besides, all the windows in this place keep the walls in check, and I find windows to be altogether friendlier.

Don’t you?

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Nukke 2 by vaula from flickr.
Doll with cracked head by zen from flickr.
Sister of chucky by peasap from flickr.
Untitled by Luisito

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Tienen cojones

I rarely do this, but this one just had me pissing, my friends.

Check out this picture of Spain's first family together with the Obamas.




I wish my dad had been as cool as Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and had let me wear whatever I wanted all the time, no matter our diplomatic engagements.

Please watch this. I can't stop watching it.

This is one of my top 10 moments of Spanish diplomacy. It is right up there with the King of Spain telling Hugo Chavez to shut up.

If you grow up amidst Spanish statesmanship and manage to be this anti-establishment when you're bumping shoulders with society's elite, you deserve my utmost respect. Or at least my chanted prayers while dancing around a pile of stones in the forest.



Now that is what you call Spanish cojones. I fucking love this country.

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That Thumb Looks Familiar

I wake up startled, as usual. The surprise reality of 8:00 a.m. scares the shit out of me every time. When will I learn to expect it and not get startled? Haven't I noticed a pattern here yet? Sun goes down, eyes shut, sun comes up, eyes open. Nothing new here, no need to have an anxiety attack every time it happens.

But this is my welcome into each day; the dream world-- my world -- ceases abruptly and somebody else's life begins for the day, a responsible person's life.

This time my surprise wake up is different though, not the usual alarm-from-hell wake up. This time, someone's gigantic swollen hand with brachydactyly type D thumbs I'd recognize anywhere is about to strangle me into my typical day of obligation, characterizing how I'll feel until I fall asleep again that night. I try to push the lifeless foreign arm thing away but what the fuck is happening with my real arms? Why the fuck are they on vacation when you need them? One of them appears to be replaced by this slug of a giant, swollen, clubbed-thumb hand/arm bullshit that isn't reacting at all to my commands.

Where is the obedient arm I remember that could help my docile hand check my nose for crusty boogars right now, that could rub the sleep out of my eyes, that could push myself out of bed, functional with all its submissive digits awaiting instructions from the brain?

For some time now I've had the feeling that I am no longer actively living my life as I once did, rather it is being lived and I'm allowed to watch as if I were watching my own open-heart surgery. I'm a recursive puppet, apparently with an abnormally large maverick arm with a clubbed-thumb hand, controlling its own show, but a puppet nonetheless; no soul, no spark, no ganas, infinitely feeding myself back into my own circularity, leaving myself bewildered by my own uncontrollable control over my own life.

My own abnormally thumbed sadistic hand is holding me down, holding me in place, smacking me in the face to wake up, hurry up, go here, read this document, go there, stop for milk, call the guy to get the dishwasher fixed. The rest of me – the me that hangs from strings controlled by the swollen infidel appendage-- just wants to be left the hell alone with the full use of my capacities, with digits and limbs that mind their master again.

Someone's hand that looks like mine slaps me into the reminder that the laundry situation is no longer bearable. If I controlled my own arm, I might go out and just buy new underwear to avoid responsibility for that giant mountain of dirty clothes that has long since overpopulated the hamper, sprawling out onto the floor, creating a suburb of clothes alongside it now, competing with the hamper itself in size. If I controlled my own arm, it would rest behind my head as I'd watch the pile of clothes grow and mutate, pants giving birth to dirty underwear caught inside their legs. My well-behaved arm would help my hand light a cigarette for me – a much better alternative as an activity for arms compared to sorting laundry.

Then I'm slapped in the face with the tumescent tissue again, as a reminder that dinner must be made -- an event, something acceptable, something balanced, something fit for a proper family with real plates and shit. Popping a frozen bagel into the toaster to calm a single rumbling tummy simply. won't. do. This act would be too utilitarian, giving nutrients to the bloodstream, nothing more, sans the symbolic ritual of it all. If I controlled that traitor of an arm, it might prepare just that and then check off the hunger box on my list of shit I can be bothered to deal with. I'd eat my acceptable nutrient-product while staring at a blank wall without blinking. For dessert, the dutifully complying arm/hand would fetch me a spoonful of peanut butter which I would enjoy perhaps sitting on the kitchen counter, with that same blank stare, my other hand following orders to support my chin and to not dare attempt to mince garlic, wash dishes, or throw away the spoiled chicken in the fridge.

Maybe one of these days, I'll wake up and my arms will become incumbent upon me again, cooperating once again and surrendering to my will and will stop trying to run my life with all their busy activity. The first thing I'll do with my obedient arms is grab the scissors and cut the puppet strings.

Vacation countdown: 26 days.

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I went on a hike this weekend, that's what I'm trying to say

I have this thing.

This perpetual thing that is hardened to me from over-use that I sometimes call "homesickness". If it is a sickness at all, it is most certainly improperly diagnosed.

Truthfully, homesickness was what I felt my first semester of college, when I had to say goodbye to the home I had finally found after having put a stop to my parents bouncing me around in a ping pong match. Homesickness was what I felt when I spent a few weeks too many in the Amazon jungle, bathing in a fucking river and trying to determine where the tribal folk took shits and had sex. Homesickness was what I felt as a study abroad student, completely out of my element and way, way, way before the assimilation of culture.

True homesickness only happens when you know for sure, beyond any doubt, that you don't belong.

Herein lies my problem. When I go home, my suspicions that I might belong here are supported. And shadows of doubt hover over my fantasies of belonging there, only there.

No, this...this is not homesickness.

Call it perpetual maladjustment (cultural or otherwise) or incessant emptiness or constant unease. Or something.

"I'm homesick". This just makes me not have to deal.

It will be eight months of not being near my organic place. Eight months in what feels like a plant pot that's way too small for me. Eight months away from my original soil, away from my familiar precipitation and that sunlight that I've been perfectly acquainted with all my life touching me just so, just the same way as always, photosynthesizing me from within just as intended, allowing me to flourish as I was meant to, as I was taught to subconsciously, through gestures and symbols, language and allegory, and place, oh, especially place.

This misnomer is an unscratchable itch-inducing bitch that doesn't hide, and whenever I hit a wall, as I am wont to do, it's often the delinquent responsible for my misfortune or discontent. Problems don't exist for me here that are separate from this one problem, see, I don't let them.

How ridiculous. How irresponsible of me to attribute everything to this misnomer. Doesn't hate exist anymore? Or pure loneliness? Or pure disappointment? Or pure wrong-doing, independent from this worn out crutch?

This thing I've mislabelled is difficult to alleviate, mostly because I am constantly concentrating on the banana skins that exacerbate it, like being hogtied by red tape. I stop on my path and pick up the stones I've tripped over despite having seen them.* Then I study them under microscope and determine their mineraloids, whether they are sedimentary or metamorphic, noting their texture and chemical composition, when all I really had to do was kick them the fuck out of my way to begin with and keep moving.

Until last weekend.

When we went for a hike.

When I left my misnomer somewhere and I left the stones I had tripped over in my fucking geology lab of doom and we sat on a rock near a waterfall and had our lunch.

Suddenly, my roots were nourished in soil that felt damn near original. The sun shone on him and me bright as ever, but it was actually raining at the same moment; one of those impossible moments in nature, one of those impossible moments that happen all the time in Arizona. And then the rain cleared away and the sky held the horizon sharply in focus from the dryness in the atmosphere so much like home. I looked out at the leaves, grateful that they moved in just the same way as I knew they would, that the water flowed just as it was supposed to, that gravity held me down on the rock like it always had before, and that the birds sang those same songs I remember from the warm spring days from long ago and far away.

And I felt my inner photosynthesis happening in it's old way, it's familiar way. For a few hours, I flourished and I knew I belonged to that place at that moment, without tripping stones or dangerous banana peels, or crutches to blame.

*this comes from something Denise sent me that says "La experiencia me sirve para reconocer la piedra con la que volver a tropezar" - Experience is good for recognizing the stone that you will continue to trip on. I think I translated that right. Thanks Denise, if you had a blog, I'd link to it.

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