tuckova

something my former hands had longed for

I had a Heart Episode at the dentist's yesterday. I really want it to Mean Something, or to at least have had a life-passed-before-my-eyes etc, but mainly what I'm taking away is that I am pissed at myself for compounding it by panicking. Also grateful that I got to call Friar and be all WHOA about it and he didn't even tell me I totally didn't have a heart attack until we were both safely home. My resting heart temperature is like 60 now; that's amazing and good right. I mean I'm not worried about my heart. I am a drama queen and I am bringing the drama, here it is: drama. I didn't tell Squire about how the main thing that scared me was thinking that I wouldn't see him again, and how determination to get over that fear was important in terms of focused getting home action. My drama has changed since the days when I thought that 27 was a good time to die, so there's that.

I think not liking the oversell of bacon is the new bacon.

I think that it is awesome how ugly Edward James Olmos is. Yes I am late to the Battlestar Gallactica show, but at least I'm here now. It is nothing new to observe that in pretty much any given film the women are going to be prettier and younger, but I still had to rack my brains to think of any woman who is even close to Olmos's league. The only woman I can think of that comes close is Linda Hunt, and I think she can act circles around Olmos, and he is really good. So maybe I could now make a blanket statement about how all ugly people who go into acting are probably really amazing, and how great would it be to have a movie with all ugly people. Except I thought Michelle Pfeiffer did a great job in Frankie and Johnny so I just blew my own idea out of the water.

I think it is funny how parents raise the kids they can stand to have and then think that all that personality is just on the kids. Certainly I think people are born with a certain amount of stuff in place, but if your kid can't fall asleep without noise-canceling headphones, I think that's on you. I'm talking only about other parents: Squire is totes his own person.

I think that it is interesting how I process maybe one thought every year. This year so far the thought seems to be "You're kidding, right?" which is when people express a level of stupid so incomprehensible to me that I think the only possible explanation is that they're joking. So far there seems to be no way to verify it with most people that I don't know, or even people I know without being really insulting, so this is a mostly internal process.

The amount of my thinking that is occupied by the past is not to be underestimated.

tug

Logic and emotion are fighting again. Logic says I don't understand and Logic does some explaining of why understanding is important while Emotion's feet tap impatiently. Impatience is also an emotion that Emotion has. Emotion wants to be trusted. Emotion says I shouldn't have to explain why I feel this; it should be enough for you that I say I feel it. Logic doesn't know what to say about that, because Logic feels the ice cracking all around. Feels it like through vibrations, not with feelings. Emotion says can you please just please try. Logic says I am trying and Emotion says not hard enough you're not. Logic talks about common sense and being sensible and Emotion talks about sensitivity. Emotion wants to know why Logic's point of view gets to go first all the time. Logic counts off facts using graphs and figures and fingers. Emotion starts to cry. Logic says why are you being so emotional. Logic passes over the tissues and puts out a hand all can't we be friends and Emotion says between sobs never mind, never never mind.

oh, Sylvia

Sometime in my early teens for a mercifully brief period of time I had the absolute delusion that my ability to take somewhat decent care of my sister totally qualified me as a babysitter and I went to work. I babysat regularly for the people across the street, who were California Jewish and that was pretty interesting, all that art and strange half-held ritual. There was another woman whose children I don't remember beyond the smell of their bedroom, sleep and urine, but I remember she called me Sarah Bernhardt. I liked it after the kids would go to sleep, wandering the rooms of the house, reading the spines of the books or flipping through the record collections, imagining I lived there.

One time I watched two children whose mother was, I think, recently divorced. She was going to a party. This was the saddest house I remember being in, not a home at all. There was a hole in the living room wall and someone had penciled above it "Sarah did this when she was mad." Sarah being the mother. Things went along okay until bedtime, when the boy completely snapped and decided he was going to kill me and his sister with a baseball bat. Let me tell you, you do not want a 15 year old in charge in this situation, because we are perfectly capable of making enough drama on our own and do not need help from genuine dramaticians. I tried to take the bat away a few times, got cracked on the arm pretty hard, and gave up. Using I guess hurricane logic, I locked myself and the sister in the bathroom and she fell asleep against me while he banged against the door with the bat. Naturally the mother had left no phone number where she could be reached. Eventually the boy fell asleep on the floor. I tucked the girl in bed and proceeded to think of ways to stay awake. There was a book with a black cover, with a hand seeming to rip through paper, holding or dropping a flower, which looked like it might do the trick. And it did; I stayed up all night reading.

The mother didn't come home til the next morning. The man who had driven her home drove me home, which was my first ride in an semi, which was interesting. I have absolutely no memory of what happened with the children that morning, but I'm pretty sure that that night was the end of my babysitting career. And that is the story of how I read "The Bell Jar".

not quite

You're just saying what it looks like to you, you're just riffing, making jokes, trading barbed wire tongue gossip. This one is an idiot trapped in a loveless marriage for fear of dying alone; that one is hopeless with the idea that love can make over the face of the beloved into something more useful than a mask; the other believes that belief is enough to transform the world. This one thinks that what it says is interesting while clearly everyone is wiping away their yawns; that one isn't even clever enough to understand the function of a thesaurus, much less a dictionary; the other hasn't learned the function of words to start with. You could rail against the world all night if left unchecked.

What's behind this of course is the illusion that while we're looking at this, that, and the other, people might fail to notice what was in fact clear way more than a paragraph ago: that you are less than what you mock; that what you are is nothing more than vinegar and salt, spooned onto others for entertainment value. You do not nourish. The poorer flavors you describe rise above sea level to majestic impression despite your sour evaluation, and you are left to float alone, as salt does. And vinegar and salt are insufficiently satisfying, which you mention as though it had nothing to do with you and your damaged taste.

hand me down my walking cane

I love editing, but it seems increasingly true to me that the things that make me really good at my job can make actual life with myself kinda hard for me sometimes. And I presume for other people, too, though I don't know. My friends seem to like me okay. Perhaps I choose friends who like hanging out with a person who can turn coal into diamonds; what do I know.

I mean: my mother sends me this adorable postcard from Turkey and tells me that turquoise comes from there, and I can't be all "That's nice!" or anything; no, I have to be totally ahem-ahem about it, because turquoise does not either come from Turkey and I see no reason to perpetuate mythology, particularly now that the internet is always open. I should point out that she's somewhat complicit in this ahem-ity, as (at least as I recall it) we were allowed to get up from the dinner table only for emergencies, and that "emergencies" extended to "consulting a reference work in the course of settling an argument". It may not have been that strict, but I remember running for the World Book more than once.

I come home from a night on the town and then send the people I just saw links to back up the facts I presented over the course of what was a perfectly lovely evening. See?! I'm yelling across the midnight internet. I was right!* I will first drink and then fact-check you under the table, is all I'm saying. On the plus side, nobody sends me "funny" email forwards anymore. Or political stuff either. If only for that reason, I don't think I'm going to change; I'm just observing that what is "giving up a cheap instant laugh for the prolonged thrill of learning and discovery" for me may come off as "a lot of furious knicker-twisting for no good reason" to people who think that it is fun to build a straw man and set it on fire.

I also send links to funny (thoroughly vetted) stuff, so you don't need to be scared to be my friend or anything. And I make good martinis, not least because I'm on a constant quest for the perfect one. Come over and help.

*ETA: If I was wrong? I will send you the links to show that I learned that you were right.

how do you like what you have?

So, where were we? Oh, yes, my tragic sleeplessness. Well that seems to be over now YAY. It is funny how when I'm in a happy moment I am usually able to name it and enjoy it even though I am aware of its transitory soap bubble status, but when I'm unhappy it takes me a long time to figure out where it comes from, and in the meantime it's always what if it lasts forever this time? And then of course the moment it's over I'm like, oh yeah well of course. Of course I couldn't sleep; I was in a burning building.

Fortunately I have outstanding self-preservation and thus continue to go through the motions of removing myself from said burning building even when it all seems so hopeless, because some clever part of me knows that if I run, I will eventually be standing outside with all what's really important, what I have that I love, and we will have sooty faces maybe but we won't be dead or anything.

And you know, I don't mean possessions, but the people I love who really make it possible... no, that make it necessary to run. Because I am surrounded by expanding circles of awesomeness, and from the people I interact with daily to the people I only talk to a couple times a year, I am so extraordinarily lucky that I can only bear to think about it very rarely or my heart would explode. I live with an amazing pair of guys, I have friends that I see regularly, friends I see annually, and friends I've never met, and yet I know that each of these people has my back. There are couches around the world that I could distressed damsel-esquely collapse on, and those people who would hand me tissue and tell me jokes, and I know this is true not least because it is unquestionable that I would do the same for them. Gertrude Stein asked, "How do you like what you have?" and I have to say I like it really, really well. I have friends who will help me sift through my shit and laugh about it. I have people who know how to distract me from my own stabby moments by discussing stab binding. I have a sister I can call at 3 in the morning who will remind me that you cannot go wrong re-reading your favorite childhood books. And there I was, curled on the couch an hour later sniffling because Taran couldn't make pottery the way he wanted, and he had to move on... I felt nevertheless finally as right as... no, more right than rain.

I just mean to say: I know I am really lucky. I know I am so unbelievably blessed to have the life I have, to have so many people making that life rich and wonderful. I know that the moments of bliss, like the moments of despair, are just shifts in the wind, and that a good gust of laughter can blow away even the acrid smell of smoke from a building I didn't have to stay in, and the rest of the neighborhood is intact, because it's filled with good people. I'm counting you.

stair master masters the stairs

Every time I got to a staircase on Saturday I couldn't see the stairs. All I could see is the floor I was on and the floor below that I was going to and the giant falling place in between, swirling with danger. I could see myself falling and falling and then at least broken bones, words like crumpled and shattered. I made a system where I would explain to somebody nearby about the vertigo, an odd dizzy trepidation, which I have gotten before. Some of them just put my hand into theirs before I even finished explaining, and they would take me down the stairs while I stared at their shoulders or some other vague horizon and chanted don't look! down! in the rhythm of the descent. Squire took me downstairs, and my first boss when I moved here, and a doctor I knew for a while. Strangers, too. So many kind people, so much sweetness. It's embarrassing to have to keep telling people that there are some things you can't do. I can't go down stairs. The amount that it is embarrassing to tell is the same amount that it is liberating to say out loud, and I had to learn every time, and there were so many stairs.

Finally I was sitting at the top of the flight, above the stairs I couldn't bring into focus, waiting for somebody friendly to come along and hold my hand. Squire's most amazing babysitter, who is now a most amazing woman, came and sat down next to me as I finished my cigarette. I started to tell her how I couldn't see the stairs, how I needed help. And she said, you know, the stairs in this building all recede when they're not being used: you have to push a button to make the stairs come out. You probably just hadn't noticed because you'd been afraid to look. And she pushed it, and I looked down for the first time, really looked, and watched the stairs unfold below me. And then we walked down the stairs, and I laughed, brave and giddy.

Dear brain, I wish you would let me sleep past 4 a.m., but I thank you for waking me up laughing. And for giving me the best metaphors, all the time.

list

Five things I am good at:
editing
explaining how I feel
arguing
playing games
organizing

Five things I suck at:
sports
taking things at face value
forgiveness
keeping routines
naming my weaknesses

Three things I am surprisingly good at:
making up new lyrics to songs on the spot
dealing with bureaucracy
haircuts

Three things I surprisingly suck at:
keeping my desk clean
making phone calls
figuring tips

spider catches fly.

You are angry, and then hurt, and then angry at yourself for being hurt. And then hurt again. This is pretty much all there is to work with, and you are working at it whenever you are not consciously working with anything else. You cannot tell the difference between licking wounds and picking scabs, and you are doing both. You spend days working, trying, but every moment is a reproach, and each reproach is three-fold: what you heard, what you listened to, what you keep replaying. The shadows made by cobwebs have an opinion about you, and they aren't impressed. This is what it comes to. Not least because of the cobwebs, not least because of the shadows, the dirt, the secrets and the lies.

This is what it means to know better. It means that you get five seconds of breathing room, five seconds of living with knowledge, and then for a moment, really only, you forget that you know and then you are down again, spiders crawling in your heart, and hitting yourself with your own fists because you should have known better. Worse: because you did.

jump

The rope goes up and down and the girls holding the ends swing it out and around, beautiful arcs, it's perfect. My hands out in front of me, cupped towards the rope, moving with the rhythm, and at the right moment I run and jump. I will run and jump soon. Not this swing, but the next, the next, the next. There's a line behind forming behind me. I don't want to hold things up. I'll go on the next swing. Maybe there's not a line; maybe it's my own impatience with myself. I can't look because I'm watching the rope. The rope slapping the ground, rising in an arc, slapping the ground, and my hands cupping the rhythm, and all I have to do is jump, and all I can think about is the sting of the rope when it hits my legs, when I miss. Not this swing, then, but the next, the next.