I’m sitting on the stone steps that lead up to my new apartment right now, catching sun and waiting for a furniture delivery. A new couch. Not to replace the one that is (hopefully) speedily on its way here from New York, but to fill in the empty space I like to call the den/office/this-is-where-I-pretend-to-work space. It’s crimson colored and perfectly squishy and the best part is, it pulls out to a bed. Seriously, people, the Aerobed is a nice idea, but
Oh holy cow. I must interrupt myself to tell you that some dude just came into view (not three yards away), and as he hasn’t noticed me, has begun pacing, smoking a cigarette and… adjusting himself. With, shall we say, real spirit and conviction. Amusing.
Anyway, I am growing less and less fond of the Aerobed. So in the Great Spending Binge of 2007, I bought the red couch of dreams. When I find the cords that go with all my computer attachments (iPod, camera), I’ll show you just how dreamy. Such redness! Such squishiness!
Speaking of dreamy! Yesterday, I bought a car. My first, very own, mine-all-mine car. I absolutely love it. I haven’t had a car at my disposal for… well, over five years. And never, ever have I had one that was mine. Mine to futz with (hello, sunroof) and wash and drive fast and sing out loud in. I couldn’t be happier! Again, when I make the Big Cord Discovery of 2007, I’ll show you just how dreamy that is, too.
Oh, and Sir Hal traveled fairly well; thanks to everyone for the helpful first time kitty flier suggestions. The poor beast clung to the bottom of his Sherpa bag for dear life, but there were no major incidents. Unless you count the bloody tracks he left on my shoulder at security. We’ve both since recovered from the trauma.
I’m gonna go hunt for those cords again. So much dreaminess to share.
Today, Loolwa Khazzoom from About.com interviewed me about blogging. You can read it here (or here, if the other isn’t current).
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have more of my most treasured possessions to pack into flimsy cardboard boxes that I just know the movers will treat with the utmost care.
Sigh. T-minus nineteen hours.
UPDATE: The movers just left. And while they weren’t exactly the most graceful dudes to handle a box of wine glasses, they managed to complete the move $600 under their estimate. Six hundred dollars.
Worst comes to worst, I’ll buy new damn wine glasses.
Going away parties are an exquisite kind of torture. The exquisite part : (almost) everyone you love is in the same place for a few glorious hours. The torture part: they’re there because soon you won’t be.
Saturday night, I put aside my stress, put on my red goin’ out shoes (the only non-schlubby footwear that hadn’t been packed away or shipped express to my mother) and met my friends at a Union Square bar for a last hurrah. Aside from the fact that I nearly broke down in blubbery tears at least a dozen times, the party was a complete success. Actually, I don’t think it could have been such a success without all the near-tears.
It was my first night off of narcotics (who never wants to see Vicodin ever again?), and in order not to deprive my system of potentially toxic substances, I got pretty tipsy in short order. What I’m saying is, some of the night is pretty hazy. Just the way I like it.
A few things I do remember:
My drunk and gallant Biscuit disco-spinning me Sarah’s mixed CDs (they’re legendarily awesome, people) Goldner’s belly. We saw a lot of it. So. Many. Hugs. The post-party drunk texting. I take it back, Stan. You’re not extra Degrassi for going home to make out with your pillow. Evil plotting with Ari and Laura. It’s what we do best. Justine’s boob That there was NO ONE to make out with. Probably better that way.
I woke up Sunday morning hung over and ready to reclaim my stress. And really freaking sad. The leaving, it is hard – lump in the throat hard.
Remember that song you learned in Brownies? Okay, remember that song I learned in Brownies? The one about new friends being silver and the old ones gold? I think, in my case, diamond-encrusted platinum might be a little closer to describing the people I’ve come to love over the last few years. Even my imaginary friends were never this loyal or imperfectly perfect. I get this heavy feeling in the center of my chest when I think about leaving them. But things change. They just do. And as one friend said, we’ll keep in touch over this here typey thing; it’ll be like I never left.
Last night as I was laying in bed, begging myself to fall asleep, moving stress finally caught up with me. Big time.
What the hell am I doing? Which, incidentally, is not the same questions as, “Why am I doing it?” Because that answer to that one hasn’t changed. Money, space, family. It’s just that the logistics are starting to take their toll and the little things have been getting to me.
Like the cardboard box wasteland that used to be my living room. Or the thought of being without my creature comforts for weeks while my furniture is in transit. Twenty-one business days! What is that?! Or what kind of havoc it’s going to wreak on Hal when I trap him in a cat carrier and drag him onto a plane. I mean, he’s already pissed at me because he sees the suitcases laid out in my bedroom and thinks I’m running off again. Just wait til he hears he’s going along.
That worry bothers me the most; cats are not known for their adaptability.
Do they actually make you take your pet out of the carrier at security? I can’t imagine Sir Hal is going to be cool with that. At all. I’m hoping that’s sort of… optional. If you have experience with pet travel, I’d love to hear about it. Just… no horror stories, please. I’m strung out and hopped up on pain killers. There’s no telling what I might do.
Once upon a last fall, I had kidney stones (and before that, appendicitis!), and people told me that I’d gone through some of the most excruciating of human experiences. You know, save child birth. Well, those people lied. Or they omitted the truth when they didn’t mention that my collective pain history — every minor ache and major trauma — could be trumped by one small hole in the back of my mouth when I sneezed the day after surgery.
One sneeze. Days and days of pain.
When I went to the dentist yesterday morning, I had tears in my eyes. They’d been there since Saturday night, when I sat like a lump on Ari’s couch trying not to cry through our Law & Order Marathon. I spent the next few days puking, either from pain, or from the levels of Vicodin my doctor was telling me to dump down my gullet. Two Vicodin and two Advil every four hours. Sweet god! There are tweakers and junkies hopped up on less!
But even on vomit-inducing amounts of drugs, I was still in agony. Walking became pretty much out of the question, as did sleeping, talking, or typing. So I sat, very still, with an ice pack glued to my face.
Then yesterday, the doc snipped open my stitches, pried apart the socket (eew), and shoved some strange smelling gauze in there. Clove oil and… what, Balm of Gilead? Because last night, I slept for more than two hours consecutively. Today, I walked, and rode the subway, and ate! Macaroni and cheese!
Behold, a mighty miracle has been worked!
The good news is, it looks like I’ve been spared any residual numbness. But in the spirit of good science, I’m not calling off the experiment. You know, in case it’s just too early to tell and all.
It’s a little after midnight on Sunday night when it starts started raining in the bedroom. I hear the initial plop, plop and look from the dark spots on my comforter to the ceiling where a seam has bulged and split, letting in the storm.
“Oh crap!” I say, launching myself from the bed, startling a sleeping Hal. He dodges my clumsy feet as I lunge for the laundry hamper, scattering the dirty clothes in a hurry to catch the fountain of rainwater. I yank cords from the outlet, sending both the lamp and the alarm clock into darkness.
“Crap, crap, crap.”
The bathroom skylight has been pouring rusty water for hours.
Were I a mother, I think I would turn the leaky roof into an adventure. Throw sheets over the furniture and create a camping trip out of leaky ceilings and interrrupted sleep. Fake cheeriness as I tuck children into sleeping bags in the living room, and make thunder into God’s estate furniture company liquidation. Everything must go! Fall asleep with a flashlight lodged under my ribs.
But I’m not a mother. I don’t have frightened kids – just a cranky cat equally unimpressed by the night’s upheaval. I am tired and my bed is wet.
“This f**king sucks,” I tell the cat, and crawl onto the sofa. And as I lay there an hour later, pissed and sleepless, it occurs to me the fake camping adventure might have been a better idea, kids or no.
Yesterday, I went in to have a wisdom tooth extracted. Yeah, yeah, we already went through that wholenon-ordeal, but for whatever reason, the insurance goons wouldn’t let me have the lower one done because it wasn’t through the gums yet. And recently, it has been. Through the gums and making life pretty effing intolerable. And now that I have no dental insurance at all, well, I just love a good case of some really bad timing.
Last time, I made a big deal about it (as is my way) and then felt silly when Stephanie came to pick me up at the dental surgeon’s office and I was totally fine. Ah, well. One can never be too prepared. But the way the surgeon said, “We need to talk” as he plopped my x-ray onto the lightboard, made me think that this time, things were not totally fine.
He explained that due to the location of the nerve canal, making two quick lines with a blue pen on my x-rays, and the location of the tooth, tapping on my number 17 molar, the extraction could cause some nerve compression.
“Which means you might experience temporary to permanent loss of feeling in your lips or part of your face.”
“What exactly do you mean by might,” I asked, shifting uncomfortably in the dentist chair.
“You have more of a chance of it happening than not.”
“Oh.”
“What we’re talking about here are things like, you won’t be able to put lipstick on without looking in a mirror, or be able to tell if you have a bit of food on your lip…”
Pfft! I thought. I’m not much of a lipstick girl, and the food thing – that’s what friends are for.
“…and most patients report a change or loss of sensation in kissing.”
No! Oh, no, no, no! Who likes, nay who loves kissing more than I do? Nobody, that’s who! I would do it professionally if there were a legitimate occupation to be had doing it. There’s nothing better than a good kiss, and no crime greater than a bad one; how would I know the difference anymore? Nooooooo!
I nodded to show I understood, then lay back in the chair and gave god, what in the seventh grade we’d have called, a major crusty.
If I waited, and left the tooth where it was, we could fight the flare-ups with antibiotics and painkillers, but the tooth would eventually have to come out. And the older I get, the less and less chance I have of regaining that lost sensation.
“Okay,” I told the doc, who’d been chatting with me about travel and family for the past twenty minutes (he seemed totally disinclined to rush me into any sort of decision — the mark of a good man and a good surgeon, in my book). “Let’s do this.”
Out came the IVs and monitors and suddenly, I wished I’d dragged Ari with me for this joyful experience. But the moment the sedative hit my veins (doc said I’d feel really, really drunk, really, really quickly and he wasn’t joking), I lost all track of that thought and went to Italy. No kidding, the entire surgery, I dreamed that I was vacationing in Italy. Which, if you’ll allow a tangent, is better than the dream I had last night where I got lost trying to find my apartment with Suzanne Sommers in tow, and got made fun of for it by Sarah Jessica Parker. End tangent.
Well, the good news is, the Novocaine wore off and although some parts of my face feel strange and tight, my lips feel mostly normal (I take back that major crusty, god). But the bad news is, the Novocaine wore off, and holy hell, does my jaw hurt.
Now, I guess the only way to tell if and when I regain full feeling in my lips is to take a scientific approach. Therefore, I propose to be kissed once a day for the next several months, and record my findings in a journal. Now accepting applications for a volunteer medical study. Compensation will be generous.
After months of being at each other’s throats like quarreling lovers, I’ve decided that if we’re ever going to have a lasting, loving relationship, this city and I need a little time apart.
Like most of the really big decisions in my life, I made this one on a whim. On Friday, I arrived in Dallas, wound too tightly and, as always, half-broke. By the middle of last week, I’d put a deposit on an apartment, off-loaded my UES apartment, and booked the movers. Then I emailed my loved ones.
Dear The People I Love, it went. I’m moving to Dallas. In two weeks.
The most common response has been, WHAT? Which I can understand. It is rather out of the blue. But what can I say? I’m impulsive; it’s just the way I’m wired. Besides, it’s only temporary.
I like that word, temporary; it feels nice and commitment-free. Which is pretty much all I can handle at the moment. Temporary will be long enough to write my book (oh, yes, it’s in the works!), save some money, and do a bit of traveling (Prague! Florence! Mykonos!). It’s going to be temporarily kick-ass.
Once upon a time, New York and I were truly, madly, deeply in love and I want it to be that way again. I figure a few months of Metroplex traffic, not having the world’s best coffee five steps from my front door, and missing some of the people I love best in the whole world will set me straight. And when I’m good and rested, forlorn for my friends, and carrying around a lot less debt, I’ll appreciate New York again. Instead of wanting to stab it in the eye.
There’s nothing I like more than a good, exciting adventure, and hopefully, my temporary stay in Dallas will be just that. Besides, I like to think of it as a whole new population of men to misunderstand. And what about that isn’t exciting?
Being a single gal of modest income in a stupidly expensive city, nothing chaps me more than not getting my money’s worth. You know, like shoes that break on the second wearing. Or meals that cost a fortune and still send you running for the fridge the minute you get home. Or the last several Sandra Bullock movies.
But the greatest offender on the list of Things That Waste My Hard Earned Cash? A namby-pamby massage.
In my world, a massage is an extravagance. It’s the kind of treat I only allow myself when I’ve been so on my game just I just deserve one (think of it as an oiled up gold star); when I’m starting to develop a Quasimodo humpback from too many hours in front of my computer with off-the-charts stress levels; or when I’m on vacation in some tropical paradise and my brain has lost all concept of money and suddenly a massage sounds like a very good use of next month’s grocery money. In that case, the decision is usually affected by fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them, and I can hardly be held responsible.
Last Friday, being neither on my game nor on vacation, I found myself on a massage table trying to unwind from the ball of stress I’d become over the past few weeks. Which wasn’t easy. My last massage was so meh that not only was my back still all knotted up, I was also suffering from buyer’s remorse (a brand of guilt I try never to entertain). As I lay there beneath the white sheet, eyes rolling back in my skull, it was all I could do not to anticipate being let down.
“Maybe she’ll be good,” I told myself.
She was good. So good that sometimes, I thought if she pressed any harder, my head was gonna pop! right off. I left the salon half-comatose.
This morning as I was getting out of the shower, I noticed a dark smudge on my reflection in the bathroom mirror. On closer inspection, it turned out to be four dark smudges. Four quarter-sized bruises between my shoulder blades. Ow! I said to the mirror as I pressed the tender black-and-blues. I turned back and forth, taking stock of the beating I’d received on the massage table. Then I smiled the smile of a very satisfied customer and got dressed for work.
“I write about everybody,” I said, laughing. “My life isn’t as interesting without all the characters I run into every day.”
I filled out a couple more lines of paperwork, then promised her I’d change her name if she did anything wacky and I was forced to tell the Interweb about it. Like yesterday at the grocery store.
“Can I ask you a question?”
I was twisting the plastic bag of gala apples and knotting it closed when I looked up to see the grocer – a large, friendly-looking, young-ish guy in in a green apron – smiling at me.
“Sure,” I said, but isn’t it usually the other way around?” I never have picked a good melon without the grocer’s help.
“I was just wondering… did you do those braids yourself?”
“Yep.” I smiled, suddenly self conscious of my Half Pint braids.
“Well, how do you get them so symmetrical? I tried to braid my little sister’s hair like that and they all came out uneven. She wasn’t too happy.”
Bizarre things happen all the time, and for a second, I wondered what would happen if I didn’t tell this man the secret to precisely even pigtail braids. Would he follow me to my car and hack them off with a cleaver he stole from the meat counter? I looked him over and decided he didn’t look like the hacking kind at all, that his sister was probably a very nice girl (one who deserved symmetry, damn it!), and that weird as the conversation may be, I was in no danger.
“You can’t look,” I said. “If you do it all by feel, they turn out perfect every time. Well, almost every time.” I smiled, and figeted with my apples.
“Ah, I’ll have to try that next time.”
He thanked me and I set my apples in the cart and wandered off down the aisle, trying to imagine this man braiding someone’s hair. I couldn’t.
On Saturday, I drove down to Austin to see my sister, and to drop in on Stephanie, Phil and the twins (though, seriously, since I hadn’t seen those little guppies since they each weighed less than three pounds and were living in baby aquariums in the NICU, I’m tempted to give them top billing).
Baby time is just ridiculously magical. I got to kiss baby cheeks, and rub baby tummies, and give a grunting little Lucas his bottle – it was all I could do not to nibble him to death. And when I climbed into bed after the 4 hour drive back to Dallas, I rolled over and could still smell sweet little baby head on my skin. I sighed, and some deep, dark part of my brain, obviously the part affected by hormones and baby smells, whispered, “Man. I have got to get knocked up.”
Then I reminded that dark part of my brain about the poop story Stephanie had told me that afternoon. And suddenly, there was no more talk of getting knocked up.
She ain’t Heavy; She’s my Blogger
Gonna have to figure out how to monetize this. In the meantime, enjoy some free content.
