Montage

It's been about two weeks since my last post, a lapse that was altogether deliberate and purposeful, and whose artistic merit will soon be clear. I have not written for two weeks so that I could then come back and write two stunning weeks of my life in a montage. For you. Really! A montage! That film device where all of the improbable parts of the plot are glossed over and rushed through to the accompaniment of lame, getting-things-done music.

Ready?

Cue the music: something mid- to up-tempo heavily reliant on synthesizers-- think of that song in "Scarface" called "Take it to the Limit" that plays during Tony Montana's building-my-drug-empire montage.

Scenes in quick succession, one fading to the next:

me valiantly blow-drying my hair in an effort to make it look professional

circling the campus where I work in a fruitless search for parking among my students' Hummers and Lexi (plural of Lexus?) and giant tricked-out, ultra shiny pick-ups, I jauntily hold up my hand to block the rays of early morning sun, which light up my now hopelessly retarded hairdo like a brown fan around my head. still the music continues upbeat as I walk the three blocks to work.

at the front of a long classroom, I try to point to my email address scrawled on a white board while simultaneously trying to scratch my face, causing me to lose my balance and nearly fall. This happens a lot, this total lack of spacial orientation while trying to teach. Also, I am pointing with my arm bent at the elbow and clamped to my side because somehow I am sweating profusely in this mild-temperatured classroom and am mortified of being the community college teacher with sweat stains under her arms.

the community college teacher with sweat stains under her arms returns home and throws a frisbee for her dog in the semi-sadistic hope of finally depleting the dog's boundless energy. Useless. In the final nuclear winter that will end all life on earth, Abby will somehow survive and trot from one wasted horizon to the other with her frisbee clamped between her teeth, whining for someone to throw it, god damn it, Throw. It.

roughly halfway through our two-week artistic hiatus, a crippling depression strikes. The cheesy synth music must now fade into some Depeche Mode or, God forbid, Morrissey. For roughly 48 hours I am an intolerable cloud of barely muffled sobs, shuffling from refrigerator to couch staring at nothing and eating nothing. I tell my husband I no longer give a shit where we are stationed next because I can't imagine it getting any better. Then I go sit in my car along the sea wall, watch the waves, and write in my journal about the butch lesbians next to me in their pick-up, shotgunning Bud Light from the huge cans you get at Stop N' Go. Big lesbians with big square working-on-cars shoulders, who tromp over to the sea wall trash barrel to throw out their empties and stretch their backs as the evening breeze ruffles their squarish mullets. Feeling much better, I head home, eat a bag of M&M's and am much restored.

return of upbeat music, more quick shots of me teaching interspersed with shots of me being paid to surf the internet, where my blue-haired lady friend found this brilliant blog.

and then the final scene of the montage is me, fabulously drunk on a Spanish red wine whose name translates to "House of the Devil," devouring basil havarti cheese and poppy seed crackers with my husband while we watch "Casablanca" and recite all the lines.

And that was basically two weeks. See? Wasn't the wait worth it? Yyyyyyeeeaaaahhhhh....

The dude who lives next door with his wife and two-year-old boy is out in their postage stamp backyard (next to our postage stamp backyard-- creepily I can see them out our second floor window) with the kid teaching him to swing at a giant blue foam baseball with a giant red foam bat. The man stands about four paces from the little boy, crouches over with the ball in his hand and asks, "Are you ready?" The kid strikes his stance-- knees bent, ass out, arms nearly covering his face as he waggles the bat directly above his head-- and says, "Yeah" while taking a quick series of tiny hopping steps toward his dad to meet the pitch almost as soon as it leaves his dad's hand. Mostly this ends in the dad getting bopped in the knees with the bat, but as I was writing this I heard the whoop of victory-- the ball made it over the fence to drop softly on my car's hood.

Way to go, dude. At least somebody's making some progress around here.

Blackout #71

More evidence that I am living in a bad foreign art film and cannot read the subtitles:

I went to the military eye doctor yesterday to have him take a look at my beet red right eye, which has taken to sealing itself shut every morning with eye spackle. Perhaps it could be infected? The doctor nods at my symptoms and we face off on either side of that Star Wars-looking headpiece that harnesses the power of the sun and shoots it through my eyes and into the back of my head. Through the giant green blots in my vision I see him opening a bottle of numbing eye drops.

I don't do these.

For some reason that still remains a mystery, I faint every time these drops go in my eyes. This has been tested and retested to a comic degree because no one believes me. So I go ahead and give it a try, for what is now the sixth time an eye doctor has borne down on me, dropper at the ready: "Hey, so is that alcaine? Please don't put it in my eye because I faint. Seriously. I don't know if I'm allergic or what, but I faint and sometimes have a seizure too. Please don't use it on me."

Somehow, this translates into: "Hey, so I'm batshit crazy and nama nama nama blah blah blah," because the doctor replies, "Oh, this stuff is different-- it's just a dye that helps me see infections--" drop, drop! "-- now just lean in and hold real still... you probably won't like this next part..." And then the rest of what he's saying dissolves into cotton and handbells and I remember my face dragging across the headpiece thing, and then reaching for my feet, and then nothing.

I wake up to startled (yes, startled!) male nurses and a retreating doctor saying, "Watch her-- I don't know what happened! There are no warnings in her file." I flop my mouth like a fish and wonder where I am and a giant Hawaiian guy tells me to breathe through my nose while he tries to hold down my jerking shoulders. I slur drunkenly that I might barf and he brings a trash can, but I can only dry heave. My hands and face are numb and I am drenched in sweat. For the next fifteen minutes, the Hawaiian guy sits calmly by my side and reports on my returning color, joking about how I may be a pale white girl, but no one should be that pale. Then he says, "So I guess you're allergic to the alcaine, huh?"

"That's what that was?"

"Yeah. It's a numbing drop."

"Really. You know, this is the sixth time that's happened. No one ever believes me."

"Then you should go to an allergist and get it checked out. Get a medic alert bracelet and have it put on your driver's license."

The Hawaiian guy leaves for a minute and the doctor comes back, but now the official explanation is that I must have what's called "White Coat Syndrome," which, he explains, basically means I have some sort of psychological freak out around doctors. Nevermind that I googled this term and it actually refers to unexplained high blood pressure in the presence of doctors, and that fainting is technically caused by a sudden drop in blood pressure. Silly patient.

So now I have yet another brain reboot under my belt, adding to my already impressive and dramatic collection, and am still no closer to answering that all important question, "What the fuck?"

Pieces of the puzzle: 1) I faint when sitting up for blood draws and when getting alcaine drops, once when my appendix was getting ready to explode, and once when I was drugged up from wisdom tooth surgery, 2) sometimes I have fun seizures that scare the living shit out of healthcare professionals, 3) I have incredibly low blood pressure, and, perhaps most tellingly, 4) my mother and brother faint from blood draws and proximity to exceptional gore, though this last one has never claimed me.

I'd say the score is a tie between heredity, low blood pressure, and fear-- but tell me, is there a reason NOT to be afraid when doctor after doctor just plows past blatant warnings from my repeated experience? I'm not sure how to make myself clearer than "I know what that is, don't use it on me, I will faint."

Perhaps my mistake is using logic, and words. In the world of the foreign art film, sometimes symbology has far greater sway. I think next time I'll kill a seagull and dance around weeping and see if that helps.

I want my own Red Tent, damn it

Things seem pretty hopeless today, but that could be because I'm reading The Red Tent and a whole village of men just got involuntarily circumsized and then murdered by the narrator's asshole brothers.

I must be careful about what I read because it inevitably effects my personal life. For weeks on end I see reality through the scrim of whatever book plot my brain is marinating in. My creepy Dostoyevsky phase nearly convinced me that my husband regretted marrying me and that my many sins were unforgivable; my Lolita phase had me noticing (not without a large ick factor) the highly sexualized culture of young girls; and my recent fling with Werner Herzog's documentary The Grizzly Man and Nick Jans' The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears has me wondering if perhaps the best treatment for my own mental illness might be forging psychotic friendships with hungry sharks.

This is all to point out that "the book I'm reading now is fucking with my head," is almost always an accurate statement for me. Small things like doing the dishes or making meals now carry the weight of subservience, and though my book-addled mind resents these tasks, it also prevents me from asking for help. I'm afraid if I do ask, the undertones of hysteria will be unmistakable, and I'll have to explain that I'm nursing a grudge for a tribe of long-dead Canaanite women.

And it's not just household chores that this book is affecting-- I'm also feeling the ache of missing my female friends, some of whom I got to see over MLK weekend, which was wonderful. It's been hard to make friends in this new landscape of permanent impermanence-- it's been hard to feel like the risk and the effort are worth it. You can tell a good husband anything, but you can't always expect him to understand it, or for his companionship to fill every corner of your world.

If my mind were a book, today it would read:

"It's windy outside today, enough to make the eaves whistle and the screens rattle, and the early afternoon sun has scoured the last of the shadows from the fields around my house. The world feels overexposed and lonely and I would like nothing better than to retreat to the secret, sheltering shade of a tent with my own tribe of friends."

Holiday plunder has put me in the mood for feathered mullet

A short list of some of the great things about Christmas:

1) a collection of ten species of carnivorous plants to grow in the kitchen window, courtesy of my mother-in-law, who has the preternatural talent of perfect gift-giving.

2) a gold hotel desk bell, also from afore-mentioned mother-in-law. You never know how many things are slam-the-bell-worthy until you have one of these things. New pot of coffee? Ding! Husband's smacktabulous ass going by? Ding! Kitten nearby and way too calm? Ding ding ding!

3) Sublime Stitching. This woman has single-handedly battled my winter break depression for three weeks. And does she even know it? No. But I have slightly pornographic kitchen towels now and plans for a Tupac tribute apron.

4) Avenging Unicorn action figure playset. My mother has a tradition of having a parallel universe gag Christmas right after the real one. We all load up on wine and exchange gifts mostly from this, the greatest toy store in all creation (despite its over-abundance of hipsters on any given day).

5) MONEY. Oh, Money, I've missed you. We parted ways quite a while ago, didn't we? What was our falling out about? Oh right, I was tired of taking it up the ass for you. But there you were in my Christmas gifts, peeking coyly out of an envelope and offering a truce: the promise of a drafting table. I hunger for the 36"x48" Alvin Workmaster Jr. with 35-degree incline and adjustable floor height, the figurative launch pad for my legion of creatures and stories. Come to me.

Side note, almost too embarassing to admit: I had a rather *intimate* dream last night about Ben Stiller. Weird, but weirder still is that it was Ben Stiller from "Dodgeball." And it was GREAT. Sadly, I have no change in medication or recent crack habit to which to attribute this.

New Year's

Back in our coastal town and I am already missing the stunning graffiti of Austin, its pockets of expensively maintained women (roaming Breed Hardware looking bored, bored, bored), and most of all the way winter light takes on a golden cast and picks out all the contours and shadows in the hills, especially the ear-popping ones near Mansfield Dam.

I spent New Year's Eve at a wedding, one of the best I've been to and not just because it was for a bride who had to relearn how to walk for it. Pretty much nothing beats a brisk, cloudless night in the hill country with good beer, good food, good music, a hot date who's tethered to you for life, and gorgeous three-inch heels bought hours earlier for under $40. But add a bride who giggles through her ceremony while the entire audience is in tears, and who can two-step beautifully even with a titanium femur and a rebuilt neck, and you get something truly special.