In search of a good, therapeutic cry

I'm having "heartache" again. I've been getting mysterious but annoying chest pain for roughly the past four years during times of stress, and it's so not worthy of a whole blog post, but I don't know how to make it go away so I figured I'd try writing.

The first time I got "heartache" was in 2004 about a week after Pants went off to Officer Candidate School. I was pulling long commutes to a very stressful (but good) job, and planning our wedding and simultaneous relocation only a few months away, and drinking extravagant amounts of coffee. My shoulders had risen to ear level and the muscles had hardened and clenched so much that patches of my scalp would go numb for long periods. I was getting headaches from grinding my teeth, and all my nails were chewed and picked down to raw, pink stumps.

In other words, I was a lovely calming presence who didn't at all need a firm shaking and a large martini.

One day at work, shortly after Hurricane Ivan had stomped all over Pants and his terrified, half-starved OCS classmates and destroyed our future hometown, I started having chest pains, like someone had walked up and socked me right in the sternum-- in fact, right in the manubrium, a term I inexplicably remember from high school anatomy.* Everything I'd ever heard about having chest pains indicated that it was Bad, so for once, I actually disengaged myself from the permanent ass grooves in my squeaky work chair and went to a minor emergency center.

(* Mrs. Jacobs, if you're out there, you gave me a C but you're my hero. You taught me so much medical Latin, and the day you came tip-toeing over in your squeaky shoes and told me that mine was the most delicately dissected rat brain you'd ever seen, and then plunked it into a bottle of preservative, I positively glowed.)

Minor emergency centers, in my experience, are usually leisurely places with large waiting rooms, like the broad, stagnant places in a stream where debris eddies, lingers, spins, and waits for an indeterminate time before finally catching the current and moving on again. Even if, say, you are suffering the acute misery of a urinary tract infection, you will linger and suffer with the rest of the lingering and suffering readers of old issues of Parenting magazine until someone remembers you in your purgatory and at last calls your name.

But not, as it turns out, if you're experiencing chest pains. Chest pains are the golden ticket that whisk you right through the double doors and in to see a chipper, young Asian doctor, who will palpate, thump, probe, and squeeze various parts of you while asking a dizzying variety of questions. As it turned out, every test came up fine until she asked me if perhaps I was under any stress at home or at work, to which I replied, "Not that I'm aware of," and then suddenly, to both our surprise, burst into hiccuping tears.

After I'd explained briefly about the situation with Pants, the wedding, and the move, she laughed and said "I think what you've got is heartache," and advised that I try to relax a little.

Hayao Miyazaki is a brilliant maker of animated Japanese children's movies-- Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle are two of my favorites-- and his approach to children's animation is refreshingly anti-Disney. For instance, none of his characters are either all good or all bad, and all are shown to be capable of change, in contrast to Disney films where the moral line is drawn with fierce and unrelenting certainty. Other themes in Miyazaki movies include the spiritual and emotional benefits of performing daily chores (I would have hated that as a kid, but as an adult I find it comforting, and am suddenly grateful for my parents' long daily "to do" lists). And yet another yet recurring theme is the benefit of a good, soul-cleansing cry. At least once in each movie, the protagonist walks off into a meadow or crouches down in a private corner and bawls, just open-mouthed, barking wails. Soothing music plays, and eventually the protagonist sniffles a little, wipes his face on both his sleeves, and goes back to face the problem.

I think this is what I need to do. I need to have a good wail, with the snot and the tears, and the fragments of words. Dane Cook, by the way, has a hilarious bit in his routine about having a good, huge cry-- the lengths you go to to hide it, the things you say mid-cry, the sad life events you'll think up just to keep crying, and just how good it feels.

Think I may give it a try.

Total upheaval in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

If the military and I were tango partners, and relocations were one of those complicated, whip-lash-inducing interchanges, we'd still be bashing faces and kneeing each other in the groin. I use dance as a metaphor here, and the tango in particular, because it implies hope that I can one day master upheaval and clasp it to my heaving bosom in a passionate, complicated, synchronized embrace.

Right now, not so much.

Pants and I learned a few days ago that within the next two weeks, we are California-bound. It wasn't our first choice, but the more I think about it, I'm ashamed it wasn't. I'm looking forward to boasting about my adopted state's forward-thinking auto emissions requirements, and the fact that I was once terrified of our governor hunting me down with his exposed red robot eye. I'm also looking forward to getting carsick on Highway 1, taunting lemurs in San Diego, and goggling at trees wider at their base than the house I grew up in. There will still be plenty of Mexican immigrants to make me feel at home, but I'll also be within a couple hours' drive of world class drag shows and a nationally recognized dildo shop (inappropriate Christmas gifts!).

I have already warned a friend who lives near San Francisco that I've spent far too long away from my liberal hippie roots. Especially at our current post, things to do and places to go have been limited to dive bars and the local Chili's. I'm looking forward to ordering food I can't pronounce, seeing (intentional) performance art, and meeting people who pay for bizarre restorative treatments.*

*Very soon, Pants will have to sit in the equivalent of a giant salad spinner, whirling around a giant room until he passes out. The whole process, for some obscure and sadistic reason, will be videotaped. There's a reason for this, but it doesn't sound very convincing. Instead, I thought back to a co-worker of mine from a few years ago who paid $40 for blurry Polaroids of her aura, routinely hyperventilated while blindfolded with a group of "trance dancers," and spoke openly of the spiritual power of public nudity.

"How much do you think V____ would pay to ride the salad spinner if you told her it was purifying her chakras?" I asked. "More than $100?"

"Put it this way: probably not as much as the taxpayers pay for me to ride it, and all it does for me is make me puke and pass out," Pants replied.

For now I'm trying to focus on these good things, and not the part where I'm leaving another job I really liked and am about to engage in the crap-shoot hunt for a landlord in another state who doesn't harbor a grudge against military renters or indoor pets. Or the part where I get to frantically search for a job before the time bomb of my unemployment-based depression flattens me.

I just didn't know no better

This is spring break, and for most of my life those two words, when combined, have formed an ominous verb pair, as in, "now the black bear will spring upon its victim and break her."

I've never had good spring breaks.

This time around, since I'm teaching, I actually do get to observe the break again, but it's been consistant with its historical tendency to disappoint. It's almost over and I've spent most of the break toiling over Pants's banner. The pads of all my fingers are needle-perforated and exacto blade-sliced and coated in scales of super glue.

(I'd like to pause here and comment wryly on the commercially-driven, widely held expectation that spring break is supposed to be a time of wanton, sun-soaked abandon, rife with possibilities of fleeting romance and youthful leisure-- I'm just too damned tired and disaffected to do it.)

Anyway, back to the banner. We had a moment yesterday, the banner and I, where I realized that I'd brought it along as far as I could, and that what it now required (i.e., a backing and a precisely attached border to tie up all the raw edges) was far beyond what my skills could provide-- kind of like when Yoda and Obi Wan realized Luke's training was incomplete, but that the only way he'd learn to be a Jedi was to go out and fight the Dark Side himself. So I caved. I called professionals, an older retired couple who take in sewing and embroidery in their garage workshop a few blocks from my house.

I met with the woman yesterday morning shortly after Pants made his triumphant departure to go replace the back end of our pick-up with only a set of instructions printed off the internet, a box of cryptic looking parts, some dry ice (??), and his bare hands. I waved. "Go enjoy your inevitable success!" And then I called Marge, folded up the banner and some extra material, and bought myself a latte on the way to her house (I figure anything worth doing, including admitting defeat, is worth doing well).

Once there, I laid out my work with mixed feelings of tender pride and embarassment. Most of the good parts come from my mother's work on it weeks prior, but some of the elements I'd completed looked quite nice as well. I just couldn't do any more. Not a thing. It was maybe a tiny, tiny echo of what an overwhelmed mother might feel when dropping her kid off at the orphanage. Please help, do what you can, I'll mess it up if I try anymore...

Marge considered my work, clucking over the part where I'd tacked on a square of fabric instead of ripping out the underlying seams and properly sewing it in. More than once, this exchange:

"Now. What did you do here?"

"Where? Oh, um. That's tape. And I'm not sure what that is."

"Oh, Honey. Well, you just didn't know no better."

I endured her critiques and suggestions and tried to remember the compliments (mostly for my mother's work, so I could report them to her later), but mostly I just enjoyed hot sips of caffeine and wondered when I could write her a check.

The differences in generational skill and priority setting couldn't have been clearer-- Marge is from a different era of woman. She too was a military wife, and we discussed this, but her perspective was that of a mother trying to find good schools for her children while mine has been and still is focussed on finding a job and applying to graduate school.

"Of course, you don't work, do you?" she asked at one point, and for the first time I saw that question for what it must look like to a woman of her era, a woman fully capable of sewing her own and her children's wardrobes without using super glue or staples, feeding a family daily from scratch, and operating a household without a Shark Cordless Sweeper. Working would seem ridiculous, almost self-aggrandizing, on top of that kind of skilled labor.

"I do," I wanted to say, "It's just the unpaid part that I do so poorly."

So, gratefully, reverently, I left the banner in Marge's capable hands and came home where I defiantly hobbled my hands by applying fake nails. I did this with outright glee, because it makes me feel like a frivolous mob wife, clawed like a bird of prey and incapable of dextrous tasks like zipping my own pants.

Since then, I've been engaged in the following:

* hating our lurching, Stone Age Dell laptop-- I've actually drawn a little comic strip on all the creative ways I would destroy it, if I could. I completed the whole thing, with color, while waiting for it to load Google.

* reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.

* drawing a comic strip on all the totally inappropriate things I'm going to do when I'm an old woman and can use my possible senility as an excuse (ex.: throw rocks at cars, cuss at cusomer service reps, spike my hair and wear suspenders, make butter sculptures).

I think I might title the drawings, "Oh, Honey. She just don't know no better."