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."