Friday, August 31, 2007
Grrrr....
So the pet-sitting for my trip is going to cost $600. Blank stare. That's a big farking kick in the teeth, let me tell you. I can't seem to call in a favour on this one to save my life, so it looks more like I'll be rounding up money owed and selling stuff like the guitar. Of course I can't help but think that I probably spent that kind of money (at least) on someone over the past 9 months, enabling in that lovely way I'm so good at, and hoping somehow, someway, that it would come back to me in the form of acceptance or tenderness. I wonder how many others there were, doing just as I did, looking at their bank statements now and wondering what they got out of it. Not bitter, just broke. Oh well, at least the new girl has a lucrative career. I wonder if I can sue for something. Emotional fuckwittage? Oh the irony.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Aw shit, or why I had to add slurpee to my dictionary
I needed a pepsi slurpee. Two martinis at Second City (funny), a drop off at the 7-11 at Bloor and Spadina and I was feeling dehydrated, and there it was. I giggled with Carole the whole subway ride home but I wondered if she noticed me staring at it, brows lightly furrowed, examining the cup, watching the fingerprints melt inward, the brown trickling down like slowmotion guinness, swirling it, sipping again, stopped.
They didn’t taste like my childhood anymore, like dry-hot Edmonton summers, skipping to the plaza, knees knobby and scabbed with a dollar from some relative with less nutritional control than my mother. to get a dilly bar or a slurpee (yes, DQ and 7-11 on the same corner, insane). It felt like a long hike but I went there last summer and it is in fact just around the corner, and neither a DQ or a 7-11 anymore.
No, now pepsi slurpees taste like something else. They taste like you saying I’ll enjoy a trip into the downtown night if I’d just roll off the couch. Me skipping ahead on the way back, slurping, knees knobby and scarred and me being playful just for a moment, just for a glimpse of what might have been. And I wonder if that’s why you take me out into the air, before we’re back in your living room, passing lit things across the table from couch to couch to break the silence. The silence that occurs when there’s nothing left you’re allowed to say. Allowed to say without sounding too this or that, too bold, too much, too simple.
Now pepsi slurpees taste like this and the limbo feels like a hammock underneath me. Rest me softly on something and let the caffeine course through me, sending memories at hyper speed. I want them to burn off faster anyway. But this is how it is, life attaching itself to different things. Slurpees attaching themselves to different things, but maybe that’s fine because the 7-11 isn’t there anymore anyway.
They didn’t taste like my childhood anymore, like dry-hot Edmonton summers, skipping to the plaza, knees knobby and scabbed with a dollar from some relative with less nutritional control than my mother. to get a dilly bar or a slurpee (yes, DQ and 7-11 on the same corner, insane). It felt like a long hike but I went there last summer and it is in fact just around the corner, and neither a DQ or a 7-11 anymore.
No, now pepsi slurpees taste like something else. They taste like you saying I’ll enjoy a trip into the downtown night if I’d just roll off the couch. Me skipping ahead on the way back, slurping, knees knobby and scarred and me being playful just for a moment, just for a glimpse of what might have been. And I wonder if that’s why you take me out into the air, before we’re back in your living room, passing lit things across the table from couch to couch to break the silence. The silence that occurs when there’s nothing left you’re allowed to say. Allowed to say without sounding too this or that, too bold, too much, too simple.
Now pepsi slurpees taste like this and the limbo feels like a hammock underneath me. Rest me softly on something and let the caffeine course through me, sending memories at hyper speed. I want them to burn off faster anyway. But this is how it is, life attaching itself to different things. Slurpees attaching themselves to different things, but maybe that’s fine because the 7-11 isn’t there anymore anyway.
sigh
Crap, now all I want to do is write. What a terribly slippery slope. I hope I don't get fired. I'd have to shut my senses off, otherwise its pent up smoke in my lungs. I want to write about the guy who just asked me for a light with his tie undone and slung around his neck, the girl behind him possibly the one who undid his tie, mewing that she had a lighter, but he wanted mine. About the androgynous elderly person I held the door open for. About realizing that if the pretty med student I am currently trying to (not) woo reads this, she will be disappointed. I wish I was healthier for you, like you, for me. Crunching on spelt and thinking of you, imagining gluten and guilt-free worlds where we could reside.
On eating, or, blogging on my lunch hour with no lunch
I seem to be going through the motions with food this week. Coffee and half croissant/muffin for breakfast, coffee and club sandwich for lunch, plain sour cream donut at 3 when my arms get a bit numb, glass of wine for dinner (sure that’s a serving of fruit), midnight munchies - last night it was spelt lavash with cheese and red pepper dip (grains, dairy, veg). I can’t write when I’m full. Must be hungry and not sober.
I just stubbed out a smoke on the bench in front of work, took two steps towards food and then turned back and came inside. I wonder if I’ll ever look back on my life and realize that it wasn’t a fast metabolism but that I was a raging anorexic. Nah, you can’t see my bones. Except that it’s more complicated than that, it always is, nourishment being the promotion of life, and then the opposite. When I was 18 and told I was anaemic I stopped eating meat, turned away from health. I was bulimic for two weeks at 20 (starving would have been a waste of food, I had a meal card), astounded by the addictive power of it. Letting people I hated feed me and then throwing up fried eggs afterwards. Don’t you dare nourish me, see? I told Jen and she told me to stop and I did.
Sometimes the eating seems like too much of a commitment. Shopping, preparing, chewing, digesting, washing. Better to just stay still and conserve the energy, take the escalators, chain-smoke.
Don’t you dare read this and then try to feed me the next time I see you, it will make me feel shameful.
Ok, I’ll go out again and this time make it all the way to Tim’s. Cigarette first though.
I just stubbed out a smoke on the bench in front of work, took two steps towards food and then turned back and came inside. I wonder if I’ll ever look back on my life and realize that it wasn’t a fast metabolism but that I was a raging anorexic. Nah, you can’t see my bones. Except that it’s more complicated than that, it always is, nourishment being the promotion of life, and then the opposite. When I was 18 and told I was anaemic I stopped eating meat, turned away from health. I was bulimic for two weeks at 20 (starving would have been a waste of food, I had a meal card), astounded by the addictive power of it. Letting people I hated feed me and then throwing up fried eggs afterwards. Don’t you dare nourish me, see? I told Jen and she told me to stop and I did.
Sometimes the eating seems like too much of a commitment. Shopping, preparing, chewing, digesting, washing. Better to just stay still and conserve the energy, take the escalators, chain-smoke.
Don’t you dare read this and then try to feed me the next time I see you, it will make me feel shameful.
Ok, I’ll go out again and this time make it all the way to Tim’s. Cigarette first though.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
prescription personified
Is there a cure for addictive personality disorder? Should I know this given the letters B and A following my name on my business card? I remember limited and random things from my university days. Your peripheral vision is black and white. Nietzsche loved Wagner. Some creatures will mate with Beta males after they are already pregnant so that he will think it is his and show up with food. I should know if there is a cure, I would imagine it cognitive. I don’t know that I want to cure the intensity though. The way I zero in and indulge, grab hold like those odd sticky-hand gag-gifts you used to smack people with; covered in fur and dust. I cured myself of one, human form, recently. Not voluntarily sadly, but through fast blinking eyes and clenched jaw and fake half sentences of congratulation. Oh wow. Mmm yes. That’s great. For you. So that lanky demon in me is restless and looking for something else. Something delicious and odd with the capacity to break my heart so that I will not have to reframe my world-view.
Alissa: No seriously, I think I might actually be cursed.
Carole (gesturing to my surroundings and life with one hand) This is a curse?
Thought perhaps the over-the-counter friends would stave it off but it’s looking more like it will have to be human, or something in tablet form ending in Pam. The Pam family. Perhaps a human named Pam.
A 30-something girl sits in a dental surgery office wishing she had dressed better because the Dentist is young and cute with no wedding ring. Yet, she’s already 5 years ahead thinking about dishes flying across the kitchen, her accusing him of being square and him accusing her of not respecting the “square-ness” (he makes the quote gesture) that is paying for the roof over her head and the room on the third floor to write, read tarot and smoke joints out the window. No, it would never work. Why bother?
“Now, after the surgery I will give you a couple prescriptions and you can make the decision based on how you’re feeling.”
The girl thinks “Oh god, don’t flinch, don’t flinch, clench your jaw, NO, don’t clench your jaw, he knows jaws. Just relax your face. Relax your face.” The girl’s left eyebrow starts to spasm. This is what she’s been waiting for, giggling with the girls over, no eastern European babushka to lift a plastic bin from the cupboard above the fridge. Little plastic bottles for head and heart. Wartime habits die hard.
“Some people are ok with ibuprofen but most need the Tylenol 3s.”
She’s back at school now, hobbling on crutches with “the gout” (she does not make quote signs so as not to lose her balance). Apparently nightly drunkenness affects your kidney’s ability to function. So to ease the pain of this obviously addiction-related ailment they’ve given her a prescription of T3s and for the first time in her life she sits on the edge of her bed and feels like everything just might actually turn out fine. No one is going to burst in and drag her kicking and screaming to the noose. No speed or similar thank you very much, she has no desire to be sped up. But melt her, melt her under a heat lamp of anything
“Now if the Tylenol 3s aren’t enough that’s where some people need to use the Percocet.”
Percocet yes, shopping in Bloor West after her friend’s boyfriend’s hernia operation. Floating along, pale dry skin slowly caramelizing in the sun, fingering racks of scarves. She opens her mouth slightly and shrugs. “I guess we’ll see.” She nibbles on the pad of her pinkie. That should cover the next two break ups.
Pharmaceuticals aside, I think I found something. Something salty.
Alissa: No seriously, I think I might actually be cursed.
Carole (gesturing to my surroundings and life with one hand) This is a curse?
Thought perhaps the over-the-counter friends would stave it off but it’s looking more like it will have to be human, or something in tablet form ending in Pam. The Pam family. Perhaps a human named Pam.
A 30-something girl sits in a dental surgery office wishing she had dressed better because the Dentist is young and cute with no wedding ring. Yet, she’s already 5 years ahead thinking about dishes flying across the kitchen, her accusing him of being square and him accusing her of not respecting the “square-ness” (he makes the quote gesture) that is paying for the roof over her head and the room on the third floor to write, read tarot and smoke joints out the window. No, it would never work. Why bother?
“Now, after the surgery I will give you a couple prescriptions and you can make the decision based on how you’re feeling.”
The girl thinks “Oh god, don’t flinch, don’t flinch, clench your jaw, NO, don’t clench your jaw, he knows jaws. Just relax your face. Relax your face.” The girl’s left eyebrow starts to spasm. This is what she’s been waiting for, giggling with the girls over, no eastern European babushka to lift a plastic bin from the cupboard above the fridge. Little plastic bottles for head and heart. Wartime habits die hard.
“Some people are ok with ibuprofen but most need the Tylenol 3s.”
She’s back at school now, hobbling on crutches with “the gout” (she does not make quote signs so as not to lose her balance). Apparently nightly drunkenness affects your kidney’s ability to function. So to ease the pain of this obviously addiction-related ailment they’ve given her a prescription of T3s and for the first time in her life she sits on the edge of her bed and feels like everything just might actually turn out fine. No one is going to burst in and drag her kicking and screaming to the noose. No speed or similar thank you very much, she has no desire to be sped up. But melt her, melt her under a heat lamp of anything
“Now if the Tylenol 3s aren’t enough that’s where some people need to use the Percocet.”
Percocet yes, shopping in Bloor West after her friend’s boyfriend’s hernia operation. Floating along, pale dry skin slowly caramelizing in the sun, fingering racks of scarves. She opens her mouth slightly and shrugs. “I guess we’ll see.” She nibbles on the pad of her pinkie. That should cover the next two break ups.
Pharmaceuticals aside, I think I found something. Something salty.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
I Miss My Psychologist Today
Dr. Brenda Doyle, god love her. I'm waiting for a fresh chunk of work benefits in January to start seeing her again. Because I can't afford her otherwise. Because all my extra coin goes into funding self-medication.
30-something girl walks into Shoppers Drug Mart and shuffles to the "Prescription Pick Up" counter. She tentatively leans into the counter biting into her index fingernail. She straightens up, in an attempt to not look like a total user.
"Can I get, um, a bottle of the generic tylenol ones please?
"What size?"
"Oh gosh, um, 100?" (certainly that will take her a year to finish)
The girl gently presses her hand to her lower abdomen, feigning possibly horrendous menstrual cramps.
Sigh. So yeah. Last weekend, no... two weekends ago I read an article in Macleans about Karla Homolka and her baby. There was an evolutionary psychologist (slurp) talking about how mating and murder are very closely linked and at the time I was like "wah?" and I probably skipped that Sociobiology class to watch Danger Bay, but I digress. Today I was actually thinking about the sorts of dudes I'm attracted to in that very physical kind of way, and heavens to betsy I also kind of want to kill them. Not actually kill them but slap them around and chew on them a little bit. Its love and hate and I seem to enjoy that. So I'm adding that on to the list of reasons I need to focus on lesbianism for a while. I need to stay away from boys until I can enjoy the middle, make that emotional connection and think of them as humans.
Brenda might totally kick my ass over this theory and that's why I miss her. Like when I told her I'd discovered a pavlovian method to get over a lover - snapping an elastic band on my wrist everytime I thought of them - and she stared at me for a moment and then gently suggested I try jogging.
30-something girl walks into Shoppers Drug Mart and shuffles to the "Prescription Pick Up" counter. She tentatively leans into the counter biting into her index fingernail. She straightens up, in an attempt to not look like a total user.
"Can I get, um, a bottle of the generic tylenol ones please?
"What size?"
"Oh gosh, um, 100?" (certainly that will take her a year to finish)
The girl gently presses her hand to her lower abdomen, feigning possibly horrendous menstrual cramps.
Sigh. So yeah. Last weekend, no... two weekends ago I read an article in Macleans about Karla Homolka and her baby. There was an evolutionary psychologist (slurp) talking about how mating and murder are very closely linked and at the time I was like "wah?" and I probably skipped that Sociobiology class to watch Danger Bay, but I digress. Today I was actually thinking about the sorts of dudes I'm attracted to in that very physical kind of way, and heavens to betsy I also kind of want to kill them. Not actually kill them but slap them around and chew on them a little bit. Its love and hate and I seem to enjoy that. So I'm adding that on to the list of reasons I need to focus on lesbianism for a while. I need to stay away from boys until I can enjoy the middle, make that emotional connection and think of them as humans.
Brenda might totally kick my ass over this theory and that's why I miss her. Like when I told her I'd discovered a pavlovian method to get over a lover - snapping an elastic band on my wrist everytime I thought of them - and she stared at me for a moment and then gently suggested I try jogging.
Heller
Check, check. 1-2-3. Is Brooklyn in the house? Word.
I don't have much to say but now that this is all set up I probably should. Today I'm wondering when the 13 year old boy trapped inside me will shut up. While quite polite and sweet under most circumstances, in the vicinity of my friends I turn into Beavis. In the last 24 hours I have a) added "butt plugs" to my friend's to-do list while she was in the bathroom, b) responded to the same friend's comment that a certain someone who I am currently magnetically drawn to needs to "come into our inner fold" with "I'd like to come in her inner fold." Ehem.
I feel weird even writing that on here, but what I'm realizing is that I need to "own" who I am a little bit more, as in, completely immerse myself in the two communities that I should be and am not. These are of course the writing and queer communities. Not that either have anything to do with me being a prevert, but more that I need to not be hiding the best parts of me from the outside world. This all sounds very Oprah but is liberating. I'm quite sure that all this will come into play with a couple epiphanies swirled in when I get back from vacation in October. That's not to say that I can't get started before then as anything can happen in three weeks. For instance next week Janer has set me up to paint her apartment while she is recovering from surgery with a certain Jenn D who teaches creative writing at York and is a mixture of a fairy mentor and a sesame street puppet. Very much looking forward to picking her brain, and Jane even tipped her off that I have "talent". (wiping tear)
Then there's the whole dating thing. I kind of want to go away single, not so that I can go wild (ok maybe a bit) but also so that I'm not distracted with thoughts of home while there. The last time I was in Paris I was completely googly over someone back home, sending love letters off every second day, only to come home and be promptly dumped for a republican boy from Minnesota. Lesson: learned. But I can't control what happens before, during or after the trip except to say that I think I'm going to only date women as a political statement/healing process for a while. I realized recently through the unfortunately difficult coming out of a friend just how easy I had it/have it, and maybe I should just embrace that and go with it? Sure. I've said too much already.
I don't have much to say but now that this is all set up I probably should. Today I'm wondering when the 13 year old boy trapped inside me will shut up. While quite polite and sweet under most circumstances, in the vicinity of my friends I turn into Beavis. In the last 24 hours I have a) added "butt plugs" to my friend's to-do list while she was in the bathroom, b) responded to the same friend's comment that a certain someone who I am currently magnetically drawn to needs to "come into our inner fold" with "I'd like to come in her inner fold." Ehem.
I feel weird even writing that on here, but what I'm realizing is that I need to "own" who I am a little bit more, as in, completely immerse myself in the two communities that I should be and am not. These are of course the writing and queer communities. Not that either have anything to do with me being a prevert, but more that I need to not be hiding the best parts of me from the outside world. This all sounds very Oprah but is liberating. I'm quite sure that all this will come into play with a couple epiphanies swirled in when I get back from vacation in October. That's not to say that I can't get started before then as anything can happen in three weeks. For instance next week Janer has set me up to paint her apartment while she is recovering from surgery with a certain Jenn D who teaches creative writing at York and is a mixture of a fairy mentor and a sesame street puppet. Very much looking forward to picking her brain, and Jane even tipped her off that I have "talent". (wiping tear)
Then there's the whole dating thing. I kind of want to go away single, not so that I can go wild (ok maybe a bit) but also so that I'm not distracted with thoughts of home while there. The last time I was in Paris I was completely googly over someone back home, sending love letters off every second day, only to come home and be promptly dumped for a republican boy from Minnesota. Lesson: learned. But I can't control what happens before, during or after the trip except to say that I think I'm going to only date women as a political statement/healing process for a while. I realized recently through the unfortunately difficult coming out of a friend just how easy I had it/have it, and maybe I should just embrace that and go with it? Sure. I've said too much already.
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