I'm having decaf again, the office swill. I've heard something horrible about chemically decaffeinated coffee, and how you should make sure it isn't, and how it will out-and-out lie about being non-chemically decaffeinated right on the package, but I am just too overwhelmed right now to delve into the scary world that is my office decaf swill. It tastes good, and there is so little I can drink that makes my tongue teh happy right now, and I get about a dozen envelopes a day from hospitals and insurance companies and laboratories that need to be deciphered that I just can't give a shit about whether my unborn child is sucking up chemicals from my decaf.
Rosetta stones need to be included in the envelopes of these fucking medical bills. They have incomplete or incorrect insurance information; please remit payment in 21 days, unless your insurance will cover it in which case fill out the back of this sheet with your insurance information and make your check out to Unilab. What? If I think my insurance will cover it I need to make out a check? When picturing the people who draft these letters, I can't decide whether it's a svelte, leather-clad dominatrix with nipple clamps slung over one shoulder, a half-cocked smile and a clove cigarette, or whether it's just a little Dr. Seuss character with ADD and mild schizophrenia.
Oh yes. And their 800 number is busy. Boy, did their junk email box ever get a scalding letter from me!
--
A few new developments, babywise. I now feel it moving on a regular basis when there is no gas or turd movage on which it can otherwise be blamed.
Last week, the whole kit and caboodle moved upward into my belly. It had been a bump just below my belly button, making pants buttons annoying but otherwise just looking like a pooch, but last week I felt something like forklifts and moving vans pushing intestines aside. This resulted in pain, pulling, severe gastrointestinal ownage and more pain. It seems to have settled down, but my intestines are still on strike and now my clothes absolutely refuse to fit. I tried on the Rock & Republic jeans and they laughed. I heard their designer price tag cackling at me all the way from the landfill where it now lives.
I also have what I hope is an irrational fear: that the kid moved between ropes of intestine, leaving a tube of it around the front, and when everything really moves outward, it will burst open and I'll have to live the rest of my life like the guy in Chuck Palahniuk's "Guts".
Something like nesting took over on Sunday and I became a cleaning hobitch. Poor Mr. Aran. I slept like a drugged person that morning and he sat there thinking sweetly about breakfast and maybe hitting a museum or a dayspa (he isn't gay, I think). I rose at 11:30 looking like something between Baal and the Cow Level in D2, and he was still on a naked corpse run. His dreams of a relaxing Sunday turned into filling a dumpster with unused stuff and hitting, not some avionics museum, but Costco for a new vacuum and Brita.
--
We did end up playing some exhausted WoW. We rolled up a cute pair of dorf hunters and ran around until level 8 or so, then abandoned them for a brand new mage twink. It's important to remember, when you burn out, to play it on your own terms, to have no guilt about rolling up a NE just to watch her purple ass or go PvP in BB in the middle of a lot of high-level alliance just to see how fast you'll die. I played D2 for a couple of years and never went very far into the Hell level. Nightmare was my favorite, so I just rolled character after character, usually paladins, just to play them through Nightmare and get bored with them. It's tough when you have an uberguild that's already smoked Onyxia, with members who tirelessly spend their days drinking Coke and farming fire resist gear, but in the end, it isn't a fucking job.
I've been writing longhand lately. Mr. Aran says in his classes that art is a physical thing, and so is writing. It's a goddamn workout. Both drawing and writing can be done on computers these days, but there's something about putting pen to paper and scratching away. It makes your hand hurt, it forces your body to get loose, your mind to slow down. I get tired and annoyed half a page down. I have to force myself to keep going.
I'm not writing anything really. Sometimes it's all "Dammit get to the bottom of this page, or no fucking cookie." I get to the bottom of the page and I feel like I've accomplished something. A bit of the rainforest is gone and my ink is all over it.
Nothing has come of it, yet, nothing shareable, but this is not the fight. This is training for the fight. I just need to get my body, literally, back into writing shape.
In other news, I'm drinking coffee right now. That's right. I gave in. It's decaf. I know that doesn't matter, that there's still caffeine in it and that it's actually been proven to be worse for you than regular, but damn. Damn, it's so good. It's better than I remember. Not like smoking. I gave up smoking for a few years but always thought I'd do it again if I were ever away from Mr. Aran for more than a day. Then I went on a roadtrip alone to NoCal and my first gas stop, I bought my precious Camel Lights in the hard pack. I lit up in the car, inhaled, and nearly choked. It was awful. The smell. The taste in my mouth. Horrid. I tried another, just to make sure, and it made me sick. I gave the pack away to a friend when I got into town.
Now, coffee. Coffee is my friend. I'm having all kinds of coffee memories right now. So good.
It took a long time for me to feel like I belonged in the gym. When I first started working out, at nineteen, I wouldn't call it that. I called it walking the dog. I took this spastic mutt out for what can only be considered "walks" by the schizophrenic. The dog didn't have nearly the stimulation he needed in life, so these excursions looked less like walking than like Johnny Five in a city for the first time. Input, input, input! Every damn tree and rock had to be smelled and peed upon; every scurrying thing in the grass had to be inspected; every other dog's asshole had to be sniffed. There was nothing cardio about it. The most exercise I got was from yelling, "Rudy, GOD. Stop it!"
Then, when nobody was looking, I jogged. Only for a few feet. Then I'd see someone, or a car would pass, and I'd slow down to a walk. I was certain the people were clucking to themselves, "That ugly fat girl is trying to lose weight. How cute."
I finally got over myself enough to jog a bit, and when the weather got cold I got on the treadmill or stairmaster at the gym, and I copped a little attitude. Surely I, with my obvious fat, belonged there more than the skinny chicks in makeup who chatted up trainers the whole time. I was putting in my time, man. Sweat poured down my face and soaked my clothes.
Now I'm back to worrying about what they think of me at the gym. I'm on the treadmill doing my wicked 4.0 mph while the chick sprinting on the machine next to me, in the size zero sweats that say "cutie" across the ass, looks at me with contempt. She probably isn't even looking at me. She's probably making sure the guy on the other side of me is paying attention. But when I'm doing 4.0, it's all about me. And I'd like to explain.
So if any of you here go to the 24 Hour Fitnesses at South Coast or the University Center, or live in my building and go to the little gym downstairs, I have an announcement to make:
I usually run, okay? Usually my music is really super hard and I run. I ignore the pains and I enjoy running them out. I also go to spinning classes. I can spin circles around most of you thinner broads. And also I could kick your ass, because I'm a kickboxer. I've known more sweat and dirt, not to mention bruises and blood and pain and injury, than you'll dream of. But I had to give it up for awhile because I got pregnant and sick and I'm just now coming out of it and now I'm FUCKING OUT OF SHAPE again, and I wish I had a dog.
Okay? Shut up.
It isn't particularly late, but I should be in bed with my husband. It was nice there a few minutes ago when I laid with him, the lights on, my arm slung over his chest and his little baby-snore rocking me almost to sleep.
Something makes me want to be awake at night, some fight to squeeze time out of a day. Or the voices, the stories and conversations that run around my skull when things get quiet, maybe it's just too much to be alone with in the dark. So I get up and go to the computer every night, and post on forums because I need conversation and I really don't want to write.
I threw away half my collection of books the other day. It broke my heart to dump them. I'm sure we could've donated them somewhere, but once things are ready to go, Mr. Aran just wants them out of sight. They weren't even particularly good books; many I would never read again if I'd even made it all the way through the first time. I love books, though, I love the idea of them, and throwing them out seemed sacreligious.
In my bookcases I came across a bunch of old spiral-bound notebooks with my writing in them, stuff I really thought was genius at the time. It was so embarassing to read over that 97% of them got dumped, too. I bought a new notebook and pen at the Japanese store without guilt, because one of my great pleasures is writing on the first page of a new notebook with a new pen, and the first writing went something like:
"I'm sitting outside the market. It's sunny. These old ladies just pulled up next to me and now they're asking for directions."
Supposedly, as long as there's no emotion in it, just the bare representation of facts, I won't feel like vomiting when I read it in five years.
I have an apple in my mouth. Topless, no glasses, unwashed, just out of bed at 10:30 am on a Saturday morning. Mornings are tough. I never liked them. Now that they come with a sick frenzy that only time and nauseating food will cure, I like them even less. Now I can't sleep through them. Whenever I wake up, now, it's morning.
This morning, at about 7:00, the sky took a grand dump. It didn't rain so much as God threw out the pasta water. It fell so hard it sounded like hail, but it wasn't cold enough to be hail. Watching hail as a kid, that was interesting. Watching it jump around on the ground. Watching the adults scurry.
There's a big window in my house back home, right up front, where you can sit on your knees backward on the couch and watch the weather.
I was never grounded much. Grounded means the parents take away a privilege for a set amount of time. If I fucked up enough, the privilege was just gone. I was never just sent to my room. I was sent to my parents' room, and advised to pick out which of my dad's belts I wanted used on me.
Still can't imagine doing that to someone, but I suppose kids can drive you to insanity. You never can know what you'll do, no matter how doe-eyed and idealistic you are before you give birth.
Apple's done. Need to drag my sorry morning ass to the shower. I'm not at my best at this time.
nothing like finding out you're normal. especially when you're standing in line at the japanese market and everything goes woozy, you stop being able to hear, black spots appear in your vision, your legs give out. not the type to pass out; not the swooning kind, but there i am acting like any drama-attention-whore while handing my credit card over. people looking at me like i'm drunk, because you can't really see the belly unless you look hard.
the mister helped me to a table where i sat down, got very hot, forced myself not to throw up, and got better. just a severe fall in blood pressure, very fast, and a quick google search shows pregnant women everywhere having the exact same problem.
--
"why are we going to tower?"
he says he doesn't know, just wants to look around. this means mucho money will be spent, and i say nothing, because inspiration is priceless.
outside, mexican food and exhaust on the wind hit me in the face, hard, mean; i don't breathe until i get to the car. everything so magnified. emo boys wander the parking lot and we laugh.
Finger
LOP OFF
One day, Jaime woke up and the fourth finger on her left hand felt all tingly. The next morning she couldn't feel it at all. The next day, she couldn't feel it again, so she picked up the phone first thing, while she was still in bed, to call the doctor about it, and her fourth finger broke off.
Completely. Off.
It clattered to her hardwood floor next to the nightstand, like wood hitting wood. She spread her left hand out before her eyes, stupified and grossed out, but there was no blood. She stared at the place where her fourth finger had been. Where it had broken off, right at the palm, there was only skin, smoothed thinly over a nub of bone, soft and sensitive like brand-new baby skin. She thought of screaming, but instead she rubbed the new skin a bit, pierced it carefully with a fingernail, and practiced picking up things without it. It wasn't so bad.
BREAK UP
Brad broke up with her, he said, because the whole missing finger thing was just too weird. This announcement shocked her, certainly; she and Brad were at the five-year mark in their relationship and she'd been sensing that he was going to do a ring thing soon. However, she didn't lose her composure when her finger fell off and she certainly wasn't going to freak out over this. Losing a boyfriend, even a long-term one like Brad with a good job and a wide smile, wasn't anything like losing a finger, like seeing a part of yourself that you've had forever just fall off. She watched him go through the motions of a breakup, the small tears, the soap-opera hug with the last squeeze and pat on the back, the walking away with slumped shoulders, the forgetting of his jacket. This jacket felt heavy in her hands when she picked it up. She was supposed to raise the jacket to her face and smell him, the cologne he wore, maybe throw the jacket in rage to the floor or cut it into bits with scissors. She was supposed to do the normal breakup stuff, go through the motions, but instead she felt in his pockets and found the little velvet box. The ring was pretty, a simple solitaire, a little less than what he could afford but she would have really dug it. She would have cried, if she were still going through the motions of a whole-handed life. Now she took the pretty shiny trinket out and touched the smooth stretch of skin over the ghost of her fourth finger. It was cold and wouldn't balance there. It fell off a few times before she set it back in the velvet box, shoved the box back into the pocket of his jacket, and called his cell phone. "You forgot your jacket," she said, dull and without even a lilt of heartbreak. When he returned, he looked at her eyes, hoping for a hint at whether she'd found the ring. She smiled and told him to drive safely.
ABORT, ABORT
Jaime worked in an office as an envelope stuffer, but even she could tell there was more than a little bit of metaphor going on here. Her mother, for one, lost her mind.
For the first couple of weeks, people liked to ask about the finger. Where was the finger now? Jaime had to admit that she'd left the finger where it had landed and rolled, under the bed. No, she hadn't gone to the doctor. It didn't hurt, there were no white spots indicating leprosy, and nothing else seemed to be going numb. Besides, it wasn't so hard to do things without that finger. She wondered why she had ever needed it at all. It would have been harder to go about things without a pinky, perhaps, but day by day it became easier and easier to live without the ring finger.
Which caused her to wonder about the rest of her body. What was needed, and what could proabably just drop off?
MISSILE COMMAND
People stopped caring about the finger. Most people didn't notice. She daydreamed about other body parts losing sensation. Of removing her ears when she wanted quiet. Of having different-sized boobs that clicked on and came off, packed in foam. She wondered how she would redesign her closet space. If this kind of freedom would require special IKEA furniture. In a panic, she ran to a junk drawer and found an Allen wrench, tried it out on her coffee table legs, and discovered that she could use it just fine without the fourth finger on her left hand. She took the coffee table completely apart and stacked the pieces on the balcony. It turned out, all of Jamie's furniture could be taken apart with an Allen wrench. She did this. While taking her bed apart, she found her fourth finger. It was stiff and hard and the color of light wood veneer.
In two hours her apartment was flat. All the bookshelves and tables and dressers and such were reduced to their individual parts. She stepped gingerly between these pieces of bigger things and found her fourth finger, threw it and the Allen wrench into the garbage disposal and listened to it break.
The next morning, there was a silence she could not explain. It followed her. Irked her. She hadn't realized, until this day, that there had been a cadence to her walk, a thrum in her temples. She hadn't known what it was like to be without this drumbeat until she woke with it gone. Without it, she tripped over her own feet over smooth concrete. Her arms ceased swinging naturally with her walk.
ANDROID LUST
Brad slept fitfully. He dreamed of girls made of tin, dancing on yellow brick roads to goth/industrial music. He dreamed of taking them down into the grass under trees that grew lunchpails, of kissing their hard cold tin skin and pushing into them through holes that scraped and tore at him.
In the morning, he rolled over and, on the pillow beside him was a throbbing, moving, cheerful human heart.
He shrieked, rolled away, kneeled on the side of his bed and watched it from there. It pulsed and throbbed, attached to nothing and nothing moving through it, jerking off damn near enough to fall off the pillow. He reached out with one finger and touched it, gently and then with increasing pressure. It was tough and hard and dry under his hand, the movement inside unlike any power he could imagine. He momentarily burst into tears, then, collecting himself, decided this human heart on his bed might be a kind of glitch, something that would go away if he just left the room awhile. Like a glitch in the programming of his brain.
Slowly he rose, pulled on his bathrobe, and went to the kitchen for breakfast. He had Wheaties with milk and two spoonfuls of sugar, a short glass of orange juice and a Power Bar. Very soon after, in the bathroom, he showered and shaved and applied cologne and when he returned to his bedroom, the heart was still there, wildly banging away on the pillow on which Jaime's head used to lie.
Jaime. He called her office with fingers so shaky that he dialed the wrong extension twice, but finally was able to leave a message for her to call him immediately. In the meantime, he dressed in his closet, inserting wallet and cell phone into the appropriate pockets, collected his briefcase and keys and left, hoping for the best. He was in his car and halfway down the freeway before he considered that it may have been some kind of sick joke.
PUMP UP THE VOLUME
Brad. Bradley. B. R. A. D. Everyone could be taken down to their basest parts. Things could be modified to run smoother. Things could be snapped off like Leggos and thrown away. Jaime started counting the letters in people's names and trying to eliminate whatever she could. Bra. Br. People had always called her Jame. What about Jam? Jam was good on toast. Except strawberries. Blueberries couldn't be trusted, what with the rolling away. Like Brad. Brrrrrrad.
Her brain went like this often lately, ever since the day before her rhythm had gone. She couldn't snap her fingers or sing along with music and her mind never stayed on track.
Plus, she had a hard time answering the phone. Something about the even-ness between rings, the precision of them. Her hands clapped over her ears when it rang. Finally, she turned off the ringer, called in sick to work, and crawled onto her mattress for a few days.
The knocks on the front door were uneven, disjointed, so Jaime got up. She stretched and yawned but didn't feel rested. She answered the door, naked, and Brad was there holding a cardboard box labelled "Fry's Frozen Fries." He shoved this toward her, looking angry, so she took it and went inside.
Hollering ensued, a bunch of "What-is-the-meaning-of" and "Such-a-gross-joke," but Jaime tuned Brad out and lifted from the box a little pounding thing about the size of her fist. It felt like a newborn kitten in her hand, but a squirrely, mad bumping around kitten with no fur. Actually not like a kitten at all. She touched its rounded edges. It was not at all like a heart cut or ripped out of a body, but more like a plastic heart you'd see in a biology class. Except real. Except dry. Except really working, really thumping away between her palms. Maybe a bit stiffer.
As an experiment, she turned on the living room stereo, and hummed along with "American Pie" by Don McLean. She had perfect timing, as long as the heart was in her hands.
She turned to Brad, slowly on one heel. If her heart was going to go the way of her fourth finger, it would be wooden soon. She held it to her chest, where it burped and groaned and struggled.
"I've been missing this," she said.
Doctor's Visit
I pop mints into my mouth, one after another until my tongue goes numb, in Dr. Shirley's waiting room. The waiting room is full of purple and green chairs with ornate wooden arms, and a beautiful stereo system switched off. There is an arrangement of big yellow flowers. Outside is green and blue, green and blue. This doesn't look like a waiting room at a doctor's office, it looks like a casting call. The women come in two sizes: XXXL and Size Zero. The thinner ones drag husbands and Baby-Gap dressed children in by their wrists. Women in suits tap away at PDAs and bend their heads to their shoulders, cell phones pressed in between. An elegant older lady in a denim dress does not read the magazines (all updated) of Parenting and Good Housekeeping and Time. She sits with her hands folded in her lap, looking quietly at everyone. One woman in a leather coat streamlined down her tailored suit pants talks to a bulging preggers woman about an auction, one of the pieces being a set of boxing gloves signed by Oscar de la Hoya, another being tickets to an episode of Friends, including a shot at being extras on the show. "So that will be big," she says.
"Huge," agrees the preggers.
Outside, Catalina island is three shades of dark blue against a lighter blue sky and towering over an even lighter four shades of blue ocean. Just outside, it's only green: palm trees, grass, hedges, in January. An enormous woman sneezes and no one blesses her, not even me. Another enormous woman who may or may not be preggers (who could tell?) wears a tent of a red shirt and sneers with beady black eyes at a book. There is a painting of orchids over her head, and a potted green leafy something that could be real, could be fake, who could tell? The thing about Newport Beach, California, is that you can never quite tell.
***
It's 10:40. I've been here for an hour. My appointment was for 10:00. But that's how it goes in Newport. You make your appointment a year in advance.
The receptionists behind the counter gossip. Atkins. The Zone. Weight Watchers. Jenny Craig. It's January, after all, never mind the temperature. I remember these girls' names from a year ago, when I was calling every day and all they could tell me was, "It's normal to be sick the first trimester; we'll see you in a month." But I showed them; I got sick enough to warrant a trip to Hoag's emergency room, and met Dr. Shirley there. He looked at me, twenty-four and in the pink of health, he himself appearing to never miss the gym, a busy, Give-It-To-You-Straight guy, salt and pepper hair. He said, "A hundred things have to go right your first trimester," then the next day sucked some grams of dead tissue and fetus from me, then had to be reminded who I was during my thirty-day follow-up exam. I think it must be soul-killing to suck stuff out of a woman's uterus and not call the next morning.
Every Size Zero in high heels comes out throwing their $500 purses over their shoulders and I know they're squishy with KY, squirming around the so recent penetration of cotton and metal.
I pass Dr. Shirley on my way to the exam room and he's on the phone and he says, "Is there someone there who can rupture her? I need her ruptured immediately."
***
My lips crack and peel and I pick at them with my stubs of fingernails, pull away pieces of skin and stare longingly at my purse on the comfy padded chair. There is chapstick in that purse, chapstick made with aloe, chamomile, avocado, jojoba and shea butter. It sounds like a meal. Like things you might rub on a cold raw chicken before baking. I tear skin away and my lips bleed.
The magazines in the examination room are not so current, the covers bent, the articles about children's fall fashion and it is January, and I have no kids, and plus I have one hand clawing at my mouth and the other clasped behind my back, holding my soft gown together. I have been to clinics where the gown was paper and opened to the front. The hospital gowns in Newport are cotton and have small blue flowers printed on them. They haven't fit in either place. I am not XXXL, and not Size Zero; I am something in between, something indiscernible, something you don't see on the runways and don't see in Lane Bryant catalogues, either. I cannot stand with either group, cannot pick at salads during girlfriend lunches and cannot claim to be a Real Woman either. My back, my favorite feature, perhaps because I rarely see it, is covered completely but the crack of my ass would be visible if I didn't hold my gown together. I look at my watch. 10:59.
Dr. Shirley comes in at once businesslike and concerned and distracted. He looks more like a game show host than a gynecologist. I am nervous around him, but I like his sense of humor. When he first met me I hadn't showered in a few days, because I couldn't stand up long enough, and although I'd wet-toweled myself off in the hospital bathroom there was no way to wash my hair. I had braided it back the best I could, attached it at the end with a too-big barrette. The radiologist had just broken the news: no heartbeat, future miscarriage. I had just called and informed my husband. I was staring at my folded hands. When Dr. Shirley came, I offered him water from my plastic pitcher and he refused, kindly. He said, "I've just met you, and you're already giving me trouble." He smiled with only half his mouth and I smiled the wide smile I know is unattractive but can't help.
Today he says, "What are you using for birth control?" And I say, "Hope." The cleverness gets me barely by, in Newport. Dr. Shirley sort of chuckles. He wants to know when I'm going to have a baby. I say before I'm thirty, and he says that leaves me plenty of time. Five more years. He makes me breathe while pressing the cold stethoscope into my back and I think how ridiculous it is to be worried about him seeing the crack of my ass when he has seen all of me, pulled apart and drugged, and much of what was inside me, when he will very soon go rooting around inside me again. I breathe on command. The stethoscope moves to the front and I try not to wonder what he thinks of my small breasts. If he judges. He feels up my thyroid and breasts and tsk tsks me for not doing my own regular breast exams. When his hands leave me, I feel beat up.
The nurse comes in as if on cue, though Dr. Shirley made no indication for her to enter, as he moves between my legs. This is supposedly for my safety, though I have a feeling she's there for his. A paper sheet is balanced over my lap, I lean back, and there is only rubber and metal and an uncomfortable prying apart. Then he says he must feel my vagina. He does this by pushing a finger, I believe, far up inside me and pushing my vagina down with the other hand, from outside. I feel manipulated.
He leaves in a whirlwind of well wishes and nurse and clipboard and lunch plans. I look at my watch and it is 11:05. I leave the table slick with KY, redress, leave the room and make an appointment for next year. Outside, the sun is too bright; there is too much green and blue. Over the hill, beyond the expensive houses, is the ocean, wide and flat and motionless. I have to weave between a BMW 740iL and a Porsche Boxster and one of those bumpy new Jaguars, the bodies of which my husband has compared mine to. I pass it and resist the temptation to run my palm over its smooth, hard curves.
Catfight
After this night, everyone will say she didn't do anything to deserve it. Some will say they always knew you were a bitch.
At work you have always been quiet. Most will shake their heads and say they thought you were just shy. The rest will fold their arms and talk about your slender body, your long light hair, your violet eyes. They'll say you thought you were better than everyone else. You will hear snippets of this around the corners of break rooms, smoking areas outside. You will say nothing.
2:00 a.m.
You will call your father from the police station. He will be calm, rational. He will ask questions about bail and you will tell him that they're not keeping you, that you really just need a ride back to your car. He will arrive wearing gray sweatpants, his receding hair sticking straight up and flattening in other places, and he will ask what happened. You will not be able to tell him. You'll say something about having been drunk and he will nod, silently. This is the easy answer. You really only had half a beer.
It will start to rain. The windshield wipers will squeak intolerably. You will imagine punching through the glass and ripping the wipers apart with your hands, now capable of violence, still in fists. You couldn't pry your fingers apart from your palms long enough to even sign your name on the papers at the police station. Your signature is warbled. The fat woman who took your fingerprints said your index finger might be broken, but you said nothing, and you say nothing now.
You feel so alive.
1:00 a.m.
The two of you will sit together at the police station, she screaming nonstop, delicately touching her nose, screaming screaming that it is broken, that you certainly broke her nose, even when the tired looking cop who has had his nose broken, who has broken other people's noses, looks at it, touches it and declares it unbroken. She will spit that he isn't a doctor, what would he know? You and the cop will exchange a look. He will know why you did it, even if nobody at the office will ever understand. You belong to his club now, somehow, even though you wear hose and heels and transcribe letters and answer phones for a living. Both of you have made that connection, knuckles to nose, thumb tucked tight and low to avoid breaking. You will sit across a table from one another, a big lunky beige computer between you, your arms behind your back, handcuffed, the metal digging into you. They were put on too tight, but when they asked if it hurt you said nothing; you say nothing now.
He will take down your information: 5'10" and 130 and blonde; you will answer his questions short and low, your words almost like silence, nothing at all. You will describe the small tattoo that you hide from the people at the office: the word "strength" in Chinese on one shoulder. When they unlock your wrists you will hand over your drivers license and he will tell you it's a nice picture. It really is nice. The man at the DMV made you smile. At work the next Monday, she will tell everyone that you flirted with the cop, your long light hair and violet eyes, and that's why you got to go home. You will not argue.
12:00 a.m.
At the party, surrounded, suffocating with people, humans like ocean, like all those dreams you have about swimming, opening your eyes to see the wiggling sun over the water, and in those dreams you can't surface and you think you will drown, you will die, somehow you have to breathe. In the dreams you start breathing underwater, and you start breathing now. With all those people around, pounding music, beer spilling out of red plastic cups, fists around bottles, someone in the distance dialing the police on the kitchen phone, yelling into the mouthpiece, you will breathe. It's the first time you've really breathed all night. All these people, they pull you back by your left hand still held in a fist, fingers pressed into your palms, nails making little crescent moons in your skin that will bruise. Your right hand holds a Pete's Wicked half gone. You will sip it and someone will yank it from you, will growl, You've had enough.
From the water/bodies around you will hear them screaming Catfight Catfight, and making rooowr sounds from their throats, and it will sound like whale song.
She will flail there on the ground, her hands over her nose, blood falling over her mouth and chin, staining her teeth, down onto her white dress. She will look so funny that you will want to laugh, but won't be able to, and you will think, Later I will laugh about this. Alone in my bed tonight, or in jail, wherever I end up, I will laugh when I'm alone. Now, I will breathe. You won't say anything out loud, but then you've never said much.
11:50 p.m.
In the flash of decision making you will look at her face and not be sure where to hit. For two years you've kickboxed at the gym but you never hit a person before, only big heavy bags. You will put down your bottle; your hands will clench into proper fists and your body will meld into the correct position for a snapping one-two, but looking at her, all bumpy nose and hollowed eyes and detachable chin, all hard bone under a thin layer of skin and muscle, you will not be sure where you're supposed to hit. Your fist will not look like it fits in her face. This deliberation will happen in half a second. Choose her nose. She will notice your fists and you will wait for her to lower her beer bottle. She will laugh, mean and nervous, as if you are a four-year old who's promising to hurt her, as if you are any normal girl who would scratch and bite and call names, as if you are so beneath her that she can't be bothered to pay attention.
There will be no need for the right cross. After your jab she will bleed, she will scream and fall onto the floor, you will pick your bottle back up, and the water will close in around and threaten to drown you.
11:48 p.m.
You will want to hit her because she is one of those girls. The ones who won't look you in the eye, the ones seeking attention from every male in the room, the ones who roll their eyes when you speak and smile only when they're insulting you, little veiled threats if you get anywhere near their boyfriends. There will be the distinct feeling in your stomach of an evil in this girl even deeper than that of the other girls who judge her, a defensiveness about her body that will make you, always, her enemy.
You will remember what it is like to be her, you will remember how much you hated yourself then, and then you will hate her.
You will think of telling her, I know what you are because I've been you, and this bullshit gets you nowhere. Trust me. Trust me. It doesn't do any good to hate others just because you hate yourself. Grow up. Be good to your fellow women. We are all sisters. We are all fighting the same fight.
But you will not say this to her. You will never say this to her.
Halfway through your bottles of beer, she will say you're courageous to go out in a skirt so short; she wouldn't be caught dead in it. Then she will smile, so sweet that your jaw aches, and your fist will tighten uncontrollably.
11:30 p.m.
Standing together, both of you holding beer bottles all the way full, hers with the cap still on, you will pull your keys from your purse and hold a bottle opener keychain out to her. She will look at you like you're a bum, a pathetic homeless woman on the street having just peed herself and now begging her for money. She'll take the bottle opener from you, though, and pry the cap off her bottle of beer, and hand it back to you without a word. You'll stuff the keys back in your purse, immediately sheepish, worried that you did something wrong. She will cross her arms, holding her bottle upright, and look away from you, inch away and wave to no one in particular. You will make strained, one-sided conversation; you will ask about her work and her job, you will compliment her white dress.
11:00 p.m.
People in corners will talk about her, about how she should not wear white, she should wear something minimizing like black or brown, white isn't her color, she looks washed out and fat in that. You will hear this and it will shock you. When you were overweight, you assumed everyone talked like this about you but told yourself that everyone was too consumed with their own appearance to even notice you. Now you belong to some club, some group of people you don't want to belong to, people who talk this way in front of you because your body and their bodies are not heavy. These people didn't know you when you were heavy, they think you have always been this way, they think you go home and eat gallons of ice cream, and they hate you for it but at the same time they crave your proximity. They think being around you will make them prettier so they hover close and take the attention off themselves by pointing out the shortcomings of others.
Horrified, you will move toward this girl in white, through the pulsing people and the throbbing music. You will not join these evil people who laugh at the girl in white, who once would have laughed at you. You will befriend this girl. The two of you will go home early from this terrible party, to the drug store to buy silly things and then to your apartment, where you will hover over one another's heads in the bathroom, dyeing your hair black and eggplant, smearing silver lipstick over one another's faces, blowing on nails polished green.
10:00 p.m.
In your room, trying on different clothes in preparation for this party with your coworkers, the first you've been invited to, you think this will be the perfect opportunity to make friends. It will be dark and loud and maybe a beer or two will loosen you up, help you make conversation. You pull a skirt up over your hips and look in the mirror. Maybe now, maybe now they will accept you. Maybe now you will be invited in. You want to tell them how lonely you are, how often you've wished they would allow you inside, but you have never told anyone this. You will never tell anyone this.
It used to be good to write. I spent two years doing it full time.
Well, there was a lot of Internet surfing involved. Some naps. Also masturbation. But I was writing full-time in theory, and I did get a lot done: two novels, a few published stories, and some 89674345678976456789 non-published stories. I worked in cafes and at home. I typed and wrote. I submitted to agents and publishers and I kept all my rejections.
So, finally, I quit and went to work. It was very nice to get out of my head for a year, to shop and dress well. To dress at all was a giant step.
Now I'm pregnant and my future is laid out and it's time to write again, but I have no confidence. I have a folder full of rejections and several directories full of stories I can't even look at. In short, I have no confidence. Every sentence I write is pained over before it hits the word processor; by the time it gets there, I know it isn't worthwhile.
Mr. Aran is working a lot these days. He's skipping all else to sit at his desk and draw. The work is just pouring out of him, great quantities of beautiful robots and schoolgirls and monsters and stuff, each better than the last. He wakes at 4:30 am and goes directly to his desk.
I remember being like that. I want to sit behind him at my desk and work; instead I post on message boards and type in IRC.
I took a big step yesterday. I burned every bit of writing I could find on the laptop onto a CD and put it up here on my new computer. Maybe I'll go through it. Actually post something, for the two of you who read this page. I'm not expecting comments. I just want to see it up in print somewhere. Probably won't help, but I'm tired of not working. It's ripping me up.
**For future notice in this entry, a "Jesus handle" is that handle you hold on to in the car when the driver takes the corner too fast and you scream, "Jesus! Slow down!"**
There's a weird, middle-aged, overweight man at work who likes to leer at me and make strange conversation while giving me the elevator.
I am not offended. God knows, if it weren't for this guy, my husband and Latino construction workers, no one would come on to me. It is, however, uncomfortable and annoying, at least for my ego.
It's happened before. Guys in offices flirt with girls in offices, and sometimes the office girls go out with the office guys and sometimes the office girls go to HR and sue the office guys. It's the last one I have a problem with.
Except in extreme circumstances, this can be avoided. Women know when they're being looked at. We know when the guy is talking and when he is flirting. It is the rare, sociopathic guy who will continue after the woman has turned Her Royal Highness the Ice Queen, which I did immediately, along with avoiding the guy's area altogether.
Women enjoy attention up to a point, even from men with whom they have no intention of ever having sex. Maybe my threshhold is just lower than most. Looking is fine, but when it comes to contact of any kind, my quills come out. Those blessed Latinos on the roof of the unfinished building are fine until they call out to me - then I break into the shittiest half-run half-walk you ever saw. Sort of Napoleon Dynamite-ish.
This man at the office hasn't taken to coming over to my cube, or approaching me, so things haven't had to go any further. Bitch mode has served me well thus far. I wouldn't think twice about telling someone that I was completely unavailable and uninterested, progressing to telling them privately that it was making me uncomfortable, and from there going higher up.
I just don't understand suing. Especially for millions. My dad instilled in me a sense of pride in earning the money I make, and I don't think that these chicks being slapped on the ass or forced to feel uncomfortable at work deserve millions. Especially the ones who work in this horrible environment for years and years then suddenly snap and go for the gold. Shouldn't something have been done sooner? Like say, immediately?
It reminds me of women who get married, have kids, lead productive lives, discover in therapy that they were abused as children, then center their lives around weepy support groups. Hi! This horrible thing happened to you thirty years ago. You have a family that needs you now. Time to deal and get over it.
Or maybe I'm just pissed off at the two Filipinas at work. I call them Filipinas because they call themselves that, but they barely make the cut. They talk like Valley Girls. They've never been to the Philippines. They don't speak the language. They know nothing about their culture, not even that the Spanish and then the U.S. occupied their country for a long time, changing their look, culture and language. But they love being Filipinas. It's their little Jesus handle, the thing they hold on to in this quickly-spinning world that gives them a semblance of community and self.
But it isn't real. At some point, you think that guy in his forties who can't stop talking about his football glory days in college needs to catch up with his life. That Newport divorcee with the fake boobs, tummy tuck, facelift and Juicy sweatsuit, too. Honesty sets us free, allows us to be human, even though it's hard at first.
I don't know how I got here from there. I like my husband, though. He's nice. My identity is being a part of my family, even though we aren't all the same color. Geography means less and less these days.
Why is every woman I meet a goddamn flake? I have more flakes in my life than in a bowl of Kellogg's.
Onward and upward.
I like Pokemon. It's a good game, well-crafted. Good job, Japanese! However, I have one major beef.
I only have twenty minutes a day to play. Some of those big end-game fights take up all twenty of my minutes. I'm upset that I can't catch 'em all. The game needs to be changed so that people who only have twenty minutes a day can catch 'em all, or I'm quitting and I'm never buying a Pokemon game again.
Why don't we ever hear these arguments about Pokemon? For chrissake, assholes, if you don't have the time to play WoW through the endgame, it isn't Blizzard's fault. Quit your bitching.
And ladies? When you say you want to get together, please either fucking get together at the time we decided, or give me a goddamn call so I can make other plans. I'm tired of your bullshit. I'm tired of people treating me like I'm second class in their lives. I have better things to do with my time. Like contemplate how to meet more gay men, so I'll have people to hang out with who won't want to bone me.
I didn't listen to much of the State of the Union stuff. There were more important things to do, like get dinner and watch Office Space. But I did catch the part where he deftly skirted the gay stuff by promising a constitutional amendment to protect the sanctity of marriage.
I, for one, am looking forward to this. I agree with President Bush that family is the cornerstone of our society and that marriage should be protected from those who would misuse it. I have a couple ideas for the amendment.
1) Distribute marriage licenses only after the couple has attended classes where they learn basic child care and discuss their child rearing, sexual, religious and financial principles. This would really cut down on our divorce rate, as those pesky arguments about money, sex, god and children would happen before the caterer is chosen.
2) Disallow divorce while there are minor children in the family, unless there is provable abuse. All of this "We're good friends, but we're just not really in love anymore, so I think everyone would be happier if..." bullshit would go away.
I can't work it out logically in my head that Britney Spears can get drunk and married on a whim in Vegas, then six months later marry another guy with two children at a wedding with a "Pimps N Hoes" theme, but two men who have been together for years and want to raise a child together will be constitutionally unable to do so. Please. Someone explain this.
I am at a loss.
Last month's incentive program at work was, whoever did the most work got a little bonus money. Simple. Made sense.
This month, our incentive has nothing to do with work. It has to do with our decorating style.
The first week, we will be judged on the cleanliness of our desks. The rest of the month, though, there are themes.
Week two: Chinese New Year.
Week three: Valentine's Day.
Week four: President's Day.
I don't think I'm built for this kind of thing. I have a life growing inside my body and I can't muster up a maternal instinct; how am I supposed to squeeze a nesting instinct out of a data entry job and a gray cubicle?
Suggestions are very welcome.
