All the Horrible Girliness

I feel like shit, but I'm too tired to be angry about it.

***

Yesterday, Mister Aran and I went to the wedding of a friend. It was down in Newport, fifty miles away, and on the way it started to rain, plus we left late, so we ended up coming into the ceremony late, my boots clonking against the wood floor.

We love the friend. We don't know the new wife very well. She's an actress, and sometimes it's hard to know when actors aren't acting. We're very good with the friend on a one-on-one basis, but his friends all seem... old. Even when they're not old, they seem old. Our conversations are always held across this wide expanse of age.

Nobody seems to know where to seat us at their weddings. They always end up throwing us in the back corner with their other assorted random friends. Then they were out of coffee. Then we were scolded for plucking at the harp. And because we are grown up now, we left.

We went to a B&N for coffee and perusing. We found a board book about opposites for The Bug. I bought some decaf vanilla tea. On the way home, it stormed. It doesn't often thunder and lightning in Southern California, even during hard rains, but last night the horizon lit up and the thunder threatened to crack the sky in half. When we got home, The Bug was beautiful and asleep and it took all I had not to squeeze hell out of him.

***

I finally got to bed a little after eleven. I was exhausted. At 12:45, the dog started barking.

He's my inlaws' dog, and he isn't housetrained, and we have the cat, so this dog stays out on the patio. And now, even though he is just a little dog who is scared of the thunder and lightning, I hate him.

From 12:45 until 5:00 a.m., I sat with the dog. Most of those hours were spent outside, in a thick yellow hoodie sweatshirt and sweatpants, petting the dog so he wouldn't bark and wake up the entire neighborhood. Mister Aran got up and demanded that I return to bed and ignore the barking, just sleep in another room where I might not hear it so loudly, but this wasn't an option and that pissed him off so he decided to be awake and play on the computer. So I stayed outside with the dog until the baby cried, and while I fed him the dog barked and barked and BARKEDANDBARKEDANDBARKED and when I finally got the kid to sleep despite all the barking, I went back outside and soothed the dog again, and it was cold. It wasn't freezing, not enough to complain about, but it was cold, the kind of cold that seeps into your clothes and into your pores and runs through your body with your own blood.

At three something, I thought maybe we could put the dog into a bathroom, and I was going to bring this up to Mister Aran, but I looked into the window and there was no blue computer light, no WoW flashing, and I knew I was alone, not just in the apartment but in the world, too. I sat back down, read my book. The rain was so loud that I thought there were cars coming, or people talking, but it was just the rain.

At 5:00, the rain let up a bit, the dog settled to some extent, and I collapsed. I was so tired that when the kid was ready to eat, I just laid him in bed with me, something I don't really believe in doing. We half-slept together until 10:30, when the dog started barking at a fresh thunderstorm. It's after noon now, and he is still barking. There has been a bark every two seconds all this time.

I just refuse to fucking go out there. I feel like I did my time. If the neighbors want to complain, which they have in the past, let them. Let them come and take the dog away. Let him loose in a field somewhere, like my dad used to threaten to do to our pets as kids.

This is the fatigue talking, I promise, but I'm just. So goddamn. Tired. And I want to strangle the bark out of the dog, which isn't even mine.

If nothing else, last night solidified my cat-person status.

***

Sometimes, I can feel the thunder. It shakes me. That's how close it is.

I need to get away from the barking, but it's too hard to leave right now.

posted by Samus @ 11:51 AM