All the Horrible Girliness

posted by Samus @ 7:31 PM 2 Comments

Why didn't I stalk Sabrina while I lived in Los Angeles? Fucksake. I just looked at her photo and she's hot. I always feel better after reading her blog. Guess because I suck at drinking. But surely she's into caffeine, too?

posted by Samus @ 11:19 PM 1 Comments

Holy shit. My blog has never before this lived up so wholly to its name. I feel the need to write about kickboxing and gaming or something. I need some literary equivalent of sherbet here.

Mister Aran and I trained this morning at our old haunt in Signal Hill, the best school in Southern California, so if you're interested, comment and I'll get you the number. I can't believe there was a time when I did that three or four times a week. I can barely move. Imagine how I'll feel tomorrow morning. Crossfit is god.

My conditioning is such ass now. I was gasping for air during a kicking drill. I forgot how to hit focus mitts.

***

And now, for all the lonely gamer boys who read this page: if you get naked pics from a chick within hours of first chatting with her, she is a man or a drama whore, and you need to steer clear.

***

All of you: go call your mothers.

posted by Samus @ 8:08 PM 0 Comments

Dear Ma,

I know we just talked about all this on the phone. You were understanding and sweet and took it like you take all the blows life and family deals you. I know you won't be reading this page anymore, but I've come to realize what a big-headed, mean-spirited, superior bitch I've been here, and that the people who read this really don't know who you are, because I only write about you when I'm pissed off.

Your dignity means a lot to me. I want everyone who reads this to know more about you.

Taking care of others isn't your second nature. It's your first. Anyone else would back off when the meth addicted girl comes to the door begging for shelter, but you don't think twice. Anyone else would have alienated their family decades ago for the shit they've put you through, but you continue to care and to try, and not to change them. Anyone else would have called to remind her children of all the things she'd done for them, but time and again we hurt you, and you don't.

Who can hurt you worse than your own child? My son is in my lap now, still groggy from a nap, sucking on my shirt, and I don't know what I'm going to do when this kind of thing happens to me. I won't be able to handle it.

Anyway, enough of my apologies. Everyone, please allow me to tell you about my mother.

After years of being told by her mother that she was ugly and would never find a man who loved her, my ma got married at seventeen years old. On her wedding night, my dad told her he wasn't in love with her. But my ma was seventeen, and her choices were to stay with a husband who didn't love her, and have a chance at her own home and children, or go home to her abusive mother and sister and her absent father and prove them all right. She stayed married.

A few months after her wedding, her husband was in a bad motorcycle accident. He caught on fire. Over 80% of his body was charred. Nobody but my mother thought he had a chance of survival. He was in the hospital for three months, and they didn't have insurance.

Don't forget: at this time, she's still just seventeen years old.

At eighteen, she was pregnant, and she had me at nineteen. She had my brother at twenty-one. She stayed at home with us, made sure we didn't get into trouble, made sure we knew we were loved.

While I was in junior high, I think, my dad's father spent his last months in our home, under hospice care. My ma took care of him during those months. He died in our home, surrounded by family, because of Ma.

More than twenty years after dropping out of high school to get married, Ma got her G.E.D. and started college. During a bitter, long-time-coming divorce and several moves and boyfriends, her son joining the Marines and her daughter fleeing to California with her fiance and her parents moving to Missouri, Ma stayed in college, and excelled. She graduated and became an R.N.

She worked in all different aspects of nursing, including Mom/Baby at the hospital. You'd think that's where she'd want to stay. The start of life can be so rewarding and wonderful. You get to see birth and hold babies every day. But my ma chose to become a hospice nurse. So, every day, she goes into the homes of dying people and cares for them. The hours are long and her patients are not always nice people. Many of them are bitter or senile. Some are panicked about dying. Some of them are nice, but their families are angry. It's Ma's job not only to administer care and medication, but to deal with their fears, to talk them through the process of death. She falls in love with them all. She attends their funerals.

I've mentioned my ma's bad habits a dozen times here. Have I ever written about how badly I miss her? How I call her every day, begging for help with The Bug? How wonderful it was to have her with me in the delivery room, how I might not have been able to do it without her? How much I wish she could have been there with me the first couple weeks of The Bug's life? She is the only one in my life with whom I feel comfortable enough to really cry, or talk for hours. She makes me feel good about myself.

Because her parents raised her to hate herself, she raised me with an ego, the very ego that bitchslaps her on this page all the time.

I wish I could write more. Life with a six month old will go on, no matter how much you wish you could sit quietly and ruminate on the keyboard for hours, and maybe that's the best thing about having a kid. You can't ever just sit and get all deep in your own bullshit. Life is in motion.

But Ma, I want you to know, you're my hero. I wish I could be like you more. Your whole spirit is open to the pain and needs of everyone else, and maybe all your bad vices are just your ways of taking care of yourself, a desperate way of feeling good for just a few minutes in the middle of all the sadness. I'm not saying this to make myself or you feel better. The damage is done. I haven't taken care of your heart. I've been selfish and rude. But I'm writing this because it's true, and long overdue, and I could not have chosen a better mother and grandmother for my Bug.

Love you.

posted by Samus @ 11:43 AM 3 Comments

I have to record this so I remember it: how awesome it feels to have dinner in the crock pot, perfectly fitting jeans, a jangly necklace, The Bug napping soundly, wicked pointy gator heels, laundry started, last night's workout and sex under my belt, makeup done, hair freshly dyed and cut. It's good for the soul.

posted by Samus @ 11:02 AM 0 Comments

Random writing from the last few weeks

There are a few good ways to eat edamame. You can get it in your mouth, just holding the tip, and bite between the beans to pop them out. You can bite directly into the beans, popping them out smushed, and get leftover bean skins afterward. You can pull the string off so that the shell opens up to you, like unzipping a lady's dress.

I like edamame better with soy sauce than with salt, though both are good. You can drizzle the soy sauce over the whole batch, but the problem with this is, you could get too much soy sauce on some and too little on others, plus what if you can't eat it all in one sitting? Then some would have to go back in the fridge with soy sauce on them, marinating. You could also just make a little pool of soy sauce, in a separate dish or cup or just in the corner of the plastic thing the edamame comes in. A patient pourer can get just the corner filled with sauce. Then you dip the edamame in it and turn it upright, so the soy sauce drips down, then eat it before it runs onto your fingers.

I am reading and eating tonight. I'm reading a book I've already read, that didn't particularly strike me as anything amazing the first time I read it, and I'm eating whatever I can get my hands on. Also, I am wrecking my lips, which I've been trying not to do for a couple of weeks now.

When I tell people what happened with my brother today, I lie. To my mom, I said I told him to go fuck himself. To my husband, I say I told him to eat a dick. The reality is I was weeping and gentle and even apologetic, and flustered like I always am with him, because I care so much what he thinks of me. He got the last word. The end result is the same, though, because we're pretty much done. I have to start hating him now. I wish it were easier.

It should be easy. He's a hateful person himself, full of displaced rage. He is selfish and rude and mean. He doesn't see how he hurts people. He doesn't care.

The last several years, he has lived between thirty and one hundred twenty miles away from me. I have done nearly all the driving. I was there when he graduated from basic, I was there when he graduated from Drill Instructor school, and I have gone to graduations for Marines I don't know because he was presiding. I went to see him when his girlfriend broke up with him and he was miserable. I have invited him to every holiday and party, but he won't attend. This year, he spent Christmas cleaning his apartment. That was more fun or interesting or important than meeting his first nephew.

Around my brother, you can't do anything right. You feel his judgment on your back. So you spend your time trying to impress him. You wheel and deal. In high school, I used to have to promise to buy him things for him to go anywhere with me. He got used to that treatment.

My birthdays, Christmases, wedding, the birth of my child – none of it was important enough for him to visit or even call. We stopped even attempting to give gifts to one another almost a decade ago, though I promised him one if he'd just come up for Christmas a couple years ago. He didn't.

I'm done now, and there's this hole in my heart. He thinks I'll be very sorry, because he's planning on dying in Iraq this year, but I'm working really hard on hating him now. I wish I could. I have all the facts in front of me, but I can't. All his bad qualities together, if you just unfocus your eyes a little, a 3D image of him as a child comes popping out. That smile, that voice, that tender heart. You want to believe that person you grew up with is still in there, somewhere.

I've spent years making excuses for his behavior and now I can't anymore. He's been doing the rounds, saying what could be final goodbyes to the family before he goes, and he was planning on getting around to doing it to me, too, but he won't now.

My mom had back surgery when we were teenagers. He was just starting to hate her. I was worried about the surgery, but he told me he wasn't, that he wouldn't care if she died on the table. If I told people he'd said it, they assured me that he did care, that he talked that way specifically because he did care, and for the last ten years I have believed that too, but I don't now. If I died today, he wouldn't care.

He wouldn't care wouldn't care wouldn't care.

He's a dick and I hate him I hate him I hate him but I love him, so much my ribcage hurts from it all. The only way I've found to get away from the pain is to read and eat everything I can get my hands on: bananas and edamame and oranges and meat pastries. It works for awhile but then I think of him, the heat of his back through his tee shirt, his hilarious stories, his beautiful face. I have a letter he wrote me when he was going back to Okinawa from being in Korea, where he killed people, and it breaks me in half to read it again. I think of him hurt, bleeding, and a scream rises up in my belly. I feel that I have to protect him, I have to help, I have to pray and hope and love hard and maybe it will create a big hamster ball of energy that will encase him and deflect bullets and explosions and make him live a long, healthy life where he finds out what it is to hold your own child in your arms, where you come home to food and smiles and love and a warm bed.

If you could only hear his voice on the phone. How bored he sounds with the whole prospect, the whole idea of me, how worthless I sound through his voice, how utterly unimportant, how quickly and easily he passes me off as not worth his time, how my weeping throws him into rage in a finger snap.

Is it any wonder that I collect brothers? I smother Mister Aran's brothers, and I only have this blog because Brendan had one and I thought he might read it. If I had an inch less pride, I would go to his house and force myself on his family.

I just miss my family, my dumb mom and my nutso dad, my frail grandpa and my scheming grandma. I miss my senile great aunt and her massively overweight, lesbian daughter, with their opinions and pets. I miss having my own people. Mister Aran's people are quiet understanders, but my people are loud arguers. When there is nothing to argue, we create something, because that is how we know to relate. Here, I am loved and cared for, but I feel alone.

The bad things are coming back into my head now, so I should take a shower and go to bed. Everyone else is fast asleep.

*

Here is the scoop on The Bug: if you lay him on his back, he will roll to his belly within seconds. He is a pro at it. After he discovers he's there, though, he gets royally pissed off and whines until I turn him back over.

He figures out toys that are months too advanced for him. I think he's past twenty pounds now. His arms and legs look like they may burst through his clothes, though they are for babies much older. He still has only his first two teeth, which came in together: his bottom front two. He eats fruits and vegetables and turkey. He seems to enjoy squash, carrots, mango and turkey best. He likes to watch us eat. At restaurants, he gets a taste of marinara sauce and lemonade, just so we can see the expression on his face. We gave him a breadstick once and he went to town on it, covering it with slobber.

He's figuring out his voice, making it go squeaky high when excited, shrieking with joy when we tickle in just the right places. I kiss him on the mouth, which he leaves open, and I get his drool on my upper lip. He grabs at anything he can, figures it out, then doesn't want it anymore. He doesn't amuse himself for long. He is frustrated a lot of the time. He thrashes. The other night, he struggled enough to tip his carseat over, even all belted in.

*

It's now Sunday, some time after ten p.m. I am having a turkey and provolone cheese sandwich, with spicy mustard, and my favorite kind of orange, and water.

Today I am annoyed and angry and I have only thought of blood seeping from my brother's mouth a few times. I was busy and didn't have time to panic.

This morning, on the way to have breakfast at the Gypsy Den, we were diverted onto another road because marathon runners were coming through, and there they came, five or six African runners. Their bodies were beautiful, sleek in their thin clothes, and it was fifty-one degrees. I was happy to be on that wide street in the cool winter morning just in time to see the runners. Then I wondered what they would tell their families at home about America, about people who munch on sweets in crystal bowls, how they sit all day long, the rows and rows of food at the supermarkets, the choices, the cars, the wide streets and the fat children.

Then of course I wonder where my brother will be, what he will be feeling, dread or excitement or both, or maybe more fear and rage than I will ever know. I wonder what it means to be a citizen of Fallujah, where he is going, where nothing is constant, where you see people and places blow up, where you could have to run for your life, where it is normal to lose a child in the most horrible of ways. I think that I would hate me, too.

I saw a program when I was pregnant about the Russian children who lived through that terrorist thing in the school – I have to ask Mister Aran to remind me; my memory is bad – and these little boys and girls with their big eyes and serious faces, talking about things they should know nothing about, talking about revenge. I couldn't watch it now. I'm fragile, weak. A citizen of Fallujah would think I am weak and fragile because I can't handle the sight of people in pain anymore, even if it's fake, even if it's entertainment, even if it's animated. I'm no good at separating myself anymore.

I get to concentrate now on the move, on feeding The Bug, on Mister Aran's back pain, on my little skirmish with my brother. It's candy, this stuff I get to think about, because I can't handle the meat of life. I can't save my brother, I can't protect my son, I can't care for my husband, like I want.

So, I'm going to eat this orange and fold the clothes on my bed, and kiss my husband and check on my son, and try to sleep.

posted by Samus @ 10:51 AM 0 Comments

Some people look down on New Year's resolutions, seeing as how 90% of them go by the wayside by February, but I like any excuse to create positive change in my life. I don't have any specific resolutions, myself, but January One always feels fresh and new, like a deep breath of cool morning air.

One thing I know about changing a habit is, success stories rarely go like: "One day I just decided to change, and I never ever did it again!" You hear it sometimes from ex-smokers. My massage therapy instructor once said it about her diet. I wanted to smash her face. If eating sugar were really such a bad habit, she wouldn't have had such an easy time stopping, n'est pas?

So all of you resolving to not do all the things you're doing tonight ever again, my best hopes and wishes go with you. Remember: most smokers snuck a cigarette or two, or at least stood close to a stranger smoking at the bus stop, before they gave up for good, and many of us kicking the sugar habit will still need that weekly cookie (or three), and those of us with crisp new gym membership cards will skip some days, and sometimes whole weeks, before we get it right. We will fail many times before we succeed, and even our success will be dotted with little failures, because that is life.

Indeed, many of us will make the same resolutions on January One, Two Thousand and Seven, but the only way we fail is by giving up forever, so this year, let's not beat ourselves up. Let's maybe take better care of ourselves when we fall down. Let's meet our messups with forgiveness and kindness and a lot of humor.

Happy New Year, everybody.

posted by Samus @ 2:01 AM 2 Comments