traveling swallowing dramamine

women, shit.

tuesday night, i went to my faulkner professor's house to watch a movie with the rest of my class. i gave cameron a ride home after the movie, and on the way back to my apartment, i got rear-ended at a red light. i watched it happen through my rear-view mirror. i heard this car horn toot, and i looked in the mirror, and there were two cars behind me, side-by-side, and the guy directly behind me was looking at his friend in the car next to him. and coming at me. way too fast. faulkner keeps talking about how you think things in a flash--you think them before you even think to think them--and that's what it was like. i heard the horn, i looked in the mirror, the driver was looking away, he was coming at me fast, and i thought: "he's going to hit me" and then he did. and it was loud. and my head bounced back against the head rest. and then he got out of his car and asked me if i was ok, and i said yes. and then we pulled over and exchanged information. both cars looked fine. which was good. i was shaking and laughing and i told him he scared the shit out of me, and he apologized profusely. it was kinda fun like bumper cars.

so then i went home and ben had called my cell. so i called him back and i said "what's up" and he said "my phone is going to die in three seconds" and i said "what should i do?" and he said "you should come over" and so i did.

i sat with him on his sofa, and drank I Love Lemon tea, and finished The Wild Palms--which was awesome--and started joyce--but then we started talking about our dads, and political-correctness, and words like woman v. girl and "feminism," and abortion, and activism, and fundamentalism v. moderation. it was our first real argument--in the debate sense, not in the fight sense--and it was fun. and then we went back to reading joyce. and i drew a butterfly on his foot. the butterfly had a speech bubble coming out of its mouth quoting the last line of The Wild Palms: "Women, shit." and then i said, "let's make out" and he said, "okay." and so we did. and we were lying in his bed, and i said, "haha, you want me." and he laughed and said, "you say that like you win or something." and i said, "well, i do win." and he said, "well, you've been winning for weeks."

he asked me to spend the night, and i said no (we had joyce at 9:30 and i needed to actually sleep). and he asked me to meet him for lunch the next day and i said okay. we were supposed to meet at 12:30 in front of middleton. and so the next morning after joyce, as i was walking to my faulkner class, i said "12:30 middleton?" and he said "yeah."

i usually eat lunch with rikki on mwf, right after faulkner lets out at 11:30. so i told her in class that i was ditching her because i had a lunch date. and then i headed to middleton to do homework until 12:30. on my way out of allen i ran into ben and cameron, who were standing in the quad talking. and then ben went into allen because he has syntax in there from 11:30 to 12:30.

so at 12:30 i'm reading in front of middleton. i'm still reading twenty minutes later. i look around and i don't see ben. i call his cell and it's off or dead. i go to his classroom and it's dark and empty. and i think: what the hell, i've been stood up. so i meet up with some joyce kids (cameron, naomi, and dumb bitch girl) in front of the union and eat with them. and i'm trying to figure out how ben could have possibly forgotten to meet me. since he would have just gotten out of class, right next door in allen, at 12:30. it's not like he'd had a break where he could have gone home and fallen asleep and or something. and i knew he wouldn't have stood me up deliberately.

i'm annoyed. but it's the first even remotely inconsiderate thing he's done since we started all of this. so i'm not sure how i should react: i don't want to come off pissy; but still, it's such a flaky thing to do. so i'm kind of agonizing over it--because i feel like however i handle it will set the precedent for all future potentially unpleasant interactions. it's like--in the first fight, you kind of carve out a role for yourself in the relationship--i will be the rational one. i will be the sarcastic one. i will be the melodramatic one. i will be the emotional one. i will leave angry messages on your answering machine. i will hang up the phone in mid-conversation. i will write long and careful analyses of our arguments and email them to you. i will storm out of the house. i will curse at you. i will speak through gritted teeth. i will stare at you sullenly and refuse to speak. i will slam the door. i will retreat inward and become emotionally unavailable. and so you carve out these roles, and you stay rooted or rutted in them as the fights cycle through, and you shout and curse at each other from the same positions, in the same patterns, over and over and over.

so i feel like i have to choose my words and my tone very, very carefully in these early moments. because in some sense, i'm casting myself in a role. i get to choose how i want to be cast. so finally as i'm walking to my 2:30 dance rehearsal, i call his cell and leave a sing-songy voicemail: be-en, you stood me u-up. and then i said i was going to see "13 ways to kill a mockingbird" that night at 7:30, and that he should call me if he wanted to go.

i ride the bus home with breton after rehearsal, and she decides to go with me that night to see the show. and we're both hungry, so we drive to saigon for dinner. on the way, we stopped at highland and at ben's house to see if we could find him. and he wasn't at highland and he didn't answer his door. so we go to saigon and order pad thai with shrimp to split and then ben calls my cell (from his house--he'd been asleep when i knocked on his door). and it turns out--much to my relief--that he was indeed at middleton at 12:30. but he was by the front doors and i was on one of the concrete benches under the crepe myrtle trees and so we missed each other. and he met us at saigon and we gobbled our food and hauled ass to the show. which was sold out by the time we got there; i had to run around the back of the theatre and beg trish to let us in. and so we got in and saw the show--opening night--i had seen most of the video stuff but none of the live performance, and i was very happy when i saw it--the show was kinda messy but really interesting and good. and the audience laughed at the appropriate places of my documentary segment. i was psyched. especially because they laughed the hardest at this one spot that i'd spent hours working on--it was a gag with the music, and i couldn't get it to come off right, and i worked in the office one night from 10pm to 2am trying to get it. and finally it sounded kinda like i wanted it to, but i wasn't sure if it was funny (at 2am, when you've been listening to the same 3 second audio clip for four hours, nothing is funny). but the audience was cracking up. so i was really pleased.

afterwards me and ben and breton went to charlie's and ate eclairs and drank iced tea, iced chai, and hot chai (respectively). and we laughed a lot and it was fun. and then breton drove us back to our apartment. and then i brought ben to his house to pick up clothes for work in the morning, and then i brought him back to our apartment, and we hung out in my room (breton and jason and clint were downstairs watching a movie), and eventually went to sleep. (well, i went to half-sleep. which is as much sleep as i apparently will ever get if another person is in bed next to me.)

in the middle of the night, fred came in and tried to jump in bed with us. except he didn't quite make it to the top of the mattress--he was kind of hanging onto the edge--and my elbow happened to be there--so he kind of hooked his little claws into my elbow and hung there--i was like "fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck." and i removed him from my elbow and sort of hurled him off the bed. and then he started scratching at the box spring, which makes this loud awful popping noise. and i'm like, half-asleep, dead-tired, mumbling "fred, shut the fuck up" and he won't. so i push him out the door and close it and get back in bed. and he starts scratching at the door. and i curse again and get up and open the door to let him in and i curse at him and i get back in bed. and ben, who's mostly asleep, makes a sympathetic noise and throws his arm over me. and i say, "fred clawed my elbow and it hurts," and he kisses my elbow for me. and then he tells me that he's just had a strange and horrible dream about his dad.

and so we lay there and i thought: this is nice. it is nice to be mad at the cat in the middle of the night and have someone there to kiss your elbow. it is worth not sleeping to be able to hold someone when they've had a strange and horrible dream. it is so worth it.

sherbert.

i haven't posted in almost two weeks. partly because i hated that blue/gray design, it made me not want to look at the site. and partly because i've been really content, for the first time since i've been back from prague. for the past two months i'd been writing compulsively as a way of coping. so now that the need to cope has been alleviated, i need to find some other feeling to write out of.

also, i had a short story due, so that was taking up a lot of time.

anyway.

i love my house. i love, love my roommates. i love being at home. it's kind of bad, actually. i fear that it will be detrimental to my social life. er, "social life."

we seek out the cat from the dark underbelly of the bed, from his lazy sprawl on the ottoman, from atop the washer. we seek him out and we lift him up and we present him to each other. look, here's the cat. he is my gift to you. he's the best kind of gift. warm and furry and recyclable. i am reading on the uncomfortable sofa in the back room, the "parlour," with the piano and the cool lamp from my dead grandmother. i am curled up with a book and reid comes in beaming, brandishing the cat. "fre-ed," he sings out, depositing the cat at my feet. then he leaves, and so does fred, because, well, he's a cat and cats do that sometimes. but it's the thought that counts.

my dad emailed me this afternoon to ask what my BR address and phone number was. then he called at nine-ish and told me he was in town and that he had chinese food for me. he hadn't seen the house yet, so i ran around like an idiot pretending to clean up. the house wasn't really messy. it was a matter of principle.

i gave him the grand tour and introduced him to rikki (reid disappeared into his room, presumably to take a shower, though maybe he was hiding, who knows). and then we sat down in the back room and my dad and i played piano and sang. and rikki giggled. she said when he left that he was cute and had a good sense of humor. and that i must have gotten my "charm" from him. the thought of my dad being "charming" is strange. i suppose he must be, on some level, since he's doing very well with his insurance agency. but. you know. he's my dad. the one with whom i have the schizophrenic relationship. and anyway my mom is the vivacious one.

speaking of which, i met fran. i had to. he evacuated with my mother and michael when ivan was gunning for new orleans. my mom told me that my family was going to abbeville, then she asked if she and michael could sleep here, then she called back to say that fran needed a place to go. and i said fine, and then i called back and said that i didn't want him in my house, because in the almost two years they've been together, or pseudo-together, i'd only met the man once, for five seconds, in my driveway when he came to pick her up. and it's one thing for him to sort of invade my family life as i'm being very intentionally kept out of the loop. but for him to invade my home, which is, at this point, the only place where i feel safe. i thought that was a bit much. and i knew that he would end up here regardless, but i wanted my mom to know that i wasn't happy about it. so we ended up crying on the phone for an hour. we'd needed to have the conversation anyway. and as it turns out, fran is allergic to cats. thanks, fred. i owe you one.

actually fran was okay. he's a decent guy. very, very decent. friendly and outgoing and decent. kind of a putz, though. and my mom needs more than decent. she needs something closer to brilliant. and besides that, he's not in love with her. it's painful hearing her talk about how they're just good friends because really the infatuation period was short-lived and now he works for her office anyway and really, truly, they're just friends. when it's glaringly obvious that she wants it to be something more. i'm past the point of seeing my parents as superhuman; i know my mother is flawed and merely mortal. but it's still strange and awful to see her in this vulnerable position. it's a little bit pathetic; it makes me embarrassed for her. she's so logical and straightforward and strong. and she's my mother. she's the one who tells me when the guys i'm seeing are full of shit. she's the one who points out the red flags. for me to be the one to tell her, repeatedly, that he is totally mind-fucking her--it's a weird reversal.

i don't much like it.

i got my second graded problem set back from my linguistics teacher today. i fucked up an entire section of it, but i still got a 96. my teacher wrote across the top: What are you doing in creative writing?!? mcgee used to write that sort of shit on my papers for his class. it always makes me feel really good.

except after linguistics i went in for my creative non-fiction independent study with jim. and we went over my essays and revisions. and i left wondering the same thing. what am i doing in creative writing?

nothing i write fits where it's supposed to fit. my fiction is too essayistic. my essays are too narrative. my plays are non-existent. i have no sense of structure. i feel so mediocre.

and i'm graduating in may and rather than make plans for it, i'm just sort of pretending it's not going to happen.

this is frustrating.

but. becca came over the other night bearing ice cream: Bluebell's raspberry sherbet-and-vanilla swirl. i didn't think they still made that stuff. remember the night when i was dying of a sinus infection, 103-degree fever and i'd just broken up with jesse, and becca and breton got me ice cream? they looked all over for the raspberry-vanilla, but they couldn't find it, so they got sherbet and vanilla separately and mixed it by hand. talk about love.

talk about. i mean. really.

here's to the future.

for the first time in my life, the new year comes as a relief.

i'm starting to get in the writing mood again, which is generally a sign of improvement in my mental health.

still i'm not really feeling complete sentences.
or full paragraphs.
so.

there's a lot going on, but what i feel like saying is this:

--the effort this will require makes my chest hurt a little bit so it comes out as it comes out--

finally moving out of my old apartment was a deadline push. i was sweating it, but now that it's done it's a weight lifted. fred had stayed there for the interim. i thought it would simplify things, i wasn't really ready, i didn't have all his stuff, plus i was out of town. all of these things were excuses. i wasn't sure how i would sleep, physically how, i don't have doors except for the bathroom door, and i have to have some way to keep fred out of my bed because otherwise  he sits on my face and i'm a light sleeper. so i bought a pet gate, and returned it, and bought another pet gate.

i packed up my car new year's eve and then i unpacked it and then i packed it up again, this time with the cat on my lap, and i actually said to him, as i was driving away from the old apartment, 'free! free from the ties that bind!' which doesn't really make sense in context, but it was heartfelt.

i didn't have expectations for midnight but still somehow was disappointed.

came home at 2am and set up the pet gate at the top of the stairs. fred cried a lot and i didn't sleep very well. at 5am i became more awake than i had been before and i checked the clock and realized fred had been crying for three hours. i try not to cater to his whims, i don't want him to think he can get whatever he wants by crying, but three hours of crying isn't melodrama. he was in an unfamiliar apartment, he could probably smell the previous resident kitty, and there was nowhere soft for him to sleep downstairs. so i took down the gate and he got in my bed and he was shaking. i was laying on my stomach and he sat down on my back. when he was a baby it was cute but now he weighs like thirteen pounds. and he kept kneading me. we came to some sort of agreement about appropriate touching and i fell asleep eventually and woke up every two hours or so.

last night was better. i only woke up once, right as the sun was coming up. before bed i was trying to write this post, and in the middle of it he sat down on my stomach so i couldn't see the computer screen. i gave up. he's so aggravating. i'm not going to get a solid night's sleep ever again, until i move someplace with doors.

still it wasn't home until he got here.

$198.77

is how much i spent tonight at the grocery.
i'm not sure when i last went and bought actual groceries. as opposed to a single frozen dinner + deodorant + cat food.
i think it was february.
march april may june july
five months.

two hundred dollars.

i suppose i should feel bad about spending two hundred dollars on a single grocery trip. i do not. here's why:

i eat out for every meal. the only time i don't eat out is when i have leftovers from eating out.

although my social life often seems to revolve around eating out (because this is southern louisiana, we love food, and we are all lazy twenty-somethings with generally non-functional kitchens/empty fridges/no cooking ability), eating out as much as i do is expensive and unhealthy.

i am semi-horrified at the condition of my body: consequence of a haphazard exercise schedule and a retarded diet of whatever-is-available-and-doesn't-overly-disgust-me.

there are way stupider things to spend two hundred dollars on.

the only thing i maybe regret is going grocery shopping while both hungry and hormonal. i'm pretty sure the latter explains why i purchased four kinds of ice cream and three kinds of pickle.

specifically:
a pint of häagen-dazs rum raisin (it makes me nostalgic for that summer at ailey.)
a pint of ben & jerry's cherry garcia (it reminds me of dad, who lately has taken to gently microwaving a little bowl of it for me when i go over to his house.)
a pint of häagen-dazs triple chocolate something something (because, uh, i have to have chocolate in the house or.......or nothing, there's no alternative, i just have to have chocolate in the house at all times. and lately i've been living off spoonfuls of nutella.)
a half-gallon of bluebell's strawberry low-fat frozen yogurt (it didn't come in a smaller size, it's fucking delicious, and i don't feel like a bad person for eating it. not that i feel like a bad person for eating real ice cream, since i never eat much of it in the first place. i guess what i mean is that the strawberry frozen yogurt makes me feel like a good person.)

as for the pickles, it's mt. olive jalapeño dill strips, sweet relish, and banana pepper slices. yeah, i know banana peppers aren't pickles, but categorically, i mean, it's the same weird hormonal impulse, so. it counts.

also i don't know what my deal is lately with the sweet relish. i find it so appealing. it started at barrett's house one night, i was staring into their (perpetually impressively stocked) fridge and had an overwhelming desire to eat a spoonful of sweet relish.

i'm pretty sure i went ahead with it.

.

mid-afternoon i realized that even karen was out of town this time and i had absolutely nothing to do for the rest of the day. instead of staring desolately at the walls, though, i managed to think of a few things i wanted to do and a few things i needed to do. then i did some of them: started a new book, filled a prescription, balanced my checkbook, got rubber cement for my prague scrapbook, wrote the rent check. went into the grocery for frozen dinner and lightbulbs, left with two hundred dollars worth of reasons to keep living.

it's really like that. the same way that this journal is a barometer of my mental health, not in terms of my mood when i'm writing, but whether or not i'm writing at all. i'm starting to feel in that good place again. it's been a long time. i'm paying attention. there's food in my fridge. there's flowers in the bear-mouse.

at some point in my life, a frozen chicken pot pie dinner-for-one will sound terribly sad.
right now it feels like some sort of achievement.

.

PJs, clean face, fed cat.
i could have gone to chelseas tonight.
instead i'm going to sit on the sofa and re-watch in good company. because it feels good and topher grace is cute.
and i have four kinds of ice cream.

maybe it's irrational and impractical to buy four kinds of ice cream for one person.
or maybe i should go grocery shopping shot full of crazygirl hormones more often.