On One Small Lesson Learned

Six years ago, I had a hangover.

I had been out to late with the then-husband and my best friend. We had enjoyed a wonderful dinner of olives and pasta and far, far too much wine. I woke up the next morning tired and dehydrated with a brain batted in cotton.

It was a glorious morning, the kind of early autumn day that seems as though it were colored out of a 64 Crayola box onto newsprint by an incredibly beautiful second-grade child. I unceremoniously deposited myself into my car to get to my dead-end job that I truly, deeply, disliked.

I don’t know at what point the news from NPR began to penetrate my post-drunk fog. Somewhere on the drive; at some point before I parked, I noticed that Bob Edwards (I think he was the Morning Edition host at the time) sounded completely, totally, confused. Lost. Bob Edwards was, in the coolest and most professional way possible, freaking out.

I walked into the ground floor of the building where I worked. There was a third-rate radio station there, one that got its news directly from some wire. The people in the booth looked gobsmacked; the woman had her hands over her face. The men gaped.

And that was when I realized we were fucked.

I am certain that everyone has a story that is, to a greater or lesser extent, similar. Where they were. What they were doing. What they thought. I remember being unmoored; like I didn’t know the world. Given my visceral, blood-thirsty reaction, I didn’t really feel like I knew myself. As I said at the time, it was like I couldn’t imagine a world without crying in it.

I don’t know that I’ve ever managed to make meaning out of September 11th, 2001. I don’t know if one really can. Maybe there is no meaning that can be made of 2974 dead. No meaning. Just a glass to be raised; a candle to be lit; a prayer to be said.

And, for me? A life to be lived.

Because after the shock of 9/11, I came to and realized that I was only going through the motions of my life, and that I was not doing a terribly good job of it. Once the shock of the attacks wore off it occurred to me that it was inexcusable for me piss away my life in the most mediocre way possible, when 2974 people had abruptly, suddenly lost their lives and couldn’t do anything at all with theirs.

Since then, I have struggled and won and lost and fallen out of trees and hit-every-damn-branch-on-the-way down and hit the ground and dragged myself back up. I haven’t written the great American novel. I haven’t created some great work of art. Hell, I haven’t even cut my grass in weeks. But I haven’t settled for miserable. I haven’t decided that just hanging on is enough.

I don’t think my small life is any, any kind of monument to their lives lost. I do think, though, that my small life would have been incredibly smaller without the remembrance of their unwitting, unwilling sacrifice.

2974 lives wasted is 2974 more than too many. It taught me not to waste one more.

Saturday Plans

When I don’t have to go to pink collar wage slave job #2, my Saturdays generally consist of sleeping in, followed by perhaps brunch with the boy and some sort of effort to extricate my house from borderline chaos and filth with which I seem destined to surround myself. The evenings often involve friends and dinners or bars, again assuming that I am not working.

This Saturday, though, an old friend of the family is getting married. Our parents have been friends since they were in high school, and our mothers were pregnant with us at the same time. Our families have shared countless barbecues and midwinter parties, and some of my fondest memories of early childhood involve playing with Paul.

Perhaps, if she seems a laughing sort, I will tell his bride how Paulie and I used to play Star Wars in a blue plastic pool in his backyard, or how every summer he seemed to have a ready supply of box turtles. If I get really drunk, I might be prevailed upon to relate my earliest memory of the dashing groom, that is, him pitching a howling fit because the cold butter had torn a hole in his bread at the local pizza place. Although that last might be a story I just save for the other people who went to high school with us.

As Paul and I grew up, we found that we had fewer and fewer interests in common. When we went to high school together we were certainly friendly, but in the distant, nod to one another in the hallway kind of way. Now as adults, we see one another for major events but not much else. Still though, I am very happy for him and his family, and I’m looking forward to meeting his new wife and to hearing about their excitement about their new life.

I like weddings as a general rule, as long as the other guests don’t devote overmuch time to conversing with my cleavage. There is something life-affirming about the human willingness to fly in the face of evident futility and accumulated knowledge and promise lifelong devotion to another. It warms my chill little heart to see people behave with so much hope and so little reason.

That said, though, today a quick little wave of dread washed over me as it occurred to me that this wedding will be widely attended by people who attended my embarkation of my matrimonial Titanic’s maiden voyage just over six years ago. I have seen all these people since I’ve been divorced; it’s not like it will be news to anyone. Hell, most of these people have known me my whole life and probably weren’t surprised that another human being was unable to tolerate my constant companionship.

I feel kind of like a tart who spent a bunch of money to stand in front of a bunch of people with a fistful of flowers and a mouth full of lies. Even though I know that no one but me gives a fleeting fuck about any of this, the fact remains that I do. I sort of feel like I should wear an inappropriate evening gown and my whore-red lipstick to this shindig.

You know what though? I sort of think I should feel this way. Not in some sort of self-loathing-I-deserve-to-be-punished-and-suffer-way, but more that I think it’s important to have learned from that mistake. If it didn’t hurt a little, then wouldn’t that mean that I didn’t, at the very least, mean the words I said at the time that I said them? Even though that marriage was a mistake, and I suspected so at the time, I can at least say that I leaned into the traces and tried to haul that miserable fucker out of the sucking mud of failure.

It should hurt when you break promises, even if they were the wrong promises to make.

This little pang will pass. Tomorrow will be lovely, I’m certain. Perhaps if I’m lucky there will be good music and The Boy will honor me with a dance. That would be a good thing.

On Anger

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend of mine at a party when he mentioned that he liked my blog. I was reasonably flattered, as I have assumed right along that in general the only people who would read it are those that have to, such as The Boy and The Liquor Fairy, and the occasional stalker who finds it by accident while trolling for victims. Also, I quite enjoy his meandering vitriol, which means that I count him in the .02% or so of the population whose opinions I don’t dismiss out of hand.

As we chatted, he mentioned that one of the things he liked about my blog is the fact that I’m so “angry.”

Hmm.

Even though I knew he meant it in a good way, my first response was to dispute that fact. “I’m not angry,” I protested, “I’m . . . not . . . I’m a pleasant person. I’m NICE.”

Who the fuck do I think I’m kidding? I’m not nice, I’m polite, and sometimes I can’t even manage that convincingly. Hell, I don’t even want to be nice. In fact, I am pretty angry. I’m not joyless or bitter about it, but I spend a decent amount of time in a state of low-grade rage.

Why? Well, god. There are just so many reasons.

I have been pissed about President Halfwit since the word go. I am pissed that he was elected the first time, and I’m REALLY pissed that he was elected again. He’s a fucking idiot of the first order, and I’m beginning to suspect he might be batshit crazy to boot. Do not even get me started on the rest of monsters in his administration.

I am tired of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights being read like lists of suggestions.

Speaking of the Bush administration, I remain pissed off at Ralph Nader. I will always be pissed off at Nader. If Nader’s teeth were on fire, I would not piss in his mouth. I will always, ALWAYS blame Nader for Bush. Every dead soldier in Iraq? Nader’s fault. As soon as the first woman dies after Roe v. Wade is completely gutted by those bastards on the Supreme Court, I’m sending him the picture of her bloodied corpse (which I feel certain will appear in the local paper or online). If he’s dead by then I’m taking it to his grave. I love a futile gesture as much as the next girl, truly I do. There is, however, a line between making a noble but futile gesture and being a megalomaniacal asshole.

While we’re on the subject of dead women, I’m sick of being a second class citizen. I am angry that we cannot manage to treat the decision to have a child as though it were anything but a flippant decision on par with picking a fucking handbag; one that is the exclusive province and problem of women. I’m angry that after all this time, people still talk to my boobs. I’m tired of a lot of things having to do with being a chick. I am sick of “women’s issues” being somehow different and inferior from regular “issues.” Hell, I’m mad that my first reaction upon being told that I’m angry was to insist that I’m not. I should be angry—I’m not stupid. My first reaction should not be to feel bad about that.

BUT, I have it lucky. No burqa. No child marriage. No dowry. I can leave my house. See a doctor. Go to school. I might be cranked about some of the bullshit that goes on in this country attendant on my having a uterus that goes on in this country, but at least I’m here. At least I don’t have a target on me, or a very low price on my head. At least I usually don’t feel expendable.

I am angry about reality television.

I am angry people who don’t have enough sense not to, at the very least, vote against their own best interest. Do you come from a LOT of money, preferably OLD money? No? Then why. The Fuck. Would you ever. EVER. Vote Republican? You stupid ‘git.

I am angry about those stupid health care personal savings accounts folks keep bandying on about it. The whole proposition of “People will choose more wisely if they are spending their own money,” is asinine. Yeah. I just randomly SPEND healthcare dollars. I go to the doctor because I love waiting and old magazines. I take birth control for shits and giggles, not because I don’t want to have a kid I can’t afford to feed. And when the time comes I need a mammogram? It will just be because I want to have my boobs mashed. Are there people who over-utilize healthcare resources? Sure, but most don’t. Most avoid the doctor unless they need to go, either for illness or for a checkup to prevent illness. Since most people don’t like waiting, co-pays, or needles, most people partake as little as possible in the healthcare system.

You know what will happen when people are forced to pay cash for their own healthcare, without assistance from insurance? Lots and lots of dying, punctuated with gangrene and tumors the size of grapefruits.

And finally (for now), I am angry that so many people don’t recognize the difference between “everyday” and “every day.”

On Anniversaries

Yesterday was, in a bizarre example of life’s occasional symmetry, the anniversary both of my marriage and of my divorce.

On May 12, 2001, I meringued up in a traditional fluffy white dress and walked down the aisle to meet the man on whom, it turns out, I had settled. Four years later at 2:30 in the morning on May 12, 2005, I realized that I was finished and that my marriage was over. Normally, I would call it May 11th due to my usual insistence that the next day doesn’t begin until one has slept and wakened, but that’s not important to this story. Whatever. Close enough, non? What does matter is that I can still remember the noise I made when I realized my marriage was over, indeed I don’t think I can forget it, but I don’t think I could ever reproduce it.

Let me pause here and say that I have never, for even one instant, regretted the fact that I’m no longer married to my ex-husband. Hell, I can still almost give myself a facial tic just by thinking about him.

Because unlike many of my fellow humans I do have a tendency to use my forebrain, I have made peace with the mistake that was my marriage and the . . . extraction . . . that was my divorce. The Ex was, at the time of our marriage, a drunk. I sort of knew it, but my wedding and marriage was all about denial, so I went right ahead. In retrospect, I met The Ex far too soon after what was, in essence,a bit of a nervous breakdown and a short but dreadful series of heart bruising and breaking. I didn’t need to get married; I needed an intensive round of the therapy.

That said, The Ex doesn’t get a free pass. He wanted to get married, and I was just the next woman who happened along. I think he knew less about who he was and what he wanted than even I did. Eventually, The Ex got sober. Once he cleared the whiskey cobwebs from his brain and soberly appraised the situation, he realized that he didn’t particularly like me. Which made me not particularly like me, either, but made me like him even less.

Like all things that are ultimately doomed a breaking point was eventually reached, and suddenly the Kate that I had somewhat lost reasserted herself. Realizing that my situation was fucked, my marriage was fucked, and the fool to whom I was married was completely fucked—I decided that it was time to leave. And to take most of the furniture with me.

There is some friendly back and forth among my friends and I as to whether or not he ever really loved me. Since I don’t think he ever really knew me, I say not really. In all fairness, I don’t know if I loved him enough for our marriage to have worked even had the halcyon period immediately following his sobriety continued.

In the moments when I do not feel like tarting up the truth in pretty ribbons and bows, I knew the person I was marrying pretty well. He had all the depth of your standard casserole dish. I failed to predict how out of control his drinking would get, sure, but I knew it was a problem because it was a familiar one (shout out to the family!). The problems we encountered after he stopped being a drunk were unanticipated, but predictable. Oops. His behavior changed, but only because he quit filling the echoing hollow of his empty inner-life with booze and began plotting to fill it with work and children for whom he expected me to care.

I married Mike because I didn’t think I was going to do any better. I divorced him because I realized that it didn’t matter if I could do better because I sure as hell couldn’t feel any worse. After Mike’s surprise at my announced decision wore off his relief was, as I recall, palpable. He wanted out as well, he just wasn’t strong enough to do it.

What took the longest time for me to come to terms with, indeed what still troubles me from time to time, was the fact that I was, after all, the kind of woman who would make these mistakes. I got married for foolish, selfish reasons. This led, inexorably, to divorcing. I failed not because my marriage ended, but because a stupid, weak choice necessitated my marriage ending.

That sound I made on that late, late night when I finally realized that my marriage was finished, that terrible, pained yip, was not the sound of me mourning the end of that relationship. No. It was the sound of realizing that I was not the person I thought I was.

Oh well.

Two years later I am okay with the person I am and okay with the mistakes I made. Not proud of them, or indifferent, but okay. I needed, I think, to fucking burn myself in all that. It seared off an awful lot of fluff. I hope that it didn’t temper me, that it didn’t make me hard; that’s not what I want. I would never want a stupid mistake made when I was young and raw to forever harden that part of my life. I don’t think it has.

I will not, however, be making that fucking mistake again.

On Monologues and New Year's Non-Resolutions

I came, I saw, and I . . . moaned. A lot and loudly.

This weekend was The Vagina Monologues. It was a great experience, if not entirely what I expected. In future, I hope to get some direction from any directors with whom I work. “Thanks,” while appreciated, is not exactly useful in developing a character.

Still, though, a good time. I stood in front of a roomful of about 100 people and moaned—loudly and repetitively. A year ago I wouldn’t have thought I could do such a thing.

I find that I’m in an interesting place right now. I turned 30 in October, a milestone that I greeted with much the same enthusiasm as my annual gynecological exam. Like my trip to the stirrups, I figured it as a necessary evil that would pass more painlessly if I mostly ignored it and tried to relax. While my actual birthday was about that good (attention boyfriends of the world: do not stand up your girlfriends on their 30th birthdays—no excuse is sufficient or will staunch the inevitable flow of tears), my 30th year has, thus far, been rather enlightening.

My friends who are a couple of years older than I told me that being 30 was a self-changing thing. That I would feel more secure in myself, more certain, and less-inclined to the struggles and self-doubt that characterizes people’s 20s.

I don’t know if it’s the passage of the mile marker that is 30, or if it’s the fact that the latter part of my 20s were filled with sundry disasters that, at the end of last year, culminated in a sort of interpersonal Armageddon—wherein the worst thing I could imagine happening to me (that did not involve death or physical harm to self or close friends/family) actually happened. Once “the worst” has happened, it becomes increasingly difficult to give any more than a fleeting fuck about “the rest.”

I said before on this blog that I don’t much go in for New Year’s Resolutions. I still don’t. I have, however, embraced a couple of mottos:

1. What are you trying to prove?

Whenever I look at taking on a new task/chore/job/challenge/whatever—I ask myself what it is I’m trying to prove, and to whom I am trying to prove it. If I realize I’m trying to prove something not in question (“I’m smart”) to a random “them” about which I really don’t give a damn, then I opt out. If I’m trying to prove something that I care about to myself, then into the breach.

2. If I don’t owe you money; I don’t owe you anything.

Civility, decency, respect—sure. Otherwise, unless your name is Chase Manhattan and you are holding my freakin’ mortgage, then I don’t owe you a damn thing. There are some exceptions made for very dear friends who have a right to expect some things from me, and who pay me back in kind, but in general I’ve spent far too much time worrying a great deal about what others want or need, or think they want or need. Fuck’em and feed’em fish heads.

3. What could happen?

Thank you, Julie Powell of the Julie/Julia project, for this one. Want to try out for a play . . . what could happen? Want to take time off school/quit school entirely? Refer to Motto #1 to and quit already . . . what could happen? Stand in front of a roomful of people and pant . . . what could happen? Yes, this does lead to things like my recent Peanut Butter Dessert Disaster—but it also leads to fun things like first kisses with new people.

On the Bright Side

In case anyone is reading this, and doesn’t already know, the last five months or so have done an admirable job of bringing home my place and function in the universe. To be perfectly honest, actually, the last year and-a-half has been less than stellar.

Okay, so the wheels started to wobble at the end of ’04, but no need to dwell, eh?

Of late, though, every day feels vaguely like a new, fresh, low-grade ass-kicking. I am tired. I am pissed off. I am not getting laid which does absolutely nothing for my disposition. Despite the fact that I am most-assuredly NOT an optimist, I’m doing my level best to put a bright and smiling face on things as much as possible. Granted, the smile is a byproduct of some pretty serious teeth-gritting, but given the alternatives, there’s really no choice.

Well, no choice that does not involve risking jail time.

It’s not so much that I’m trying to get “back on track” (a phrase I loathe and think smacks of ra-ra corporate bullshit); more I’m trying to feel like I’m not tied to the damned track. And if I can find a ticket window that will sell me a ticket to someplace that doesn’t suck, so much the better.

To that end, I’m trying to expand my personal endeavors. Example the first? This blog. A good exercise I think, even if virtually no one reads it (hi, Mandy). Example the second? Well, I’m writing a play. Of course, right now it’s not very good—I’m not sure it can ever be—and even if it could I don’t know anyone to put it on. Whatever. That’s not the problem at this point. At this point the problem is the end of Act 1. Or rather, the problem is that I don’t know yet how Act 1 ends.

And I’m making new friends. Or trying to. “What of your long-time local friends?” you ask. Hmm. How can I say this? We had a 15 minute conversation about banking the other night. Behold, a pale horse. It was like I had landed on a space called “Shuffleboard” on a mythical Monopoly board and had been forced to move my little pewter dog directly the AARP holding pen.

Yeah. I’m thirty. And single. And not getting any. And I don’t have actual money. Banking has got to be only slightly less boring to discuss than . . . um . . . I’ll get back to you. It’s not that I don’t love these people, but clearly I’m in a different place right now. A very. Different. Place. Where checking account interest doesn’t matter because there is never any damn money in there, anyway.

And finally? More acting. Not for money, because god, I’m broke enough as it is without having to worry about that flavor of madness. But for fun, I hope, with people I like and can learn things from. Again I hope. We’ll see, I suppose.

Now if only I could get a pause in the daily ass-kickings. Because, yeah. That’d be awesome.

On Time

Well, yesterday I blathered on for quite some time about St. Louis in January and the New Congress. Luckily, I wasn't particularly enamored with my post. Blogger ate it. Good bye, post. We hardly new ye'.

Anyway.

Mercifully, this January in St. Louis has lacked the bone-snapping cold so common to the after-holidays in our region. The weather? Gray and dreary—it’s like someone ordered it special just for me. It’s the perfect background for my aggressive moping. This is the time of year when the weather and the post-holiday letdown usually leave me unmotivated and depressed. Lately, I’ve just been unmotivated and depressed generally, the holidays were just the final dollop of yummy whipped misery.

So, the interminable gray of midwinter is upon us. I feel slothful and dull, as though I’m encountering the world at its maximum viscosity. I am trying to find things, many things, anythings, to do to fill the stack of hours between waking up and sleeping, that time between my alarm clock and the witching hour when it becomes reasonable (rather than pathetic and weird) to go to bed. Time is like a nest of baby birds, and I am constantly looking for bits to drop into the twitching, gaping mouths.

So I walk the dog. I watch absolutely terrible reality television and feel superior to the people I’m watching. I eat popcorn and chocolate to excess. I write. I read. I drink too much.

When I was divorcing, there was about a three week period when I still lived in Florida in the house I then shared with my not-yet-ex-husband. I had set myself up in the guest room and I spent all my non-working hours in there, emerging only to forage for food, to check my e-mail in my adjacent office, or to use the bathroom.

I was trying to avoid the Ex, any encounter was more likely than not to turn into a screaming fight—I recall on one memorable occasion looking around for something close to hand with which to brain him—but I was also trying to disengage from that life, from all the things I was walking away from. The house I was leaving. The state I was leaving. The perfect job I was leaving. The dog I was leaving. The marriage I was leaving. The only social interaction available to me was long-distance calls to friends and family who were hours and hours away, and who, despite their considerable efforts, could only do so much to help while away the time. Of which there was so. Damn. Much.

Time felt like it had stopped. Broken. Like some unfeeling fuckwad who just hated me had monkeywrenched the entire operation of the universe to trap me forever in that guest room. That was lilac. With pink carpet. And in Florida. There were times when I almost could not remember what it was like to have a life that did not consist of sitting on the floor in a room watching t.v. and waiting to go to bed.

Finally, though, the three weeks ended and I moved out. I returned to St. Louis and commenced wild experimentation in new ways to ball up my adulthood.

And right now, I’m sitting at my desk, and reminding myself that time does pass. Eventually.