utterly squdlin
Sunday 6 March 2005 | I like a cookie
Mrrrrrt! announces Eloise brightly, and chases her crumpled-up paper ball across the hideous brownish shag carpeting (”crapeting” I typo, and almost don’t think worse of it). How many times am I allowed to blog today?
I can’t think if I’ve ever confessed various things, various romantic happenings which seem so backgrounded to my life now that I may never have bothered to blog them. It’s seamless in a deceptive way—N. now replaces M. easily and smoothly in my prose—but have I admitted that N. is the first boy with whom I’ve ever seriously discussed (hell, even frivolously discussed) having children? Did I bother passing on that earth-shattering, bone-blasting, brain-warping news? We even have a sketchy timeline (when I’m 41 and he’s, riotously enough, 29, AM I BARKING MAD) and a backup plan (adopting a small horde of skinny beautiful little African/Indian/Asian urchins if my uterus fails to pass muster at the last minute)—and have admitted each to the other that if we accidentally impregnate the me, we neither one would wish to terminate the event. We are dopey with the possibilities of procreation, though we agree with dismay that our progeny will be short, have blisteringly high IQs and be thoroughly mentally ill.
Then, N. confessed to me about a month ago that the reason he freaked out, right after he first grabbed me in mid-sentence and kissed the breath out of me on a San Francisco pier, was that he had an involuntary vision of me at eighty, “thin and wrinkled and radiant” was how he puts it, a vision so overwhelming he couldn’t speak for several minutes afterward which was why we walked in aimless circles, arm in arm, me wondering what was going on, did I kiss funny or taste weird or something unspeakably worse. After a solid unspeaking ten minutes, during which he, shaking, smoked a cigarette and I died a thousand older-married-woman deaths (”am I not pretty enough?” as the young lady sings plaintively)—he finally turned to me and said, almost angrily, “I choose you.” And I thought, well, that’s kind of weird, and it reminds me of Ralph Wiggum (infamously, smittenly gaving Lisa Simpson the valentine with a picture of a train and the legend, “I choo-choo-choose you!”); but, okay. We then drove to the Trench, making out all the way down the coast, and I never knew what was going on that day on the pier until he told me a few weeks ago. That he saw and believes he will be there, then.
But it’s madness, I tell him, lying sweaty together on top of my duvet after having shagged so impetuously that at one point the top of my head grazed the carpeting and twice, with unstifled curses, he had to shake the cat off his ankle, whence she had pounced. I lie here with you as a living testament to the fact that no two people can happily remain lovers for longer than four to seven years. No two people can fulfil each other over a lifetime. It is impossible. Everything proves it. Do you not see that. Of course he doesn’t, he’s 24 and he wants a daughter, wants a son. This is another one of your koans, he says, pulling me closer. How can you love someone so completely, and then stop. How can someone love you like that, and stop. How many times undone / can one person be.
I am drinking ginger ale and I don’t care about the carbs.
Kitzi peers with a dim simulacrum of intelligence at the blinking cursor. I’ve got to stop this and write a bloody review of bloody Fear and Trembling, which has nothing to do with Kierkegaard and everything to do with a bizarrely dominant/submissive relationship between a starry-eyed young Belgian woman who gets a position as a translator in a Japanese firm, and the Japanese woman who is her superior and takes great malicious pleasure in humiliating her Western employee. It’s based on a novel, which in turn feels as though it’s based on a true story, and it’s kick-ass. Unfortunately I can’t content myself merely with that but need something a bit more longish—say, 550 words’ worth of longish. It’s really really really really really really really really really realy (there, I said I’d type it until I misspelled it) kick-ass? Never mind.
I procrastinate still further by making, will wonders never cease, an Ani DiFranco mix for my parents (carefully censored, making sure none of the songs say cunt or fuck—they wouldn’t survive in Blighty, those two). It’s 10:47 and N. will get off work at 11 and come over here, worn out from his mercilessly heckling clients and strung out from giving up his last addiction (what’s left? pace Adam Ant). And I’m—well, let’s be honest. Honestly? I’m thoroughly suicidal. I have no money and I have a $96 phone bill and an article deadline, and I’ve somehow managed to wreck my relationship with my Zen teacher, or she’s wrecked it with me; and if I do get into grad school I have to quit my job and break my lease, disappointing people right and left, and if I don’t get into grad school I have to get another job because the one I have doesn’t pay, and right now I have a window of maybe, maybe, ten days before the raging PMS clamps down on me again, and honestly? I wish it were February 21 again and this time I had barbituates enough to pass out cold instead of stupid antihistamines enough to apparently unconsciously decide it was okay to wander back down the mountain.
But I have an elegant Arab-speaking aikido-goddess fleidermaus Mandarin who’s visiting in less than two weeks, and I have a bewilderingly grown-up 24-year-old boyfriend who says he wants to be my husband, even though we all know that’s an incredibly stupid idea. I have some things. I have a cat. I have a can of ginger ale. I have fingers that type. I have to hang on. I don’t know why but I just tell myself stubbornly that I do. I don’t even know why it’s important. Because, as President Bartlett says defensively on The West Wing; because smart people told me.
have the strength to just sit inside your sadness
even if you’re sitting there alone
(and in juxtaposition, this, from another peppy tune of Mr. DiFranco’s:)
I don’t think I am strong enough
to do this much longer
God I wish I was stronger
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