melao

"Baby" was my favorite love song for a long time. Portastatic did it, but I don't know where it came from. The Portuguese songs always confused me. In a pleasant way.

Baby is also the name of my brother's wife's dog. She's a Pomeranian, a bundle of energy. She jumps up in my lap every time I sit down at their place. If I don't sit down, she bounces on the floor next to me. So I usually sit. I pet her while I make small talk. Her fur is tangled and matted. Fleas crawl over my fingers while I try to work out knots.

My brother offers to sell her to me for a hundred dollars every time he sees me. "She's a purebred," he says, every time. "She's got papers." I ask him where his papers are. He misunderstands and looks excited for a second before he realizes I am making a joke.

I don't know what it means, this thing people say when they talk about how much a dog is worth. Papers. I have yet to see a single piece of paper about a single dog, unless you count the "Please Adopt Me" section of the newspaper. And I doubt that's what people mean. But "papers" is a noun. It's a thing. It exists. Where do these mysterious papers come from? Where do people keep them? Who keeps track?

A hundred dollars, my brother says. Baby licks my hand and whimpers. I tell her not to give it up so easily. Play a little hard to get. She misunderstands my joke and wiggles happily, trying her best to lick my face.

One year ago today, I smoked my last cigarette. I have not smoked in one whole year. Last year, at the company Christmas party, I ducked outside to smoke. This year I get to stay warm. The Christmas party will be in the same place as last year, on its own anniversary. And here everything has changed.

When I leave my brother's house, I always smell like smoke.

it's a groucho marx sort of club

I need to update my links list. Get a blogroll going. Do some housekeeping stuff around the blog.


Please let me know if you would like me to link you.


I will be cleaning out my lists, getting rid of broken links and references to websites that are no longer updated regularly.


Hey, if you have a favorite blog or website or downtown bar (just kidding), let me know about that, too! I mean, if you're down with sharing. It's cool if you're not. Just don't be a jerk about it. Don't email me all, "I read this AWESOME blog every DAY and I'm not going to tell you what it is." You won't be getting any Christmas cookies from me acting like that.


On second thought, maybe I'm not-so-just-kidding about the downtown bar. Hey, a girl's gotta drink. Apparently.


So, yeah. Interact with me. It'll be cool.


You can reach me by commenting here, but I am also available by email, twitter, FaceBook, U.S. Mail and carrier pigeon. Send any pigeons BEFORE I get a cat. Kthx.

in which the bed became a raft I used to sail to Cuba

I went home sick the other day. I waited until five, then bolted for home. Thought I was going to throw up. Thought I was going to come apart. My head was spinning and nausea rolled through me in waves, leaving me shivering and shaky.


Something I ate? Something I drank? A doorknob I touched, maybe?


I don't know. Staying upright when I wanted to fold in half was exhausting. All I could think about was being warm in bed. If I could make it to my bed, I could pass out. It wouldn't matter, because I'd already be in bed. Passing out would be like sleeping. My stomach felt like it was doing backflips, but really deep breaths held it almost still.


I made it home. Dropped my backpack in the dining room and dove into bed with all my clothes on. Curled up in a tight ball and let the room rock. Thought about getting up to get my mop bucket. Decided I'd rather clean puke off a hardwood floor later than get up right away and cross that cold floor to the broom closet.


And that's about the last thing I remember. The room spun and I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, two hours had passed and so had the nausea. I sat up tentatively. Stretched. I felt, for reasons I can't explain, like I had gotten away with some kind of mischief. I padded to the refrigerator and drank ginger ale straight from the two-liter bottle.


Then I finished reading Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down and sat stunned and stupid for awhile like I always do when someone shows me they know where I've been.


The parts that made me cry -- Maureen is an old lady who tries very hard not to come off like she's complaining. She'd rather not talk about something horrible, even if it's true, because she doesn't want people pitying her and ruining their own good time. I know, I know. I mean, poor little martyr, right? But I think calling her a martyr would be missing the point. She's not passive-aggressive. There's no aggression to it.


(Character-in-the-book Jess, not my sister) Jess lost her sister, sort of literally. So you have someone dealing with grief and loss without closure. I had typed "someone unequipped to deal" and backspaced because nobody is equipped to deal with grief. Sorry. We're just not. We make tools and we equip ourselves, same as cavemen.


I don't really like to talk about it, because it's hard to talk about it without bringing people down. So I use as few words as I can and it still comes up to too many because if there's one thing I suck at, it's being concise.


"I was suicidal. For like, a couple of years."


And when I go on and try to explain -- I'm okay now -- shit piled up, you know? Maybe you do. Maybe you don't. My marriage fell apart. I lost the job I valued too much. My mom got cancer and then died.


"I couldn't figure out a way to do it without hurting people I loved. Maybe that's why I'm alive."


I had a plan, but it was not exactly right. I could never quite work out all the kinks. I tried. I tried really hard. It just never quite made sense.


You know what's funny? I know exactly how to do it now. And I'm not suicidal anymore.


Hilarious.


But that's not all!


You know what else is funny? In the months leading out of that -- I don't even know what to call it. People seem to want me to define it in sharp contrast to my life now, and I'm not sure I can do that. It wasn't a, "black, horrible, deep depression." It was more of a muted, muffled, glazed-over sort of thing.


It's like if you were on a path through the woods, and your whole life had been lived on this path, but one day you look down and there's no path under you and you're just fucking LOST. And you might panic for a while, or you might not, but you spend however long wandering through this fucking forest that's maybe even kind of a cool place but if you don't get out you will DIE. You might starve. You might die of exposure. You might get eaten by a bear. I don't know. And you become less and less panicked until you are only curious. You wonder if you will make it out with your bloody feet and your ribs poking out because of course you didn't pack a lunch or wear proper shoes. And then you find the path again.


I'm sorry I can't do better than that. But! In the months that passed while the, I don't know, FOG receded, I remember realizing I was getting better. That's not the funny part. The funny part is, it was when I started being afraid of things that would hurt me that I realized I didn't want to be dead anymore.


I began to test myself. I'd hear a noise and think, "Uh-oh. Axe murderer? Crazy methhead? Vampires? Zombies? EX BOYFRIEND?" like you do. And I would ask myself what I would do if it were true. Would I fight whatever monster might be scratching at the door, or would I shrug and let it do my dirty work for me?


Believe it or not, being scared caused the first little glimmer of hope I'd seen in a very long time.


I don't know if that's normal or not. I'm okay with it if it's not. Not everybody cares as much about zombies as I do.


A few people got really angry with me about it when I told them, so I mostly stopped talking about it. The suicidal bit, I mean. And I still think it's kind of funny. Being angry with someone for how they feel. I guess we do it more than we think, though. Get angry with people for not loving us the way we love them. Get pissed off because someone doesn't love a song the way you do, doesn't GET IT, how you can hear all the emotion and soul that went into this one recording, I mean, are you really listening to this? How do you not hear that?


Or maybe it's just me.