Lost Weekend

Goddess, I'm a wreck! This heat is fucking killing me. All this weekend I couldn't do anything except lay on the living room floor watching television, playing video games, eating popsicles, and suffering. It was one of the worst wastes of time I've ever experienced over a three-day weekend.



It wasn't a total waste, of course... I did get some laundry done (three loads to be exact), and I watched some good movies with Caroline on Sunday afternoon (Spirited Away and Cowboy Bebop, both excellent bits of anime, and the latter had a soundtrack that totally got me wet). But I didn't do any writing, I didn't do any housecleaning, and I was really looking forward to doing some of these over the long weekend. Three whole days off, and I just watched television... and for most of the time, I wasn't even watching the television programs, I was simply staring at the colors and pictures as they flashed by in hyperspeed.



I am sometimes amazed by the amount of crap that is on television. I know I shouldn't be, but the sheer volume of crap is just stunning. I only have seventy-five channels on my cable, and at least fifty of them I never watch at all (news channels, sports channels, foreign-language channels, documentary channels, local access channels), and on the channels I do watch there is only about 25% of their programming that I will ever sit through for an entire show.



But if I had digital cable, I'd have five hundred channels to choose from, and probably not many more that I actually watched... maybe twice as many watchable compared to six times as many overall. So if you consider the four hundred or so channels for which I would have no use, and then the 75% dreck-rate on the channels I do watch, it just boggles the mind to think about how much utter crap that all adds up to.



Of course, one has to take into account one's own tastes... I suppose there are a lot of channels and shows that are not, in and of themselves, crap — but I don't like them, so they may just as well be crap for all the good they do me.



Nevertheless, there I was, absorbing the crap, so sapped by the heat that I didn't have enough energy to even read a book or browse the internet... I just lay there, pushing the remote's buttons and occasionally getting up to eat or drink or pee or go to sleep. On Monday I varied the routine by playing my now-antiquated N64 video games, getting through the childhood portion and the first adult quest of The Legend of Zelda and the Ocarina of Time (for about the seventh time) in about three hours.



Every once in a while I would go into my room and try to write in Worst Luck, but nothing would come out. I got so sick of looking at that last paragraph where I was stuck that I seriously considered scrapping the entire project.



But I realized that I was worrying too much about forcing myself to a stopping-place, and letting that prevent me from furthering the story or sharing what I already have. I have to struggle against the urge to make it perfect the first time. So I posted what I had, and figured I could edit a little when I do get to the end of the chapter... I guess I married myself to the structure of parts of chapters being the only thing I posted on the Worst Luck site.



But then I reminded myself that the whole point of putting it in a blog was to gain forward momentum... and just because something isn't part of the story yet (I should be writing out notes when I have ideas for later and posting them along with the sections), or just because it's not a natural pausing-place in the narration, these are not important enough to stall the progress.



So I am going to henceforth be a little more focused on forward movement in the story instead of on form and perfection, which can and should be instituted after the first draft is done... I keep forgetting that the Worst Luck blog is a first draft, not a finished novel. So I am going to do the parts as first-draft, then edit the parts together into chapters that will be posted whole and separate... and then when the whole thing is done, I'll start revising it into its finished form.



The other point of putting it in a blog, of course, was to get feedback on the progress, to have people out there reading it and letting me know when I am getting too far off-track, or too self-indulgent in description, or too lazy about momentum. So please do go visit Worst Luck and tell me what you think.



In the meantime, thanks for listening to me bitch about heat and television. I'd better get back to work... today I am assembling fifty bankers' boxes for our move, and it's almost as restful as origami, if one were making cranes out of thick cardboard. Then I'm going home to take yet another shower, I'm all hot and sticky and I can't stand it!



Have a super day!

By the way, I just noticed the date-stamp... today is my grandfather's birthday! He would have been 101 today. He was a wonderful man, maybe not the nicest or the most enlightened, but he was remarkable: he cheerfully shouldered far more responsibilities than his pampered upbringing prepared him to handle, and he accomplished more than anyone could have expected of him.



I miss him a lot still, even though he's been dead for seventeen years and was non compos mentis for another five years before that. I'd show you a picture, but I've never scanned one... there's a project for me, as soon as I unearth my scanner and get it set up again.

The Size of the Sighs

Bonjour, M'sieu Tristesse! I don't know what it is today, but I feel horribly sad. Yesterday afternoon I did, too, just a little, after I got home from work (and overate all afternoon and evening as a result: three hard-boiled eggs, two peach popsicles, some potato chips, three or four coconut macaroons, quite a few cashews, a dinner of leftover Chinese food, and the top fourth of a quart of Dreyer's 50/50-Bar ice cream which I shoveled into my face straight out of the carton with a soup spoon until my teeth started to freeze); but today it's almost overwhelming.



It was even worse when I was at work and couldn't just curl up in bed with the rest of the ice cream, I had to just sit there and deal with it while answering phones (without snapping "What the hell do YOU want?" when I did it) and preparing for the first board meeting of the school year (which went unusually well).



The thing is, I am only having the physical sensation of sadness: that squeezy feeling in my chest and nose that comes right before I start weeping about something. But I have nothing to weep about. Besides the weepiness itself, I feel pretty good about everything (except those goddamned motherfucking asshole clitcrack Republicans)... I have enough energy to do my work, and I'm getting things done — I even like the outfit I have on, and my hair looks good. But when I sit still, when I'm not working and not eating, that overwhelming sadness just washes over me and leaves me feeling desolate.



Granted, I am completely broke yet again because I just had to have that $170 dress (it's so fucking fabulous, I tried to resist but couldn't, see it here) and so I'm living on my credit card again, which is kind of depressing; and then I'm not losing any weight, and after a week of dieting and exercising daily I actually gained a pound and a half, which was kind of depressing (and after last night's binge, I'm probably all the way back up to 215 by now); and let's not forget the Republicans... I try not to think about them, but there they are, ruining the world.



I had to eat my dinner on the back deck this evening so I didn't have to hear George Dumbass Bush jacking his asinine jaws on television. What I did hear sent me scrambling out of the house as fast as my big ol' feet could carry me, my dinner plate in one hand and my cranapple juice in the other, my phone-book-sized September Vogue tucked under my arm (my only other choice was to throw the television out of the window, and the Grandmother after it): in his opening remarks, Dumbass claimed credit for bringing the recessed economy he'd inherited up to a peak of prosperity.



Perhaps I missed something, but didn't this recession start with Dumbass, and isn't it still lingering?



Maybe he's talking about his own family's economy, which is getting fatter by the minute. I know my prosperity isn't peaking... I haven't had a raise in three years, not even a cost-of-living adjustment, and yet I paid more taxes each year.



Fucking Republican assholes, encouraging personnel outsourcing and raping the environment so the rich can get richer and the poor can go fuck themselves and the rest of us just sit here bewildered by debt; they don't even have a half-assed economic theory like Reagan's "Trickle-Down" to give us something to talk about over coffee... they're just distracting us from it by belaboring hot-button emotional issues in hopes that we won't notice what's going on.



Fucking shitcrumb motherfuckers. No wonder I feel depressed.



Well, I'm not going to let Dumbass and his cuntcrust coterie ruin my day. I'm going to go read Vogue some more and think about how fabulous I'm going to look in my new dress; maybe I'll think up more disgusting compound words while I'm at it. I hope you're feeling better than me, and don't let the assholes get you down!

Now I Get It

When I got home from the grocery store last evening, the Grandmother was all aglow with Right-Wing Rhetoric, palpitating with love for John McCain, who had just finished speaking. I'd brought home Chinese food, and she asked if we could eat in the living room so she could keep watching the RNC. I was too tired to express my true feelings about the Republicans (that they stand for social recidivism and economic exploitation but call it "morality" and "prosperity," that they talk about "freedom" but they really mean "freedom for straight white midle-class Christian Americans who think like us"), so I just told her that she could go ahead and eat in the living room but I didn't want to watch TV.



Anyway, since she was in the living room instead of her bedroom (with only a wall between us instead of a stairwell, a bathroom, and two closets to buffer the sound), and since she's been a little extra deaf the last few days, I heard a lot of what was going on while I was here in my room trying to write in Worst Luck (I wrote one word... "brusqueness") and downloading two albums from iTunes (Barbara Cook's Broadway and Great Cabaret Performances).



And from what I heard, I finally figured out why the GOP was so hot to have their convention in Manhattan: to capitalize on the World Trade Center tragedy... to remind us to be afraid of terrorism, to remind us of how great George Bush is and hopefully veer his approval ratings back toward his post-9/11 highs. It seems that everyone who stepped up to the podium gassed on and on about 9/11, and then segued to the War on Terrorism; I heard people focussing on how cool it was that we slapped the shit out of the Taliban and how great Iraq is now that Saddam is captured, singing the praises of a strong commander-in-chief but "don't look at the casualties and fatalities, all our dead and maimed. That's not important: our might is important."



It made me pretty sick. But then, I expect Republicans to make me sick, that's why I won't watch them on television, not even to find out what the sneaky little shits are up to.



But from what I saw of the Democratic National Convention, the Democrats make me sick, too... all that empty rhetoric, all that fence-riding on the issues, all that "we're not going to lower ourselves to talk smack about our enemies" and not even mentioning the name Bush or this stupid life-wasting war... the main gist of what I heard from the Democrats was "we'll believe anything you want us to believe, we'll do whatever you tell us, just please vote for us!" But as sick as this wishy-washy begging makes me, it doesn't make me as sick as the Republicans' incipient Nazïism, so I'll have to vote Democrat just to try and help keep the nation from spilling too far into the Right.



I believe in Democracy, and I believe that our Constitution will keep things from getting too bad; but friends, the USA is entering a very dark time. There is no moral center, there is no common vision anymore; I see so much corruption, so much demagogy, so much misdirection and center-seeking in one party and a strong fascist trend in the other. We'll weather through, but it's going to get scary for a while. It's so ugly, I can't bear to watch; but it's my duty as a citizen to keep my eyes open — and, despite what the Republicans would prefer, keep my mouth open too — no matter how grisly it gets.

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Deep breath. The above bothers me more than usual because I'm really not feeling well today. I had a hard time getting to sleep last night, and then I had nightmares, and I woke up several times, and so I only managed to cobble together about five hours of unsatisfying sleep. And I should be heading out to the office right now, instead of writing this, but it was on my mind so I figured I'd better get it off my mind so maybe I can get something done.



So my dears, I hope you're feeling better than I am; and remember, we can keep the world from going to crap around us by being kind and good to each other. Yesterday in my "AA Thought for the Day" email, I got this really great quotation that gave me heart about the state of the world:

Unity

Throughout the entire world today we are witnessing the breakdown of "group conscience." It has always been the hope of democratic nations that their citizens would be enlightened enough to manage their own affairs through chosen representatives. But in many self-governing countries we are now seeing the inroads of ignorance, apathy, and power-seeking upon democratic systems. . .Consequently many a land has become so helpless that the only answer is dictatorship. Happily for us, there seems little prospect of such a calamity in AA. The life of each individual and of each group is built around our Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. . .An even greater force for AA's unity is the compelling love that we have for our fellow members and for the principles upon which our lives today are founded.

(c. 1962 AAWS, Twelve Concepts for World Service, p. 8.)

It's Never My Fault

I woke up this morning upside-down in my bed, with my feet tucked under my teddy-bear and my head resting on a pile of discarded blankets. It was kind of nice, opening my eyes on a different vista of room than I usually do; but it was kind of unsettling that my unconcious body moved itself so dramatically without waking me up. It makes me wonder if I should move my furniture again so that the top of the bed lies in that direction (south-by-southwest, but I always sleep diagonally across the mattress and so was pointing due south).

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I've decided that I cannot blame myself for this lack of anything to talk about. I was blaming my depression for the verbal lassitude that I've been suffering all week, but I've written through depressions before, so now I think of it I'm sure it's not that. The truth is, there is nothing going on in the world that is worth my interest. Everyone is talking about things like the Olympics and the Republican National Convention, but I don't find those things interesting.



One would think that hours and hours of hot guys in tight costumes doing nifty physical things would be able to hold my interest, but it just hasn't... I watch for a minute or two, and then get bored. And one would think that all of the RNC weirdness would be worthy of comment, or at least indignation, but all it does is depress me. The USA is rapidly turning into the McCarthyist version of the USSR, which is too sad to even be ironic.



The Scott Peterson trial was supposedly rife with soap-opera happenings last week, but I've never been able to generate any interest in it... I mean, people kill people all the time, and the only reason this is getting any airplay at all is because it does read like a soap-opera, and features good-looking people. Even the weather, that old stand-by of the nothing-to-say set, is boring: it's really hot here in the Bay Area, there is a hurricane off the coast of South Carolina, and typhoons are raging in Central America... but it happens all the time, it's simply that time of year, so who cares?



Even in my own life, nothing interesting seems to be happening. At the office, we're still working on moving, and finally found an office space that I like... and then events transpired that the pigeon-coop space I hated is no longer available, and so we're moving to the space I like (the realtor was rilly cute, too). Upheaval is coming, though, and I'm not looking forward to it. But it doesn't strike me as that big a deal anymore.



There was some family drama yesterday, but I don't know how much detail I want to put into it. Basically my father and my uncle decided to have a family meeting Sunday afternoon, but they didn't organize it at all well, and somehow I got bitten in the ass three or four times over the fiasco when I didn't have anything to do with it; for example, nobody told me about this meeting until I was getting in the car to go to church on Sunday morning, and I had already committed to being at an extremely important Court function that afternoon; and then, nobody told my cousin Jamie, in whose house the meeting was to be held, so she and her husband were in Half Moon Bay. The whole thing threw a huge kink into an already difficult day, and I'm still a little too pissed off about it to talk about it calmly.



Actually, "pissed off" is too weak a word. I am enraged. But that doesn't make it easier to talk about, and I imagine that once I do calm down enough to write out the sequence of events and mistakes, they will prove too boring for even me, the Queen of Mundania, to publish here.

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Well, I think I will focus on something positive instead of bitching about how boring the world is and how enraged I am over that silly Sunday fiasco. So here's some positive:



Saturday was a nice day. I got a lot done... not as much as I wanted to get done, but a lot more than I've been getting done. I got about eight new paragraphs added to Worst Luck (even though I didn't get to the end of the chapter yet, so I didn't post it; and I have introduced two new characters, describing them at some length, even though they are merely incidental to the story), and it felt really good to get moving on it again. I also, at the same time, washed six or seven loads of laundry (although I didn't get the floor picked-up enough to see the rug, and I still have another six or seven loads to go, and I don't have anywhere to put the clean clothes yet), and it feels good to have clean clothes to wear.



Sunday afternoon (aprés le fiasco) was Royal Grand Ducal Investitures, when our new Monarchs (Royal Grand Duke XIII Peter Padilla and Royal Grand Duchess XIII Ruby Slippers) granted all of their reign's titles. Caroline was made Royal Princess, and Madasin was created Lady in Waiting; I was dubbed Royal Entertainer, which is one of the lowest titles in the Court... I started getting offended, but then I realized that since I already have the second-highest lifetime title available (the only higher is Grand Duchess), it would be a waste of time to give me another crown title which would only be subsumed by my lifetime title. It also underlined my preferred role in the Court, as an entertainer rather than an administrator; besides, any possible offense was absorbed by being invited to perform at Investiture, a signal honor.



The Investiture itself ran like clockwork, no dead air and no hemming-and-hawing, and was over with in about an hour and a half (last year's took almost four hours), so the rest of the afternoon was left blissfully free. I was able to get out of face right away (the heat was crushing, and in a wig it was just untenable), and spent some time just sitting and chatting comfortably with the courtfolk.



Afterward, Caroline and Madasin and I went out for walkies ("walkies" is a pastime that encompasses window-shopping, people-watching, and chatting all at once) and had some dinner at the Claremont Diner (whose menu has become extremely gay, favoring artisan breads and pomegranate-wine sauces and feta cheese in everything, instead of the substantial and predictable diner-food they used to serve, but the burgers were quite tasty and the waiter was cute as a bug, in a quirky urban-hipster way). It was all very pleasant.



Today when I went to get my sandwich, there were two new guys working at the sandwich shop... and while I was temporarily taken aback by being denied my daily dose of cutie-pie Kyle, the two new guys are really cute, too. Not quite as cute as Kyle, but then one cannot realistically expect such a thing... nothing in the world is cuter than Kyle, except maybe a basket of puppies.



So that's the positive. Having got all that off my chest, I think I will go back to work. I have to chivvy some information out of our bank, and they're always so reluctant to give information over the phone, so I may have to draft a letter. And pretty soon I'm going to have to start going through my files and throwing out irrelevant paper... it would be stupid to pack up trash and schlepp it to our new office. Those two tasks ought to see me through until it's time to meet Caroline at the gym for our forty minutes of cardio.



Have a super day!

How Dry I Am

Sorry, kids, but my creative cupboard is bare. The river of inspiration isn't even a trickle. The muse is giving me the silent treatment. In essence, I have nothing to write about, not even a nonsensical ramble or a vituperative rant. I've started posts every day for the last three days, thinking that maybe if I just stare at the screen long enough, something will come rushing out of my mind to fill the silence... but I can't even come up with an opening paragraph. I'm just dry.



But he isn't:

Buggeryfuckshite

When you have nothing whatever to say, assemble a colorful phrase of swear-words; bonus points if you can incorporate an Anglicism or two. Then repeat it over and over in a sing-song voice until they come to take you away to the Nut Hut.



Do you ever wonder if, given the opportunity, you might do something really insane and wrong? I mean, do you ever get a sudden urge to do something horrible, like running over a random pedestrian or raping some passing boy or shoving a steak-knife into a dinner-companion's forearm, for no particular reason? And then worry that someday you'll have such an urge and the voice in your brain that stops you from doing such things might just be taking a little snooze? Or is it just me?



I sometimes worry that one of these days my Impulse Control Mechanism is going to get overloaded and just quit working without telling me. Like maybe someday my superego will be keeping my id from jumping on Kyle at the sandwich shop and just chewing on him (my usual struggle when confronted with Kyle's almost-unbearable adorability), and my id will just snap and slice my superego across the throat with a straight-razor, and there I'll be assaulting the poor boy and ending up with a restraining order and nowhere to get a sandwich at lunchtime.



Perhaps my problem is that I don't know how to just let loose in an appropriate manner, so I always keep every impulse under control at all times... thereby overstressing the Impulse Control Mechanism and possibly weakening it with overuse. Perhaps that was one of the benefits of alcohol, getting good and drunk so that my controls turned off and got some rest. Since I quit drinking, though, I can't think of any situation in my life where I allow myself a complete loss of control... even in sleep, my superego is on guard, keeping my dreams from getting too out-of-hand.



Maybe I was potty-trained too early.



But I guess the thing is that I'm just feeling a little crazy today... the Depression is here with me, I think (it's the usual time of year for it), and I have been experiencing odd surges of emotion — sudden anger, sudden despair, sudden sorrow — punctuating long stretches of almost oppressive indifference and mental lethargy, all overlaid by the comings and goings of various tension and sinus headaches. And when I feel this way, the suddenness of impulses takes me more by surprise, and I feel but a slippery grip on them.



The time has come, the Walrus said... I'm going to see that homeopath next week, as soon as I get paid again. I have paid off all of the big expenses that have plagued my bank-account this summer (annual gym membership, car registration, new glasses, etc.), and have rather curbed my shopping practices (increasing the strain on the Impulse Control Mechanism), so I should be able to afford it now. I look forward to a more evened-out physical and emotional state; hopefully he or she will be able to do something for me.



In the meantime, it might be wise if I avoid driving, pretty young men, and sharp objects... and maybe find a healthy way to relinquish self-control for certain periods of time...perhaps investigate a light B&D scene?



Mmmmmmmm perhaps not.

Headache

I have a dreadful headache today, and I don't know why. I woke up with it, my neck and shoulders hunched and sore, God knows what I must have been dreaming about; I almost decided to spend the day in bed on the strength of it (but realized that it would probably be quieter in the office). I took a Sudafed for sinus headache a couple of hours ago, and it helped, though it took over an hour to kick in; but there're still these two knots of tension floating around the top of my head and wandering behind my eyeballs as they shift position every few minutes.



It doesn't hurt so much when I'm eating, though, so now that I've had my sandwich and chips for lunch, I might just be lucid enough to catch you up on my multifarious and wildly glamorous doings over the last few postless days.

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Thursday was uninteresting, work and gym and dining out with the Small Children. The feature of the day was renting Thirteen Going On Thirty at the repeated and unbearably annoying request of my little cousin Jessie. In her (decidedly uninformed) opinion, this is one of the greatest films of all time, she loved it in the theater and had been talking about its DVD release all week. I naturally assumed that this would be a children's film, but it turns out to be a romantic comedy... though there wasn't any sex or nudity involved, there was some rather adult language and situations that took me by surprise (I'm always dismayed that my cousin lets her children watch PG-13 romance movies... they're so unhealthy, with their potty-mouth scripts and shockingly unrealistic images of human relationships).



And of course it was a dismal film... I mean, it was kind of cute and entertaining, but I'm coming to truly loathe all romantic comedies, and this one was just the same-old-same-old about a person suddenly changing age (Freaky Friday and its recent remake, Big, Vice Versa, Eighteen Again, etc., it's practically a genre of its own). I found Jennifer Garner's blank gazes and scrunched-up grins irritating, and her hands are eye-catchingly ugly and mannish; Mark Ruffalo, though an excellent actor, always inspires in me a dreadful desire to hook his nipples to a car-battery just to get a little pizzazz into him; the magazine that provided the workplace mise-en-scène didn't make any sense at all, no business could possibly be run so badly and still survive. The writers of this dreck should all be flogged. The only person involved in the production that didn't bug me was the wardrobe mistress... the outfits were dazzling.



However, I did enjoy one thing about it, an element of story-line that didn't receive any explication but which teased my intellect a bit: in the interim between wishing to be thirty and waking up in a thirty-year-old life, the main character discovered that she'd been a total bitch during all that missed time. It was as if it were her soul that got fast-forwarded through time, skipping the seventeen years of adolescence and early adulthood, leaving behind a shell of a person motivated only by ambition.



What really teased me though, was the naturally-following question of what happened to the souls of the other empty shells motivated solely by ambition who populated this film. What birthday wishes had sent their souls off to some other time or place? Where do the souls of soulless people go? A pretty profound question from a thoroughly shallow film.

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Friday was a somewhat better day; after getting to work late, I got everything done that I needed to do in just over two hours, thereby freeing my afternoon for errands and loafing... I intended to go get some new glasses, and while waiting for the glasses to be made I'd get my nails done. I have been getting my glasses in the same place for years, loving the low prices, drop-in appointments, and one-hour prescription wait-time; but when I got to Site for Sore Eyes, they didn't have any open appointments, so I made an appointment for the next day and buggered along to get my nails done. But then I decided to put that off until the next day, too, and just spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around pointlessly.



After the gym, Caroline and I went for dinner at La Mediterranée, followed by an extensive round of conversation and window-shopping that took us on a two-mile walk up and down College Avenue; aside from the pleasure of window-shopping, people-watching, and enjoying the balmy evening weather, this lengthy schlepp also allowed me to work out the quite magnificent case of gas I'd gotten from a weird food-allergy reaction I'd experienced the day before... that deadly-foul miasma wasn't something you could take indoors.



We eventually returned to my place, and settled into my room to watch Donnie Darko; I had heard good things about this movie, it seemed that every hot guy I ever browsed on Friendster listed it as a favorite film, and so when I found it on the $4.99 table at the video store, I snapped it up. I was a little concerned about the giant rabbit, things like that tend to scare me, but Jake Gyllenhaal is such a cutie-pie... I figured the two would balance out.



The movie was very disturbing, especially the giant bunny (shiver), but other images as well (Donnie's demented smile when he was having a psychotic episode was utterly haunting), and there were a few spots in the film I could have lived without (when the guy in the clown costume jumped out of the car, Caroline and I both nearly shat ourselves... I hate clowns). But it was a good film... I'm not sure I'd list it as a favorite, but it was certainly satisfying and thought-provoking.



It just occurs to me that I can't really discuss what was so thought-provoking about the film, though, without spoiling the ending for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. But I can say that I spent much of the night and all of my waking moments the next morning unravelling, in my mind, the fascinating web of actions and consequences that were resolved by changing just one thing in the past. I am going to have to assume that this thought-provocation is what makes the film so interesting to so many people... it wasn't all that exciting on the surface, but it really got the little grey cells jostling along.

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So then along comes Saturday. I started writing this post that morning, but I didn't get it finished before it was time to go back to the optometrist for my appointment. Caroline unexpectedly turned up on my doorstep... her plans for the day fell through, and Caroline without a plan-for-the-day is a sad and sorry sight to see. I was glad for her company, though, since it always helps to have someone honestly critical along to help pick out new eyeglass frames; I was even gladder for her company when the eye-doctor decided to dilate my pupils so she could have a dekko at my optic nerve and scrutinize my corneas... I could barely see for quite some time afterward, and if it weren't for Caroline I would have had no end of trouble negotiating through the rest of my day.



So anyway, two hours (it took a while to pick out frames, and I had to do that before I could dilate, then wait for the dilating eyedrops to work) and $500 (highway robbery, how they can look themselves in the face after charging that much money for some bits of wire twisted together) later, I got to wander around with dilated pupils and a receipt for pick-up of a pair of squarish-looking ProFlex glasses featuring magnetic sunglass clips with a slightly stronger prescription than my current pair, which should be ready tomorrow (no more same-day service... Site for Sore Eyes ain't what it used to be).



We had lunch, then I got my nails done (I've become addicted to French tips), and then stopped off at the drugstore to pick up a couple of things for the Grandmother, and then we parted ways: Caroline had a rehearsal with Miss Daisy and Madasin for a show on Sunday, and I went home and got in bed to sleep off the rest of the dilation. I napped for a couple of hours, then tried to work at the computer to finish the post and maybe work on the novel, but it hurt my eyes, which were still dilated after six hours; instead, I read my new paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (I lent my hardback copy to my niece and haven't seen it since) under a dim lamp, and then after dinner spent the rest of the night watching five episodes of Mapp & Lucia (a very droll little British comedy based on the novels of E.F. Benson, the sort of thing only an Anglophile like me would enjoy).

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(I have to note that it is now Monday night and has been several hours since I wrote the above paragraph, which I did just before leaving the office, almost four hours after restarting this post from where I left off Saturday... these long posts take an unconscionable amount of time to write when I'm having difficulty concentrating).



Sunday I didn't have to go to Church, thank God (there's an irony in there somewhere, I'm sure)... though I wish it were for a better reason than that Grandmother overdid it Saturday with cooking breakfast and futzing around in her stupid garden and trying to clean out the under-sink cupboard, and ended up hurting her knees again. Sometimes I think the woman has no sense at all. Why the hell would anyone in his or her right mind crawl up under the sink with a bottle of 409 and a sponge when s/he has the perfectly good excuse of extreme old age and a bum knee to avoid such tedious exercise? It's just not right.



But I was nevertheless glad to be able to sleep in and have a slow day: Sunday evening was "Cookie After Dark," our monthly show at Martuni's hosted by the inimitable Cookie Dough. Still, even with the extra rest, I just wasn't in the mood for it... if I hadn't promised to give a fellow performer a ride to and fro, I would most likely have crapped out and phoned my regrets. But instead, I dragged my ass out of the bed, showered and shaved, threw a couple of dresses in a bag, and off I went.



Usually when I don't feel like going out, I generally change my mind after I get there... especially a drag show. I shuffle and moan and wish I was in bed until I get that first earful of applause, until the first person tells me how fabulous I am, and then I'm happy I came. But this time, I just shouldn't have been out. Nobody seemed to notice that I was turning in some half-assed performances, I guess my accidentally well-painted face and carelessly-chosen clothes and jewelry distracted from my lackluster expressions and movements; I was uncomfortable and unhappy all the time I was crimped into my corset and pinched into my pumps and worried by my wig.



The funny thing is that I enjoyed everything except being in drag and pretending to perform; I got to spend time with people I love, I got to flirt with the cute barwaiter, I got to watch some quite riveting performances from my colleagues... if I'd just not been in drag, I would have had a great time. After I got out of drag, I felt fine, and had a wonderful time going out for dinner at Sparky's with Pretty, Madasin, Sue Nami, and a bunch of the latter's friends from work. Maybe next time I'll listen to that little voice when she tells me that today is not a Marlénè Day.

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And so we come to Monday, the Day of the Endless Headache. I muddled through work, disgruntled slightly at my boss who has become obsessed and enamored with the office space I hated most in our tours last week, a little pigeon-coop of a penthouse perched atop a recently-remodeled turn-of-the-century factory four blocks away from our current location and no closer to restaurants or transportation or anything useful. Straight men can be such a bafflement, I cannot understand what thrills him so about this cramped and inconvenient space. I was just disgruntled enough that I don't feel even remotely guilty for spending time writing a letter to my nephew at boot camp, nor for spending time writing this post. I was too headachey to do much work, anyway.



After spending a shamefully brief time at the gym (fifteen minutes on the elliptical machine was all I could stand), I meandered on home... oh, the delicious echoing silence! The Small Children are gone home! I love the little buggers, but I'm just unspeakably glad they're not in my hair anymore.



I made a simple dinner for the Grandmother and myself, bringing her a tray in her room and taking mine into the living room... retreating to our separate televisions as we had before the Small Children came back. She was alternating between an A's game and the Olympics... I wish I had the patience to watch sports, especially sports with rilly-hot guys, like swimming, diving, gymnastics, etc. But I can only watch for a few minutes, filling my eyes with muscles and skin, and then I get screamingly bored with it all and have to change the channel to something else, anything else. There's something about sports that just hurts me on some level.



So instead, I viewed a new DVD that I haven't had a chance to watch since I bought it last week, The Butterfly Effect with Ashton Kutcher. I bought it just for Ashton's face, and was quite impressed with the writing and acting... but here I found myself watching another movie about time-travel and the consequences of actions... a trio in theme, can you dig it?

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Still with me? Let's see if I can bring it to a close soon so I can go to bed. I like thematic continuities, perhaps I should have only written about these three films instead of interleaving them with all that rubbish about my tiresome activities. But what the hell... I spent all this time writing it, damned if I'll erase it just because it's irrelevant.



I think it is a human trait to be fascinated with the possibility of time-travel, to want to go back and fix something that went wrong or to jump ahead out of an unpleasant present. I've seen this theme worked out in every medium, from novels and short stories to film and theatre to The Simpsons and Jimmy Neutron. I myself have often thought about what I would change in the past, if I had the chance to go back... I've lain awake nights thinking about how far back I'd have to go, positing what kind of life I might have now if I had done certain things differently.



But I have learned in the last few years that it is a crucial element of maturity to be able to accept the past instead of wishing to change it. Shit happens, and even if we could go back and change things, shit would still happen... it would be different shit, but it would still be shit.



Still, it's an interesting topic to ponder, without wishing or pretending... just an intellectual question: what would life be like today if I had done something differently. For example, what if I hadn't skived off of PE all those years, applied myself to exercise when I was young and pliable: would I now be in better shape? What if I had gotten better grades in high-school and gone straight on to college, focusing on the major I want now instead of the one I wanted then? How much of a career might I have now? I could be an established writer with a rather nice body right now, if only.



On the other hand, if I were able to go back and do my teens and twenties over again, would I have started drinking? I mean, I wasted a lot of my youth on alcohol and related pointlessness; if I could go back and do it again, knowing what I know now, would I take that first drink again? If I didn't, I wouldn't become an alcoholic and would never have had a reason to go to AA, and I wouldn't have met any of the wonderful friends I have made in the rooms. Are Miss Daisy and Shiloh and Madasin and all my other sober friends a fair price to pay for having my youth back?



It's an interesting puzzle, the interlacing patterns and paths of actions and consequences and consequent actions. It presents a fascinating study, going back and seeing our mistakes and our good luck, and seeing the good luck that came from our mistakes and the mistakes that came from our good luck. The unexamined life is not worth living, They say, and so I welcome anything that gets me to thinking about that sort of thing... unless, of course, it's a badly-written romantic comedy starring a screwy girl with man-hands. But that's what you get for taking movie advice from a neurotic eleven-year-old.

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Well, if I haven't bored you into a coma by this point, I have certainly taken up all the time I intend to spend writing today... it's now half-past twelve, and I have to go to bed now if I'm going to be any use tomorrow. Thanks for sticking with me, and I hope this post has yielded some reward for you, either intellectually or soporifically.



Nighty-night!