Military Perspective

Gad, it’s amazing what a good morning walk can do for a bad mood — I’m feeling wonderful after having walked downtown to buy a paint tray and some masking tape.

It’s just a little over 32 degrees F. outside and gorgeous, there’s snow melting on the sidewalks and I was wearing my new Galactic Web Empress Coat (believe me *grin* it’s enormous and heavy enough to warrant the capitalization) and listening to the pop-psych show on my walkman radio. I was tremendously relieved to find that the hardware store is indeed still open — it seems like the big strip malls are putting all of the small businesses out of business and sometimes walking around downtown is just depressing — but hurrah, they were open and smiling and having work done on the roof, which was particularly cheering because they probably wouldn’t be throwing money at the roof if they’re not doing well themselves. So I bought the paint tray and masking tape (I mean, when’s the last time a shop owner actually asked you what you were looking for and if they could help? You could tell who the people were who’d never been there before because they were the ones looking dazed at so much consideration) and walked to the deli which is owned by a really sweet family who are always sure to say hello. I don’t know, maybe this all sounds very old hat to people who are used to it, but it’s still a wonderful novelty to me. Well, I guess the people in Missouri do that sort of thing, but only after you’ve lived there for, like, 80 years…

So I walked into the deli and was talking to the husband while the wife made my sandwich and he was asking how I was, and I grinned and said, “Well, I’m tired but warm,” and he said, “Well, yeah, I was just going to say something about your coat!” and I told him I’d found it for only $20 and then this guy, who’s maybe in his early fifties and is definitely the sort to have been in the military, said, “Those military coats — the army might never made attractive clothes, but they sure made them sturdy,” or something like that, which really made me giggle all the way home. I guess because I think that military coats are very attractive and neat looking it didn’t even occur to me that they would look totally functional and ugly to someone who’d actually worn them in the army. But anyway, so when I was still at the deli I was picking out potato chips (I got addicted to salt and vinegar chips when I was in England and while they ones they sell here aren’t anywhere near as yummy I still can’t pass them up) and reached into the refrigerated soda cabinet, and got out a Dr. Pepper.

And I started to think about the fact that I never drink Dr. Pepper unless I’m at this deli and I’m getting a deli sandwich, and that in fact if someone offered me one I probably would ask for water instead. And how on planes I always drink either tomato juice or ginger ale, but I don’t drink either of those things when I’m anywhere else. I wonder why that is? Routine, maybe? Not sure.

Had a nice night last night, Todd got home relatively early and we decided to go out to dinner. Neither of us was up to a very long car drive, so we ended up going to an italian restaurant pretty close to the house, ugh. One of those places where they think that “non-smoking” means that the smoke is on one side of the restaurant and you’re on the other and the smoke is somehow sentient and knows that it’s not supposed to come over to where you are. I don’t know, I guess it’s disloyal in a weird way, since Kitey and almost everyone she knows smokes, but every time I hear about another restaurant, or town, or even state (!) going non-smoking I really chortle with glee. This morning when I was listening to the pop-psych show on my walk someone called up and the pop-psychologist immediately said, “Are you smoking?” and the woman said she was, and the pop-psychologist said, “Well, I’m allergic. Put it out, please.” I thought that was great. Anyway, what was I saying…? Oh, right, about this restaurant. We keep forgetting how bad the food is (I know, I know, we really do notice the trend) but since the last time we were there we were seated so close to this really foo-foo family that we could have been in their laps and they’d hardly have noticed the difference we thought that it’d been the company and not the food. Unfortunately, it really was the food (they have a great menu writer who tends to make the food sound much better than it is — for example, wouldn’t you think that “thick slices of mozzarella cheese topped with garden fresh tomatoes, herbs, and balsamic vinegar” would have been more exciting than four pieces of mozzarella, four pieces of old gaggy tomato and some vinegar on the side?) but we had a great time anyway.

Then two different contingents of people from two different companies came in and started having their “we’ve worked late, now let’s eat” dinner and so they were all sitting there desperate for something to say to each other, and one guy seemed to have a perfect conversational trick down — he just kept saying the name of this festival that happened this summer over and over again, Todd and I said to each other that we’d have to remember that one.

Uninspiring Worry

I did write up a journal entry yesterday, but DFW was down all day so I couldn’t put it up. Which was frustrating because, as we all know, I get crabby when my routine is screwed with, so I ended up being out of sorts for much of the day yesterday.

Woke up at three o’clock in the morning and was freezing, I’d been dreaming that I was a big important business executive and just couldn’t understand why I was cold because, after all, surely big important business executives don’t have these sorts of problems. So when I did wake up I thought that Todd was hogging all the covers, but it turned out that Karma was actually the one doing it, and we were both freezing. It’s an ongoing mystery, we fall asleep perfectly cozy with Karma lying by our feet and wake up cold, he’s lying near our feet but we can barely see him in the mountain of blanket he’s collected around himself. So I woke Todd up, I don’t remember why, and we went upstairs and went to the bathroom, then came back downstairs and Karma had given up some of the blankets so we could be at least comfortable. I lay there for half an hour trying to get back to sleep and just couldn’t. I felt crabby and dreary and sad for no reason that I could pinpoint, except that I haven’t felt very inspired about anything for about a week and a half.

And I don’t doubt that a huge part of the problem is that one day a week and a half ago I felt uninspired and then worried about it, so that now I wouldn’t know an inspired feeling if it snuck up on me in the middle of the night and stole all of the blankets, if you see my point. I tried all the tricks I know to fall asleep, including thinking about sex (I know, I know, it’s very weird and no one believes me, but it works) and counting, neither of which helped, and finally sighed and got out of bed and turned on the computer. I can usually catch both Sherlyn and Damon on IRC between three and four in the morning, because they’re in wildly different time zones, and they were both there as well as Laurel, which was nice. I checked email and found this message that completely pissed me off.

This was email from the same person who read my journal entry about the creepy guy who was sitting in the car doing jack-shit while the woman he was at the laundromat with was inside doing all the work folding the laundry, anyway, this person wrote a defensive letter about how they always folded their laundry and detailed the reasons why. And I wrote back saying, “Er, I think you missed my point. I wasn’t casting aspersions on people who fold their laundry, I was casting aspersions on people who sit out in the car like the lazy jerks they are while other people fold their laundry for them.” So anyway, this same person wrote again telling me all about why murdering deer is “really fine” because of “overpopulation problems” so I replied telling them about the birth control methods for deer that are being used with great success and asked also if they supported slaughtering all children who can be labeled a part of the overpopulation problem.

So then I grumped around on IRC and was generally not much fun to be around (sorry about that, guys) and then was too cold to sit in the computer room anymore and logged out. Lay in bed for another few hours, hearing the dog that the troglodyte neighbors have barking and wondering if he was outside in the backyard while it was snowing and not knowing what to do. In the end, I didn’t go and look because I knew how angry I’d be if in fact the dog was out there and didn’t know what to do. Sigh.

The alarm went off at five and Todd reset it for five thirty, and I instantly fell asleep, who knows why. Woke up enough to give Todd a hug before he left and then woke up around nine, started painting the purple room. Yesterday I went in and cleaned up all of the purple paint that was on the floor — when I painted this room last…what, last summer, I think? — I was impatient and just wanted to get it over with, basically change it from the way it looked because anything was going to look better (I mean, the people who lived here before thought that it would look fabulous to put dark panelling on two of the walls and blue wallpaper speckled with gold flecks on the other two walls, it was a depressing room) than what was already there. It turns out that panelling can look great when it’s painted over, it’s just a pain in the ass because you have to get into the cracks between the “boards”. Anyway, I was really impatient last time and got a lot of paint spatters on the floor, so I listened to two soap operas on the one tv channel the radio gets (I confess: I watched soap operas on a different network for years and years, part of what was boring is that it was a different network and different shows), it was boring but the other options for talk radio were Rush Limbaugh and a show entirely about money which consists basically of a husband and wife team who are very rich telling other rich people how to invest their trillions, so you can see how the soap operas were the lesser evil.

When I had all of the paint up I came downstairs and read for awhile, made myself dinner and Sarah called, she was really surprised that I’d actually answered the phone. (The computer interferes with the farther away radio channels so if I want to listen to it for any length of time I have to log out and turn the computer off). We talked for awhile, I told her all about the saga of the bed and breakfast people, she told me what’s been going on in her life, it looks like things might be taking a turn for the better, that she and this person she’s been with may be getting back together — happily, she’s still looking for her own house, which I’m really glad about. It looks like getting off that antidepressant really really helped her to think more clearly about everything in her life. At that point I still thought that Todd might be gone for the weekend, so we decided to do the X-Files on Friday night whether or not he did go, and I’m looking forward to spending time with her. Turns out that Todd doesn’t have to leave on the weekend but is going during next week instead, which was a relief for both of us.

When Todd got home we hung out together, around nine he lay down on the bed and I started to read the Tanith Lee book — he and Claire cuddled up together and fell asleep. It was really sweet.

I’m just in one of those funks that is self-perpetuating. I’m uninspired. I’m worried because I’m uninspired. I’m worried because I’m worried that I’m uninspired. And so on and so forth. I’ll get over myself.

Pigs and Crabs

Geez, it is really cold in here. It didn’t even occur to me until a few minutes ago that the heater might not be up high enough, so I turned it up but the house isn’t warmed up yet.

My hands are numb and it feels strange to be typing. I’m in a bit of a funk today, not really sure why — woke up in a bad mood, that’s part of it. Had another guilt-dream, Damon, don’t laugh, but it was about the blond guy on Kids in the Hall. Ridiculous, isn’t it? I dreamed that I was having an affair with him, one of those obnoxious things where by the time I showed up in the dream it had already happened, so I spent the rest of the dream feeling terribly guilty but not able to do anything about it, which is how I felt when I woke up, not much fun.

Todd found out yesterday that he’ll probably have to go on a business trip this weekend, which has us both a bit grumpy because we know how much we’ll miss each other. In four years we’ve never been apart for that long. Oh, and I can’t access my email, which is making me crabby too. All in all, a kind of dreary day.

One good thing did happen, though, I found out that a cousin of mine, who is studying to be a doctor and who I like very much is going to be studying in this area. I haven’t seen her since I was thirteen, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing her again. Strange, too, because no one who knew me then (except my father) has seen my life here. Oh, wait, I guess a friend from high school did. We’re not friends anymore — when I realized that her priorities in life were 1) ensure that she garnered compliments on the way she looked in a miniskirt and 2) make her pig of a boyfriend happy THEN 3) pursue school and a career, and I swear to god they were in that order, I wrote and said I thought that both of us had changed too much to be friends anymore, and she agreed. She was the one who introduced Marian and I, and ironically for years Marian and I couldn’t stand each other because we were so busy competing for her attention. Then, I’m not entirely sure what happened — maybe the pig of a boyfriend happened on the scene and we were both out in the cold? — we realized that the two of us were the ones who had a thousand things in common and enjoyed each other’s company tremendously. Marian got tired of letters full of detailed descriptions of compliments about this woman’s legs in a miniskirt too, even before I did. The whole idea of being flattered by that is so alien to both of us that aside from being disgusted that this woman was flattered by it we both simply had nothing to say in response, aside from, “Oh…uh…well…hm…”

Maybe I’ll start painting the dark purple bedroom today. It turns out that we have a bunch of primer and a paint roller left over from painting the rest of the house. Blah, blah, blah.

Flattened Old Futon

I’ll get the awful part out of the way first. That way I know I’ve written about it and hopefully I won’t cry and it’ll be over with.

On Sunday morning on our way back home we pulled into a McDonalds to pee (much better than a gas station ’cause you don’t have to ask for a key) and there was a mini-van with a murdered deer tied to the top. It was horrifying. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life. I couldn’t stop crying for a long time. I kept thinking about that deer, just walking through the forest, having his life, and being slaughtered because — because what? Because some shithead who deserves to be murdered himself thought that killing would be FUN? Because some men (I’ve never met a woman who hunted in my life) think that it’s a big thrill to take away the spirit and the energy and the gentle look in an animal’s eyes? Doesn’t that sound evil? It does to me. If you took anything a hunter (god how I hate that word and anyone who would apply it to themselves) said and replaced the word “deer” with “child” he would sound like the most evil, frightening, sick fuck on the planet. But it’s somehow okay because it’s an animal. Somehow it’s all right. I think that hunters should hunt each other. It’s why I am so happy about paintball — I wouldn’t play it myself, physical games don’t appeal to me — but my god, what a fun way to spend an afternoon! What a wonderful way to use all of your senses, to spend a day in the woods! No one gets killed. No one even gets hurt. And if hunters think that they “need” to murder something to feel “good” (Doesn’t anyone worry about people who “need” to murder something to feel “good”? I wonder about women who marry, much less have a conversation with, men who hunt. I do. I really do.) then they can jolly well murder EACH OTHER. The planet would be a better place for it.

Okay, that’s all I want to say about that, before I get too angry and too sad and start to cry again.

Other than that, we had an absolutely fantastic weekend. On Wednesday night after I wrote the last journal entry we went to our favorite Indian restaurant for dinner. We were eating when we heard a lot of kind of scary shouting outside and then a lot of kids, they looked about 13-16, came into the restaurant. It was frightening. I remembered watching that really ridiculous movie Barbarella, with Jane Fonda, when I was about nine. It was on Cinemax and there wasn’t anything better to do. And there’s this scene where she’s wandering around lost and comes upon a group of children who she thinks are nice and cute and then they all reveal their creepy teeth, which are horror-movie-quality, and start coming at her and biting her. I remember thinking, when I was watching it, how interesting it was that they’d chosen kids for that scene because it was that much more scary, since kids aren’t something to be afraid of. So I’m sitting in the restaurant and thinking about that and Todd is reassuring me that it’s fine, and one of the kids asks the owner for a glass of water, which he gives her. I think it may have been a sort of game, going into all the restaurants asking for a glass of water, who’s brave enough to do it, that sort of thing. And then they all left, there was more shouting and yelling outside, and one of the kids came back in to ask what time it was. Which seemed really weird and I got nervous again, but he really did seem to just want to know what time it was and they all left after that.

We were both feeling kind of down, we came home and watched one of the movies we’d rented which was a terrible movie but had a person painting a room in much of it, so I got inspired about painting the dark purple bedroom again. Ha. Bad idea. Thursday was weird (no, really, the rest of the weekend was way fun *grin*) and we spent most of it doing this really dumb thing that we do that we even know we do but seem helpless to stop doing. It goes like this:

Sage says: I want to do X.
Todd says: I want to do Y.
Sage says: But we can’t do X if we can’t do Y and we can’t do Y if we can’t do X.
(discussion of what would be more fun ensues)
Sage thinks about it and decides that Y would be more fun than X.
Meanwhile, Todd has thought about it too and X sounds way more interesting than Y.
Sage says: Okay, let’s do Y.
Todd says: Um, wait, but X sounds better.

So we end up rooting for each other’s ideas, which is extremely silly and this is exactly what happened on Thursday. And so we were going to get paint and I was going to paint the bedroom, but then going to New York City sounded like it was more fun, and so we were going to do that, but by the time we’d figured it all out and gotten to the train station (we didn’t want to drive in on the day after thanksgiving, traffic was nuts) it was going to be dark by the time we got home which sounded overwhelming, so we went to a bookstore instead and had coffee there. Went to a lovely Indian restaurant, were giggling madly because Beverly Hills 90210 was on the tv there but without the sound, and since we haven’t seen that show since last year when we stopped watching tv, all we know of it is from Danny Drennan’s hysterical show summaries, which are, if you think of it, kind of like having listened to the show instead of watching it. So we were doing the Danny Drennan voice over for the show and eating wonderful yummy food and feeling very much more cheery than we had earlier that day.

Decided, like the tired and sleepy fools we were, that it would be a great idea to stop for paint at the home improvement store on the way home, and ended up spending a good part of that time crabbing at each other about what color to buy and how much to buy and should we buy blinds too, and really, we were like little kids who haven’t had their naps, and by the time we’d stomped over to the cash register we turned out to be $3 short, so I told the cashier that sorry, we were just going to go, and apologized for leaving her with all that stuff and we went home, agreeing ruefully that next time we were going to go there with a list of things we wanted.

Saturday morning I woke up for a little while and then fell asleep until eleven (I feel weird when I sleep late, I always feel like I’ve missed out on everyone else’s fun) and Todd said, “Hey, want to go to Northampton?” which sounded like a lot of fun — it’s a very liberal and interesting town — and I said sure, so we got our stuff together and kissed the cats (no, really) and were on our way. It was a long trip so I took a Tanith Lee book and read to Todd for much of it, we were quite amazed at how accurately, in 1981, she’d predicted things that were happening just 14 years later, although she did have everyone listening to cassette tapes which was pretty silly since the book took place somewhere in the late 2000’s. The trip wasn’t bad at all, pretty swell, actually, and once we arrived in Northampton we were in fantastic moods. It was really cold, though, and I’d worn my Galactic Web Empress t-shirt (hey, Damon, there’s a street called Damon Avenue in Massachusetts! We were going to take a picture for you but we couldn’t stop, it was right next to the onramp of a highway) with a vest over it, so I was freezing. Todd loaned me his coat, since he had a longsleeved shirt on, and I wore it over to the nearest thrift store, where I found a huge, heavy military coat for only $20. I look like Napolean in it, it’s hysterical! It’s almost so long it scrapes the floor, but not quite. Todd says it’s my Galactic Web Empress outfit.

We had dinner at a very cool teensy mexican restaurant, then didn’t really know what else to do, we’d thought about going to the Iron Horse but the band playing wasn’t very interesting. We found a “things to do in Northampton” brochure, with a map and everything, and found an internet cafe, which sounded great but unfortunately wasn’t open yet (powermacs at every table!) for business and went to a bookstore where we found a bed and breakfast review book and decided on a bed and breakfast to stay at, then drove there. The woman who opened the door for us was a big sweetie, she showed us into our room which had this Bed O Hugeness, I mean it wasn’t like a bed you could hop into because it was so cushy that I climbed up into it (and I do mean climbed) and then just sort of collapsed and couldn’t move, it was so comfortable. We went to a small restaurant near the bed and breakfast and had nachos and people-watched, were opinionated about the people coming in since we were right by the window. One family, the ones who ended up sitting at the table right next to ours, were walking up the restaurant. It was an older couple, maybe in their late fifties, and then an eighteenish looking woman with an eighteenish looking guy. And we both immediately said, “Aha — she’s introducing him to her parents,” which we found out was true when they all sat down. We couldn’t figure out what it was about the four of them that made that obvious, either. Interesting.

Then this guy who looked EXACTLY like Todd, except maybe 2 years younger, walked in. It was uncanny. I mean, he looked so much like Todd that he looked familiar to me, so familiar that I would have felt completely comfortable going up to him and saying hi. Todd saw it right away — he was the one who pointed the guy out to me, which I thought was fascinating because I don’t think that people see themselves in the mirror the same way that other people see them. We went back to the bed and breakfast and found this book on the bedside table which was full of comments people had made about the place, and it was a little surreal, the whole thing felt like a web page guestbook. We read through them, and the two most interesting were:

Had a great time. We both felt very
comfortable and breakfast was delicious.
It felt like we were in a movie.

Which is pretty sad, if you think about it. I mean, that attitude of “We had to re-find our relationship so we went to a bed and breakfast,” and everything that comes with it, and I’m staring after them saying, “But how did you lose it in the first place? I don’t get it,” and the way that having a wonderful time feels like “being in a movie”, what are their real lives like? So then the other one that we particularly noticed was:

What a dream this room is, or was it a memory?
No television to remind us of the chaotic world
outside. A gracious and gentle interlude that we
will definitely want to repeat.

I mean, if tv is reminding you of the chaotic world outside and you don’t like that, don’t watch tv!

Oh, and I completely forgot, I did a bit of a journal entry when we were there:

November 25, 8:?? PM

I’m sitting in a bed and breakfast on a huge antique bed smiling to myself while Todd takes a shower. We just arrived ten minutes ago and have been whispering the whole time, because it’s so quiet. When we lived in New Hampshire together we shared a house with three other people, so in a way this place, even the actual placement of the room itself, feels very familiar. Quiet jazz is playing on the radio and I’m smiling, thinking, this is a wonderful life to be living. Thinking about how when I was a little girl I would imagine the kind of life I wanted — writing stories that people care about, listening to NPR on the radio, loving a person who loved me too, waking up to the patter of little kitty paws…all of that. And somewhere along the line it happened. What did I do to deserve such an amazing existence? Todd just came and sat next to me on the bed and said, “Hey!” and I turned around and he said, “It’s the fourth anniversary of the day we actually met at the airport,” which it really is. Gad *grin* I feel so cliche now…

I read more of the Tanith Lee book to Todd until we were both sleepy and fell asleep. I didn’t sleep very well, had what felt like hundreds of short dreams and woke up many, many times. It didn’t occur to me until later on the next day that it was probably partly due to the number of people who have also slept in that bed — some sort of…oh, for lack of a better word, psychic residue, must have been left by some of them. Emotions. Feelings.

We went down to breakfast, which we ended up eating with

The Most Obnoxious Couple In The Known Universe

Geez, was it hysterical. Part of the trouble was trying not to laugh — they were so absurd that it really started feeling like WE were in a movie and they were actors hired to play the parts. We sat down to breakfast, and I wasn’t looking up, I was putting butter on a blueberry muffin and concentrating on not crumbling the muffin to bits, and I heard a man’s voice and a little girl’s voice, she sounded about eight years old. Like I said, I wasn’t really paying any attention so I didn’t know what they were saying, and then the man came and sat down right across from me and catty-corner from Todd, and I sort of inwardly sighed, I mean, I could see the small talk coming from a mile away. There were literally five other chairs he could have sat in, four of them far away from us, but he sat next to us. So he introduces himself, and we’re talking to him enough not to be rude, he says something like, “How did you find this place,” and we tell him it was a whim, and he’s, like, in shock because he cannot understand that we did this on a whim, it’s incomprehensible to him. So he asks what kind of drive we have to get back home and we tell him, and he’s getting confused because we’re not playing the small talk game right, we’re not asking him all about himself (because we could give a damn, I mean, okay, maybe he was trying to be nice but neither of us are very good at faking an interest in people who we could care less about) and then the little girl shows up. Except now I’m looking up, kind of gritting my teeth because he’s going on about the colleges in Northampton and Amherst and can’t seem to stop talking about the students there, he even asks if we’re students and we sort of looked at him for a stupefied minute before saying no, and something about the way that he asks the woman who owns the place if students ever stay there makes it sound so sleazy, and yes, Sherlyn, that really was just one sentence. So I’m looking up this time and the eight year old girl turns out to be a woman in her THIRTIES who for some incomprehensible reason is talking in this totally put-upon little girl voice. Like, imagine any eight year old girl you know and the way she talks, and take out every ounce of energy in that voice and go about three notches higher with the pitch and you have this woman’s voice perfectly. It was put on! This is the part that really was getting on my last nerve, that she was doing it on purpose. And we know this because at one point the owner, who’s trying to help this sad limping conversation along gets frustrated with this stupid voice and asks her to speak up and she does and her voice is totally normal and then she looks startled and goes back to the horrible voice.

So the guy is going on and on and on about the colleges in the area and the students, and Todd and I are starting to get a picture of the potential reasons that this woman is putting this voice on, and then she asks if there’s any dairy products in the pancakes. And the owner says no, there isn’t, and the woman does this laugh which I can’t even describe to you it was so irritating, something like, “Ohteeheeheehee” and then says, “I can’t eat dairy products,” and indicates her fake-milk stuff that she’d brought in with her, and the whole time this conversation is happening she is slathering butter all over her muffin.

We finally finish breakfast and bolt upstairs and fall over laughing once we get to our room and get everything together and check out, then drive home. I read the Tanith Lee book for quite a bit of the drive home, and then when we got here we checked email, hung out doing not much of anything for awhile, then decided to do laundry and clean the house as much as we could, considering how tired we were. That worked out wonderfully, I read some more just before we went to bed and we both slept beautifully. Who knew a flattened old futon with a thin comforter over it could be more comfortable and cozy than a huge antique bed?

Ranting and Raving

Geez, what a dismal day it’s been. Both of us are too tired and grumpy to feel up to making something to eat, so we’re just sort of being dreary at each other, pouting because nothing’s fun and out of sorts because nothing’s open.

It’s been creepily silent all day, too, as if everyone else in the universe has disappeared completely and we’re the only ones left. Which wouldn’t normally bother us, but today it’s just one more dreary blah yuckiness and neither of us seem to be able to get out of this dumb funk.

Last night was weird too — both of us had had unproductive, unmotivated days and were fully expecting that the other person had had a wonderful day, which wasn’t true for either of us. And Todd was really missing Sean — after hearing all day about everyone else’s plans for the four day weekend with their families, he felt awful that he couldn’t spend the time he has off work with Sean visiting us here. And because he was on a totally different track than I was, wanting to spend time with Sean while the thought hadn’t even occurred to me, we ended up having a crab at each other. And in retrospect the whole thing got really funny, at one point I was ranting away — not even saying things that I cared about, just going on and on because I’d started and dammit, I was going to Make My Point, and Todd couldn’t help it, he started to laugh, which of course made me want to laugh too, but I didn’t because I was too busy ranting. He was nerve-wracked because I was yelling, which neither of us ever do.

Kitey was, I think, kind of gaggified by the fact that we never yell, because I think to her it was a kind of oh, right, restrain your feelings and don’t be free with them, but it isn’t that sort of thing at all. It’s about both of us having grown up in households where yelling meant that bad things were happening, and yelling just scares both of us. It’s a very powerful thing. So we just made a conscious choice really early on to not yell at each other, and it’s been easy. We haven’t ever felt like we’d have been able to say something more effectively by yelling than by just saying it in a normal voice.

So, blech, eventually we got over ourselves and Todd admitted that holidays are hard for him because he especially misses Sean and we ended up having a great night after all. (Hmm…I guess I left something important out: the only way Sean can come to visit us is if Todd calls up his father and lies through his teeth and says, basically, “Oh, well, I like you after all,” which Todd isn’t willing to do, and isn’t it sad that his father, knowing that that was a lie, would accept it?) Today I watched Sorrento Beach, which we’d rented last night which is set in Australia and while it was an interesting movie, mostly I was fascinated because of Sherlyn and spent much of the movie thinking how different Australia is, how strange it is that people who even speak the same language can have so many differences, that even the smallest things seemed exotic. And what’s attractive about accents, I wonder? I must admit to admiring accents, and really, what are they? A different way of saying any given word.

Eeek, time to go to dinner — we’re going to try our favorite Indian restaurant and see if we can’t ground (i.e. see people, connect with the rest of the world) and feel better. Also have some coffee, of which there isn’t any in the house at the moment. Todd finished taking his shower and was being traigic upstairs so I went to see him and he said, “Remember the Peanuts special with the spelling bee?” which we’d both seen as kids, and I said yup, and he said, “I feel like Linus looked when he couldn’t find his blankie without my coffee.”

Movie Reviews

What a bunch of adventures we had last night! Well, adventures and movie reviews.

I’m noticing as time goes on that Todd and I laugh together a lot. And I’m wondering why anyone would commit to a lifetime relationship with someone who they can’t laugh with. It sounds so lonely and so empty.

We knew we had to do laundry, and when Todd got home really early we decided to rent a movie and watch it in between going to the laundromat to change the washer and dryer and everything. So first we stopped at the video store, and right away found a really cool looking movie called Go Fish. Generally we both stay far, far away from movies focusing on lesbian women because generally they are some piece of…of…let’s see, what kind of word do I think would describe this movie — ah well, anything strong enough would probably get me in trouble with my net provider, so I’ll just say that piece of shit “Basic Instinct” (I mean, if you think that lesbian women are ANYTHING LIKE THAT AT ALL you are really off base) which I was horrified to find that Jill and Kitey both enjoyed tremendously and further horrified when Kitey said, “But it was such an excellent portrayal of a lesbian woman,” and I think it was when she realized I was speechless that she took me off the hook and said, “– compared to what Hollywood usually has to say about the subject,” which made me feel slightly better.

But I did check and it was written and directed by a woman, no idiot movie stars in it either, and so we decided to rent it. We stopped at the laundromat to put our clothes in the washer and there was this extremely upset woman sort of pacing around the laundromat with her friend talking to her and looking concerned. Far from what it looked like, which was that this woman had private information about the world ending in the next three minutes, she’d just lost five dollars in the change making machine. And we were just stupefied by her anguish over this five dollar bill. While we were putting the laundry into the washing machine I stood there trying to really empathize, think, “Okay, here I am, this woman who has had a bad day already, and I’ve decided to take my last five dollars until I get my paycheck next Friday down to the laundromat and do my laundry. The change machine eats my five bucks and now I’m so upset I’m hitting the change machine hard enough to really do some damage to my hand,” which the woman started to do after awhile. But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t do it, because the absolutely most horrible thing that could possibly happen as a result of this situation, assuming that she has no friends who would loan her five dollars until her paycheck comes, is that she wears dirty clothes.

Then we both got a good look at her eyes and the weird, concerned look on her friend’s face and realized that the odds were that she was just off enough for this to truly be a huge concern in her life. Not that it wasn’t possible that she was a perfectly “normal” person that this was happening to — gad, Todd and I have had enough clerks cringe and wince when something goes wrong with whatever we’re buying (someone actually apologized to us this weekend for not being able to find the price on something we’d bought) and seen the look of intense relief on their faces when we don’t freak out and smiled instead that we know how horrible people are capable of being. When we got home we started the oven preheating so that we could have french fries, figuring that starting dinner would be dumb since we had to go switch the laundry anyway, and turned on the movie.

Well, so the first thing that comes on the screen is an ad for a computer game that actually looked great and made us even firmer in our decision to buy a CD-ROM soon. Then an ad for a wrestling video begins, that idiot wrestling federation, whatever the hell it’s called and we’re getting kind of worried and looking at each other and giggling, and fast-forwarded through it. At this point we were wondering just what kind of movie it was, and saying to each other how revolting it was going to be if they put in the wrestling ad because of the men who would potentially be renting this movie because they wanted to jerk off to lesbian sex, and that if it was that sort of thing we weren’t going to watch it, blech, and so another preview comes on and it’s for a really interesting Australian movie called Sorrento Beach, which we’re definitely going to look for next time we go to the video store. And then the movie starts.

There’s a fly buzzing around this gross looking room, and this gross looking man is looking through, I kid you not, PORNO VIDEOS and by this time we are really looking at each other and laughing, and I’m saying, “But wait, it said on the box that it won this extremely cool film award,” and so then this gross looking guy in the movie puts the only non-porno movie he has in his video collection into the vcr and starts it up and the first thing we see is “Starring: Adam Sandler!” at which point we both dived for the remote and turned the video off and went to check and see if this was indeed the correct movie, by looking up the title in the internet movie database (handy thing, that database). Neither of us could remember the title Go Fish, but I did know that it had some kind of sea/ocean theme to it, and the movie we had in our hands was called Going Overboard. A movie made in 1989 that was originally called “Babes Ahoy” and by this time we were laughing so hard we could hardly stand up and holding the video by its corners and getting ready to go back to the video store so that we could exchange it for Go Fish.

We went back to the laundromat first, to change the clothes so that they were in the dryer, and that woman was still there, having somehow gotten the change she wanted and was dealing with her laundry, with her friend still there and still looking worried. She was so angry that it was a little scary to be in the laundromat with her — the woman, not the friend. We went to the video store and got the right video, and then went home and watched about half of the movie and ate dinner, pasta with garlic bread and french fries too, and then went to the laundromat, picked up the clothes, put them away together and watched the rest of the movie.

And I have to say that Go Fish is among the best movies I’ve ever seen in my life. Rent it. Really. It is amazing. We found it at a video store that’s extremely mainstream, so unless you live in Missouri you should be able to find it. Here’s a review, if you’re curious, but it does give away a lot of the movie. It was the first time Todd or I had ever seen a movie that actually talked realistically and honestly about women, much less lesbian women (gad, it was like going to visit Kitey except Kitey wasn’t there) and it was sweet and funny and loving and — just go rent it. It did have some obnoxious things to say about het relationships, but both Todd and I had to admit that we had exactly those opinions about 90% of the het relationships in America and we just felt crabby and defensive about it because neither of us could say to the author of the movie, “Well, okay, but WE’RE not like that,” which we aren’t.

We got inspired, too, about making another video about our lives. We borrowed Sarah’s video camera the first time Kitey came to visit and I shot a huge amount of video, then took music and words and time lapse and played around with everything until I’d created a piece of film that even I was impressed with and excited about.

The Rat Race

So I was having my morning routine, cleaning litterboxes and making tea (out of coffee again — eek, just realized what that looks like, not making tea out of coffee beans, I meant to say that there’s no coffee in the house again) and listening to the pop-psych show, feeling cheerful and sat down to eat some warmed up pizza from last night — not as gross as it sounds, the local independent places are actually made out of food, not plastic and cardboard like the big chains (but I do miss Round Table pizza *nostalgic sigh* which was the only place other than The Good Earth that we ever went out to for dinner when I was a kid) and the news came on.

A couple of days ago Todd and I read this article in the online version of the New York Times which went over exactly what Americans think the world is about, after getting all of their information from tv news. Boy, was it depressing. So I’m listening to the radio version of the tv news, which is exactly the same except you can’t see the insipid anchors — who I am not completely convinced are human as opposed to computer generated heads — and all anyone wants to talk about is the presidential race.

And I’m thinking with dread about how many stupid ads are going to be on the radio and how many “vote for X” banners are going to be across people’s web pages, and how many bumper stickers I’m going to see, and so I thought I’d just put in my bid for who I’d like to be president now, before everyone is sick of the whole thing, except she’s dead.

I discovered Louise Fitzhugh when I was still in elementary school. I don’t remember what attracted me to the book Harriet The Spy, all I remember is that it was the very first time I’d read a book about a girl who didn’t give a damn about her hair, or about boys, or about if her goddamn socks matched her cutesy outfit — she cared about life, about finding things out, about being a writer. And she was my best friend, from the first page to the last, and I carried her around with me in my head when things felt horrible on the outside. I wrote Kitey about Louise Fitzhugh, and she borrowed the book from the library and wrote me saying how astonished she was that she could have missed such a wonderful writer, that she was going to write Louise Fitzhugh and let her know how much she’d enjoyed the book.

Meanwhile, we were both finding the other novels — The Long Secret and Sport, and reading them, writing to each other about what we’d thought — this was before I was allowed to see Kitey, so at this point I hadn’t seen her for years — and one day Kitey wrote and said that Louise Fitzhugh’s publishers had sent a letter saying that she’d died. It was shocking. I believe in reincarnation, though. I think she’s back, hopefully in human form, in elementary school even now, handing in her first brilliant piece of writing.

Relief!

What a relief! I was getting really worried that I’d just turned into an intolerant creep about Sarah’s problems and feeling more and more guilty about it every day, and then she called Friday night and left a message asking if we wanted to come with her to a book sale.

I called her back, and she sounded millions of times better than she had the last time we’d talked — even though nothing had changed — she was much more with it, she was alert and even cheerful. We had a great conversation, talked for a long time on the phone and before I hung up I mentioned that she was sounding terrific, and she told me that she’d been to her doctor and had stopped taking the antidepressants she’d been on. Hurrah! I was so relieved to find out that it had been those stupid drugs and not Sarah at all that had changed her behavior so dramatically. She called again last night and we talked about how things were going and she really does sound so much better that it’s scary. Unfortunately, she’s going to go back onto a different antidepressant but at least it isn’t the same one.

Also a big relief to find out that Marian hadn’t dropped off the face of the planet after all but just hadn’t had access to email — her ancient ancient ancient pre-1990 sad little Mac finally went to Mac Heaven and so now she has one that’s used but happily much newer than the last one and can read PC files. She sent email over the weekend to let me know, said she’d missed me quite a bit and hoped I wasn’t mad because she hadn’t written in so long. I’ll have to tell her this funny dream I had the night after I got her email, which was all about me trying to get her to sit down for five minutes so that I could read her the Sage Words columns — she’s read all of them but the last one so that was weird in itself — the funny part was that her name was Marian in the dream, not her real name at all and hmmm…wonder what a psychologist would say about that *grin*.

Speaking of Sage Words…! Thursday night just before I fell asleep the idea for Sage Words 8 had been wandering around my head and I thought I’d sit down on Friday and try to see where I could go with it but didn’t really have any high hopes. And I really did, I just sat down and typed out the first line and told my rotted monsters to just shut up and fuck off for just a couple of hours, please, and they did! And I had a wonderful time writing the column, stopped frequently to read it out loud to myself, had the computer read it out loud to me (it helps to hear things read in that monotonal voice, it makes awkward sentences much easier to spot) and laughed a lot. Yet more sighs of relief as I realized that I can indeed still write — the last thing I wrote that I was this proud of was Sage Words 7, and that was quite awhile ago. When Todd got home he was thrilled to find that there was a new column, and sat down in one of the big chairs in the computer room and I read it to him. He had a big smile and laughed and when I was done said how much he liked it and that I was positively beaming. When I was upstairs later that night I glanced into the mirror and was tickled to realize that I was beaming, a huge smile and rosy cheeks and just in general looking incredibly happy.

Decided to walk down to the ATM to get $20 so we could have chinese food delivered, it was a beautiful walk, freezing cold and I brought my walkman, listened to (I know, I know, you’re all very surprised) Ani Difranco and sang along and beamed.

Spent the rest of the weekend driving around to a lot of different towns, went into a lot of different bookstores but only bought one book (British mystery), found the Tyrtle Times along with my graphic listed in the new “Yahoo! Unplugged” book which was, as Kitey says, a “big happy” and talked to each other a mile a minute, feeling grateful and glad to be alive.

Purple Sleeping Pills

It was a rousing old time in Nightmare Land last night, and I am getting sick of this.

Woke up at a little after two, or maybe it was three, I don’t remember, trying AGAIN to throw up. I’m starting to wonder if my own body has it out for me. Woke up feeling very disoriented and a little scared and drank lots of water, which helped a little. Managed to fall asleep, finally, and instantly dreamed that I was dead. When I tried to fall asleep after that particular piece of fun, I realized that I was starting to choke every time I lay down. Gave up on the whole idea and went onto IRC, woke up Todd and got lots of reassuring cuddles and hugs and felt much better by the time I did fall asleep. This sort of thing is why I’ve never allowed myself to take sleeping pills — from as far back as I can remember I’ve had trouble falling asleep and staying asleep, and sleeping pills sound so wonderfully tempting that I know I’d be hopelessly addicted to them in about two days.

Got a really long letter from my British aunt yesterday and spent a long time reading it — she’d taken a batch of letters written over the past few months to other people and sent them all on, so in a lot of ways it felt very much like a diary, which of course fascinated me. I felt for the first time like I was getting a picture of who she is, and that probably has something to do with the age I was last time she wrote me, I guess I must have been thirteen or so, but in any case I was very glad to read the letter and am starting to really appreciate having gotten back in touch with my family.

I say “my family” and as I was typing that I realized that I do call my father’s sisters and brother, father, mother, etc. “my family” and don’t ever talk about Kitey’s side — it’s because I don’t know anyone from Kitey’s side of the family. I saw them every once in awhile before I was five years old, but don’t remember any of it. Kitey and I talked about it while she was here, about families and the awful dynamics that are involved in most households. One of the things about life in America that continues to fascinate me is this amazing ability of most anyone to treat people they supposedly “love” in absolutely horrifying ways and then look at the ceiling and whistle and say “Oh, but my, like, FAMILY life was like that when I was growing up, so of course I can treat people like horseshit because my FAMILY is at fault, not me,” and that sort of thing just leaves me staring at people in a stupefied “What in the world are you talking about?” sort of way. Kitey grew up in a really weird stupid atmosphere, nothing anyone would want to experience in a million years, but my point here is that she didn’t bring it into her own life. Yeah, she spanked me until I hit about two years old and sat her down and said, “Listen, lady, what gives you the right to hit me? I don’t hit you,” and she absolutely stopped. She saw that it wasn’t right and she stopped. She didn’t look at that two year old baby and say, “Well, but my, like, PARENTS did it to me so I have to do it to you,” she JUST DIDN’T DO IT ANYMORE.

So anyway *wry laugh* I didn’t mean to go into that whole rant, what I meant to talk about was the fact that we were having this conversation and Kitey mentioned that her brothers had taken the way they’d been treated as children and she could see very clearly that they were treating their own children this way now. That it was somewhat easier for her to understand, having grown up in that house and seen what went on, to understand why her brothers were doing the same thing. Because they just simply didn’t question it. It wasn’t like they were looking at the way they’d been treated and thinking, “This is wrong and bad,” they were looking at the way they’d been treated and thinking, “This is the way childhood works. It may not be much fun but it’s the way it works.” So why isn’t the question there? What is it about people that makes them question or not question a lifestyle?

Because I don’t think it can be that simple. Todd grew up in a horrific way and didn’t question it — again, it was “this is the way childhood works, I sure hope it’s over soon, but surely everyone is treated this way” — but his not questioning it didn’t preclude not acting that way. What I’m trying to say is that he didn’t act that way himself, even though the questions weren’t there. He wasn’t condemning his parents (I do. I’d like to get them both in a small room for five minutes.) but he knew that he didn’t want to be like them. He knew that from as far back as he can remember.

Well, gad, that all sort of took off in a different direction then I was intending it to, but I’m glad it did. It’s been a long week and I’m very much looking forward to the weekend — I’m thinking about repainting one of the upstairs bedrooms (tried an experiment the first time of using a rather dark shade of purple, which just ended up looking rather dreary instead of cozy and warm) and Todd has been home so late for most of the week that we’re missing each other quite a bit.

David Lynch Possessed My Computer

Boy, was IRC surreal last night. It all felt like some extremely weird dream that David Lynch was narrating and directing. Laurel and a friend of hers were so lagged that conversations looked like they were being held by not-quite-sane people, something like this:

LAUREL: So I thought I’d go to the bookstore tomorrow.
SAGE: Where do you put the fish, then?
LAUREL: There are some books I’m interested in buying.
SAGE: Because I saw the fish at the park in the pond.
SHERLYN ENTERING CHANNEL
SAGE: Aha! Sherlyn, you’re back!
SHERLYN: Laurel: there are two of them.
LAUREL: Sherlyn: ??
SHERLYN: Laurel: I put them in the box.
LAUREL: Sage: either she is incredibly lagged or nuts.
SAGE: sigh

Add that to the fact that we were all getting on and off IRC trying to get the lag to go away and so we kept meeting ourselves (I expected Q to show up any minute) coming and going, saying things that we’d said ten minutes before.

NOTSAGE ENTERING CHANNEL
LAUREL: Who’s that?
SAGE: Oh dear *laughing* that’s me.
NOTSAGE: Laurel? Sherlyn? Are you guys there?
SAGE: notsage: Go away!
NOTSAGE: Oh well, I guess I’ll log out and try again.

Todd got home relatively early last night — before six — and went to sleep around eight thirty, poor thing. Before that, though, we went to the cd store and I thought about buying a Mandy Patinkin album, I confess, I have this huge weakness for contemporary musicals not by Andrew Lloyd Webber, but I listened to it at the store and it sounded to me like he wasn’t singing with his full voice which was a disappointment, so I didn’t buy it after all. When we were getting checked out I was astonished by how teeny the clerk was — she looked about sixteen years old but was actually shorter than me which is something I hardly ever see. The only people shorter than me are generally in the five to eight year old age range. I was saying to Todd as we walked out of the store how teeny she was and he laughed and said, “But Sage, that’s how teeny you look to me you know,” and I said I was glad he was tall because if I were with someone shorter than me I’d be saying how cute they were and patting them on the head all the time *grin*.

I have a thirty six exposure film thingie in the camera, so I’m planning to spend a good part of the day taking pictures of the kitties for the Feline Cohorts section. I figure, thirty six exposures, eight cats — I ought to be able to get one good picture, right?