Sometimes I forget that this blog really can just be a blog, i.e. something I use to entertain myself and also to enjoy the community of people out there reading it, instead of a place where I pressure myself to be brilliant and witty and interesting. So in the spirit of not really trying to be brilliant and witty and interesting, I’d like to do something that I’ve done before to great success and entertainment. So, shoot. Ask me a question about anything in the wide magnificent universe* and I’ll probably answer it over the course of the day. Leave your own blog-link and it’ll appear in the question, leave an email and it won’t.
* Actual questions about the universe and its wide magnificence will probably be relegated to our handy accessory, the Husband Feature. Questions about fashion, though, are encouraged.
The questions are starting to roll in, and they’re “after the jump”, as all the cool people say.
For those of you following along at home, yesterday’s mail brought another letter, with more of the same. I could say I’m upset, and I continue to be disappointed it’s true, but at least it gives me a good excuse to listen to this piece of genius and laugh bitterly. Bitterly I say!
Every few nights for the past month, I’ve dreamt about Kenya. It’s always a similar landscape and plot – I’m in the neighborhood of my home and school, in that suburban northwest corner of Nairobi’s sprawling slopes. In most of them, I find that I’m returning to ISK for a few more classes, ten years on, and I’m both shocked and surprised at this turn of events. In one, I’m getting into a bus just down the street from our house, right where Lower Kabete Road turned into Kyuna, and trying to navigate the friendly driver into stopping by my house before school so that I can put some decent clothes on for my first day. The streets are soaked in color, the red dirt kicking up along the side of the road, the blue sky draped above the trees. I keep getting very close but not quite making it to our home, but I’m not fussed, so distracted by the wonder of the familiarity of it all.
I just got another rejection from one of the lesser-competitive options, leaving me the three big scaries on my list. Blah blah blah faith self-confidence trust in myself keep on keepin’ on etc etc blah blah.
Anyone got any funny jokes? Greg? I’m looking at you.
It’s official. I’m obsessed. What’s frustrating is, I’m obsessed with something I’m not ready to talk about here, but I’m a blogger, so it’s my natural instinct to want to talk about it here. I’m obsessed with the applications I’ve eluded to, and the responses I’m NOT getting, the Mail that is NOT arriving, the worst case scenarios I am trying to be prepared for, and the best case scenarios that I’m trying not to want too badly.
Two months ago, I was healthy about this. I was confident and as laid-back as I’m capable of being. I had faith. Two weeks ago, I was anxious but ready. Two hours ago, I was in total denial of my escalating panic and worry. Two minutes ago, I realized I was sitting on the very edge of my chair, with my face three inches from the glass of my iMac, staring at some college student’s livejournal page where she mentioned letters she’s received from places whose letters I haven’t received yet.
Two minutes ago, I entered into obsessed.
It’s been bad enough coming home from the subway every evening. I’ve turned the corner onto my street, realized the Mail was waiting for me in the lobby of our apartment, and suddenly wished for a full flask of vodka strapped to my leg to help me cope with the rising nausea and anxiety. It’s like the Oscars, all this mail-waiting. I’d much prefer to get phone calls out of the blue – phone calls are a sudden-onset sort of anxiety, brought about when the phone rings. They don’t have the constant ritualistic guarantee that for seven minutes while walking up your own street, you will be terrified of your OWN MAIL.
If my first response (which I mentioned last week) had either been 1. positive or 2. from someplace I wasn’t sort of expecting a positive reply, then I wouldn’t be as bad off this week as I am. As it is, I’ve never wished so hard to be drunk all the time, just as a coping strategy.
You’ll note that I managed to fill four nervous paragraphs with anxiety and hang-wringing without ONCE giving you all the satisfaction of really explaining what I’m talking about because my domino-conga-line of superstition won’t let me talk too much, too openly, until I know whether or not I’m getting what I want. On a certain level, I’ve already said too much. But I don’t think Stuart’s willing to scrape the exploded carcass of my balled-up energy off the walls of our apartment, so I guess I’ve said just enough to get myself through another Walk to the Front Door.
Two minutes ago, I forgot all the good advice I got about how freaking myself out to the point of blanching isn’t actually going to have any affect on the outcome of this process, nor will it make me feel any better if I get bad news to have known that I was freaking out for a good reason, that YES, I am the Cassandra of my own disappointment. I’m currently grappling through the crashing waves to find that lifevest of calm again, yes, I am.
So before you very justifiably tell me how I’m working myself up for nothing, I just want to let you know that I KNOW that if you were sitting across from me at the bar, friends, here’s the moment where I notice how hard I’m squeezing that nice comforting hand you’d extended across the table to stroke my arm, the stroking you thought would coax me into an altogether lower plane of tension (without resorting to marijuana). I’m self-aware enough to know what my own panicked face looks like. Wow, look! I’ve drained the blood from your fingers. You okay? Me? I’m FINE. I’ll be FINE. YEAH. No, totally fine.
Don’t I look fine?
People are always getting on my case about my irrational love of chihuahuas. They’re tiny and loud and nervous, everyone says (and by everyone, I usually mean Biscuit, who swears he won’t darken my doorway if I ever own a chihuahua). People don’t seem to understand that I’M tiny and loud and nervous, which makes me + chihuahua = match made in heaven hell. I love those tiny yappy-type fuckers. I think they’re fierce miniature little ninjas and I want five of them. Also, they have the added bonus of being portable in even the daintiest of my purses and people, my purses get pretty dainty.
I have a deep personal appreciation for the get-out-of-my-space fierceness of chihuahuas. My friend Raych had Lupe, when we were in high school together, and I’ve never been more reluctant to turn my back on anything quite that small (note: I am usually only reluctant to turn my back on rhinos, veloceraptors, and other much larger predators). Lupe would bark and snap at you in this way that stated, very clearly and without prevarication: “the minute you turn your back on me, fearsomely large adversary, I will BITE MERCILESSLY THROUGH YOUR ACHILLES’ TENDON so that when you are felled, I may eat victoriously of your face and possibly internal organs, depending on time.” This is quite clearly the message of a chihuahua’s bark.
You might wonder why this would attract me to them. It’s because I respect that. I respect the genetic ability to cause a ruckus totally disproportionate to your size. As you can imagine, this ability resonantes with me. I also respect skunks for the same reason. I was at the Bronx Zoo this one time, and we were looking down on a serene wooded area where absolutely fucking enormous deer were roaming about aimlessly. Suddenly they all started skittering about, freaked out like they were teenagers caught smoking. I looked around for the source of the commotion and oh, yes – there was a skunk. A small animal about a foot in length with a God-given defense mechanism that drove deer twenty times its size away. That commands RESPECT. I, also, am small and seemingly without defenses and while I don’t stink up a room or rip through your Achilles’ tendon, I have built up my own set of defenses against the cruel world (mainly involving my awesome lung power and big, big friends).
So you see, I have respect for the diminuitive chihuahua. I feel that we would be great companions. One of the reasons I don’t insist on getting one as soon as we’re allowed to have dogs is because of my husband. I seriously cannot imagine Stuart carrying around Doctor Death*, my little chihuahua. And you know, he’d have to be carried, because Doctor Death cannot cross storm drains on a leash. At at some point in his life, he would have to be carried by Stuart. And, well, Stuart is a lot of things but dainty and wee is not one of them. Because I love him, I perhaps think that getting a chihuahua would rob him of the ability to live his life NOT carrying around a tiny little dog the size of his hand. Still and all, I’m pretty sure that if anything could convince Stuart of the AWESOME POWER of the angry chihuahua (and our immediate need to own one, STAT), it’s this video. Stuart, and the rest of you as well.
FEAR THE CHIHUAHUA.
* This is not really my dream chihuahua name. My dream chihuahua name is so awesome that if I told you, you’d rush out and buy a chihuahua just so you could use my awesome name and I’m not stupid, so I’m not telling you. PPFFBTBT.
So, whilst the war rages on in Iraq and the people of New Orleans struggle to rebuild and Australia sends relief to a devastated coastline and Milosevic is buried and, well, the world turns, New Yorkers are obsessed with this coyote.
Let me rephrase: I am obsessed with this coyote.
There’s a coyote! In Central Park. Apparently, this isn’t the weirdest thing in the ENTIRE world – there was a similar incident in 1999. Still and all, there’s a coyote roaming around Central Park consistently evading capture by whole swarms of police and Parks Department people. What’s much more amusing than actually reading the relatively mundane articles about this coyote where everyone tries desperately to avoid using the word WILY but can’t, in the end, and cave to the inexorable pressure to use the word WILY but then giggle moronically to themselves after they do (Channel 7 reporters, I’m looking at YOU) is actually discussing the various ways a fucking COYOTE got onto the island of Manhattan.
Because the news and articles keep suggesting he came from Westchester, and I’m thinking, Metro North? Surely not. He’d have to leash himself. Henry Hudson Bridge? That toll can be seriously prohibitive when you’ve got no pockets. Maybe a cab? Oooh, rollerskates! The news keeps saying he might have swum across the Harlem River but this is obviously a very urbane and sophisticated coyote, surely he’d know better than to swim in a body of water for which you need tetanus shots before even entering. Plus, I don’t know, THE CURRENTS.
This would be a good time to make a joke about the other definition for the word coyote, namely the human border smugglers. Instead, I’ll just sit here and giggle about a coyote riding Metro North. Coffee? Paper? Umbrella? Coyote.
Someone explain to me how 27 degrees counts as the first day of Spring? My hair is still wet, after my shower, and I can’t bring myself to leave the house.
Spring? Really?
I won’t say that two years ago, Stuart walked through the front door and I knew I’d marry him. I’ll err on the side of caution and say, I knew it three days later. So today is the anniversary of the day we met, three days before I knew without question that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.
I will say that the heart doesn’t lie. When we sat down to eat Chinese food, 30 minutes after he arrived at Shiv’s apartment, we started talking about books and I got this feeling in my ribcage, possibly my heart. The best way to describe it is this: when a horse has been locked in a stable for a long time but it’s a beautiful day and you open the stable door to let him into the paddock, he will immediately sense the wildness of the land outside the paddock. He will sense the summer day, the grass, the running he has to do. And he will pace, back and forth, twitching his tail, trying to get you to notice that he needs to be let out of the paddock; he needs to run. That was my heart, when Stuart and I were talking. I didn’t even know what the summer’s day was, or that it was there, but there was something fundamental inside me, pacing back and forth, demanding to be let free.
Another way of describing it would be to say that I’d been sliding along in a dark room, along the smooth wall, for years. I’d been sliding around a doorless room, almost wondering if perhaps there was no door, there was only wall. But I didn’t stop sliding. The feeling inside me during that first real conversation that I had with Stuart, where our eyes kept lighting up with understanding and camaraderie, was the feeling of having crept around uselessly in a doorless, unlit room only to finally stumble upon a crack in the wall, and to follow that crack around the pitch-black wall with the tips of your fingers barely daring to believe you’ll find a doorknob. And the doorknob will be there even if it’s never been there before, and that frantic excitement mingled with disbelief mingled with incontrovertible proof, that’s how it felt to meet Stuart. Like a door had opened.
So you can see what it was like two years ago. I didn’t have these words, I didn’t have the assurance that would come with our first kiss, the first time we said the word love, the first time he told me he couldn’t and wouldn’t be apart from me anymore than he absolutely had to be, that beside me was where he was meant to be even if it meant crossing an ocean. I didn’t have those comparably solid emotions, words of substance to react to. All I had on that first day was this kicking, breathing, daring-to-believe-it feeling that the summer day was here, the doorknob was there, and something huge had arrived. Something life-changing had happened.
And I couldn’t wait to get started.
I’m home today to deal with some domestic household issues (read: everything’s a mess) and I got some middling-to-poor news about my MFA plans from one of the places I felt confident about. I realized, in the past hour of moping about it (oh, waitlisting, why do you feel like a consolation prize) that perhaps this is what blogs are for sometimes – to dump some negative mojo into the ether and let it go.
So I’m letting it go here, feeling a little gloomy, and knowing all the care bear stares of love that you guys send my way all the time will perk me up. So will Belinda and Abe’s disco wedding CD, which is totally on right now for me to tidy the house by. Because how can you be down and gloomy when you’re positively being FORCED to do the hustle, right?
I guess my luck of the Irish didn’t come through for me today, but maybe it got lost in the post on its way from Ireland, and it’ll come through for me like the drunk lazy leprechaun that it is, right?
I’m off to do the hustle. And possibly get down just a little bit, in funkytown.
