The programs director at the jail, who, traditionally, sometimes does not reply to my emails regarding scheduling for weeks at at time, emailed me this today: "Hi Emily. Did I hear right that you're pregnant?"
No need to be defensive. It is what it is.
Introduction to a Food Diary
February 5, 2010
5 am. a handful of dry Kashi Golean, 2 squares sugared ginger
9:15 am. bowl of Golean with about a cup of 2% milk
10:30 am. cup of Cumby's dark roast coffee with 2 tbsps cream, 1 tsp sugar
12:15 pm 2/3 can tuna with 2 tbsps mayo & chopped yellow onion on 13 or so garden herb triscuits with 2 oz. monterey jack cheese, melted. A couple handfuls Lay's potato chips. 1 large piece of pepperidge farm frozen chocolate frosted cake, 1 cup vanilla frozen yogurt, 5 sl. dried mango, 8 squares sugared ginger
5 pm. 2 bowls of casserole made of whole grain Kraft cheesy mac, fried ground turkey w/ bread cumbs and sauteed onions, oiled & salted baked sweet potato chunks, nutritional yeast. Buttercrunch chocolate donut hole. Trix yogurt, 2 squares sugared ginger.
11 pm. Hardboiled egg with salt & cayenne. 2 large bowls of Golean, Cheerios, & Wheat Chex with a cup or two 2% milk. Large apple. Large orange. 2 or 3 oz. of baked chicken thigh. 3 squares sugared ginger.
February 6
4 am. Handful dry Kashi Golean
[Dream of secret lover, feeding nutritional bars in lieu of food to a young handicapped boy, but he was neglecting him, we were this close to kissing the whole time; I was so high on marijuana my tongue could not move in my head and I thought to myself in a flash, I am just like my mother, and then I thought, and my child will be just like me, and it was frightening but also, somehow, relieving]
8 am. Handful dry Kashi Golean.
10:15 am. 1 cup Dark roast Cumby's coffee, cr. & sug
[absolute fit because future-babydaddy was lovingly creating himself a breakfast sandwich. Tupperware smashed. after a couple false starts, fut-bd left in a huff, leaving me two steaming plates of food.]
12:15 pm. 3 slices bacon, 1 scrambled egg, 1 chicken thigh [this mixing of adult & fetus ought to be unkosher] w/ skin mostly extricated, 1 cup of a brown rice/black bean/onion/canola oil/cayenne, garlic powder cumin etc. spiced stir fry. 1/2 buttered whole grain bagel. 1 large slice Pepperidge farm frozen chocolate cake, [cell phone stopped working & many attempts amidst frantic eating hovering on the stool were made to remove battery with pair of tweezers], 1 large scoop or maybe 3 of vanilla frozen yogurt/ice cream Edy's blend [which tastes like chemicals and not in a good way]
3 pm. 4 garden herb triscuits with 2 TBSPS tuna salad (tuna, mayo, cayenne, paprika, diced yellow onion)
5:40 pm. [Free supper at St. Mark's. My placemat was dirty and there was a bottle of dish soap on the table. The preemy looking guy at the table next to mine and sitting directly next to me but with a small gap between us because of the different table thing, spilled flamboyantly his coffee. I was getting fed up with all this, and the butter swiped while I was still eating a roll, until I was given, free of charge, a large container of frozen homemade chicken soup, 12 Dannon strawberry banana yogurts and an excellent loaf of Hannaford whole wheat bread, as well as kifed 5 or 6 sticky homemade fudge brownies from the tables] Shepheard's pie with round beef green peas & white potato. 1 roll with TBSP butter. 1 large brownie, 1/2 strawberry banana yogurt [split it].
6:15 pm ish. 1 lg apple, 3 sugared ginger squares.
9:30 pm. 1 garden herb triscuit with large scoop tuna salad [previously described] "pizza" flavoried veggie burger with ketchup and 3 bread & butter pickles, several bowls of popcorn with salt, melted butter, a dash of cayenne, and shittons of nutritional yeast. Sugared ginger square.
11 pm. Greasiness, a couple slices of bacon and a scrambled egg. 1/2 buttered bagel. Hardboiled egg with salt and cayenne. Bowl of vanilla frozen yogurt.
11:35 pm. [at Walmart] 8 Crybaby candies. [I did not like them]
February 7
7 am. Handful dry Golean Kashi.
10:30 am. Large bowl of Cheerios, Golean, & wheat Chex with a cup or two of 2% milk.
1:30 pm. [with Eli] Small plate of white spaghetti, mix of thin (spaghettini, is it?) and regualar with oregano, a bit of corn oil, salt & pepper and onion powder; Ragu's premade sauce and several tbsps parmesan cheese. Orange and delicious; memories of childhood.
5:50 pm. [Listening to NPR on the small cassette player] 1 cup of brown rice stirfried in oil with black beans, onions, the usual spices. 1 large plate of deep fried Chinese "orange chicken, a couple cups of pork fried rice, 1/2 an egg role, 1/2 cup steamed chopped broccoli (rather bland). The Chinese food was from Water Street and the tiny restaraunt was all smoky with some vent problem and the door propped open when I got there; everything except the egg roll was made without MSG. Though I ate the food compulsively and as though it were a guilty pleasure indeed, it tasted rather off. The chicken was for the most part stringy and tough (even now, however, I fantasize about it).
6:30 pm. 1 large red apple. 1 piece of Pepperidge farm chocolate cake, 1 large brownie left over from the dinner, cup of vanilla frozen yogurt.
11 pm. 1 bowl of Oatmeal ("Quick" kind) w. 1/2 a red apple, chopped, a lil brown sugar and butter. 1/2 an orange, a Trix yogurt.
TODAY
4 am handful Golean Kashi
10:30 am 2 bowls Cheerios & Golean Kashi with a cup or two 2% milk.
11 am 1 cup Cumby's dark roast coffee with cream and sugar.
12:30 pm. 2/3 cup of stir fried brown rice with black beans oils onions bla bla etc. A couple pieces of the infamous and dreaded pollo anaranjada. another "pizza"-flavored veggie burger, rather gross really. 1/2 a red apple.
4 pm 2 trix yogurt
[hour long walk in the cold. a glimpse of the one-time lover from the bar, the tall heavyset aspiring skinhead. wandering around eco Hannaford for nearly an hour]
6 pm. Large plate of salad: red leaf lettuce, baby carrots, cucumber, italian croutons, and red onion with creamy parm dressing. 1 bowl of the chicken soup (chicken, red potato, carrot, onion, spinach] from the folks at St. Mark's, grilled cheese (monterey jack & cheddar) with bacon on whole wheat Hannaford bread fried in butter, with garlic powder. 1 large slice of the same old cake, 1 large brownie, 2/3 cup of neopolitan Hannaford Ice cream, a bunch of whipped cream, a red apple, several squares of sugared ginger... It was very delicious, with NPR on in the back ground.. but the red onion was so pungent it burned and is still affecting my mouth...
& there will be more eating tonight, of course
Monday, February 8, 2010
Saturday, February 6, 2010
"Any questions?" "Yeah, how do you spell 'boner'?"
I'm pretty sure no one reads this and I suppose it's a good season for talking to the wall. I've been unable to get along with anyone but strangers & acquaintances and ... I don't know. The internet is my friend. If I'm going to be a loner I ought to do something amazing. I keep going back and forth... looking at adoption sites, then I behold the little one wriggling and pulsating on the screen, receive most of the babygear I need without the humiliations of a "shower," and I'm like, oh, yes really is someone brewing in there, and I forgot, for a moment, my concerns.
Yesterday was a blessed day and today I dressed up and looked decent for the first time in awhile (until I had an absolute fit and smeared the mascara per usual) smart curve hugging clothes - I'm not showing yet of course this being my first, though I've gained around five pounds, which I could spare and I certainly have warranted with massive binges and still I am not so happy about it - metal drop earrings and make up that sort of distracted from the many eruptions of my face.
Yesterday I read and walked and ate well (and started a food journal, for a variety of reasons, not least to establish a habit for breastfeeding to track if something in particular upsets the baby). I volunteered at the foodbank with the Boys and Girls Club and it was delightful to be physical, to take items off shelves, wipe the shelves, and return the items in greater order. To put on gloves and bag up frozen cherries, to help some of the slower kids participate.
After a break for dinner and internet, I went to the jail for almost four hours. I presented and facilitated discussion of part of Ginsberg's "America" last night with the female and male inmate groups (&, as I've been doing, created impromptu pregnancy support forum with the participants, almost all of whom are parents, & if not perhaps the ultimate role models, I still appreciate the stories they have to tell).
The guard in the female block objected to someone reading "Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb," though this is what it said. Then I asked participants to write their own poem/ letter to America.
Here are some excerpts, with slight edits, & permission (except from Ginsberg):
America by Allen Ginsberg (first part)
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia....
"America Thank you for the beautiful girls we're given,
Though in other countries there's the same variety of women
To all my soldiers in county jail, I salute you
Why can't we be united like we used to?
We move things around like heroine and crack
You're worried about that, when there's terrorist acts?
Why do you act like problems solve themselves?
In an 8 by 12 cell, the equation is hell
If I was in the army I could kill and fight
But civilian kill civilian and they'd give me life...."
- J. Choate
"....
February 5 2010
The country's as fucked up
As it's ever been
Will we turn around
And do it again
Trillions of dollars
Will we ever be out of debt
Probably not
That's what I bet
Sold out to China
Too many like their food
We love their fortune cookies
But that isn't good
Telescopes hunting
For other planets that live
Another disaster
Borrow some money to give
Americans taking babies
But leaving the sick
Distracting with one hand
While the other does tricks
We'll show the world
Who has the biggest dick
Don't so no to war
Let's get into it thick
Put all the drug users
Into our jails
Until we go broke
And our system then fails
....
What will we do
When the Chinamen come
When we sell them our homes
That won't be any fun
Or maybe the Iranians
Will put us in our place
We should sell them Iraq
Reunite Persia to save face
-D. Mallett
*
Jail Anthem
I Hate Being told what to do
When to shit and how to move
What time we eat and all the food
I hate being broke as ah fucking joke
Money on the books but I can't buy smokes
Can't drive a car or even a boat
I'm sick of hearing the word Nope
I hate waking up to the bad days
Lookin around at the possible gays
Me and my duaghter can't even play
I hate that I'm back here in jail
Stuck here without any bail
Everyday they holding my mail
Rehab's nothin but a fairy tale
-J. Howard
My free write on it was much less encompassing but a little more aligned with Ginsberg's tone:
America you gave me all the cans of cubed
fruit and kidney beans a girl could
want
You measured and dated baby after
baby and said, You do whatever you want
You said, The third time's the charm
America you made me feel like a feisty piece of
shit in my 1994 Oldsmobile, your drive thrus taunting
I navigated front seat electronic window stuck at 2" open
America you've been screaming at me to "Lose the baby weight" since
I was a baby, weighing your values in the
express lane. You told me to be young and vibrant, to
focus on a career. You told me seek first the kingdom of
individuality, then effortless love would be
added unto it. I tried to
interpret my dreams they became thick with gunsmoke,
the foreign accent of Grand Theft Auto sex gods, America
you left my faither to raise us on hardtack and Genesis and
whatever he picked up at those single parent support groups.
The new wife of my father made chop suey and
eventually, whole grains. Her well behaved daughters placed the
ground wheat berries and everything else, the same amount everytime,
in a bread maching.
The old wife of my father (the dark one who lived to lose her tooth,
drunk on the pavement, weak from hepatitis), used to knead with her
dusty knuckles, measured nothing.
America I have lost all sense of proportion. I don't
know the first thing about politics. I voted for Nader the year I was 18,
and America, I hardly ever wear my seatbelt. I fantasize about dying
every day and take fish oil, valerian, probiotics.
I made a pair of mittens on a sewing machine with lots of supervision, I
was hoping to woo him slow and sweet, to turn back
time, I dragged myself antsy through the stitchy process, listening to
Miley Cyrus, who said, "If you text it, I'll delete it," among
other things.
The Greyhound bus could not make it up the snowy hill so I
walked down it with the mittens, smoking my last Pall Mall for a
very long time because despite the reinvented
argyle sweater I was
already
knocked up.
*
"America why do you have to put people in jail like Dean Mallett who needs to get out to take care of his twenty cats." - Charlie
"Do you want me to make a loud sound when the two minutes are up?" - the guy who keeps farting extremely loudly during our writing times.
"No thanks, you've contributed plenty tonight."
"She's a douchebag. I want to punch her in the face then have sex with her." - the farting guy.
"You are a misogynist. While I appreciate the comedy, I hope you never date anyone again."
*
"Don't waste your time with that Castenada stuff... It's interesting, I know, all the teleporting... I wasted a lot of time with it, but..."
"I know, it's not Gospel Truth."
Yesterday was a blessed day and today I dressed up and looked decent for the first time in awhile (until I had an absolute fit and smeared the mascara per usual) smart curve hugging clothes - I'm not showing yet of course this being my first, though I've gained around five pounds, which I could spare and I certainly have warranted with massive binges and still I am not so happy about it - metal drop earrings and make up that sort of distracted from the many eruptions of my face.
Yesterday I read and walked and ate well (and started a food journal, for a variety of reasons, not least to establish a habit for breastfeeding to track if something in particular upsets the baby). I volunteered at the foodbank with the Boys and Girls Club and it was delightful to be physical, to take items off shelves, wipe the shelves, and return the items in greater order. To put on gloves and bag up frozen cherries, to help some of the slower kids participate.
After a break for dinner and internet, I went to the jail for almost four hours. I presented and facilitated discussion of part of Ginsberg's "America" last night with the female and male inmate groups (&, as I've been doing, created impromptu pregnancy support forum with the participants, almost all of whom are parents, & if not perhaps the ultimate role models, I still appreciate the stories they have to tell).
The guard in the female block objected to someone reading "Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb," though this is what it said. Then I asked participants to write their own poem/ letter to America.
Here are some excerpts, with slight edits, & permission (except from Ginsberg):
America by Allen Ginsberg (first part)
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia....
"America Thank you for the beautiful girls we're given,
Though in other countries there's the same variety of women
To all my soldiers in county jail, I salute you
Why can't we be united like we used to?
We move things around like heroine and crack
You're worried about that, when there's terrorist acts?
Why do you act like problems solve themselves?
In an 8 by 12 cell, the equation is hell
If I was in the army I could kill and fight
But civilian kill civilian and they'd give me life...."
- J. Choate
"....
February 5 2010
The country's as fucked up
As it's ever been
Will we turn around
And do it again
Trillions of dollars
Will we ever be out of debt
Probably not
That's what I bet
Sold out to China
Too many like their food
We love their fortune cookies
But that isn't good
Telescopes hunting
For other planets that live
Another disaster
Borrow some money to give
Americans taking babies
But leaving the sick
Distracting with one hand
While the other does tricks
We'll show the world
Who has the biggest dick
Don't so no to war
Let's get into it thick
Put all the drug users
Into our jails
Until we go broke
And our system then fails
....
What will we do
When the Chinamen come
When we sell them our homes
That won't be any fun
Or maybe the Iranians
Will put us in our place
We should sell them Iraq
Reunite Persia to save face
-D. Mallett
*
Jail Anthem
I Hate Being told what to do
When to shit and how to move
What time we eat and all the food
I hate being broke as ah fucking joke
Money on the books but I can't buy smokes
Can't drive a car or even a boat
I'm sick of hearing the word Nope
I hate waking up to the bad days
Lookin around at the possible gays
Me and my duaghter can't even play
I hate that I'm back here in jail
Stuck here without any bail
Everyday they holding my mail
Rehab's nothin but a fairy tale
-J. Howard
My free write on it was much less encompassing but a little more aligned with Ginsberg's tone:
America you gave me all the cans of cubed
fruit and kidney beans a girl could
want
You measured and dated baby after
baby and said, You do whatever you want
You said, The third time's the charm
America you made me feel like a feisty piece of
shit in my 1994 Oldsmobile, your drive thrus taunting
I navigated front seat electronic window stuck at 2" open
America you've been screaming at me to "Lose the baby weight" since
I was a baby, weighing your values in the
express lane. You told me to be young and vibrant, to
focus on a career. You told me seek first the kingdom of
individuality, then effortless love would be
added unto it. I tried to
interpret my dreams they became thick with gunsmoke,
the foreign accent of Grand Theft Auto sex gods, America
you left my faither to raise us on hardtack and Genesis and
whatever he picked up at those single parent support groups.
The new wife of my father made chop suey and
eventually, whole grains. Her well behaved daughters placed the
ground wheat berries and everything else, the same amount everytime,
in a bread maching.
The old wife of my father (the dark one who lived to lose her tooth,
drunk on the pavement, weak from hepatitis), used to knead with her
dusty knuckles, measured nothing.
America I have lost all sense of proportion. I don't
know the first thing about politics. I voted for Nader the year I was 18,
and America, I hardly ever wear my seatbelt. I fantasize about dying
every day and take fish oil, valerian, probiotics.
I made a pair of mittens on a sewing machine with lots of supervision, I
was hoping to woo him slow and sweet, to turn back
time, I dragged myself antsy through the stitchy process, listening to
Miley Cyrus, who said, "If you text it, I'll delete it," among
other things.
The Greyhound bus could not make it up the snowy hill so I
walked down it with the mittens, smoking my last Pall Mall for a
very long time because despite the reinvented
argyle sweater I was
already
knocked up.
*
"America why do you have to put people in jail like Dean Mallett who needs to get out to take care of his twenty cats." - Charlie
"Do you want me to make a loud sound when the two minutes are up?" - the guy who keeps farting extremely loudly during our writing times.
"No thanks, you've contributed plenty tonight."
"She's a douchebag. I want to punch her in the face then have sex with her." - the farting guy.
"You are a misogynist. While I appreciate the comedy, I hope you never date anyone again."
*
"Don't waste your time with that Castenada stuff... It's interesting, I know, all the teleporting... I wasted a lot of time with it, but..."
"I know, it's not Gospel Truth."
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
What is a mortal sin?
"I think she'll be a girl, and I think she'll be handicapped."*
Geez.
I'm sluggish from dinner two hours ago, and slumping over in bed with "A Guide to Rational Living" in the too hot apartment. I have to move in under two months, which will definitely rain on the sloth-party. The keyboard isn't working as well as it used to and certain keys aren't sticking.
I'm trying to focus on gratitude instead of wishing things were different but it's a constant battle. My eyes are burning a bit from the heat and the tiredness. Last night I dreamt I gave birth to sextuplets. The sensation was more strange than painful (one after another). Two died in the womb and I was going to need a D & C (dilation & cutterage, a surgery that is considered fairly safe unless it's for an elective abortion). I remember being overwhelmed at the prospect of a parade of Virgos more than anything else (at one time I was sitting at a booth with the two girls and the boy who lived and they were quite grown up and though I loved them I was sort of like, man, you kids are a bit dull) Of the four I gave birth to, there were two boys and two girls. The boys were seriously handicapped and the girls were fine. One boy was almost like a corndog on a stick, which explains nothing I realize. He perished almost immediately. The other boy was severely disabled mentally and physically which ended up being somehow a beautiful experience and though it's terrible lazy for me to just drop that like a stone, I can't imagine how to convey it.
My professor Jill Rubinson (I dream of her often) was around, and I gave her a very graceful hug which is something I'm not really good at it and I always jump a bit when I do it. (I tend to be more comfortable in sexual embraces. Physical displays of platonic affection elude me). I said something about wanting to go to grad school and she very tactfully changed the focus to a sixth grade teaching job which I later realized, sadly, was because I was saddled with all the children.
Fatalism is the enemy of rationalism and I wonder what I'm doing because I don't fully expect it to improve the quality of my life but more so to bring shame and stress. I feel compelled to do it so I might as well embrace it. There are plenty of appealing notions regarding having a child and I mainly only regret the mate I chose. I keep having awful and also condescending thoughts about how it's not all about me, and perhaps it is my mission to help him and improve the quality of his life and it doesn't matter if I'm happy with him.** The last time I clearly thought this, that someone was potentially gaining far more out of the relationship than I was, was with DH, who in a matter of a few short months, shot me with a rifle.
I made good on that experience by celebrating my individuality and pursuing pleasure as I always have. I love to eat and also drink and smoke, and after the initial shock, and hospitalization, and horrid days deprived even of eating because of huge doses of anesthesia (one surgery was nine hours, which is still nothing compared to some) I settled quite comfortably into several new routines. I lived with my brother in Whitefield in a lofty three room apartment in Richmond. The room I slept in used to be the Orthodox church sanctuary when the Russians first settled there. At night he lit a candle in the ikon, which at first bothered me, but was nothing compared to the brightness of the Boston hospital.
After four months with my brother in which we bickered (once he said, "Everyone's crazy, but you're a little more crazy than everyone else" and I slapped him in the face. Now he is practically begging me to move to Kentucky to be cared for by he & his soon to be wife. He has a dazzling faith, a child like optimism which never flogs for long) , I cooked strange dinners, I went by wheelchair and then crutches to the general store a couple blocks away and lingered there for inordinate amounts of time, leaving with a banana, two sweet potatos, who now can say? After this, he decided to go to a monastery, and El had been patiently courting me for some time, beginning in the hospital during which he slept on an incredibly uncomfortable padded surface in front of the window, bummed pain medication off me (I rarely ate even half of what they administered; with the exception of one notable weekend in ICU), took my money and bought me chicken caesar salad from the cafeteria every night and shared my overflowing trays of food. We watched a lot of bad movies.
He drove out to Richmond with increasing frequency and I kept saying I'm not going to date you, I'm not going to date you, and he would say I know, that's not why I do this. And one night we went to Augusta and drank rather heavily with FP and perhaps some others in the same building where I was shot, only a different apartment, and I was going to sleep on the spare bed in his basement bedroom at his parent's house, and it was something like 3 am, and he turned off the lights, and I jumped into his bed, and he said, You're going to hurt me, and I said, Yeah, that's probably true, and we were up long after the sun rose.
And so when my brother went to the monastery I moved into an apartment with El, and though we fought miserably- I was whacking him with crutches, the computer went flying, we made ourselves hoarse... I had my own mattress which shamed him, I wanted to sleep alone, I was always on my way out, and awful, I had bangs and we made a home movie in which I berate him and bask in his attraction to me and though it is funny on some level and on an even distanter plain slightly endearing, it is shocking cruel - I remember many good things, the dinners he made me, the way the leaves looked in the sunshine like a canopy out the slanting third story windows.
I left that apartment in a whirlwind. I was hospitalized immediately after a debaucherous Thanksgiving for an infection (my foot was huge and puffy and red, streaks were going up my leg, and I remember thinking, which: emergency room, or Karaoke Night at Bridge Street Tavern?) in which I sent El away from the hospital because D, on a whim I imagine, deigned to visit me there, and I told El this over the phone on a quadruple dose of intravaneous benadryl, because I'd started to swell in the throat from a certain antibiotic, and had hopped into the hall screaming for help when no one answered the nurse call bell. And El was hysterical, cursing me, who knows, and I fell asleep under the spell of legal narcotics.
I'd been plotting my escape with the Family Violence Project Homeless Shelter for some time... what an experience, I'm too lazy to continue. I was there for four months. I hope someday I really want to write, though it all slips away so fast. I think more than anything else, being in the shelter made me want to have children because I saw how they could be a joy under even dire circumstances.
I'd rather talk about those things which are impossible to explain, like how it's much harder to be kind to someone with whom you're very familiar, & utterly entrenched in a dynamic of petty disputes, to rise above this is nothing like rejecting a person's attempt at being cruel. The way I eat all kinds of rich things, and always have, but genuinely love hardboiled eggs, mashed up with salt and cayenne, and whatever else is on the table (bits of french fry, nutritional yeast, Annie's macaroni and cheese, whatever).
*This was a superstition/fear left over/inherited from the great electrical shock of the pregnancy of spicy shalom in the year of our Lord 2010.
**There is nothing, ever, to regret in kindness. What I do, however, is never consistent. I am kind and patient for awhile, cooking food, dispensing reminders, covering costs and (now) giving rides. Then I explode in rage and criticism because I don't see my efforts rewarded. Disinterested kindness is never as investment though.
And I miss other boys who waited on me in such obvious ways. This one is a good lover and very smart but very, very stuck and ineffective. He articulated his background in a way I'd never heard him do tonight, after an unusually relaxed dinner. (I don't consider us "back together," but I am straining, nearly popping at certain times, to try to hear what he has to say. It is worth a fucking shot...as long as the hands aren't for hitting.) He said his parents are trapped in a marriage in which they both resent the other, and it keeps them from getting anywhere. His dad recents his mother for coming from snobby intellectuals, for getting a free college education at Columbia, for believing her to be a workaholic who is overly success oriented. His mother resents his father for, I'm not actually sure, but if I were her I'd resent him for not doing his share (he doesn't work, he doesn't cook nearly as much, he doesn't attend church or drive their nine year old around nearly as much), and for regularly insulting her in front of people.
The more time passes the more I realize that it is not jealousy that I feel for this family but a sort of fascination with the stuck-ness, with the potential for beauty. D. has a certain flair and I've always hunted for its origin. I keep thinking about legacy, and who can escape it? I don't know where the deeper lesson is. In sticking it out and being kind and generous, or kicking someone who doesn't do their part to the curb. I think that when I'm purely rational about it, I realize that either way is okay. It's fatalism to believe I'm cursed to a certain path that doesn't aid me (that I've gone the wrong way), as though there were one correct way to live.
There are other men, if need be. I'm as guilty as everyone else of giving D mixed messages. Sometimes I tell him he must change, he must be responsible, what is wrong with him, everyone else does it. Other times I tell him I believe he can't. It's this age old sort of unspoken debate about the difference between one who can't and one who won't. As I wrote I think only a few posts ago, it does seem that if someone won't, they can't.
My mother is not one of those people who says she's an alcoholic because she sometimes drinks too much and it's an elegant or appealing notion in many circles. My mother is a black out, fall down, front-tooth losing, seizuring, failing-liver spectacle. I have honestly never seen anything like it. When I was a kid she used to drink twenty four packs. She's 5'6" and hovers around 115 when she's eating. She says the years when my brother and I were babies were the happiest of her life and the photographic evidence heavily supports this claim. She is an amazing cook. Her homemade bread, her challah, her pie crusts and the little cinnamon rolls she makes from the scraps make me cry.
She was so afraid of me getting my period. She used to nervously broach the topic whenever I was home from school. She used to always say that when it happened to her she had no idea, that she was so scared. My mom never had a mother. She lost her in infancy to breast cancer. My father lost his own father before his first year to a heart attack. In a way it's a miracle that my brother and I are (except for perhaps me), really okay. People can rise above practically anything.
When I finally got it (my period, of course), after my first school dance in sixth grade, she was nowhere to be found.
I had forgotten how truly angry her departure when I was ten (no contact for over a year while she worked in a gift shop and got drunk in a tiny, roach-inhabited apartment in Daytona Beach with her boyfriend, whose connection to our family is one of astounding irony as he was an old high school friend of my father's who resurfaced three years before the affair when he- my father - was suicidal over his own violence and failure and in this opportune environment, he, the soon-to-be boyfriend of my mother, converted my father to fundamentalist Christianity; he, the new-boyfriend, also had the same full name as my brother's then-best friend) made me until a few days ago when we had a spat regarding whether or not she would offer me support in terms of childcare. She was rather evasive, kept saying, I'll do what I can. When I asked her to please be more specific to help me plan the best course of action, she was unusually hostile. She said, What do you want me to do? Move in with you? Take care of your child all the time because you don't want to? I said, You're a bitch, and hung up the phone.
This was three days ago or so. She's been sober for months because she has hepatitis and could easily die if she's not. She is a great mystery to me and someone I'm inclined to avoid even when I give her accolades from afar and fantasize about her split pea soup with the stringy pieces of ham.
I haven't felt like writing any of this. I think I'm going to do some planning. I don't know if I want to write about my own life or not. It is simply the most accessible and the most potentially authentic, but it's growing rather boring to me.
Geez.
I'm sluggish from dinner two hours ago, and slumping over in bed with "A Guide to Rational Living" in the too hot apartment. I have to move in under two months, which will definitely rain on the sloth-party. The keyboard isn't working as well as it used to and certain keys aren't sticking.
I'm trying to focus on gratitude instead of wishing things were different but it's a constant battle. My eyes are burning a bit from the heat and the tiredness. Last night I dreamt I gave birth to sextuplets. The sensation was more strange than painful (one after another). Two died in the womb and I was going to need a D & C (dilation & cutterage, a surgery that is considered fairly safe unless it's for an elective abortion). I remember being overwhelmed at the prospect of a parade of Virgos more than anything else (at one time I was sitting at a booth with the two girls and the boy who lived and they were quite grown up and though I loved them I was sort of like, man, you kids are a bit dull) Of the four I gave birth to, there were two boys and two girls. The boys were seriously handicapped and the girls were fine. One boy was almost like a corndog on a stick, which explains nothing I realize. He perished almost immediately. The other boy was severely disabled mentally and physically which ended up being somehow a beautiful experience and though it's terrible lazy for me to just drop that like a stone, I can't imagine how to convey it.
My professor Jill Rubinson (I dream of her often) was around, and I gave her a very graceful hug which is something I'm not really good at it and I always jump a bit when I do it. (I tend to be more comfortable in sexual embraces. Physical displays of platonic affection elude me). I said something about wanting to go to grad school and she very tactfully changed the focus to a sixth grade teaching job which I later realized, sadly, was because I was saddled with all the children.
Fatalism is the enemy of rationalism and I wonder what I'm doing because I don't fully expect it to improve the quality of my life but more so to bring shame and stress. I feel compelled to do it so I might as well embrace it. There are plenty of appealing notions regarding having a child and I mainly only regret the mate I chose. I keep having awful and also condescending thoughts about how it's not all about me, and perhaps it is my mission to help him and improve the quality of his life and it doesn't matter if I'm happy with him.** The last time I clearly thought this, that someone was potentially gaining far more out of the relationship than I was, was with DH, who in a matter of a few short months, shot me with a rifle.
I made good on that experience by celebrating my individuality and pursuing pleasure as I always have. I love to eat and also drink and smoke, and after the initial shock, and hospitalization, and horrid days deprived even of eating because of huge doses of anesthesia (one surgery was nine hours, which is still nothing compared to some) I settled quite comfortably into several new routines. I lived with my brother in Whitefield in a lofty three room apartment in Richmond. The room I slept in used to be the Orthodox church sanctuary when the Russians first settled there. At night he lit a candle in the ikon, which at first bothered me, but was nothing compared to the brightness of the Boston hospital.
After four months with my brother in which we bickered (once he said, "Everyone's crazy, but you're a little more crazy than everyone else" and I slapped him in the face. Now he is practically begging me to move to Kentucky to be cared for by he & his soon to be wife. He has a dazzling faith, a child like optimism which never flogs for long) , I cooked strange dinners, I went by wheelchair and then crutches to the general store a couple blocks away and lingered there for inordinate amounts of time, leaving with a banana, two sweet potatos, who now can say? After this, he decided to go to a monastery, and El had been patiently courting me for some time, beginning in the hospital during which he slept on an incredibly uncomfortable padded surface in front of the window, bummed pain medication off me (I rarely ate even half of what they administered; with the exception of one notable weekend in ICU), took my money and bought me chicken caesar salad from the cafeteria every night and shared my overflowing trays of food. We watched a lot of bad movies.
He drove out to Richmond with increasing frequency and I kept saying I'm not going to date you, I'm not going to date you, and he would say I know, that's not why I do this. And one night we went to Augusta and drank rather heavily with FP and perhaps some others in the same building where I was shot, only a different apartment, and I was going to sleep on the spare bed in his basement bedroom at his parent's house, and it was something like 3 am, and he turned off the lights, and I jumped into his bed, and he said, You're going to hurt me, and I said, Yeah, that's probably true, and we were up long after the sun rose.
And so when my brother went to the monastery I moved into an apartment with El, and though we fought miserably- I was whacking him with crutches, the computer went flying, we made ourselves hoarse... I had my own mattress which shamed him, I wanted to sleep alone, I was always on my way out, and awful, I had bangs and we made a home movie in which I berate him and bask in his attraction to me and though it is funny on some level and on an even distanter plain slightly endearing, it is shocking cruel - I remember many good things, the dinners he made me, the way the leaves looked in the sunshine like a canopy out the slanting third story windows.
I left that apartment in a whirlwind. I was hospitalized immediately after a debaucherous Thanksgiving for an infection (my foot was huge and puffy and red, streaks were going up my leg, and I remember thinking, which: emergency room, or Karaoke Night at Bridge Street Tavern?) in which I sent El away from the hospital because D, on a whim I imagine, deigned to visit me there, and I told El this over the phone on a quadruple dose of intravaneous benadryl, because I'd started to swell in the throat from a certain antibiotic, and had hopped into the hall screaming for help when no one answered the nurse call bell. And El was hysterical, cursing me, who knows, and I fell asleep under the spell of legal narcotics.
I'd been plotting my escape with the Family Violence Project Homeless Shelter for some time... what an experience, I'm too lazy to continue. I was there for four months. I hope someday I really want to write, though it all slips away so fast. I think more than anything else, being in the shelter made me want to have children because I saw how they could be a joy under even dire circumstances.
I'd rather talk about those things which are impossible to explain, like how it's much harder to be kind to someone with whom you're very familiar, & utterly entrenched in a dynamic of petty disputes, to rise above this is nothing like rejecting a person's attempt at being cruel. The way I eat all kinds of rich things, and always have, but genuinely love hardboiled eggs, mashed up with salt and cayenne, and whatever else is on the table (bits of french fry, nutritional yeast, Annie's macaroni and cheese, whatever).
*This was a superstition/fear left over/inherited from the great electrical shock of the pregnancy of spicy shalom in the year of our Lord 2010.
**There is nothing, ever, to regret in kindness. What I do, however, is never consistent. I am kind and patient for awhile, cooking food, dispensing reminders, covering costs and (now) giving rides. Then I explode in rage and criticism because I don't see my efforts rewarded. Disinterested kindness is never as investment though.
And I miss other boys who waited on me in such obvious ways. This one is a good lover and very smart but very, very stuck and ineffective. He articulated his background in a way I'd never heard him do tonight, after an unusually relaxed dinner. (I don't consider us "back together," but I am straining, nearly popping at certain times, to try to hear what he has to say. It is worth a fucking shot...as long as the hands aren't for hitting.) He said his parents are trapped in a marriage in which they both resent the other, and it keeps them from getting anywhere. His dad recents his mother for coming from snobby intellectuals, for getting a free college education at Columbia, for believing her to be a workaholic who is overly success oriented. His mother resents his father for, I'm not actually sure, but if I were her I'd resent him for not doing his share (he doesn't work, he doesn't cook nearly as much, he doesn't attend church or drive their nine year old around nearly as much), and for regularly insulting her in front of people.
The more time passes the more I realize that it is not jealousy that I feel for this family but a sort of fascination with the stuck-ness, with the potential for beauty. D. has a certain flair and I've always hunted for its origin. I keep thinking about legacy, and who can escape it? I don't know where the deeper lesson is. In sticking it out and being kind and generous, or kicking someone who doesn't do their part to the curb. I think that when I'm purely rational about it, I realize that either way is okay. It's fatalism to believe I'm cursed to a certain path that doesn't aid me (that I've gone the wrong way), as though there were one correct way to live.
There are other men, if need be. I'm as guilty as everyone else of giving D mixed messages. Sometimes I tell him he must change, he must be responsible, what is wrong with him, everyone else does it. Other times I tell him I believe he can't. It's this age old sort of unspoken debate about the difference between one who can't and one who won't. As I wrote I think only a few posts ago, it does seem that if someone won't, they can't.
My mother is not one of those people who says she's an alcoholic because she sometimes drinks too much and it's an elegant or appealing notion in many circles. My mother is a black out, fall down, front-tooth losing, seizuring, failing-liver spectacle. I have honestly never seen anything like it. When I was a kid she used to drink twenty four packs. She's 5'6" and hovers around 115 when she's eating. She says the years when my brother and I were babies were the happiest of her life and the photographic evidence heavily supports this claim. She is an amazing cook. Her homemade bread, her challah, her pie crusts and the little cinnamon rolls she makes from the scraps make me cry.
She was so afraid of me getting my period. She used to nervously broach the topic whenever I was home from school. She used to always say that when it happened to her she had no idea, that she was so scared. My mom never had a mother. She lost her in infancy to breast cancer. My father lost his own father before his first year to a heart attack. In a way it's a miracle that my brother and I are (except for perhaps me), really okay. People can rise above practically anything.
When I finally got it (my period, of course), after my first school dance in sixth grade, she was nowhere to be found.
I had forgotten how truly angry her departure when I was ten (no contact for over a year while she worked in a gift shop and got drunk in a tiny, roach-inhabited apartment in Daytona Beach with her boyfriend, whose connection to our family is one of astounding irony as he was an old high school friend of my father's who resurfaced three years before the affair when he- my father - was suicidal over his own violence and failure and in this opportune environment, he, the soon-to-be boyfriend of my mother, converted my father to fundamentalist Christianity; he, the new-boyfriend, also had the same full name as my brother's then-best friend) made me until a few days ago when we had a spat regarding whether or not she would offer me support in terms of childcare. She was rather evasive, kept saying, I'll do what I can. When I asked her to please be more specific to help me plan the best course of action, she was unusually hostile. She said, What do you want me to do? Move in with you? Take care of your child all the time because you don't want to? I said, You're a bitch, and hung up the phone.
This was three days ago or so. She's been sober for months because she has hepatitis and could easily die if she's not. She is a great mystery to me and someone I'm inclined to avoid even when I give her accolades from afar and fantasize about her split pea soup with the stringy pieces of ham.
I haven't felt like writing any of this. I think I'm going to do some planning. I don't know if I want to write about my own life or not. It is simply the most accessible and the most potentially authentic, but it's growing rather boring to me.
Monday, February 1, 2010
shit
For a long time I have wondered how big of a crisis it will require to make me take the Kingdom by force. To make me love God above all others. I thought the gunshot, that gasping and soaked-sweating on the threshold of two rooms, beggint to live, would transform my character in remarkable ways but it did not. As I've noted elsewhere (Myspace, for example), it merely reinforced certain character traits I was already aware of. That I generally will endure anything, but I do it partly by making the people around me utterly miserable, bitching the whole way through; crying through the finish line. Or walking through it.
I do, generally, finish what I truly set out to do, and rather well, but I don't enjoy the process. I am certainly "neurotic" but in some ways the type that has a very hard time but presses on. Does this make me superior to those who give up in their frustration? Not at all, considering the hell I put the people who try to care for me through on a regular basis.
You see, I don't mean to. I never set out to hurt anyone. I don't think anyone did, except for perhaps after a certain point. How to reconcile this innocence of intention with original sin is a question for the philosophers and theologians but I don't think intention and nature are one in the same. We intend to be better than our nature, I think. Sometimes we succeed, and it's beautiful.
So much pain could have been spared, so many trials avoided. I never had to have this pregnancy under these circumstances. I never had to be hanging around with that guy who shot me. There were warning signs galore in these and many other of the situations I complain about and even garner sympathy for; plenty of opportunities to flee, and genuine rallying of the soul, to do so.
As the the leaders of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy teach, however, one bad choice does not doom one to keep making them. No situation utterly compels anyone to be miserable. For sure, many parts of life are unpleasant and annoying. They concede that when faced with the death of a loved one, there are no thoughts which can stop the grief process, and that this is part of our biology and what helps us survive. At the same time, we tend to react with our physiological alarms to trifles as though they were tragedies.
My current situation is perhaps in between (a trife and a tragedy), in transition?
I'm a little distracted because I lent my car, not that it's of great worth, but it's all I have, to someone without a license. That someone is my (again, my what? I can't call him my boyfriend, my fiance, or anything. Or I don't care to, at this point) he's my... co-producer in this freakshow, so to speak, and he's been rather awful these past few weeks, and then, so have I. But I'll be damned if I don't try to be civil.
So after several apologies from him, and several days without speaking, and a scenario yesterday in which I scored tons of free baby gear from his friend RF (which surprised me deeply; I honestly thought he wouldn't give it up, out of arbitrary spite. And then he did; he and his child's mother saved me -us? I'll say me, for now- hours and hours of hunting at the least and perhaps up to a thousand dollars). I got a state of the art crib, two strollers, a high chair, a changing table, a swing. It restored my faith in this process not a little. I will be honest in saying that I resent having to spend tons of money on a creature that cannot even socialize with me. I know some would condemn me for such an attitude. But sometimes I think these feelings are better expressed (in an appropriate context, not to the child or anywhere they will unearth... or maybe, I don't know; Anne Lammott wrote vividly in her best-selling memoir of single-parenting an infant of her homicidal fantasies in that postpartum haze, and many from those trenches - i.e., other parents- were relieved more than disgusted) then repressed.
My original point being that I am trying to be civil to the father of my child, and give him a thorough benefit of the doubt. On Thursday we had an awful scene and he snapped his cell phone in frustration and proclaimed, "Now I really won't be getting any jobs," or something of that manner.
He hasn't had a phone since, so I did something that is not in the vein of tough love. But he had given me a small amount of money, so I picked him up from his friend R's, where he and his younger brother C were painting (C for money, he for effing guitar pedals; that is another haunting tale) the kitchen. I brought him bologna and cheddar on a buttered and toasted sesame bagel and two plump donut holes, and I bought him a cordless phone and an answering machine, since the house he lives in co-owned by his father (and two uncles, inherited from his late grandmother) has phone service. That way he can use that line for jobs, and not pay for a cell if he doesn't.
He seems attached to the cell, I don't know why, but at least he has a more practical option now. I also let him drive. But than I let him take the car to get me a sundae by himself and he has been gone over half an hour and I am quite upset.
to be continued
I do, generally, finish what I truly set out to do, and rather well, but I don't enjoy the process. I am certainly "neurotic" but in some ways the type that has a very hard time but presses on. Does this make me superior to those who give up in their frustration? Not at all, considering the hell I put the people who try to care for me through on a regular basis.
You see, I don't mean to. I never set out to hurt anyone. I don't think anyone did, except for perhaps after a certain point. How to reconcile this innocence of intention with original sin is a question for the philosophers and theologians but I don't think intention and nature are one in the same. We intend to be better than our nature, I think. Sometimes we succeed, and it's beautiful.
So much pain could have been spared, so many trials avoided. I never had to have this pregnancy under these circumstances. I never had to be hanging around with that guy who shot me. There were warning signs galore in these and many other of the situations I complain about and even garner sympathy for; plenty of opportunities to flee, and genuine rallying of the soul, to do so.
As the the leaders of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy teach, however, one bad choice does not doom one to keep making them. No situation utterly compels anyone to be miserable. For sure, many parts of life are unpleasant and annoying. They concede that when faced with the death of a loved one, there are no thoughts which can stop the grief process, and that this is part of our biology and what helps us survive. At the same time, we tend to react with our physiological alarms to trifles as though they were tragedies.
My current situation is perhaps in between (a trife and a tragedy), in transition?
I'm a little distracted because I lent my car, not that it's of great worth, but it's all I have, to someone without a license. That someone is my (again, my what? I can't call him my boyfriend, my fiance, or anything. Or I don't care to, at this point) he's my... co-producer in this freakshow, so to speak, and he's been rather awful these past few weeks, and then, so have I. But I'll be damned if I don't try to be civil.
So after several apologies from him, and several days without speaking, and a scenario yesterday in which I scored tons of free baby gear from his friend RF (which surprised me deeply; I honestly thought he wouldn't give it up, out of arbitrary spite. And then he did; he and his child's mother saved me -us? I'll say me, for now- hours and hours of hunting at the least and perhaps up to a thousand dollars). I got a state of the art crib, two strollers, a high chair, a changing table, a swing. It restored my faith in this process not a little. I will be honest in saying that I resent having to spend tons of money on a creature that cannot even socialize with me. I know some would condemn me for such an attitude. But sometimes I think these feelings are better expressed (in an appropriate context, not to the child or anywhere they will unearth... or maybe, I don't know; Anne Lammott wrote vividly in her best-selling memoir of single-parenting an infant of her homicidal fantasies in that postpartum haze, and many from those trenches - i.e., other parents- were relieved more than disgusted) then repressed.
My original point being that I am trying to be civil to the father of my child, and give him a thorough benefit of the doubt. On Thursday we had an awful scene and he snapped his cell phone in frustration and proclaimed, "Now I really won't be getting any jobs," or something of that manner.
He hasn't had a phone since, so I did something that is not in the vein of tough love. But he had given me a small amount of money, so I picked him up from his friend R's, where he and his younger brother C were painting (C for money, he for effing guitar pedals; that is another haunting tale) the kitchen. I brought him bologna and cheddar on a buttered and toasted sesame bagel and two plump donut holes, and I bought him a cordless phone and an answering machine, since the house he lives in co-owned by his father (and two uncles, inherited from his late grandmother) has phone service. That way he can use that line for jobs, and not pay for a cell if he doesn't.
He seems attached to the cell, I don't know why, but at least he has a more practical option now. I also let him drive. But than I let him take the car to get me a sundae by himself and he has been gone over half an hour and I am quite upset.
to be continued
Saturday, January 30, 2010
And nobody ever thanked me for teaching them the art of love
As always, I am kidding. (And pay steeply for my jokes)
It's the full moon, the time of my period, is this phantom PMS I feel?
Like J, I've been (albeit, very noncommittally/pessimistically ) trying to think of a way to make money writing. I have this idea that I could be rather original. I have a desire to be able to stay home with the baby. (I do want to keep the baby, I just don't know, how to stop repeating myself.) Vague ideas regarding sending poems to magazines. I did enter a magazine essay contest once. For Real & Simple, $3000 cash prize. The topic was to describe the most important day of your life, and I alluded to my gunshot injury in the most discursive, rambling, and anticlimactic fashion possible. I wrote until I reached 1500 words, and stopped. I think I've lost it in the shuffle.
The blogosphere seems beyond my comprehension, and I'm too stubborn to honor themes. I feel like if I'm freelancing on assigned topics, it's not really writing, but perhaps that is a symptom of immaturity. Of course if I actually found a way to make money, I'd probably feel different. The truth is that focus can sharpen and enhance the process of writing; I found a certain energy in writing literary analysis. Narrowing my approach to the defense of a thesis actually seemed to make me more creative, because I have a tendency to string words together rather thoughtlessly, to write as though (I always use this unremarkable metaphor) paddling idly in a canoe. (Do I need a sugar-daddy to support my child's need for recreation, for the great outdoors?)
I've never been so pregnant before, and it's barely started. The past couple weeks have been an astounding exercise in isolation, mostly because I push people away, as the saying goes. I haven't conversed with anyone in my family or had any social interactions except poor El, with whom I'm keeping it clean and honestly have no romantic interest in. What his motives are, only God can say- but he is engaging and sympathetic company. I haven't talked to D in a few days, though I received a very apologetic email (which I wrote back to as diplomatically as possible; I see the benefit in leaving the lines open) and a couple phone calls. He gives up so easily though, and I need my space. Yes, I secretly wish he would fight to “win” my affection back, but I know the way he is, and the way we've been, and those are the fantasies of a young girl, and I have bigger fish to fry.
(I wasn't the first and I won't be the last, but at the end of the day I'm alone. / It might have been curse or a veritable blast, if I'dve just let it grown.)
The high points in my week were- besides eating, of course- babysitting a ten year old and visiting my mentee at the Boys and Girl's Club. I had a couple appointments in the morning which knocked me out for the rest of the day-- I've been sleeping 10 + hours a night -- reduced me in fatigue to a screaming, sobbing toddler. As I contemplate the last few days, my eyes get wet.
And sometimes the only thing that makes it feel better is realizing that it's not really a big deal. Instead of touting a ruined life like a mantra, realize that there are many paths. You took a certain path, big deal. It is never too late to be forgiven by God, to become enlightened, and to act responsibly. And though no power on earth, no brush with death or fantastic heartbreak, has ever shaped me up, that too- that being inured to change*- is a common enough plight. Nothing is new under the sun, and no mistake I'm making has not been made, and anything can happen. What I fear most of all is my aversion to social contact, when I need it the most. I already feel heavy and awkward. The dragging laziness of a day in which I force myself to go for a brief walk to get a little sunshine and exercise, only to obliterate any benefit with huge meals and laying in bed the rest of the day, and to wash the dishes, looking upon the dirty walls and dirty floor and really cursing the day I was born; where was I?
As if this is redeemed or transformed by communicating. This isn't communicating/ the story has no moral. I am no victim.
And life comes from the wretchedest places, slips through the booze shaped cracks, and mean people spring the loveliest faces, Don't turn back & just relax.
The writing, well, that's another story. I just want to be not depressed and not a fucking bitch.
(*A single mother I admire listed as one of her interests on her Myspace profile "being forced into change kicking and screaming." She is one of many young mothers with little support who thrives despite not being particularly maternal, not being totally overjoyed at motherhood. You don't have to feel it's the best thing to ever happen to you to do a good job, it's okay even to think you should have waited. You just protect your child from these feelings as is age appropriate, and are committed and loving, and grow into your role. <- Best case scenario. I'm very afraid)
We'd do anything to laugh, man. The father of my child, the father of my child, is not meek or kind or wild, The father of my child, the father of my child … Someday I will write a babydaddy poem.
It's 7:40 and I'm boiling eggs. I will eat several of them with multiple bowls of cereal, keefer, and hopefully not too much else. I have been ravenous, the old wives' tales point to a boy. I'm almost at the point where I think if it's a boy I'll have it put up for adoption. I know that's flippant and evil but where are all those babydaddies? Sure, the tide is shifting, incrementally, but seriously, where are all the baby daddies? Why do we blame the women? (Do you think your the fucking prime minister, you shoot out a wad of embargo. / The priests tell you fornication is sinister, but women they carry the cargo. )
Although in many ways I am grateful to be in America and am almost positive I will be fed and sheltered, I am angry at this culture for contributing to my impulsivity and isolation. While in the final count, my blame rests on me, our society is hysterical, the fucking tabloids man, the baby mania and the in vitro and the push-pull of finding a man or saving yourself. Sometimes it really is better to be alone, I've never felt more certain. Anyway, someday I will tell you all my opinions about how we attract people who seem like tyrants for good reason, how none of us are more wrong than anyone else, etc. But I walk in a fog of hunger. The only thing that seems pegged down is when I am perched on my stool (I've developed an aversion to the chair I usually sit in) hovered over a plate of food, devouring it without the interruption of silverware or other human beings.
(Nobody once asked me, would you like to be born. / There was no invitation*, no allegiance was sworn. )
*Or was there?
The "Scarlett Letter" stood for Adultery. A. Abortion. Adoption. And and and and and
It's the full moon, the time of my period, is this phantom PMS I feel?
Like J, I've been (albeit, very noncommittally/pessimistically ) trying to think of a way to make money writing. I have this idea that I could be rather original. I have a desire to be able to stay home with the baby. (I do want to keep the baby, I just don't know, how to stop repeating myself.) Vague ideas regarding sending poems to magazines. I did enter a magazine essay contest once. For Real & Simple, $3000 cash prize. The topic was to describe the most important day of your life, and I alluded to my gunshot injury in the most discursive, rambling, and anticlimactic fashion possible. I wrote until I reached 1500 words, and stopped. I think I've lost it in the shuffle.
The blogosphere seems beyond my comprehension, and I'm too stubborn to honor themes. I feel like if I'm freelancing on assigned topics, it's not really writing, but perhaps that is a symptom of immaturity. Of course if I actually found a way to make money, I'd probably feel different. The truth is that focus can sharpen and enhance the process of writing; I found a certain energy in writing literary analysis. Narrowing my approach to the defense of a thesis actually seemed to make me more creative, because I have a tendency to string words together rather thoughtlessly, to write as though (I always use this unremarkable metaphor) paddling idly in a canoe. (Do I need a sugar-daddy to support my child's need for recreation, for the great outdoors?)
I've never been so pregnant before, and it's barely started. The past couple weeks have been an astounding exercise in isolation, mostly because I push people away, as the saying goes. I haven't conversed with anyone in my family or had any social interactions except poor El, with whom I'm keeping it clean and honestly have no romantic interest in. What his motives are, only God can say- but he is engaging and sympathetic company. I haven't talked to D in a few days, though I received a very apologetic email (which I wrote back to as diplomatically as possible; I see the benefit in leaving the lines open) and a couple phone calls. He gives up so easily though, and I need my space. Yes, I secretly wish he would fight to “win” my affection back, but I know the way he is, and the way we've been, and those are the fantasies of a young girl, and I have bigger fish to fry.
(I wasn't the first and I won't be the last, but at the end of the day I'm alone. / It might have been curse or a veritable blast, if I'dve just let it grown.)
The high points in my week were- besides eating, of course- babysitting a ten year old and visiting my mentee at the Boys and Girl's Club. I had a couple appointments in the morning which knocked me out for the rest of the day-- I've been sleeping 10 + hours a night -- reduced me in fatigue to a screaming, sobbing toddler. As I contemplate the last few days, my eyes get wet.
And sometimes the only thing that makes it feel better is realizing that it's not really a big deal. Instead of touting a ruined life like a mantra, realize that there are many paths. You took a certain path, big deal. It is never too late to be forgiven by God, to become enlightened, and to act responsibly. And though no power on earth, no brush with death or fantastic heartbreak, has ever shaped me up, that too- that being inured to change*- is a common enough plight. Nothing is new under the sun, and no mistake I'm making has not been made, and anything can happen. What I fear most of all is my aversion to social contact, when I need it the most. I already feel heavy and awkward. The dragging laziness of a day in which I force myself to go for a brief walk to get a little sunshine and exercise, only to obliterate any benefit with huge meals and laying in bed the rest of the day, and to wash the dishes, looking upon the dirty walls and dirty floor and really cursing the day I was born; where was I?
As if this is redeemed or transformed by communicating. This isn't communicating/ the story has no moral. I am no victim.
And life comes from the wretchedest places, slips through the booze shaped cracks, and mean people spring the loveliest faces, Don't turn back & just relax.
The writing, well, that's another story. I just want to be not depressed and not a fucking bitch.
(*A single mother I admire listed as one of her interests on her Myspace profile "being forced into change kicking and screaming." She is one of many young mothers with little support who thrives despite not being particularly maternal, not being totally overjoyed at motherhood. You don't have to feel it's the best thing to ever happen to you to do a good job, it's okay even to think you should have waited. You just protect your child from these feelings as is age appropriate, and are committed and loving, and grow into your role. <- Best case scenario. I'm very afraid)
We'd do anything to laugh, man. The father of my child, the father of my child, is not meek or kind or wild, The father of my child, the father of my child … Someday I will write a babydaddy poem.
It's 7:40 and I'm boiling eggs. I will eat several of them with multiple bowls of cereal, keefer, and hopefully not too much else. I have been ravenous, the old wives' tales point to a boy. I'm almost at the point where I think if it's a boy I'll have it put up for adoption. I know that's flippant and evil but where are all those babydaddies? Sure, the tide is shifting, incrementally, but seriously, where are all the baby daddies? Why do we blame the women? (Do you think your the fucking prime minister, you shoot out a wad of embargo. / The priests tell you fornication is sinister, but women they carry the cargo. )
Although in many ways I am grateful to be in America and am almost positive I will be fed and sheltered, I am angry at this culture for contributing to my impulsivity and isolation. While in the final count, my blame rests on me, our society is hysterical, the fucking tabloids man, the baby mania and the in vitro and the push-pull of finding a man or saving yourself. Sometimes it really is better to be alone, I've never felt more certain. Anyway, someday I will tell you all my opinions about how we attract people who seem like tyrants for good reason, how none of us are more wrong than anyone else, etc. But I walk in a fog of hunger. The only thing that seems pegged down is when I am perched on my stool (I've developed an aversion to the chair I usually sit in) hovered over a plate of food, devouring it without the interruption of silverware or other human beings.
(Nobody once asked me, would you like to be born. / There was no invitation*, no allegiance was sworn. )
*Or was there?
The "Scarlett Letter" stood for Adultery. A. Abortion. Adoption. And and and and and
Friday, January 29, 2010
I've replaced coffee with keefer
What was once a disgrace becomes a point of pride, reverse shot, and so on. Dream of heavy chocolate presence, liquid form, the analogy of the Holy Trinity as water- whether steam, liquid, or ice: all is water/only the form changes-- more disturbing images, too: the Mormon's belief that God is a man about 6 feet tall, living on a planet near such and such planet, who had sex with Mary, and the fact that Egyptian religions had the same story of a Savior (Horus, I believe it was) walking on water, healing people, killed, resurrected after three days found by two women and "oh yeah, he had twelve disciples."
The old excitement I feel before each meal, the plotting, the strange punctuation in the days which are otherwise dragging through. The heavy let-down of afterwards, the desire to doze through life and only wake up for meals. Nobody has to work, nobody has to live, nobody has to do a damn thing. That is what I must keep reminding myself again and again, as I choose to do this or that small thing which feels so monumental in my tiny perspective. I remembered in my heaving sobs and animal cries that it's not work which overwhelms me. Or ever has. I've always been a heavy sobber, a damsel in distress (though never strikingly beautiful, only such a girl in my hysteria with charm peeping through, and it's sick to say such things, and I took a picture of myself on my cell phone after I was shot with a rifle, after the secret shames; I wasn't going to waste those special tears). I think about pizza and remember that I've cried in the same way and for the same vague reasons since I was five if not earlier: it's a feeling of exclusion, a feeling of not being loved, not being graceful with other people. Blocked in turns by too-rabid need and self-loathing which oozes out to others. I ponder facebook photos with jealousy that drops in the gut. People buying houses, having careers, and announcing pregnancies with unadulterated joy. Today I stand near a boy I used to crush for, hard, drinking PBR and listening to his "beats," and I choke down the change, the outrageous demarcation of my impulse: how I cannot now- or for a long time, or so I've framed it- hunt the way I've amorously hunted, for years. Today I saw someone's gut and almost blanched with disgust. May I pay dearly for such bullshit.
And, now, I drive around, in my extremely cheap car, I visit my mentee and almost give up on him when he yells at some younger kids for eating chips which were put there for everyone, and he senses how I recoil, and grows very manic and even misty-eyed and talks about how everyone at the Club makes such a difference in everyone's life, and I'm preoccupied with an orange, I try to cut corners, my waist must now disappear however, I so long for a tabloid; and when you're on a path... I miss having my period, I miss it very much. I get flickers of longing for the violent sexuality of just a couple months ago. I sustain myself less with faith, I'm sorry to say, and more with curiosity. I remind myself that I always valued, at least ideologically, richness (whatever that means) more than comfort.
And how I love to sleep, and sleep, and sleep. At least the father of the child to be, at least he knew how to touch me in a way I loved. At least we made the child doing something I think he was very, very good at. And his entire life so far reserved for me. I don't hate him, I don't hate him at all. I suppose if there is a God in Heaven - that's not me doubting by the way, I don't know, "Doubt, that's what I'm selling" - He knows what I need. I may need this. I thought I'd gone long enough feeling miserable and isolated, that I'd already passed through the vision M. had of me lying on my back screaming in such misery that he felt the strong urge to look away even from his (presumably nebulous) palm-reading vision. The other part of the "reading" was this: that some day I would help people. Whatever that means, I hope it is true. It seems so very distant, right now, my little efforts obviously perfunctory mockeries to love
And what do I have to give you, baby?
The old excitement I feel before each meal, the plotting, the strange punctuation in the days which are otherwise dragging through. The heavy let-down of afterwards, the desire to doze through life and only wake up for meals. Nobody has to work, nobody has to live, nobody has to do a damn thing. That is what I must keep reminding myself again and again, as I choose to do this or that small thing which feels so monumental in my tiny perspective. I remembered in my heaving sobs and animal cries that it's not work which overwhelms me. Or ever has. I've always been a heavy sobber, a damsel in distress (though never strikingly beautiful, only such a girl in my hysteria with charm peeping through, and it's sick to say such things, and I took a picture of myself on my cell phone after I was shot with a rifle, after the secret shames; I wasn't going to waste those special tears). I think about pizza and remember that I've cried in the same way and for the same vague reasons since I was five if not earlier: it's a feeling of exclusion, a feeling of not being loved, not being graceful with other people. Blocked in turns by too-rabid need and self-loathing which oozes out to others. I ponder facebook photos with jealousy that drops in the gut. People buying houses, having careers, and announcing pregnancies with unadulterated joy. Today I stand near a boy I used to crush for, hard, drinking PBR and listening to his "beats," and I choke down the change, the outrageous demarcation of my impulse: how I cannot now- or for a long time, or so I've framed it- hunt the way I've amorously hunted, for years. Today I saw someone's gut and almost blanched with disgust. May I pay dearly for such bullshit.
And, now, I drive around, in my extremely cheap car, I visit my mentee and almost give up on him when he yells at some younger kids for eating chips which were put there for everyone, and he senses how I recoil, and grows very manic and even misty-eyed and talks about how everyone at the Club makes such a difference in everyone's life, and I'm preoccupied with an orange, I try to cut corners, my waist must now disappear however, I so long for a tabloid; and when you're on a path... I miss having my period, I miss it very much. I get flickers of longing for the violent sexuality of just a couple months ago. I sustain myself less with faith, I'm sorry to say, and more with curiosity. I remind myself that I always valued, at least ideologically, richness (whatever that means) more than comfort.
And how I love to sleep, and sleep, and sleep. At least the father of the child to be, at least he knew how to touch me in a way I loved. At least we made the child doing something I think he was very, very good at. And his entire life so far reserved for me. I don't hate him, I don't hate him at all. I suppose if there is a God in Heaven - that's not me doubting by the way, I don't know, "Doubt, that's what I'm selling" - He knows what I need. I may need this. I thought I'd gone long enough feeling miserable and isolated, that I'd already passed through the vision M. had of me lying on my back screaming in such misery that he felt the strong urge to look away even from his (presumably nebulous) palm-reading vision. The other part of the "reading" was this: that some day I would help people. Whatever that means, I hope it is true. It seems so very distant, right now, my little efforts obviously perfunctory mockeries to love
And what do I have to give you, baby?
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Open Letter to the IRS
Just Kidding, of course
if you need your money you can have it. i'm not trying to punish or starve you. neither of us is seeing the others perspective with much empathy or logic. so many things go through my head... i don't ever know how "tough" to be. before picking you up at uma, i thought about getting a breakfast sandwich for myself at bagelmainea than thought well, that's mean...he's probably starving... then i thought about getting you one. then i thought maybe we could eat at my house since you'd brought food over. rejecting eating with me is rejecting me, and a chance at a family. it doesn't solve anything from my perspective, but i guess closure must be your biggest priority. that's fine; i can't say i blame you but it's a big step & perhaps only because of this impulsive and still-foolish (i think i at least can possibly make it something better, with a great deal of faith and determination) pregnancy.
food is not my religion though it is a preoccupation, and a damn healthy one in a lot of ways. in some ways, not so much but at least i'm trying to choose something that doesn't drag me all the way down. (but i am dragged down, i am floundering, and it is not a game) sometimes i think drugs - including coffee - are yours. i can tear anyone apart in my mind, or put them on a pedestal. it's all mostly illusion, a certain arrangement of facts & impressions. another cell phone lost in the shuffle... and who knows when we pass the line of no turning back.
what i'm complaining about in terms of what you are or aren't doing is in some ways no different than the alcoholic who claims they have a disease. it's not like any of this just happened to either of us. we are responsible-- but also helpless, because we are diseased, because we are fallen. it's sad though common and i can see surprisingly, without doing anything about, the lockdown we are in, how the other seems positively evil... also, how dedicated we are to this misery, since either one of us making a step towards kindness or vulnerability is consistently rebuffed. i understand you struggle but i also think you're deeply, deeply selfish- in a way that goes much farther than frosting.
that comment about how i divide dessert as a way of proving my stinginess seemed really stupid to me, btw. you know what i've given you, and what you've given me-- and my eating tics are no worse than yours: you who says like a broken record you can do nothing/have no drive, but are always heating up your food so it's just right, drinking another cup of coffee; buying for yourself and hunting a buzz, regardless of your debts. nobody can make you feel guilty. legitimate guilt is objective, either you are or you aren't. there is a baby on the way and you think everything will be fine, today you said people are raised in all kinds of situations. but i promise you, anytime a baby is raised there is ALWAYS someone who considers a baby someone worth being very concerned about, that it's a very urgent matter. i don't think that will be you, and i'm sure in the grand scheme, for the baby at least, it's mostly okay. while at the same time, completely unacceptable. i'm sorry i said you were going to hell. i have no idea. i don't even know what that means, but I believe God reigns over the wicked and the just. I don't know which you are, and contemplating it brings only further suffering. but i've had enough of your foolish ultimatums. you don't know what you're talking about, you don't know how to thrive, so stop lecturing me & telling me i'm a mess, when you positively revel in being a nonentity
if you need your money you can have it. i'm not trying to punish or starve you. neither of us is seeing the others perspective with much empathy or logic. so many things go through my head... i don't ever know how "tough" to be. before picking you up at uma, i thought about getting a breakfast sandwich for myself at bagelmainea than thought well, that's mean...he's probably starving... then i thought about getting you one. then i thought maybe we could eat at my house since you'd brought food over. rejecting eating with me is rejecting me, and a chance at a family. it doesn't solve anything from my perspective, but i guess closure must be your biggest priority. that's fine; i can't say i blame you but it's a big step & perhaps only because of this impulsive and still-foolish (i think i at least can possibly make it something better, with a great deal of faith and determination) pregnancy.
food is not my religion though it is a preoccupation, and a damn healthy one in a lot of ways. in some ways, not so much but at least i'm trying to choose something that doesn't drag me all the way down. (but i am dragged down, i am floundering, and it is not a game) sometimes i think drugs - including coffee - are yours. i can tear anyone apart in my mind, or put them on a pedestal. it's all mostly illusion, a certain arrangement of facts & impressions. another cell phone lost in the shuffle... and who knows when we pass the line of no turning back.
what i'm complaining about in terms of what you are or aren't doing is in some ways no different than the alcoholic who claims they have a disease. it's not like any of this just happened to either of us. we are responsible-- but also helpless, because we are diseased, because we are fallen. it's sad though common and i can see surprisingly, without doing anything about, the lockdown we are in, how the other seems positively evil... also, how dedicated we are to this misery, since either one of us making a step towards kindness or vulnerability is consistently rebuffed. i understand you struggle but i also think you're deeply, deeply selfish- in a way that goes much farther than frosting.
that comment about how i divide dessert as a way of proving my stinginess seemed really stupid to me, btw. you know what i've given you, and what you've given me-- and my eating tics are no worse than yours: you who says like a broken record you can do nothing/have no drive, but are always heating up your food so it's just right, drinking another cup of coffee; buying for yourself and hunting a buzz, regardless of your debts. nobody can make you feel guilty. legitimate guilt is objective, either you are or you aren't. there is a baby on the way and you think everything will be fine, today you said people are raised in all kinds of situations. but i promise you, anytime a baby is raised there is ALWAYS someone who considers a baby someone worth being very concerned about, that it's a very urgent matter. i don't think that will be you, and i'm sure in the grand scheme, for the baby at least, it's mostly okay. while at the same time, completely unacceptable. i'm sorry i said you were going to hell. i have no idea. i don't even know what that means, but I believe God reigns over the wicked and the just. I don't know which you are, and contemplating it brings only further suffering. but i've had enough of your foolish ultimatums. you don't know what you're talking about, you don't know how to thrive, so stop lecturing me & telling me i'm a mess, when you positively revel in being a nonentity
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