Neck Breaker

From my Living with a Commedian Series

Sunday night, we collapsed in bed upon arrival. After being pampered in Marriott's super-comfy bedding all weekend, Monday night I decided I wanted clean sheets. I asked M. if he would help me…I'm not lazy or anything, but making big beds in small rooms is much easier for two people.

I started stripping the old linens off first: sheets and pillow cases. M. was way behind, pulling off the old sheets and reaching for a fresh bottom sheet. I was stripping cases off my pillows, as M. futzed with the clean sheet, so I asked "Are you going to strip the old pillowcases off, or are they just now getting the right SMELL level to them...?"

"Not only will I NOT remove the pillow cases on currently," he replied, "but I am also going to keep adding pillow case after colorful pillow case...one layer after the other...until, at last, I have the ultimate...Neck Breaker!!!

Virgo is opposite Pisces

My Horoscope today says:

Virgo is opposite Pisces and this Virgo New Moon reflects light on the closest relationships in your life. It is more difficult at this time to accept those you love, for you really want them to be their very best. In a way, you might be expecting them to compensate for your own shortcomings. Forgiveness is typically one of your strengths. You may now have to forgive yourself for being human so that others can live up to your expectations. Wednesday, August 23, 2006

I do LOVE this stuff. It makes me think about things, and brings the small thrill of synchronicity to the everyday. Like this:

Virgo is opposite Pisces and this Virgo New Moon reflects light on the closest relationships in your life.

Oh, you mean people closest to me, and Virgos to boot...like MY HUSBAND? I don't "expect" him to compensate for my shortcomings...I depend on him for that!

I like the idea of forgiving myself in order to offer that to other people. I do have trouble here...and especially with forgiving the opposite problem: Being such an ego-maniac that my attitude becomes: "If I can do it, why can't everyone else?!"

Except when he isn't...

My blog hero is great...except when he isn't. Another thing I love about him also just became a thing I hate: his "normalcy." He just left this post about how he wouldn't be posting for awhile due to his son's birthday, and the first of many parties for his newly engaged sister, yadda-ya.

I feel like cussing him out and saying, "You [insert bad word here]! What makes you so damn lucky?" Even while I realize I like to read his stories about the closest thing to a "nuclear family" in the new millenium, I am simultaneously irked by the selfish, "Why can't *I* have THAT?!"

A sister. A sibling to get along with (or multiple siblings, the jerk!). Reasonable family relationships and conversations. Engagement parties instead of surprising notes with a date and time scribbled on the back because a girlfriend got pregnant and there had better be a wedding...

Hey, Hero! It isn't that what you're writing is BORING (though without any content or tension, yeah, its that too), but I slam the webpage closed when I feel taunted by refrains of "Look what Aaaaaahhhhhh've got, and you can't haaaaaaaaave it...."

As my dear friend K. would say, although I know he stole it from somewhere else: "Bitter, Party of One."

Not Arachnaphobic

My husband posted this to his blog on the 31st:

Not a story about Black Widow Spiders

On Sunday, Yvette and I were rearranging stuff in the garage in preparation for the roofing guys to come in and tear the roof off way too early in the morning on Monday. During the course of moving all the boxes around and covering stuff up, we managed to disturb a spider. I looked over at Yvette, and I saw a large, globular black spider crawling up her neck.

Now, it so happens that Black Widow spiders aren't all that uncommon around here, and from a few feet away, this thing really, really looked like a Black Widow. I attempted to calmly say "Hold still" so I could brush it off her without her getting bitten, but apparently my eyes gave me away, and Yvette totally freaked out. So she's shaking all of her clothing out and moving around, while I'm trying to get her to stand still so I can find the stupid spider and get it off her before she gets bitten.

Mentioning that I thought the spider was a Black Widow was decidedly not helpful. It probably would have been comical if we weren't doing such a good job of completely panicking each other. Yvette managed to get the spider off of herself, and I eventually recovered it. It turned out to most likely be Steatoda grossa, a much
less dangerous relative of the Black Widow.

After the incident, Yvette and I talked about what we might have done differently. We didn't really come up with anything, other than possibly running "Spider Drills". I'd just walk up to her and calmly say "Don't move" or something similar, and we'd practice not freaking each other out. I really hated the feeling of the whole thing spiraling out of control like that, with everything I said and did just making the situation worse.

I wanted to tell my own version of the story as I remember, or don't remember, it because there are two funny things and one "interesting" one.

First, you have to know what I'm wearing during this panic: Comfy cotton Eddie Bauer Crossover Tank and sweatpants. That becomes important, because my arms, shoulders and neck were all exposed.

There are two reasons I panicked. The first one is that I believe I "sensed" the spider. When Mark first gave me THAT LOOK, instead of freezing in place and taking a deep breath (something I'd like to learn to do for the future), I took a swipe at my own right neck/shoulder area and jumped a foot to the left (Screaming like a banshee). Once the flight response kicked in, I COULD NOT STOP doing this shivery mini-bolt from place to place.

What happened next is that I had somehow obscured the spider (or perhaps had gotten him off me). Mark couldn't get close to me to see it, and when he did, he started gently trying to figure out if the spider had escaped into my hair. MY HAIR?!?!?!?

A few light, tickling searches through the curls, and there was MUCH more screaming and bending over and shaking and clawing and panic. Finally, even though only moments have passed, I'm trying to get calm, saying "What do I do?! What do I do?!" and Mark replies, "You need to get all your clothes off NOW and go take a shower."

Here's the funny bit: I tear off my top and drop my pants, screaming and wobbling with adrenaline...only to suddenly realize the garage door is up, and I am naked to the whole neighborhood. Always a winner for spreading CALM.

I ran to the shower, washing my hair bent over forward, hoping that it would prevent the spider in my hair from crawling down my naked back. I was in there a LONG time, feeling desperately like I couldn't get clean, shaking from the epinephrine aftershocks.

What is interesting is that normally, Mark can keep me pretty calm - I trust him completely. I blame my spider-sense for the initial panic, and hope that over the next 50 years of our marriage we do figure out how to better care for each other in crisis. I *do* think Spider Drills are a good idea.

Living with a Comedian - Foreign Currency

Foreign Currency came up while MJB and I were carpooling this morning. Here is the story he relayed on our commute together:

I told you about that right? I was in line at the grocery store. You know how there are a lot of African immigrants in our area? Well the guy in front of me was trying to buy food with a third party, goverment issued check...Drawn on a bank in Burundi, Eastern Africa...And he had no ID.

The Checker was like "Uhhhh...I have no idea how to deal with this, there's no 'button' for Burundi."

"Oh, just give him the groceries," I thought. "You can't figure this out before the food rots anyway..."

Deep Thoughts on Old Friends

My friend G. has been living in Austria as a U.S. Expatriot for several years. Recently I asked him if I could come and visit early next year. He replied, "Of course you can. Duh!"

I wanted to share this profound statement because it made me realize that the BEST thing for me about old friends is how precisely I can hear that "Duh!" in the last e-mail. Every quality of his voice, his tone, his inflection sounds off in my head. It is really only with the people you've known a loooooong time that the internal voice-overs turn on automatically.

Start from the Horoscope and go....

Sometimes you are more comfortable in your own dreams when they don't have words attached to them. Now, however, you are more likely to have detailed explanations that come from too many words. Your environment is intellectually noisier than you prefer. It will be easier if you remember that the noise arises from within you and not from out there, regardless of appearances.

Hmmm. I was trying to figure out how this related to "dreams" - sleeping dreams, which are rarely of me seeing words, as if written in a book...then I realized the universe meant "Dreams" as in, aspirations! How funny, fun and interesting....More later.

[Later]
The noise arises from within me...my big barries to "success" as I see it is in the sheer number of interim tasks which have to be completed to be "successful." I wonder if those are the words...the descriptors...the "noise" from inside of me.

But I LOVE WORDS! The question is do I love them as much as I love the kinesthetic doing / making / creating of visual elements...fabric, papers...and do my words block me from just being with and pursuing those creative outlets.

Hmmmm. Time for a trip to Michaels before the Music Festival this evening! I need to get started on my CorocoDolly Costume...and the place to start is with floral foam....

YK

One week later...

I don't feel much better. I'm definitely depressed. I don't usually stay depressed for very long, and this feels so very weird that it is bordering on despair. I'm ready to be finsihed now. Hello???

I stayed in bed most of the day yesterday. I skipped my health class and my bellydance class. I was warm and comfy and finished a fun book...but I was actually wrapped within a sodden emotional heap of invisible blankets.

Once my husband got home for the second time (he showed up to pay the roofer around 6:30, but then had to go back to work again), I was actually able to sit up and try to interract with another human. It was hard, because sometimes it is SO much easier to just read a book and ignore the world, but I love my husband and I definitely see him as one of the few people who can "fix" me - help me flip the energy / happiness switch in the access panel under my left shoulder blade. Unfortunately I didn't really have it in me. I tried...but then got sucked back down into finishing the book.

After a bit of him geeking and me reading in bed, I started to feel hungry. I headed to the kitchen for my favorite late-night snack: cereal. It always helps me sleep. I realized I was actually more hungry than I thought, so I decided to add chunks of white peach to "the usual."

The problem with that plan is our cereal bowls are not quite big enough to hold an entire piece of fruit + cereal + milk. In the weight management world, that is a good thing: If I put the peach in the bottom, then there is less space for cereal and milk, which are both higher calorie. Screw weight management. I pulled out a deeper, purple bowl from my pottery barn set.

M. followed me to the kitchen for his own snack. He took one look at my "snack" and said "Eating from a mixing bowl tonight, huh?"

"This is not a mixing bowl...its a serving bowl."

He mentioned something about semantics, and I returned to the bedroom.

Soon he was next to me in bed again, looking over at my snack. "Mmmm. Smells like cereal," he said. "There's more in the kitchen," I said, once again engrossed in what was happening with the witch heroine in a Kelly Armstrong novel. I was sitting in bed in my perfected reading / eating position: paperback open in the fingers of my left hand, one edge of the bowl in the palm of the open left hand, and the bottom resting near my collarbone. M. is fascinated by how I can do this and very effectively eat and read. But I can, and I'm a pro, so I was reading and crunching down Kashi, when M. walked back into the bedroom...holding a large black plastic serving spoon and the BIGGEST serving bowl we own.

"Mmmmm, Cereal," he said.

I started laughing so hard that I was lucky to get my cereal bowl to the bedside table. I forced myself to breathe through my nose long enough to swallow, preventing a gruesome death by Kashi. He pulled his regular bowl and a normal spoon out of the bottom of the huge bowl where it had been hidden, and proceeded to eat his cereal, sitting down next to me on the bed.

I didn't actually inhale much for the next 10 minutes. As hokey as it sounds, it is possible to laugh until your eyes water in a steady stream down the cheeks. Until abdominal walls are weak and sore from the muscle spasms. Thankfully, I was already on a bed, so when I couldn't stay propped up anymore, I just collapsed to the side. Gasping for air and kleenex to wipe my running nose I told him "That was the craziest, clownish thing you've ever done."

"Mmmmmm...cereal," he smiled.

Augustory

Happy first day of August! Here is a short entry to process a few things going down RIGHT NOW:

First, I have been sitting down and with my 15 minutes a couple of times a week, instead of actually writing, I take some time to read my bloghero's work first. NO MORE! I've decided that although it is inspiring, WWDNs ongoing meta-topic of "get the story" is simply reminding me that I have four-or-five AWESOME stories sitting in draft form in this blog waiting to be finished. all because I'm "wasting" my time reading first, writing second. From now on - that changes. Write first, Read second.

Next off the chest, I have to say I am having a BEEP, BEEP, BEEP couple of days. Massive mood swings after the marathon, due primarily to how GREAT I feel having completed it and getting to show off, and how SEEING-RED-ANGRY I feel about:

1) Having to travel / vacation alone (My husband's line of work SUCKS!)
2) Having work done on my house (and some "little" annoyances associated with that)
3) Getting nowhere with anyone on my "business" and my "costume"
4) Feeling fat (up 20+ lbs) and ugly (tight pants) and unloved (where the hell are all the damn "friends" when I want to visit my hometown?)

That is all the time I have for today...hopefully next week will be better.