Random Acts

Yeah, that’s me.

The weekend went by without incident.  We worked hard in the yard on Saturday and I went to a yarn shop by my office yesterday.  The yard work completely took everything out of us.  It’s astronomical the amount of shit three dogs can deploy.  Between that, the weeds and the area that used to be grass, Fruitpie and I barely made a dent.  While I was rinsing some shoes with a hose, the dogs started going crazy by the fence.  I turned to yell at them when I noticed the new neighbor staring at me over the fence, smoking a cigar.  The embarassment from him looking in my disgusting backyard totally cast a shadow over the creepiness of the situation until much later.  I went to speak to him and keep the dogs from jumping and snarling, but it didn’t seem like he much wanted to talk.  Perhaps he’d never seen a white lesbian rinsing boots with a hose in a yard full of shit and weeds before.  I don’t see how that could possibly be entertaining, but who knows?  It seems like it would’ve been more prudent for him to wait for the sweaty dykes heaving a hoe.

I was looking forward to going to the yarn shop.  There was a 70% off sale on tons of different yarns and notions.  I went in hoping I could find something good fairly cheap and not quite anticipating that the place would be packed.  Everyone seemed to know each other and they were animatedly chirping about all the money they’re spending and the projects they’re working on.  Some wore their creations in the hopes of commentary and compliments.  I can’t possibly understand any other reason for someone wearing a scarf out in the dead of summer…I don’t care how many yarn overs were employed.  One of them had this awful, nasal, squeaky voice reminiscent of Owen Meany.  She was the most chatty of them all.  Others were squealing over an intense fuschia merino yarn and making jokes that only hard core knitters might get.  I realized that I was perusing the yarn as quickly as I could to avoid the cackling gaggle.  I really just wanted something with cotton and maybe some acrylic.  I didn’t want to talk to anyone…I just wanted to get out of there.  Of course, checkout took ten minutes…not because there was a line, but the owner had employed her inept husband who was not even remotely a quick study.  $24 later, I was out of there with a circular needle, six skeins of thick cotton from Germany and two skeins of mercerated cotton from Italy.

I drove away swiftly and it occured to me that I don’t belong with these people.  I’m not sure where I belong.  I stopped taking art classes because I couldn’t stand other artists.  I stopped acting because I hated the other actors.  Our cooking club disbanded because I suspect the other ladies weren’t too fond of me.  I had nothing to contribute to the conversations about their children and husbands…and being the young, novelty lesbian gets a little old after a while.  So, I don’t get along with the kinds of people who do the things that I like to do.  I’m not athletic.  I’m not outgoing.  I have an off sense of humor and Fruitpie’s friends didn’t want me around because they thought I was too weird.  I am weird, but I didn’t think I was that offensive.  I just get quiet in social situations.  I’m perfectly fine to sit quietly in a corner with my bottle of beer…silently observing social interactions I will never be a part of.

Still, I can’t help but wonder what is wrong with me.  Fruit thinks it’s something I can conquer, but even if I did it would purely be acting on my part.  I think a part of my brain must be missing or cordoned off.  I see people talking.  I can predict what they’re say, how they’ll act, what they’ll think is amusing.  I hear them laughing and cackling and gushing about meaningless bullshit and it all seems so painfully arbitrary and pointless.  Maybe I should just switch off that part of myself…play the game…pretend to be charming, witty and involved.  I just don’t know how I can be something I’m not and not start to hate myself for pretending to be someone else.  I don’t know where I belong, but I suspect they keep most of my people locked behind metal doors and heavily medicated.

My best friend called me yesterday about our impending reunion.  We ended up on the phone for a good 45 minutes…which is actually quite a lot for two people who loathe talking on the phone.  It’s $115 a person and we’re both appalled.  We’re not alone, either.  Another old friend of mine from the same class wants to crash it by various witty means.  For us married folk, $230 is just too steep to see a bunch of people we will likely still loathe.  Curiosity may still get the better of us, but we might end up telling everyone we’re meeting at another bar for a low-budget affair.  My other reason besides finances and the need for weight loss was the fact that I really don’t want to know who has children.  It’s not like I have anything to prove.  I’m probably one of the only ones who owns property, has a well paying job and is happily married on top of it.  That missing piece just kills me.

I told her about my infertility problems for the first time…she had been afraid to ask how the baby thing was going.  She knew we were going to try, but I never filled her in on the details and we speak so infrequently as it is.  She and her husband want to wait a few years until he has a stable career and they own a house together.  I’m a few years ahead of her in that respect, but her clock has been ticking also.  I told her about the three week old I held the other day and how I had to shove her into someone else’s hands when I started bawling.  That day has been haunting me.  Those first moments with her in my arms…those little eyes staring intently into mine.  All I could think was how much I wished she were mine…and that overwhelming urge to just run off.  She said she refuses to hold babies because that urge overwhelms her.  All those stories we’ve heard about women who are driven insane enough to steal infants finally make sense in a whole new way.  The fact that we can both empathize is frightening.  I’ve thought about driving down to a Mexican orphanage and smuggling one across the border.  I’ve stopped myself from going up to a woman with multiple children and asking if I could have one.  I can picture it all in comical fashion…my friend holding a baby, getting that deer-caught-in-headlights look in her eyes and sprinting off.  I can picture myself the same way and I have to admit that it is a bit unsettling.

I wish there was a pill I could take that would make my biological urges subside.  There seems to be a pill for just about every other ailment, why not this one?

I’ve got thirty minutes until I can go upstairs and crawl in bed next to my Fruitpie.  I have to give her a headstart on workdays because she has to get up early.  If we went at the same time, we’d inevitably distract each other with talking, tickling, wrestling or maybe even a little more.  I don’t know what it is about bedtime.  I can sleep on her shoulder on the couch all night long, but the second we’re in bed, I can’t help being frisky.  I love when the weekends come and she doesn’t have to get up at four in the morning.  I look forward to it all week.

So she’s up there and I’m down here recounting the day.  We still haven’t put the futon mattress back upstairs from Mable’s surgery.  We slept on it for two nights before finally going upstairs.  Maggie is upstairs with her papabear, Nut is in the kitchen and Mable is sleeping down here on said mattress…seemingly in a sound sleep until thumping her tail at my slightest movements or her audible flatulence.  The boys stayed with me, too…Mr.D on the couch and Mr.T cleaning himself on an office chair that is inexplicably in the living room as well.  I could probably fall fast asleep right now if I laid down flat…except for the endless churning of my mind.

The formerly pregnant woman at work brought in her three week old baby this morning.  She was beautiful and it broke my heart.  I tried to be strong and detached when the receptionist put her in my arms.  It still wasn’t enough to keep from bursting into tears.  I don’t think there’s any trying at this point.  It is a very real possibility that I will never have one of my own and I need to get over it.  I feel like my time is running out and I don’t know why.  I’m still in peak reproductive years.  I should be happy and patient, but I’m not.  I don’t know how to be.  I guess I never was much of an optimist.  I’m tired of hearing that it well happen when it’s supposed to or when some omnipotent being or force deems it so.  What does that even mean?  I find it incredibly hard to believe that some supernatural deity has any kind of vested interest in whether or not I reproduce and when.  It’s infuriating, really.  People who know at work say they’re praying for us.  I thank them, but it just feels empty.  I wish I never mentioned anything to any of them.  I’m sick of hearing platitudes and various cliches.  I’ve prayed, pleaded, bargained and hoped that we could have a child while throngs of assorted lowlife push them out like vending machines.  If there was a god, why would those unfit be allowed to procreate while those who truly want children and have the means to raise them cannot?  There is something seriously wrong in the universe and I have a hard time believing that there is some kind of divine reason for these things happening…or not happening as the case may be.

It’s almost bedtime and I’ve gotten myself all riled up.  I still have to wash my face and brush my teeth…and go up to bed where I will undoubtedly spend half an hour staring at the ceiling before I finally drift to sleep.  The cycle will start all over again in the morning…and I’ll start my day as I ended it before going off to work.  So it continues as time steadily ticks away…wearing down my resolve, hopes, dreams and ever souring bitterness like waves on a rocky shore.

I had the hardest time getting to sleep last night.  I don’t know what it was…maybe my yearly inventory.  It’s not like I was excited about my birthday…we already celebrated.  I just couldn’t stop my head from spinning.  I kept thinking about my age…how on past days before my birthday, I would recall all the shitty ones I’d had in the past.  This time was different.  Maybe I’m over it.  I’m too old to count the ghosts of the past.  Instead, I tried to remember those phone calls I would get from my grandma when she was alive.  I tried to remember what her voice sounded like when she would sing Happy Birthday…even though I always hated being sung to…and still do.  I would give anything to hear her sing to me just one more time.

I’m 28.  It’s really just a random year, but it seems significant somehow.  I can safely say I’m almost 30.  I can easily wonder what I’ve done with my life so far.  Ten years ago today, I went to a 7-11 and bought cigarettes, lottery tickets and porn.  A few years after that, I picked up a bottle of vermouth from Vons for my ex’s mom.  It’s odd that my first alcohol purchase was vermouth of all things…it was very anti-climactic.

My boss baked me two dozen cookies and some coworkers took me to lunch.  I really didn’t think anyone would even notice that it was my birthday…at least not until my sweet Fruitpie sent me beautiful flowers and balloons.   I wonder if I’ll remember this on the eve of my 38th…and I hope by then I’ll be a mom.  I really thought I’d be pregnant by now.

I think it must be PMS or something.  Fruitpie and I had this discussion on Saturday after I got off the phone with my father and the fucking thing has been playing over in my head ever since.  In the course of the discussion that started about my mother being a jackass again, she brought up how she stopped seeing her friends because they didn’t like me…because they had said that I would be the worst thing to ever happen to her.  In the beginning, she told me some line about how they just flaked on her after the accident.  I guess it was  monumentally stupid of me to believe that…it even seemed preposterous at the time.  It wasn’t until sometime last year that she finally told me the truth.  They wanted to hang out with her, but they didn’t want me around.  I think I would’ve almost felt better if she had just gone out with them without me…because now I feel responsible.   She is a very social creature and here I am pushing all of her friends away.  I don’t even know what I did…or what it is about me that is just so goddamn unpalateable.  It seems like they already didn’t like me just because I was so young.  I keep replaying the visits I can remember…and I probably only remember them because every time Fruit would either pull me aside or give me a rundown afterward about things I shouldn’t have said or done.  She tried very hard for a long time to teach me how to interact with fellow humans.  I guess I should be happy that she gave them up because she loves me, but I just can’t seem to stop feeling like shit about it.

I drove KD to LA last Thursday for the last time.  I love that car.  It seemed strange all the way, telling myself that this was the last time I would ever drive her like that.  It feels good to at least have her in the family still, but turning over the keys wasn’t easy.  I get so horribly attached to things.

It was love at first sight when  I saw her at the dealership.  She was in the back lot and had to get a jump so I could take her for a spin.  That was the first day of active car shopping, and we already had a tenative thing going with the enterprise dealership over a white foreign something.  I don’t even remember what kind of car it was, but it was supposed to be the same as a corolla but not.  I had the ex and her mom in the car with me.  I didn’t have to take KD for much of a ride to know that I wanted that car.  She only had 12 miles on her.  We worked out how I could buy her when we got back and the cost really didn’t seem undoable.  Her mom sat through the whole process with me, but the ex was so pissed off that I was going to do it that she pouted in her mom’s car the entire time.  She thought it would be too much money for us.  The payment ended up being $279 and I think we had been planning to only spend $9000 on something.  KD was 16.  I had a down payment for 3500, and the loan amount really didn’t seem like something we couldn’t handle.  So, I did it.  It was totally out of character for me to buy something I knew she’d be upset about, but I didn’t care.  I loved that car.

I didn’t get to drive her off the lot because I didn’t have insurance yet.  That still bothers me, even though it’s really silly.  When I finally did have it, I took her for a long ride from Woodland hills, through Calabasas to Agoura Hills and the backroads back.  I can still picture everything.  She handled better than anything I’d ever driven yet…until three thousand miles later when I was broadsided by a stupid bitch turning from the wrong lane.  She was never the same after that, but she was mine.

Now she’s my dad’s ‘new’ car.  I don’t think he’s had anything in such good condition since I was a kid.  It was totally surreal being there again.  The house was in such bad shape as I had anticipated and yet, I knew they had cleaned up for me.  The first thing that hit me was how old they look.  It’s only been a few years since I saw them last, but those years were definitely not very good to them.  I offered to buy them lunch even though I have no idea what they eat anymore.  They always talk about eating so healthfully and being practically vegetarian these days.  They insisted on ‘treating’ me, so my dad took orders for Carl’s Jr.  He was all proud of himself because he called them on their ‘no receipt/free meal’ deal and got our entire order free.  I kept hoping that they didn’t spit in it and tried desperately to put it out of my mind as they happily dined away with their five dollar burgers and white zinfandel.  Between that and eating in such a gross environment, I could only stomach half and give the rest to the doglets.  It even disgusted me how they fed them from the table, even though they always did that when I was a kid.  My girls have to wait until we’re done eating before even dreaming of getting scraps.  But, I suppose there is no comparison, really.

Everything was pretty much as I had remembered it.  The front door had a plate on ti from where the wood was falling apart.  The tile in the entry way was coming apart for the same reason, so they had a few random tiles placed in the gaps that looked suspiciously like they were swiped from Nordstrom.  They were ugly, gaudy, shiny tiles that would’ve blended in fine if they weren’t high gloss.  The carpet was covered with stains.  They were dark, black circles that covered every square foot.  My mother kept telling the dogs not to pee on the carpet, and I couldn’t help but wonder how they could even tell anymore.  They don’t appear to move from the table very often.  The furthest my mother goes is to papo’s closet aka The Sewing Room where no sewing has been done since the previous owners were foreclosed upon.  The whole experience was disturbing at best.

My dad rode to union station with me and left me in line for the train to Oceanside.  He was going to get his hair cut, and I had a hard time picturing what that would look like.  He has the old, gray, curly jewish hair thing going on.  I guess it’s the same as always, only a different shade.   His hair guy tries to straighten it and comb it back, but a few days later it goes right back to looking like it always has.  I guess it’s good for him to be getting out of the house.  It definitely an improvement upon burrowing himself in his office all day as Bessie burrows away in her little computer hole.

She scurried off to said hole when she got a phone call from her redneck friend on the other side of the country.  I was equal parts relieved and annoyed…but only because it was incredibly rude of her.  She goes on and on about how much she misses me and that she hates how she never sees me and then she’ll go off to talk on the phone with someone she already talks to for hour every single day.  It’s irritating, but unsurprising.  I think the only truly surprising thing that happened was at lunch.  They held hands and prayed over their five dollar burgers as I munched away at french fries while they were still hot.  My dad has always been silently religious, and I’m sure he silently prayed all those years.  But, my mother’s newfound evangelism is extremely obnoxious.  I don’t need her to preach to me about ‘the power of prayer’ or how things either are or are not ‘meant to be’.  I hate people like that.  When someone is feeling shitty about something, they don’t need to hear about how some benevolent being planned it that way…or that others have had it much worse.  I can respect the silently religious types.  The ones that beat you over the head with it need a swift kick in the ass.

On the train back home, a nineteen year old girl clung to me from the platform all the way to Oceanside.  She had missed an earlier train that made her too late to make the last train to San Diego.  She was also traveling without a cell phone and couldn’t reach her boyfriend to let him know.  I let her use mine to call her family and figure out her situation.  She was an awkward thing…a tall, straggly vegan with aspirations to become a pastry chef.  She reminded me of friends I had in High School…geeky, gangly and unsure.  It was kind of sweet, really…if not bizarre.  She asked how old I am about halfway through the trip.  I told her ‘28′ and she said, “Wow!  You’re old!”.  I had to laugh at her…she’ll be where I am soon enough.