Pad My Walls

I've got the crazies tonight. The pain was mostly gone today, but all the other fucked up shit diminutively classified as "aura" rendered me insane. It's so strange that when I get like this I can write. I can do a number of other random things quite well, too. Hopefully tomorrow I won't discover that I destroyed, offended, or bankrupted anyone, but I think I got a lot of work done. Walking the dog, I was ready to chainsaw the trees after 30 seconds of the cicadas. I hate the fucking cicadas. Crickets chirp; cicadas scream like electronics, but they ebb and swell so you can't forget they're there, vibrating at the frequency of your skull.

So I thought I was hungry. I'd been munching snap peas all afternoon, but perhaps red meat would cure my homicidal crankiness. I browned ground beef, planning to add one of the Trader Joe's Indian eggplant pouch things as an instant, no-thought sauce, but then I found a can of ranchero something soup with a recipe that sounded good and we had all the ingredients. So instead of three minutes and my nice fake Indian weird beef thing, it was 30 minutes for my fake Mexican weird beef thing. When it was done, I opened the oven and grabbed at the metal without thinking--no oven mitt. I can write but I can't use a stove.
Oven hot. No touch. Four-year-olds understand this. I'm alternating typing and icing my pointer finger.

Possible Boy and I had talked about seeing a movie tonight. At some point this afternoon I considered inviting him over to watch a movie, or doing some quiet but still social activity with him. Then I stand up and everything is wooziness and I try doing basic household crap and realize how scary I look. I don't want to hide all the time and only see friends when I'm glowing, but the bad stuff is easier to ride out quietly at home where I don't have to consider the variables. I'm not sure how to maintain friendships this way, but tonight I'm curled up afraid of myself and still trying to figure out how to get back to my parents' house to help out as soon as possible.
Cancer trumps migraine. Cancer kills.

Crazy, Evolved, or Crazy Self-Critical?

I can't concentrate properly. I get frustrated when I'm trying to sew the zipper on Aural Girl's dog's hoodie but put the needle in the wrong side and under and over and wrong wrong wrong when my mind wanders. I was trying to finish the damn thing while watching Colbert Report, but it proved too much distraction.
I've always feared The Crazy. Is my wandering mind The Crazy? My short-term memory getting less and less reliable, attention taken by the shiniest and brightest of the moment and lost to what I was doing seconds before, phantom smells and ringing sounds and flashes in the corners of my peripheral vision. The doctors attribute all this to the migraines, but what if there's something more? Migraines as a symptom of Crazy?
or
Migraine sufferers are a baby-step further along the evolutionary scale and/or we have access to bits of another dimension but since we're still mostly the same old humans, peering into whatever's next tends to cause pain.
or
I just spent time with my family again and anything less than an instantly generated optimal solution is considered a screw-up. I now say things like, "Well, we're human," a lot, especially to and around my parents.
Parable:
Yesterday at brunch, my dad made people omelets to order. I can't eat cheese anymore, so I had mine with egg and tomato. As we were cleaning up, he seemed very concerned that I'd had enough to eat. I explained that I'd eaten lots of egg and more than my share of the lox that was set out for bagels, even though I couldn't eat bagels.
"I could have made you a lox omelet!" This dawned on him like he'd forgotten his prom date. I told him it was really no big deal as I'd eaten both ingredients and ended up quite satisfied, but my dad couldn't let it go because he hadn't optimized everything. So I told him a story.
"Today, I wanted to get a bunch of things done. I realized on my way here that, had I done them in a different order, I could have made it to more places and accomplished more things, but it was already too late to go back in time and change my morning. I am a person, not a robot, and it's pretty impressive that I could ever figure out the puzzle to see places to do more; that doesn't mean I'm always required to do it. I had a productive morning for doing as much as I did because that's exactly how much I could."
My dad liked and appreciated this very much.
I expect both of us still have traces in our hearts of the dwelling self-reproach for not being Perfect Saturday morning.

Thanks Crazy Family

My grandparents graduated together from NYU Medical School and continued to work at Bellvue and do research for them as long as my grandmother lived, so they lived in an incredible NYU-owned apartment right on Washington Square Park. As a teenager my dad worked in a novelty shop around the corner that sold t-shirts with boobs and sarcastic posters and things. If I was lucky I'd get to walk there with my five older cousins, doorman smiling at the gaggle of Singers on the way out and me feeling like the grown-up queen of the world for getting to go on such an adult adventure before my fifth birthday.
When my eldest cousin was closer to her fifth birthday than her fifteenth, she and our mutual grandmother went for a walk in Washington Square Park.
"Dr. Perlman! Dr. Perlman!"
An enormous black man in a pink tutu bounded towards them, calling my grandmother by her maiden and professional name. My cousin stood in horror as Grandma and the Creature in Tule proceeded to have a very friendly chat. Thirty years later, I expect that same cousin in that same situation would have the same reaction, except she might make her desire to leave more pronounced.

My dad's sister's family was raised in Deerfield, Illinois with a very narrow idea of how things are supposed to be. Artistic endeavors exist to get you into a better college. You go to the "best" college you possibly can, get the "best" job you possibly can, do business, make money, get married, make babies, etc. My dad's brother was treated as the token family failure for never living up to these expectations.

My mom's parents never went to college and my mom had to write an essay for her father to explain what she planned on doing with her schooling to prove higher education wouldn't be wasted on a girl. She wasn't expected to marry a nice Jewish doctor, but she did. My maternal grandmother's greatest wish was for blonde grandchildren, and somehow I showed up despite my two dark-haired parents.
My mom has two brothers. One is a lawyer whose salary so astronomical it would make my dad's side of the family cry, but his debt is on par with Iceland and his third marriage is destroying the offspring it produced. The other two siblings are much more like me, with more intelligence and creativity and depression than directional drive. My mom's mom has had a few paranoid psychotic breaks, but only one or two in my lifetime.
On my mom's side there are ten cousins. One cousin had severe OCD (that's doing much better in the last few years, yay!), most of the cousins have been treated for depression and/or anxiety disorders, at least four or five have tattoos, and my brother and sister are two of the only three whose lives aren't primarily driven by something in the fine or performing arts.
My mom and my dad's sister are very civil to one another though they are secretly battling for my father and the entire world's love and affection. Still, my mom makes more sense on my dad's side of the family than she does her own.

I get a sadistic pleasure out of watching the two sides of my family interact, each making caddy comments about the other in the same key but for opposite reasons. I have a cousin on each side with the same name and only two years apart. They are both fundamentally artists and married around the same time and live in Chicago. But one went to an Ivy League school for undergrad, spent time as an investment banker during the boom, graduated Harvard Business School, owns a condo in yuppie-ville, etc. When we were little, he was my favorite cousin. He's goofy and loved to play with me and have fun all the time. The other cousin dropped out of high school and got his GED. He's an artist by profession, makes amazing things and has his work in magazines and people's homes and such, but doesn't self-promote at all and works obscene hours every week for little or no money. He's extremely shy and socially awkward, but he's also very tall and has a lot of tattoos and piercings so people think he's menacing and standoffish instead of nervous and quiet. Both cousins helped when my parents redid their kitchen.

My immediate family has been to Scotland and Switzerland and Tanzania and many other places as tourists. My sister has been to every continent except Antarctica. We travel and we gawk and we try not to be the obnoxious Americans going, "Hey, look at the funny clothes! You call this food? Where's the McDonalds?" My parents, with their exacting perfectionist tendencies for themselves and their children, also instilled in me an openness and acceptance of The Other. We want to see everything the world has to offer. Perhaps my mom, in trying to distinguish herself from her family, has been more severe in keeping her judgments. My dad won't stand for slow service at the drive-thru, but he will go to any religious service in any language if it's beautiful. Then again, we all laughed hysterically at the state fair llama show when the handlers spelled out "LOVE" with the llamas to Elton John's "Can You Feel the Love Tonight."

All this and more is why I'm bringing Neighbor Guy to my family's Thanksgiving. We are not Birdie's family, where Neighbor Guy would be par for the course. But whatever my family is or isn't, whatever I want them to have been or be, they are the sum of so many parts and an inescapable part of me that can't be broken by chaos or wild cards or inappropriate dinner guests.

For all this and more, corny though it may be, I am thankful.

Maybe next year I'll show up topless.

Peachy Fuzz

I am super fuzzy out of it today. I am not in pain or anything, and I've had an extremely productive morning all things considered, but I am a total space cadet. I actually finished my crystal chandelier and did absolutely everything I physically possibly could without a second, taller person around and/or a ladder to install it in my hallway. Then I took apart the chandelier destined for my dining room as much as I could, but I can't get into the center where all the wiring comes together. I think I'm not strong enough and it's just too old and rusty crusty from spending 50+ years untouched, but I got all the other pieces apart and took pictures at every step so I won't have problems remembering how it goes back together. Then I went looking for the sockets I bought, thinking I'd at least make the sockets and the socket covers the same size and get that done, but as I looked through my container of hardware stuff my brain fizzed and bubbled as it tried to make sense of the mass of objects. Sometimes, I can very quickly glance at a group of things and then look away and tell you how many there were, what colors they were, things like that; this was the exact opposite. I stared and stared and instead of "wrench" and "socket" and "hammer" I saw mushmushmushmushmush. So no driving for me today. I'd planned on going to sell some lamps, but Man plans and God laughs. I need to find another micro-concentration project. That's what I'm good at today. Small tasks with one thing at a time. I could polish a huge box of silver if I had such a thing. Maybe I can take more photographs or make more envelopes. That feels useful and takes the right kind of functioning.

It's hard for me to express my fuzzies in writing. Writing seems to be one of those micro tasks that I can do amidst the fuzz. I will space out for who knows how long in the middle of a sentence, but that doesn't come across if I'm able to pick up the sentence and you read it all at once later without the five minute lost-inside-my-head-following-some-random-train-of-thought pause.

I fear the crazy in me.

Ok, I may be going to The Mall and Target with Aural Girl. Get me out of the house, and with a baby sitter so I don't walk into walls. I need Draino and a few other things, so this is good. Last night I finally got her and Possible Boy to watch Dr. Horrible. I'm not sure how much they actually liked it, but I probably over-hyped it and then we had to watch it on my tiny little computer and Possible Boy and I were both in odd (not bad, but odd) moods and I ate half the olives my parents left after Sunday's dinner.

Speaking of olives, I need to eat again.

Like, Really

At some point, a number of weeks ago, Other Girl gave Possible Boy the "You know we're just friends, right?" speech. I think she needed to give that speech to everybody around them, too, just to clear up confusion.

The universe is too infinite and absurd for me to handle right now. I'm all too aware that it's not my grip on reality that's slipping so much as reality is made out of brontosaurus gyroscope CheezWhiz and was never grip-able in the first place.

cutting remarks

While packing up on Sunday, my mother found a package of razor blades. She asked me why I had them in her subtly accusing tone.
“You mean the ones for my matt knife?” I asked.
“I guess.”
“They’re for my matt knife. I use it for crafting, when I make cards and stuff.” Pause for effect. “And for cutting myself.”
Sometimes, I just have to fuck with her, and I made it immediately clear I was indeed fucking with her. I don’t cut myself. In fact, I can’t even listen to other people talk about cutting skin, for self-mutilation, surgery, or by accident. But my mom has absolutely no faith in my overall sanity or ability to function, and any time I give her even the slightest hint that I’m not 100%, she takes the chinks in my armor as proof of my inability. For a long time I thought all this was in my head. My mother still insists it’s all in my head, yet it’s swelling up now to conveniently coincide with her newly empty nest. I’m pretty sure the last time it was this bad was when my sister went off to college. But obviously, it’s me. God I wish she liked pets. She needs a pet. Or my sister. My sister is much better at handling my mom’s invasive need to be needed.