Thursday, September 02, 2004

 

ENTRY 145: THE RIGHT STUFF


I called my mother on Monday. When she picked up the phone, she sounded drunk.


"Is everything all right?" I asked. It was a reasonable question, since my mother really doesn't drink.


There was another explanation, though; she and my dad had picked up an illness from the Niece. Now they couldn't keep any food down and were sort of floored. She sounded very out of it.


I'd told her last week about my job interview. At the time, she was waiting for an interested party to make an offer on my parents' house in Tulsa; they still hadn't sold it, what with my dad's sudden transfer to Houston. Then, over the weekend, Mom told me that the potential buyer drove by their house with an architect friend who must have "scared the buyer off" over some detail of my parents' place. So, no offer on their house.


Anyway, when I called and found her woozy, I had news of my own, and tried to make a joke out of it: I'd heard back about that job, and their architect must have scared them off. Even in her altered state, Mom understood.


The news wasn’t all bad. Although they ended up hiring someone with specialized experience that pertained very closely to the position, I was, they said, a “strong, polished candidate, and had [they] had two positions available, [they] certainly would have offered [me] one.” (With about 100 competing résumés, it didn’t seem like a meaningless statement for them to make.) In a way, the rejection was a bit of a relief; the possibility of employment had happened very suddenly, and, though the job sounded interesting and tied in closely with my skill set, it would have begun as a temporary position and wouldn’t have included benefits for the first year. I’ll hold out for health insurance.


"Summertime" has been in my head lately. It seems to capture the mood of the past months rather aptly, because to me the song has always been most peculiar--relaxed, even (arguably) upbeat in its ideas, yet melancholy in its execution. The strange mix of sunlight and outdoors activities and my mysterious physical symptoms and ice cream and indecision that comprised my summer seems like something of an uncomfortable dream. But I'm waking now. New things are on the horizon.


Edward wants to see a movie this weekend. I'm looking forward to it. Now that I'm feeling close to normal again, it's time to explore, to interview, to consider, even to hope.


The Accidental New Yorker will be on hiatus until October.

6:39 PM

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PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT


Perhaps you've heard, in passing, that this is a Presidential election year. The big day is November 2, and, in most states, those eligible to vote must be registered in advance.


With two months to go, time is running out. If you're not yet registered and want to make your voice heard in this crucial election (and I hope you do), click on this link for immediate, easy answers on how to register to vote in your own state. It looks remarkably easy to get a mail-in registration form. Check it out!


And if you want answers on how far in advance you have to register in your particular state, as well as how long you need to have been a resident in your state, simply click here.


Democracy works if we do.

6:32 PM

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After seeing this quiz link the other day on Crash's blog, I went ahead and took it. The results were sufficiently amusing that I'll go ahead and post them here.


eXpressive: 7/10
Practical: 5/10
Physical: 4/10
Giver: 9/10

You are a XSIG--Expressive Sentimental Intellectual Giver. This makes you a Teddy Bear.

Hee! I just want to give you a big squeeze. You are tender, honest, generous and fair. You are an excellent kisser and a sensitive, communicative lover, and you know it. You would never intentionally hurt someone's feelings or overstep his/her boundaries. You have beautiful eyes.

Most people take your laid-back attitude, blazing wit and subtle sexiness and stick you in "friend." But some see your extreme hotness for what it is and latch on. This means you have a few members of your target sex in the bank at all times -- I call this "money in the sex bank" -- but you're too sensitive and thoughtful to exploit them. More than once.

You are so rational and deliberate in an argument that it can frustrate and exhaust your partner. Your fights can take forever, but your press on with them until they are completely resolved and both you and your partner are satisfied. If your partner is weak of will, s/he may just give in -- be wary of this! An emotional or passive-aggressive outburst later will hurt and horrify you.

It is *critically important* that you are able to respect your partner. The moment you lose respect for him/her, you lose everything.

When you make friends, you make them for life -- you can go without speaking to a friend for years and pick up right where you left off. You are completely faithful, both physically and emotionally. You are the second best (to XPIG) parent of any type.

If you are male, you have a huge shlong [sic]. Just saying.

Of the 2894 people who have taken this quiz, 10.6 % are this type.

****************

I suppose there's actually a lot of truth to this profile, but I will leave exactly what to your imagination. Just found the whole thing very entertaining, personally.

5:26 PM

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Wednesday, September 01, 2004

 

ENTRY 144: HOW MY SUMMER SPENT ME HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER


The things we keep to ourselves can never be hidden entirely. They always reveal glimpses of themselves somehow, telltale flecks of the whole truth captured in the amber of an averted gaze or the flypaper on which our words are written or the ointment of an ambiguous comment.


I have a secret blog in which I record an alternate side of my life. It can't be found with even the best search engine. But there have been hints of what it contains in between the lines of what I write here. This other blog is all in my head, actually, and the posts have stacked up in the past two or three months. Sometimes their contents have seeped slightly into the known blog, the intangibly tangible one, as I see when I look back over some of the posts.


But if one of these alternate posts were to be extracted from my brain and splattered onto the screen, all chunks and fluid and unspeakable droplets, it might sound something like this....


The strange details of what happened to me this summer have always belonged here, in my head, unarticulated, because I have been reminded with icy clarity that there are limits not only to what I can handle people knowing, but what people can handle knowing.


People don't want to deal with illness or infirmity. I should know, because I'm one of those people. But finally, after all the days of surreptitiously dealing with what was happening to me, I tried to explain it to someone. I would tell only one or two people; I didn't think I could handle more people than that, didn't want to deal with a bunch of well-meaning people asking all the time how I was and whether I'd figured out what the fuck was wrong with me, didn't want to worry unnecessarily the people I cared about. But I could tell Roger. Roger, who is dependable and intelligent. Roger, whom I have always trusted.


So I attempted to describe everything in all its infuriating vagueness: the sudden onset of inexplicable malaise or near-nausea that came one day and went the next, the on-and-off-and-on fatigue that forced me into superhuman efforts just to appear I was functioning fine (always a crowd-pleaser), the bizarre heaviness in my gut--as though my intestines were twisting themselves into tourniquets--and the night I stood at the stove making dinner and felt as though I might collapse like a dropped puppet, for no discernible reason. On about 75% of my mornings, from mid-June into July, I had woken up with the ambiguous faint horror of feeling, quite simply, unwell. And I could sum it up barely more specifically than that. No sharp pains, no very specific areas or kinds of discomfort. Just a general shitty feeling, but pronounced enough to be alarming and to make me believe these weren't diet- or stress-related symptoms. Sometimes it came scarily close to being crippling; there were times I couldn't manage to get myself out of the apartment, and one night it was all I could do to brush my teeth and get myself undressed.


I was scared and furious that I was being betrayed by my own physical system.


And Roger tried, very kindly, to explain it away, to chalk it up to stress or a low-grade persistent virus. I sat there, holding the phone and listening and knowing he was trying to make me feel better, but it just made me feel worse. I didn't feel that he was really listening to me. He didn't understand the gravity of what I was trying to say, or the extent of my anguish.


I thought about calling my parents. No. No, I couldn't call Mom until I'd been able to figure out something halfway specific about what was happening. She would freak out, and it would only make things harder on me.


Whom could I tell that would really believe me? I had flashbacks of the time I was being stalked and nobody seemed able to grasp that I was truly in trouble. Why wasn't my word enough, for fuck's sake? Would it ever be?


I sobbed a little into my pillow. Then I was disgusted with myself for breaking down like that, and then disgusted for being disgusted. And all at once I realized that there was one person who really did always listen to me and take me seriously.


I would call Peter.


And he listened, and he understood the gravity of what was happening, and he took it calmly but not lightly and gave enough room to let the problem sit there without being detached about it, and was reassuring without being alarmist or smothering. It reminded me why I miss his presence so keenly. And my gratitude was so overpowering that I hung up the phone and sobbed some more.


I continued to try to understand the message my body was conveying. I scrawled notes about my shifting and uncertain symptoms on the back of a junk-mail envelope. I called my doctor, made an appointment, suppressed the thought that she might shrug her shoulders and say that this was all in my head and there was nothing much to be done and oh was I seeing a shrink?


It is true that the most terrifying horror stories have mysterious villains with confusing or unknown aspects. The worst kind of horror is saturated with ambiguity.


And a week later I finally sat in my doctor's office and poured everything out. She listened sympathetically, asked a battery of questions about symptoms, and told me she would draw blood and test for a number of different things that hadn't been covered in the bloodwork for my regular physical less than a month before. She mentioned autoimmune disease, Lyme disease, thyroid.


I actually hoped for thyroid problems. At least then I'd know the cause, could set about fixing myself.


But all the tests came back normal. "Just keep monitoring your symptoms," she said. "Unfortunately, there's not much we can do at this point except wait for something more specific to develop. And if there's an ongoing problem behind this, then something more specific will come up."


This was disappointing. I was afraid that the strange fatigue and generally ill feeling might go on and on, that I would drag myself weakly through countless months and years without any recourse in a dull, unexplainable, waking nightmare.


And then, at some point, the symptoms seemed to evaporate as quickly as they had appeared.


I can't explain what happened to me. There were all kinds of theories I developed, and many ways in which I second-guessed myself. But I trust my sense of myself and my own body enough to know that it wasn't simply stress, and not something I imagined, and not merely psychosomatic or some kind of "bug."


But I hope it won't ever come back, and that, if it does, I will figure out how to fight it.


And I told myself I would never blog about it, outside of the secret blog in my head, because I didn't want to be seen as playing for sympathy, didn't want to scroll through a bunch of you're-so-brave-and-get-well-soon-and-you-might-consider-magnet-therapy comments, didn't want to feel like I was obligated to justify all the times this summer someone would say, "Anything wrong? You're kind of quiet tonight." Whenever it happened I would look at them blankly, almost hating them for the good fortune they had in not feeling like a weakened shell of a person, for being able to take so much for granted. And I would force out the smiling lie: "I didn't get much sleep last night. But I'm fine, really."


It's over now. I was exiled from well-being for a while, but the gates that had clanged shut and separated me from everyone around me mystifyingly swung open again. I finally got myself back, which, in a way, was as scary as losing my sense of well-being was. There are people I met only a few months ago who have scarcely known me while I've felt anything like my normal self. But things are back to normal, and when I look at the recent past, that recalibration seems like an unparalleled level of accomplishment.


Sometimes, I think, we have to work our way out of setbacks to achieve the momentum to go forward. It's all very personal, and largely untranslatable. And that's why these are things no one ever has to know. It's easier that way.

1:16 AM

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