My Therapist Won't Call Me Back So I'm Analyzing Myself

Do you remember the blog post a while back where I was saying that I had ended up being the kind of older woman I wanted to be? Like, all wise and shit and living in an ivy covered cottage full of happy animals? Yeah. That didn’t work out. Lately I feel like my aging process is involving all the less attractive characteristics of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and Baba Yaga, the Russian witch. In other words, I’m going around drunk and on pills, desperately seducing young men in a hopeless attempt to recapture my misspent youth while occasionally crouching in a corner of my chicken legged hut, gnawing on babies and turning puppydogs into poison dart frogs. It’s a career, what can I say? Besides, maybe, help. Or, fuck it, come too close and I will so totally turn you into something small and slimy.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with people in their teens and early twenties lately. Part of this involves me sitting at the computer while they shoot each other with pellet guns in the basement (don’t ask) which is all fine and stuff, but part of it also involves me remembering my own early 20s and where I was then and where I am now and stuff like that, which is uncomfortably weird. I’ve often thought that if I hadn’t had a child when I was so young (cue the Specials here) I might well be dead. I got pretty wild in my late teens and I’ve always had this schizophrenic combination of total disregard for the rules and my own safety AND near crippling anxiety, guilt, paranoia and some kind of doomed attempt to fit in. Put more simply, I have no problem really liking both NOFX and Gillian Welch. Never have had and thus, somehow, my left brain and my right brain are sort of constantly at war. Part of me wants to be all mature and sophisticated and motherly and wise and so on while the other part just wants to totally tear loose and kick ass. Is this weird? Am I crazy? Do I even care? Usually, not much.

When my daughter was born, I had to kind of pull my shit together and raise her. Same went when I had my son. Now, they're pretty much raised (look, I give up on M. It's not so much that he's being raised by wolves as that he, the wolf, has challenged my human parenting abilities to a duel and they have, like, totally ceded the contest. He's a changeling or something. I tried. I swear it's not entirely my fault that he's growing up to be, well, whatever new mutant species of rock star or revolutionary that he is.) and there's a big part of me that would very much like to return to the East Village in the mid 80s and do all the drugs I didn't get around to then because I was trying to be responsible and grown up. Granted, I managed to get around to quite a few. Still. There are more. I'd also like to just drink myself into oblivion on a Greek island somewhere. I'm well aware that neither of these are a) healthy choices or b) options, unless someone has invented a time machine, in which case I think I'll go hang around Alexandria in the 20s with Lawrence Durrell, bye.

Where the hell am I going with all this? I have no idea. I feel like I'm being pulled in a bunch of different directions lately and all of them are making me miserable. Sigh. Presumably, this too shall pass and I'll regain whatever slim measure of sanity and/or control I ordinarily or at least sometimes possess. Or I'll cash in my last remaining meagre retirement account and go AWOL, which option gets more attractive every day, even though it would be a pretty short and pathetic AWOLness, given the paucity of that account. Like, forget the Greek island and perhaps consider the green way in the center of I-85 near Orangeburg.

project 365 #30: frightful the peregrine

project 365 #30: frightful the peregrine
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

Frightful (of course her name is Frightful. What's frightful is how little imagination kids have when it comes to naming falcons.) the peregrine came to visit the museum where I work today. Good thing too, since I was utterly useless otherwise all day, so being called in to photograph a falcon in front of a picture of the earth was at least something good. She's very beautiful and sort of awe inspiring and grounded forever due to an injured wing, which makes me sad.

But it isn't taking much to make me sad today. I'm kind of a mess, actually, and I'm not sure how much of it is grief and shock and so on and how much is hangover from the whole intensity of my trip, also the driving, which does tend to get me the next day. I remember this feeling, though, this wide eyed inability to focus, jagged throat, numbness and exhaustion. It's always a shock to lose someone, no matter how much you expect it, or so my mother says, and she has had some practice, so I believe she knows. I do not want to know. I do not look forward to that part of getting older when this shock isn't so much a shock anymore but a perpetual creepy small thing at the small of your back: another one lost, another down.

For now, though, it's a shock and a feeling that I thought I'd forgotten, that comes back like a blow and I remember, ah yes, this is how grief feels: this is sorrow, this is that feeling that someone is missing from the world, this is that disturbance in the force.

Goddamnit, Get Off My Lawn 'Cause I Can't See You Anyway

It's utterly hopeless for me to pretend to be a young hipster anymore. No, it's all over, I am that pathetic thing: an aging, graying hipster with youth pretensions. Tonight I went after work to meet a friend at a nearby (had to be nearby; it's horrible out) dimly lit hipster bar and, since she was late (it's horrible out, which is the international signal for Hey, Assholes! Drive Around In Circles! Day) I tried to read the paper whilst nonchalantly sipping my beer and smoking. It's tough to look hip when you're holding a newspaper as far away from you as humanly possible and angling it in a sort of hopeless, doomed attempt to catch some ray of nonexistent light. I mean, I will never know what my horoscope said, people.

Fortunately, the good people at the daily Asheville paper have addressed this issue with their recent redesign of Take Five, their weekend section. They've designed it either for the very old or the very young: it's unclear which, but the shrieking 16 point type, lots of (bad) pictures, multiple exclamation points, words of one syllable and random locals spouting paragraphs about subjects they know nothing about will clearly be a big draw to both the preschool and the senile demographics. I kid because I love, y'all - but really, what were you thinking? I grant you that the old Take Five was not going to win any prizes, but, uh, baby? Bathwater? This new thing is heinous. Actually, while I have the soapbox: please, please stop trying to be hip, oh Citizen-Times. It becomes you not. You are a daily newspaper, the very definition of an eminence grise; a paper of record, a (okay, I'm exaggerating here) journalistic source. Attempting to become a really horrible free weekly is beneath you. And if you must be a free weekly, could you at least include some comics and some Ann Landers? I miss me some Mary Worth.

It even uses outdated slang terms, and you know it's outdated when I think it's outdated, because I am the Woman Who is Officially Too Old To Keep It Gangsta, as conveyed by my children. Hell, I'm forbidden under pain of death or at least long drawn out sighs to even utter the words "True Dat" or, god forbid, "What up, mah peeps?" which has, you know, put a serious crimp in my conversational style. You've never seen anything in this world until you've seen 14 year olds in a carpool react to a mother saying "YO! Whuzzup, ma peeps? The shizznit iz in the hizzouse now, true dat!" I recommend it highly.

Damn.

teenager
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

A long lost friend just emailed me this photo - holy opium den, batman, that's me on the side there, long hair, fabulous jacket clashing with striped skirt, reflected in the mirror. Me at age 17, when I think I looked quite different, but people keep walking into my office and telling me I look exactly the same. That's absolutely wonderful in one way - do they not see the 50 extra pounds? The wrinkles? The gray hairs? Dude, awesome! - but kind of weirdly disheartening in another. I mean, it's been, uh, more than 20 years. Perhaps I should have changed my hairstyle by now? Although it's good to see my natural haircolor again and to realize that damn, I've just been dying it back to the real thing all this time - before it got darkened by kids and age. It's such a strange feeling to see this, so amazing, so weird - a photo of me I had never seen, floating around all these years. Thanks J! I promise I will send an email soon! And a picture of YOU that I happen to have, bwah ha ha.

Anyway, though, what do you think? Do I look the same? Different? Is that skirt awful or what? Well, it was 1981. Fashion was different then. For comparison purposes, here is a recent (and good, thanks S!) picture of me - same, or different?

Back to Work Blues

I have rejoined the 9-5 world, and while I genuinely like my new job (and boy howdy does it ever present some "interesting challenges." Hoooo yeah.) getting readjusted to the schedule is ridiculously hard. I mean, I did this for YEARS. I was the original underpaid overworked single mother rushing around in the nice black pumps putting the kids in the minivan with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches clutched in their chubby hands for breakfast. And yet, doing that now, when my youngest child is 14 and reminds me daily that he really no longer needs me and I am in fact an active embarrassment to his social life, seems damn near impossible. I can't seem to juggle the way I used to. By the time I get home and start making dinner (if I make dinner; we had pizza three times this past week) it seems to be like 9:00 at night. And if anything else interferes with the daily routine, like a friend's birthday or going to South Asheville to see my mom? It's all over and the whole damn thing is blown to hell in a handbasket.

I know I'll adjust eventually, but just now it's all making me a bit down. I got all depressed in the supermarket the other night, particularly when the beer buying drunk in line behind me started commisterating with me about getting old. Damn him. He was supposed to pretend like he thought I was 20, doesn't he know that? Heh. I calmed down anyway - hell, if the laundromat and the supermarket in combination didn't depress me, I wouldn't be human.