Mom Crush

To say that I was a morose teenager would be an understatement. I did the typical morose teenager things. I mastered sarcasm. I wrote bad poetry, comparing my soul to a corpse at least one time too many. (For aspiring poets out there--one time is one time too many.) I spent a lot of time alone in my bedroom playing in the hot wax dripping off the tapered candles I purchased at the local Hot Topic while listening to Bush's "Alien" over and over and over again. Other than my tortured (dare I say corpse-like) soul, I still have no fucking idea what that song is about. Since it was track 11 on the Sixteen Stone album and never released as a single, I allowed myself to feel particularly isolated and angsty since, obviously, I was the only person in the world who'd ever taken the time to listen to it. The only person, that is, other than all the people at the concert in the below clip who are singing along to it. Whatever. No one feels emotional pain like a 13-year-old.

     For those people not hanging out with me in my bedroom, by which I mean everyone, I made sure my pain was clear by basically being an incommunicative, manipulative bitch. The real key was to be happy enough of the time for people to notice when I wasn't. I'd be fine on Friday afternoon, then come back to school on Monday refusing to smile. Teachers would ask me if everything was okay, and I would say, "I'm fine," as if the words were being pushed out of my lungs with my dying breath, which is exactly what it felt like on account of the fact that I was dead on the inside. God help the teacher who took the time to ask. Probably showing an interest in a 13-year-old-potentially-suicidal girl is the right thing to do morally, but boy was it asking for trouble. The second anyone gave me the time of day, I elevated them to JD Salinger status (oh, the other thing I did that you're required to do when you're a morose teenager is read The Catcher in the Rye--several times). And this brings us to the real point of today's post. THE MOM CRUSH.

The only thing standing between me and Maria is that damn whistle.

     I had a lot of mom crushes in my day. With the exception of the fictional characters (Fraulein Maria from The Sound of Music, Reggie Love from The Client, Miss Honey from Matilda) all the mom crushes were platonic mom crushes as opposed to oedipal mom crushes. An oedipal mom crush is when you want to stab Christopher Plummer, er I mean Captain von Trapp to death with his bosun's whistle and have sex with your not-quite-a-nun-yet nanny. In addition to all the objects of my real person mom crushes being platonic they were also all teachers. I suppose this makes sense. The only grown-ups most adolescents hang out with are their parents and their teachers. 

Fairly certain she's thinking "I really wish someone would stab the captain with that whistle."

     When my parents were getting divorced, I was in the sixth grade. I don't know for sure what prompted my chorus director to offer to listen should I ever want to talk. It could have had something to do with the fact that when she wanted to give my class a lesson in movie musicals and showed us Grease, I spent the entire class period lying on the floor under my chair making sarcastic remarks about every stupid thing John Travolta did. The incident still embarrasses me, but I maintain that that movie is freaking horrible. As for whether or not it was a cry for help, I'm not sure. It may have been more like a cry of, "You're the one that I want [to be my mom] ooh ooh ooh, honey." Whatever it was, I trolled past that poor woman's classroom twenty times a day everyday for the rest of the school year in the hopes that she would acknowledge me. To her credit, she often did. We had lots of long talks and she never made fun of me (to my face) for being the most melodramatic preteen ever to grace her alto section. Now that I'm an adult not too many years younger than she was when all of this was going on, I can imagine the conversations she might have had with the other teachers in their lounge, and thinking about it makes me squirm...ooh ooh ooh.

Obviously the kid's seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show

     After sixth grade, I moved to the junior high school. Well, not just me. Everyone moved. That's where they kept the 7th grade. According to informal surveys that I've taken, I understand that grades 7 through 9 are universally wonderful for everyone, so I won't give some sort of, my-parents-were-getting-divorced excuse. Life sucked. I sucked. Everyone sucked. Pass the razor blades. At this point, the care-and-maintenance baton was passed to my basketball coach. In addition to firmly grasping how a 2-3 zone defense works, she was also a Social Studies teacher, and her classroom was close to the library. I had to (chose to) walk right past her first thing every morning on my way to my locker. If I didn't say hello as I walked by or I purposefully avoided eye contact, she'd pull me aside and ask me if everything was okay. Looking back, I can't think of a single thing that was ever wrong--you know, except my inner decomposing soul. Sometimes I think that I must have been at least a little more miserable than everyone else, but then I remember the thousands of people that were at my first Tori Amos concert and I realize I wasn't as alone I liked to think I was. 

I think Matilda and Miss Honey are watching Tori Amos on Letterman here. 

    Things got a little better but not great once I made it to my freshman year. I was still in the junior high, but I wasn't alone. I had a good group of friends who were as depressed as I was, which is to say they were exactly the right amount of depressed, which is to say they were paying attention. That's not fair. I don't mean to say that I didn't have any friends in the 7th grade. I did. It's just that instead of shutting myself in my bedroom and being sad while really only talking to my friends while I was at school, I switched to occasionally going to my friends' houses to be sad, sometimes while wearing fishnets, watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show and making instant pudding. It was my first attempt at ironic depression and it was mostly delicious. Still, there were times when I needed to know that there was an adult out in the world who gave a shit, so I was pleased as punch when the varsity softball coach came and sat next to me on the bench during practice one day (sad people are really really good at finding benches out in the middle of fields to sit on alone) and told me that he was there for me if I ever needed anything. I did say he. Mom crushes know no gender.

I know Rocky. I know.

     I could dedicate volumes to the relationships that I formed with some of my teachers when I was a kid, but, meh--I'm lazy and it's not that interesting. I will say that I might not have survived my teen years without these people. And, you know, without the shelter, clothing, food, and unconditional love that I was getting from my real mother at home. What 13-year-old is crazy about her actual parents?

    All any of the aforementioned people had to do to earn my unconditional admiration was show me that they cared about me, and I do still admire these people, even if I haven't talked to any of them in fifteen years. I don't know why none of my mom crushes lasted. All the real people I mentioned, and lots more who I didn't, got me through some pretty rough times, but eventually things just fizzled. As for the fictional mom crushes, I still think it would be just about the coolest thing in the world if Fraulein Maria (or Mary Poppins or even whatsherface from The Princess Diaries) was my mom. Come to think of it, it's probably best for your mom crushes to be fictional characters. I mean, eventually you'll figure out that your chorus director's shitty taste in men won't stop her from saying, "I do," to her third husband. You'll be out of town watching a professional women's basketball game with your 7th grade basketball coach, and she'll accuse Ohio State's women's basketball coach, who was Nancy Darsch at the time, of "dyking up the program," as if that's a bad thing. Or your varsity softball crush (male mom crush) will get fired and go to jail for sleeping with a 14-year-old student (okay, maybe I do know why none of the real people crushes lasted). On the other hand, Fraulein Maria will always help you escape the Nazis through the power of song, Reggie love will always get you into witness protection through the power of blackmail, and Miss Honey will always offer to adopt you and raise you as her own through the power of the fear of dying alone. These realities can be counted on no matter how many times you start the movie over. 

     Now excuse me while I go stare symbolically out a window in the hopes that Susan Sarandon will happen by in her underwear to ask me what I'm thinking. 

***

Just for fun, I created a Spotify playlist for this post. If you've got an account, check it out: Songs for 90s-Era Teenagers to Hang Themselves By

      

     

    

This Is Not a Funny Post

(Photo from American Academy of Orofacial Pain)

My absolute biggest fear is cicadas. But my second biggest fear is of being wrongly convicted of a capital crime, spending 20 years locked up in prison and working my way through the appeals process before finally being executed at the hands of the government which I have worshipped, in spite of its utterly flawed and broken state, since I was 10. I'm feverishly scribbling this at 12:30 in the morning with an alarm clock on the nightstand rapidly ticking toward it's 6:00 a.m. call time, so when I say this is the sort of thing that can keep me up nights, I'm not exaggerating. (Quick confession. Though I wasn't making up the bit about being kept up nights, I was fabricating the alarm. It's 2011. I use my cell phone to get up. It doesn't tick in the same kind of impending doom way I needed to set the scene though.) I accept that this fear of mine is unlikely, but I won't say it's irrational. Since 1973, 130 people have been released from death row based on wrongful convictions. You could say that this is proof that the system works. You could also be realistic for a minute and admit that probably some innocent people have been executed in the name of justice.
     Enough of this soapbox though. Let's get back to important matters. Let's get back to ME. Since I was a little girl, no one has ever seen me sleep. My girlfriend who has slept next to me almost every night for the last 3 1/2 years has never seen me sleep. This isn't to say I have not slept in the company of others. I've shared beds with my best guy friends in State College, Pa; Savannah, GA; Columbus, OH; and Gatlinburg, TN. I've crashed living room floors with Tim and Susan. But I'm careful, and I'm a light sleeper. The second my bed or living room floor mate turns over or stretches or yawns or unconsciously scratches his or her stomach, I'm up. I open my eyes, I turn over too, or I say, "Hey there." I do whatever it takes to send the message, hey you, no funny business. No sticking my hand in warm water or writing the word "idiot" on my forehead with a permanent marker or whatever it is that awake people do to asleep people when they're not vigilant. I'm onto you, mother-fucker. Seriously, what is it that people do? Someone tell me so maybe I can conquer this fear.
     For whatever reason, this is something I've been thinking a lot about today. I don't know why, but it suddenly dawned on me that, unless I meet some sort of Wile E. Coyote cartoon demise or I'm shot in the head because I flip the wrong person the bird for cutting me off on the highway, I'm not going to escape this life without someone seeing me sleep. Death, when it's drawn out, like it will be for most of us (come on asteroid the size of Texas), is not pretty. It's days, if not weeks or months, in hospital beds with doctors and nurses coming to poke at you at all hours. Loved ones sitting by your side, involuntarily measuring the time between your breaths.
     If you're on death row, people waiting for you to die is your whole life, not just the last few sick days. It's years, maybe even decades, of people watching and waiting for you to take your last breath. No, literally, in the end there are people in a gallery behind a pane of glass, eager and waiting to see you fall into permanent sleep, so that maybe, finally, they can rest. How does this not freak anyone else out?
     Whatever the cause of my inevitable death, whether it's cancer or conviction, at some point I'm either going to have to get over my fear of people watching me sleep or else come to terms with dying of exhaustion.   

God's Love: The Case for "Working" from Work

Photo from: http://foodiewanderings.blogspot.com/2010/09/coffee-art-or-heart.html

The unfortunate thing about the location of the office where I work is that it's not close to any good coffee shops. Since Jen and I only have one car, one of the things I spend a lot of time doing is driving around looking for places where I can work. I could just go home, but once you factor in drive time, I often lose an hour of potentially productive work time, so I'll often try to stay close to the office.
     Now, when I say I'm looking for places to "work," I mean I'm looking for places where I can read things that will make me feel smarter and write things that will make me seem dumber (like this sentence). Here's a bit of free advice for you. If you have dreams of one day being respected for doing something that is, in all reality, completely frivolous and technically unnecessary for human survival, you can practice that dream during your free time and call it "work." You don't even have to use air quotes when you talk about it. People will think you're hot shit. And if you're wondering where the reading part fits into the whole, "work" myth, then you've obviously never taken a writing class. Spending four years in college being told by professors that, in order to hone your craft, you not only have to write every day, but you also have to read every day is worth the price of admission, especially at today's historically low interest rates.
     It only took me two months of driving around for an hour at a time (that same hour I would have lost by just going home) before finally giving up and settling for places I know about that are nowhere near the office before I finally got wise and remembered that I carry the world around with me at all times. A phone is only as smart as the person whose pocket it lives in. I have three different apps that can figure out where my phone is (as in globally, not just in my pocket) and point me toward the closest coffee shops.
     When my phone told me that there is a place called Heavenly Cup right down the street from the office, I thought nothing of it. People call things "heavenly" all the time. It's secular euphemism at this point. "Please, try some of this corned beef sandwich; it's heavenly." "The full-release massage I got on vacation in Thailand was absolutely heavenly." You get what I'm saying.
     After I payed for my chai and grabbed a window seat from which to work, I opened up my laptop and looked for Heavenly Cup's wireless network. There were several password protected networks listed, but I was expecting to see something like, "Heavenly Cup (Free)." There was nothing like that in my list of available networks though. In fact, the only free and open network that was listed was one called "God's Love." I am, at times, not bright. My first thought, I swear to God, was, huh, is there a church around here or something? To say that I have an aversion to The Lord (do you capitalize "The" when referencing The Lord? I can never remember. Is it like The Godfather? The Sting? The Terminator?) would be going too far. I have an aversion to cancer, and carrots, and people with the nickname "Cooter," but it's not actually possible to have an aversion to something you don't believe in. The reality of the situation is that, unless I'm directly confronted with Him, I don't give Him much thought at all. Hence the fact that, despite the name of the wireless network I'd just connected to, despite the fact that every customer who walked into the coffee shop while I was there somehow managed to work talk of the previous Sunday's church service into their conversation, despite the name of the goddamn coffee shop, I didn't notice the fucking halo hovering over the "u" in "cup" until I'd been sitting there staring at the sign hanging below the register for an hour.
     It's cool. It's not like I stood up and left as soon as I realized that I was in Christ's Coffee House. The woman who owns the place was very friendly (that's how they get you), and the men who kept coming downstairs from the church offices upstairs (the talk of Sunday's service finally made sense when I noticed that all the customers coming from upstairs were wearing matching polo shirts complete with embroidered crosses) seemed to know everyone and even offered to help some guy with his algebra homework. From what I could tell, everyone who walked into the place knew everyone else who was there. Folks came in and left a couple minutes later with their preferred drinks without ever having to order. The proprietor would sit at a table with her regulars and chat with them between customers. That sort of atmosphere is nice. It's also the sort of thing that will put you out of business, which is what I assume is happening with this shop since every patron who crossed the Heavenly Cup threshold asked the owner, "Have you found a buyer yet?"
     "Maybe if I won the lottery, I could afford to take one of the offers I've gotten. Of course, if I won the lottery, I wouldn't have to sell it in the first place." At this point, I imagine someone suggested that she pray on the situation, but I was too busy packing up my shit to notice. It wasn't that I wanted to leave. It was a nice enough place to work. It wasn't dirtier than any other coffee shop; after all, I bet even the cleanliest baristas find spent coffee grounds in the strangest places after an 8 hour shift. Sure, it was small. There were only 4 small tables, but I had found a seat right away. Yeah, it seemed to be a heavenly, I mean heavily Christian establishment, but the owner was very friendly.  No, I had to leave because, in spite of its values driven charm, Heaven's Cup was missing one vital ingredient. Power outlets within reach of the tables. As a wireless network, God's Love is nearly as omniscient and omnipotent as its namesake. God's Love can give you the latest world news, resurrect our fallen heroes, and grant access to porn. What God's Love can't do is power my laptop for more than 90 minutes. Off to greener pastures I went.
     I still had more than an hour before I had to be at work. All out of ideas, I gave up and headed to the office to do a bit more "work" before work. It turns out that's where I'm most productive anyway.

 
     
       
   
   
   
   
   
       

I'm an Urbanite Snob

This post was supposed to be about something else. Then it turned into what it is. Which is not very good. Oh well. Blogs are supposed to be off the cuff, fast and dirty. They can't all be winners.  I'm saving the really good stuff for The Paris Review  or my neighborhood newspaper. Same diff.

I recently started a new job. It's great. I love it. I couldn't be happier. But.
     Jen and I now work in the same building, for the same company, at the same job. No, literally Jen and I have the exact same job. She does the job full-time during standard business hours. I do the job part-time, typically starting at 1 in the afternoon. It's wonderful to have my mornings free. But
     I now take Jen to work every morning. Then I typically drive back home before driving back up to the office at 1:00. I don't mind it, but it's maybe not totally practical.  See, Jen and I only have one car. I know that's un-American. We are commie-urbanite-snobs. Why don't we just move to New York (City, not Buffalo) with all the other commie-urbanite-snobs? Well, judgmental reader, because, Life is expensive. Until recently, we couldn't afford to. If we could've afforded to do that, we could certainly have afforded to have 2 Pontiac Grand Ams with 128k miles on them in our fleet, instead of just the one. Also we didn't need two cars when I had my old job. Also we like it in Columbus. Also, did I mention we both have jobs here? Try to keep up.
     Now, back to my point (which I'm painfully aware I never established in the first place).
     When I worked at my previous job, I was within walking distance of my office. Having just one car was perfectly perfect. Jen drove the car 15 miles north everyday on a highway she hates to work at the cool job that I coveted, and I walked 1.7 miles through a neighborhood that I love to a job that I hated. Well now everything is right in the world. It's been 2 months since Jen has almost died trying to merge onto the highway and it's been almost 2 months since I've nearly been run over by some d-bag from the suburbs who doesn't know what a crosswalk is. (Wow, I'm starting to understand why you might think I'm a commie-urbanite-snob. For the record, I'm actually a socialist-urbanite-snob.) Anyway, this way everyone wins. Everyone except the aforementioned Pontiac. But.
     Let's be honest. We live in a place where a two adult family needs to be a two car family. Let's also be honest that the real reason Jen and I haven't yet bought a second car is not because we're so principled in our snobbery. Sure, we're conscious (but not concerned) of our carbon footprint. And, we do like to leave the car at home and walk to local restaurants for dinner (except when we drive 20 miles into suburbia for Turkis/Mexican/Chinese). No, the real reason Jen and I haven't bought a second car is that I'm a child. I would rather spend the money we should be saving for a down payment on a vacation, or great seats at a Notre Dame football game (insert laughter here), or 40 really good dinners out. Ongoing debt makes me twitchy. Paying someone interest makes me irate. It's why I don't buy a house, or a car, or a master's degree. The thought that someone else should make money off of me just because they happen to have it to lend and I don't have enough of it afford things that, at least in this country, are considered necessities--well that just pisses me off. Did I mention that that job I just recently left was at a bank? You could say it was a bad fit for me.
     I realize that according to my ideals, most people would never be able to own houses (hello, Mother  Russia.), or new cars (I'll sell you the Grand Am for $1500.), or educations (We don't need no...).  I'm not asking anyone else to live by my ideals though. I'm not even expecting to live by them, myself. Someday we'll buy a house (I'm not spending my Saturdays mowing the lawn, sweetheart.). We'll have a second car by Christmas (Sorry, none of you will be getting gifts this year). And I already have a degree (that I'm still paying for and will be until I'm forty, and I wouldn't trade it for all the tea in Communist China). But.
       
   
   
        

This is a Story about Love

This is a story about how amazing I am. This is a story about how tolerant Jen can be when it comes to my desire to exploit her personal pain for my personal gain. This is a story about carrying a semitransparent bag of vomit across a busy parking lot. Like the title says, this is a story about love. 

     One thing I've learned over the course of my time as a woman who forms romantic attachments to other women is, people in same-sex relationships can get away with things that people in opposite-sex relationships can't. Like believably impersonating your partner to get drugs.
     I can't tell you how many times I've pretended to be Jen and filled the prescription for her migraine medication. On some truly unfortunate nights when Jen wakes up feeling like William Howard Taft is sitting on her head (scary, because he's dead; painful, because he's fat) and we realize that, stupidly, we've forgotten to fill her prescription at the non-24-hour pharmacy 3 blocks from our house, I jump in the Grand Am and crank the radio, thankful that no company wants to waste money on advertising at 4:00 in the morning and drive 20 minutes to the closest pharmacy that can help us out. The poor, disheveled pharmacist who's been relegated (for what crime, I don't know) to working the overnight shift doesn't need to know who I really am. "Wow, your headache must be pretty bad if you've had to drive out at this hour."
     "Yeah, hopefully this will help," I say while trying to smile my appreciation for his concern. It's harder than you might think to smile in a way that appropriately conveys a pain that you've never experienced. I'm not Meryl Streep.

     I'm Carrie, and I've never had anything worse than a sinus headache, but as soon the pharmacy opened this morning, I called and asked whether or not there were any refills left on the prescription for my migraine medication.

     "Name?"

     "Jennifer ____."

     "Date of birth?" 

     "xx-xx-19xx."

     "Nope, looks like you don't have any refills." Fuck.     

     Today it wouldn't have mattered if she'd said there was a refill left. The headache was too far gone for the pills to do any good. The only solution at this point was to head to urgent care where some unfortunate doctor who didn't have the good sense or the skill to go into plastic surgery where the real money is made is, therefore, now stuck diagnosing 5-year-olds with strep throat 8 hours a week to supplement his/her general practitioner salary in order to pay off the $200,000 in student loan debt that he/she incurred in med school when he/she still dreamed of having some never-before-discovered disease named after him/her. (Don't worry, I can't make any sense of that last sentence either.) The point is, the doctors who work at urgent care clinics are sad, and Jen needed one of them to give her an injection of the high test stuff if she wanted to get rid of her headache. The only question at this point was do we go now when Jen's only had the headache for 3 hours, or do we wait a couple days (yes, these migraines can last for days) so that the dead-on-the-inside physician won't think that Jen is a drug seeker? Since Jen had already run to the bathroom to throw up on 3 different occasions, and I had dreams of salvaging our weekend I made an executive decision. These drugs she had to get for herself. "Get dressed. We're going."
     The last time we made this trip, 3 months ago, we learned the hard way that discarded fast-food bags that you might find in a pinch in the backseat of your car are not water proof, especially if that water is being projected at 62 feet per second. before we left this time, Jen grabbed a couple plastic grocery bags that we normally hang onto for when we scoop that cats' litter box. As she grabbed the bags, we looked at each other the way two people in love do when they're sharing an inside joke that doesn't even need to be spoken to be understood. In this instance, the joke was, let's don't throw up all over the floor mats again. Hilarious.
     The worst time to drive to an urgent care north of The Ohio State University's campus when you're coming from south of The Ohio State University's campus is 1 hour before kickoff of a home game. We had to take a less than direct route. Lots of turns. Lots of jostling. Lots of me thinking, she's gonna throw up. She's gonna throw up. Don't take that corner too fast, Carrie. She's gonna throw up.
     We were so close. If I had been driving an all terrain vehicle, a tank or one of those four-wheelers that I see daddies proudly driving their 3-year-olds around on when we're driving along back roads, we'd have made it. Since I was in a Grand Am, though, I couldn't just drive over the median and down the grassy hill that stood between us and the miracle cure. Instead, I had to stop at a red light and patiently wait to turn onto the street in front of the urgent care. "I'm so sorry," Jen cried as she pulled the plastic grocery bag up to her face.
     "That's okay, baby," I replied, though I doubt she heard me.
     They should really put trash cans outside big office buildings. They should especially do this if within the office building is some sort of clinic where people who are too sick to wait for their regular doctor's office hours to be treated for ailments or injuries more severe than a cold and less severe than a bullet to the hip. What I'm saying is, I bet Jen isn't the first person to show up outside this building with a bag of vomit.
     She got out of the car and looked around. "I don't know what to do with this," she admitted as she limply moved the bag forward in case I wasn't sure which, "this" she was referring to. We walked around to the side of the building. Nothing. Jen just stopped, not sure how to proceed. It was at this moment that I did the thing that makes me amazing. I stepped up to her, and I grabbed the bag.
     Resolute and determined, I marched the length of a football field through the parking lot that the urgent care shares with a very busy grocery store. Fittingly, the bag that Jen had grabbed before we left the house had been one from this chain. What I had in my hand was not only a semitransparent bag of vomit, but also a sign of customer loyalty. Thank you for your plentiful selection of cheeses and your conveniently located trash cans, Giant Chain Grocery Store.
     By the time I got back to the urgent care building, Jen was checked in and seated in the waiting room. Now, if the worst time to drive to an urgent care north of The Ohio State University's campus is 1 hour before kickoff of a home game, then the best time to arrive at an urgent care north of the The Ohio State University's campus is 30 minutes before kickoff. Since the rest of the city was either at the game or in the Giant Chain Grocery Store across the parking lot picking up last minute game day necessities, Jen was the only person in the waiting room. As far as I could tell, we were the only people in the office other than the staff. Within half an hour Jen had been injected with an anti-pain/anti-nausea cocktail that could have made us a lot of money on the black market. We headed home with most of a weekend yet to look forward to.


      

     A few days ago I asked Jen, "If something happened, and I was paralyzed, would you take care of me?" 

     "Of course." 

     "I mean, like if I couldn't even go to the bathroom myself?"

     "Of course." 

     "Really?" 

     "Well I wouldn't be happy about it, but..." The truth is, I wouldn't even go to the bathroom in the middle of the woods if I could somehow be guaranteed that there was no other human or woodland creature within 100 miles of me, so if I ever found myself in the position where I needed help going to the bathroom, I'd have no other choice than to will myself to die, but that wasn't the point of our conversation, and I didn't want to hurt Jen's feelings by seeming ungrateful. 
     One of the more immature, yet understandable reasons that some young people give for not wanting to have children is that the thought of cleaning up piss, poop, and puke multiple times daily for 3 or 4 or 8 or however many years it takes to potty train kids is repulsive. Knowing parents always say the same thing, "It's different if it's your child." I don't know from experience, but I imagine that's true. Or maybe it truly is really fucking disgusting, but you do it anyway, because a) you love the kid, and b) you don't have a choice. In any event, I hate to be the one to break this news, but whether you have kids or not, someday you're going to end up responsible for the cleanup and disposal of someone else's piss, poop, and puke, and, if you're lucky, someone else, someone who you're lucky enough to be loved by, will be responsible for the cleanup and disposal of yours.   
     Stuff happens. We get drunk. We get sick. We get old. We get paralyzed from the waist down. Whatever it is, it ain't pretty. I just hope when the time comes, you have someone as amazing as me there to carry your semitransparent bag of vomit wherever it needs to go, and that, if that person asks permission, you're as amazing as Jen for letting them tell the story. 

I'm Always Tired, and You Should Be Too

I haven't consistently slept well since autumn 1980. I was a fetus, and for two blessed months, life was good.
     According to Science Daily and, you know, scientists, after about 7 months in the womb, fetuses spend most of their time sleeping. For me, this is easy enough to understand for two reasons. One, if I don't have something mentally (say an intense political debate with a libertarian) or physically (say running away from a cicada) stimulating happening to me for 45 consecutive seconds, I get bored. As a fetus, once you've counted all the ceiling tiles 1000 or so times and mastered every yoga position that the space your stuck in allows, you're bound to want to escape to dreamland. Two, it would take me 7 months to adapt to and block out the ceaseless cacophony of my mother's beating heart, growling stomach, and echoing external conversations ringing in my ears. (Yes, I know fetuses can't hear right off the bat, but this is not a science article.) If you think about it, the stream of noise that fetuses are subjected to for weeks on end probably violate some of the anti-torture regulations of the Geneva Conventions. Boredom or no, it would take me 7 months to get to a place where I could sleep, but once I could fall asleep, I think I'd want to go ahead and ride it out.
     After birth (not to be confused with afterbirth) I found no shortage of reasons not to fall asleep, not to stay asleep, and to wake up 15 minutes before the alarm went off every single time. The same explanation can be given for all three scenarios. Unlike so many of my fellow humans, my sleeping brain never evolved beyond the Pleistocene. As far as I'm concerned, a saber-toothed cat could come barging into my den at any moment, and I'd damn-well better be prepared. As far as my prehistoric brain knows, every sound, the flushing of a toilet, a 3:00 a.m. clap of thunder, an alarm clock sounding, could mean death. Constant vigilance is required.
     In addition to these perfectly logical, completely involuntary reasons not to sleep well, other more far-fetched yet doubly terrifying reasons were given to me by sadistic film makers and trusted teachers. My 8th grade science teacher, Mr. Bruns (who always had chalk on his crotch) showed us the 1983 made-for-tv classic, The Day After. I've mentioned this before. The film is about life in Kansas City, Missouri in the days and weeks following a nuclear holocaust. If the image of Steve Guttenberg's face rotting off due to radiation exposure hadn't been enough to keep me up nights, Mr. Bruns soothing words, "The crazy thing about this movie is that this could really happen," were. Forget the fact that I'd seen the Berlin Wall come down with my own eyes five years earlier, and the USSR had dissolved 3 years prior. The Cold War raged on and Russia still had nukes pointed right at my bedroom, and I knew it.  To make matters worse, I grew up a few miles south of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and every time a cargo plane flew over, which was several times nightly, the words that ran through my head were, "Oh my God. This is it."
     If fear of prehistoric feline attack or the end of the world aren't enough to keep you up nights, how about the possible death of a loved one? I don't know how old I was when I figured out that "everyone you know, someday, will die," but once I grasped this concept, it stuck with me.
     

For several years before I was born, my parents owned an Australian Terrier named Barney. By the time I was born, he was in his prime. By the time I was 4, I realized he, my best friend, would die. By the time I was 9, I would stay awake nights just to watch him breathe. I'm not sure what I would have done had the poor deaf, blind, and hairless 15-year-old mass of perfection stopped breathing, but, at the very least, I was more than prepared to collapse into heap of sobbing hysterics when the inevitable happened. I do this with humans too. I was lying in bed, trying to get a couple hours of sleep before returning to Hospice when I got the call that my grandfather had died. I hadn't actually been asleep, of course, because of the nagging fear that an unexpected and jarring predator in the form of my phone's ringtone could sound at any minute. Still, when the sound came, I was startled. My heart felt like it was going to explode in my chest. Then, when my mother's words finally made sense, I wished it would.

     Who could sleep knowing that you're likely to wake up to feline attack, nuclear holocaust, or the death of a loved one? Doesn't 90 or so years of complete and utter exhaustion seem like a small price to pay to prevent so much pain? Pour yourself a cup of coffe and quit your whining.