Listening to a song by A Perfect Circle. It's funny that it took me so long to like them. They had an album (their first?) come out when I was working in the CD store in Johnson City, and it got played non-freaking-stop. ALL the time. And somehow, it went in one ear and out the other. Funny how all music takes on a sort of unnoticeability when you're doing something you don't much like. I wonder how many other cool bands I missed...
The advertisement banners at the top of each of my web pages apparently display certain kinds of ads based on the content of each of my pages. For example, the links page (which prominently features the word "sausage") frequently displays ads about sausage. Weird, but whatever. Technology IS weird.
But today, there was an ad -- on the links page -- for Philly cheesesteaks. I clicked on the ad and went to the website. Apparently, this company will ship you a Philly cheesesteak via overnight FedEx. They make it, you heat it up. Supposed to be just like being in the City of Brotherly Love and Cheesesteaks. Personally, I'm not all that interested in finding out. Although I will agree that a cheesesteak is not a cheesesteak unless it's from Philly (and neither is cream cheese), I don't feel like having a cheesesteak overnighted to me via FedEx. Check this out: SEVENTY-SIX dollars for two cheeseteaks. Granted, FedEx is ridiculously expensive, but SEVENTY-SIX freaking dollars? Furthermore, the company's mailing address isn't even in Philly; it's in a suburb called Media. According to Yahoo, it's only about fourteen miles outside of Philly, but what the fuck? As they say: it ain't a Philly cheesesteak unless it's from Philly. And last I checked (about five minutes ago) Media, Pennsylvania ain't Philly.
[Furthermore, most of the time, pizza and other Italian-American foods aren't what they claim to be, either, unless they're from New York. But that's a different story...]
I had a dream about a cheesesteak once. It was a sort of nightmare. I dreamed, shortly after Neil and I reconnected, about my life twenty years from now. I was bored, lonely, and living in Buffalo, New York. I dreamed that Neil and I had gotten married and were living the happily-ever-after thing for a few years, and then he'd taken off, and I was waiting for him... I couldn't quite give up hope that we'd find each other again and everything would be pretty much perfect again -- so I lived in Buffalo, and drank too much, and sat and stared out the window. There was something about burning Sylvia Plath books, too, but I don't remember that part very well.
But in this dream, Neil hadn't left ME. It wasn't like that exactly. There had been a knock on the door and one of our old acquaintances, an individual by the name of Matt, walked in and demanded that somebody go with him to Philly to get a cheesesteak. Only, apparently, we were in Oregon. Matt, as was his custom in real life, proclaimed that it ain't a Philly cheesesteak unless it's from Philly. And nothing beats a good Philly cheesesteak. (Except a good New York spiedie, of course...) So Neil, apparently feeling restless and hungry, kissed me goodbye and told me he'd be back in a few days. Then he and Matt got into the car and left. And I never saw them again. So, in the dream, I just spent the next however-many years wondering what might have happened. I knew it wasn't some other woman. I knew it wasn't an escape from me, or from married life, or anything like that. I knew it had to have been some sort of grand adventure. And the great, vast United States of America had reclaimed Neil.
At the beginning, that dream, I think, represented pretty much every single insecurity I had about having any sort of relationship -- even a friendship -- with Neil. I was afraid it would be perfect. But that I couldn't possibly compete with Neil's whims and adventures. And that I'd chicken out -- or something like it -- on the really interesting stuff.
The next time I saw Neil, I made him pinky-promise me -- one of the most sacred promises a person can make without shedding blood -- that he'd never leave me for a Philly cheesesteak. He promised readily.
Since then, I've had a much more pleasant relationship with Philly cheesesteaks.
And over the past six months or so, I've managed to shed almost all of those initial fears. It's good. It's all good.
I had a doctor's appointment in Olympia yesterday. Due primarily to some hyperactivity among my room-mates, I couldn't get to sleep the night before. So, by the time Neil and I reached Olympia, I hadn't slept in twenty hours.
Acceptable sleep-deprivation, for me, is about eighteen to twenty hours. After that, I start getting sort of loopy. Stuff seems pretty surreal. It stops being tiredness and starts being a little bit like how I imagine an acid trip. So, at around twenty hours and fifteen minutes, I wasn't particularly surprised when Neil and I found ourselves sitting in a restaurant in a booth directly next to an insane lady. I was pretty sure I was either imagining her, or she wasn't actually as insane as I was perceiving her.
This lady was alternately sobbing and howling with laughter. When I turned around and saw her, she was wearing this dirty old dishtowel of a winter cap, and her face was bright red, as if from windburn. According to Neil, who had a better view of the siutation, she'd been wearing a sweater with one button -- and nothing underneath. But by the time I saw her, she was at least fully clothed. The poor lady just sat there, freaking out, for most of the time we were there. Until our waiter kicked her out. She didn't pay for her coffee. Oh well.
THEN, I got up to go to the bathroom, and this OTHER crazy lady comes up directly behind me, with this huge grin, and starts telling me how much she loves my skirt. And this lady is standing MAYBE a grand total of three inches away from me. I could FEEL her breath on me when she spoke. In the interest of my own sanity, I moved over to the side of the hallway so that she could walk past me and not fucking BREATHE on me anymore. She did pass me, but walked fairly slowly so that she could tell me all about how badly she had to pee. Then, spontaneously, she made a mad dash for the bathroom stall with the lock on it. The entire time she was using the facilities, she kept up a running conversation -- apparently aimed at me. I turned on the sink so that I didn't have to listen. I mean, I don't want to hear somebody's life story when it's interspersed with peeing and farting noises. Life story of a crazy person? Sure, I'm game. But NOT in a damned bathroom. When she came out, she stood right in front of me, nearly blocking MY path into the stall, fixing her shirt and talking proudly about how she'd gained weight because she was in a "program."
Weird.
Well, Neil finished up his coffee and we left for the bus station to get to my doctor's office. I'd miscalculated again and we had to take the stupid Lacey bus instead of the bus that goes directly through the hospital/doctor district of Olympia. The Lacey bus is always a little bit weird. But on this particular morning, it defied all my previous conceptions of the peculiarities of the Lacey bus. The instant we got on the bus, this older lady yelled to us, "where are you going?"
"Um... Lilly Road," I replied.
"Well!" said the lady. "This bus goes there!"
Uh... thanks for your help? I raised my eyebrows a little bit.
Various people around us murmured to each other, and the murmuring became a cacaphony of conversation, not a single ONE of which made the least bit of sense. A few people were quiet, but most of them appeared to be just as scary as the talking people. One girl had on enough eye makeup to do up the entirety of Broadway for three years. Another couple of guys looked like they'd been through some sort of failed nuclear reaction experiment, and, on top of that, were stoned out of their minds. The speaking people were even weirder though. The woman next to me was handed a recipe for something, by the man driving the bus, looked it over, and yelped, "it's got POPCORN in it! It must be a JOKE recipe! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!"
A few moments later, that woman moved as close to me as she possibly could without taking her clothes off and trying to hump me -- for no particular reason. In the process, she sat on my hand. But she wasn't really SITTING on my hand. She just sort of moved her ass against my hand so that I unintentionally groped her substantial bottom. Um... ew?
I had my doctor's appointment. I peed in a cup, got myself weighed, had my blood pressure taken, and listened to the baby's heartbeat. And got poked and prodded a little bit. The appointment ended at noon. But THEN, I had to have another blood sugar test. And the lab wasn't going to open up again until 1.15 or so. So, Neil and I had to amuse ourselves until then.
First, we played with an eye chart. I have 20/20 vision with my glasses on. Without them, I can't see the chart. Like, any of it. Neil did a lot better than me with one eye, but couldn't find the chart with the other one. I was about to make some comment about a one-eyed guide dog, or something, when this nurse came up and asked if we were waiting for something. According to her glare, it's against office policy to let patients try to read eye charts without assistance or something.
So we went outside. And that was when the fatigue and hunger hit Neil. Because of the blood test, I wasn't allowed to eat anything. And Neil supposed it would be awfully impolite of him to indulge in the partaking of food in front of me. So, instead, he chewed on the twigs of a tree and whined. Astonishingly enough, I wasn't even mildly irritated by the whining. I ignore, or yell at, most whiners. To Neil, I simply said: "My love, PLEASE do not eat the tree? What if it's toxic?"
Neil didn't think it would be toxic.
And that non-logic made plenty of sense. I very nearly started chewing on it myself.
And at one-fifty, when the lab finally decided to get their shit together and re-open, they took my blood and then had me drink this gahd-awful orange soda thing. In another hour, they took my blood again, to see if I was processing the orange soda correctly. The whole test, all in all, took three freaking hours. At four-fifty, when they did the last blood test, the technician (a scary-looking one with a google eye and a face that might have exploded if she'd tried to smile) jabbed me in the arm so hard I actually yelled a little. I guess she REALLY wanted to go home. Maybe in phlebotomy school, they teach you that, the harder you jab, the faster the blood flows? I'm pretty sure that's not true, but maybe this woman knows something I don't. I don't know why she didn't just use a sterile hatchet on my damned vein.
And then... and then... Neil and I made a mad dash for the bus stop. The faster we reached the stop, the faster the bus would come, I thought. It had been twenty-nine hours since I'd slept. And the faster the bus came, the faster it would get us to our next destination... The McDonald's on Plum Street, with its glorious, glorious dollar menu. It had been about eleven hours since I'd eaten anything other than shitty orange soda. I was ready to sing hymns to that dollar menu.
We'd both scarfed our burgers before we reached the end of the block. Neil nearly walked into a telephone pole trying to dump all of the fries into his mouth at once. For some reason, that McDonalds always ends up tasting like a gourmet meal.
We both got about fifteen minutes of sleep on the bus back.
Things get real fuzzy after that...
I remember something about eating a couple of pot pies.
Then, apparently, Neil and I slept for fourteen hours.
Got a phone call from the doctor's office this afternoon...
My blood sugar test came back perfectly normal.
Growl.
Not that I wanted to have a problem (especially since that means I'd probably have to give up ice cream for a month or two... And if there's one thing I know for sure about my daughter, it's that she LOVES it when I eat ice cream... It makes her squirm with what I can only imagine is glee...), but... I'm pretty sure they just did this test on me for the sheer enjoyment of starving me and then stabbing me repeatedly with needles. Happily, almost all of the tests I've had so far have come back with a verdict of "normal." And the tests that DIDN'T come back normal were questionable. And they came back normal when they were repeated.
In other words, other than having an ugly black bruise on my left inner arm, my kiddo and I are fine.
It's weird to be "normal."
I'm still hungry just thinking about yesterday. I'm going to go cook and cook and cook now...
Love,
~Helena*