thigh bone is connected to anywhere it hurts

I went to see my doctor this morning.  Going to the doctor makes me scared.  He always has to take my pulse twice, once at the start of the appointment and once at the end after the anxiety peaks so he can assure himself that I do not actually have a heart condition.  I have no idea why I am so scared of doctors; I have never had anything but nice doctors.  The doctor here, in particular, is very kind.

Actually I did have a problem with a doctor once, though I'm not sure it should really be categorized as a problem.  More just a strange situation.  Because I have been a mostly-very-healthy person, I wasn't terribly proactive about getting a new doctor once after moving to a new city.  In that new city I auditioned for a play that was already in production and became an understudy for the part of a sexually aggressive crazy girl (ahh, typecasting) whose primary role was to make out recklessly with the pianist.  Because it was already in production, I watched the show a couple of times to learn my part and had no rehearsals.  I did end up having to fill in a couple of times.  I was a great kisser.

Anyway, back to the doctor's office.  I had no regular doctor and so I did the yellow-pages thing and found someone close to where I was living.  I just wanted my birth control prescription refilled.  So this doctor seemed nice enough, and vaguely familiar which was weird because I hardly knew anyone in this city being so new.  He chatted with me during the exam about my life, the small-talk distraction kind of talk that doctors do, and I mentioned that I was understudying in a play.  He asked more questions, a theatre enthusiast apparently.

Or an actor.  Hah.  He was the pianist.  I had made out with my doctor.  Very very very weird.  (It occurs to me only now how rare a thing it is to meet an actor/doctor.  But I did not live up to my crazy and sexually aggressive character; I never went back to see that doctor again.)

I don't think this is why my heart races when I go to the doctor though.  The chances of this happening twice are very slim.  I hardly ever make out with  strangers anymore.


*

Shawn is coming out of retirement.  He got hired yesterday, and the job starts in a week.  I'm glad this period of unemployment was so short, not really even long enough for him to morph back into a teenager.  Last night in bed while I was fiddling around with some idiotic game on my phone I looked over at him reading an enormous book and thought, Who are we?  I have a week left in my grad program and I cannot remember how to read anything that isn't a journal article, peer reviewed and written within the last seven years.  I have traded in my books for a little game where stick men chase me and I pick them up and throw them.  And Shawn, apparently, now reads gigantic novels.  Turn turn turn.


*

the distance between us and the space inside ourselves

There is a student in my psych program who is an existential therapist.  He conceptualizes problems as arising from the internal conflict that occurs when we confront death, freedom and responsibility, isolation, and meaninglessness.  I like, in particular, that Yalom acknowledges isolation.  There are times I find loneliness overwhelming and I cannot understand why.  I have no reason to feel lonely.  Existentialists would say isolation is just part of the human condition and this, to me, makes more sense than any other explanation I have encountered.  I add to that theory that it is the ability to get extraordinarily close at times that makes those moments of isolation seem so much bleaker by comparison.



*

I help her with her baggage

I can tell he wants to talk to me by the way he tries to catch my eye.  No, he doesn't want to talk to me in particular, he just wants to talk to someone.  I open my book so there's somewhere else to look but I do not read because I am still biting on a thought, half-formed and ugly.  I am not ready to talk just yet.

He says, Hey you spend a lot of time in airports.  It's not really true, not in general, just lately.  I do not always go so many places.  Sometimes I am totally motionless except for my heart.



*

pouring light

I like it that in some ways I still do not entirely know my husband.  I like that I can know him so well and still discover things I did not know.  When you live with someone, share your world closely with someone, for a long time, it is too easy to stop noticing the small things you notice when you are still falling in love rather than having fallen and been unable to get up for a long, long time.

Shawn's contract ends in just a week, and this routine is part of his life.  In his industry, jobs are always temporary.  One works from contract to contract, searching always for a better contract.  For a lot of years we have chased his contracts and lived a lot of different places so he could get the work and get the experience he needed.  We grew accustomed to living apart at times so that he could chase without limitations.

Things are different now.  Different because of J, of course.  This child in our lives means things are different.  Priorities are different.  We promised her different things than we promised each other -- because she is a child and had less options than either of us ever had.  Things are also different, perhaps, because we are older, though I hate to think that has anything to do with it.

I am watching him go through the familiar, by now, process of searching for the next contract.  And I am noticing who he is, now.

Now he is no longer chasing work in other countries.  Not even in other cities.

He has a reputation.  (I'm interested to learn more about that, but of course people are careful about what they say.)  The industry is incestuous and everyone knows everyone.  They know, no matter where he applies to work, who he is.  They know he is a genius, truly, and they also know he is hard to manage.  He does not follow rules and he does not automatically respect authority.  They always hire him with reservations because they are fearful of what he will say or do.  But they want his brain.  I like this about him, though it makes the process more difficult than it needs to be.  I like that he is beautifully smart, I like that he is unpredictable, and I like that he is difficult to manage.  Whatever it costs.






*

Some of the pups are misbehaving this morning.  Exhibit A.

I would like to give these two the benefit of the doubt, but they look pretty guilty.




















Interrogation Room.  Tell me everything you know.

Today was the last day; now it is Spring break.  I celebrated by backing my vehicle into the garage door.  I do not really know how this happened apart from wanting to blame Emory.  I didn't open the garage door as soon as I normally would have because Emory was there and I did not want him to be tempted to dart out of the garage and go eat worms off the driveway, one of his favourite activities after a hard rain.  So the garage door was partly up when I started to back out, but apparently not all the way, because I clipped it and forced the door off its track.  This made it impossible for the door to go either up or down.  I wanted to blame Emory, but as he was quaking with fear at the sound of the crunch I decided to comfort him and called myself names instead.

I phoned Shawn to tell him I wasn't coming to pick him up since I couldn't get out of the garage.  Sometimes I cannot string together three or four reasons for him to be able to tolerate me.  He phoned his father who picked him up and drove him home.  While I waited for Shawn I stood on the driveway surveying the damage, which was minimal, until I noticed that the keypad that allows us to open and close the garage door without the remote opener was flashing.  I felt stupidly compelled to try and stop the flashing and pushed a button on the keypad -- which was an enormous mistake.  The door began to open automatically, but because it was no longer properly on its track, the door went up only partway and then fell on top of the vehicle.  Sigh.  This was how the dust had settled by the time Shawn got home.

His Dad helped get the door off the vehicle and recommended someone who knows something about how to fix garage doors.  Now the garage door is lying on the ground in the garage and the vehicle is parked on the driveway.  Some guy is coming out to look at it tomorrow.  And Shawn is still speaking to me for reasons I cannot fathom.  He did call me a Force of Nature but I think I kind of liked that.  I am going to go drink wine now.  I'm glad it's Spring break.

*

My sister would have been 33 today.  Amitriptyline, Oxycodone, and Methadone were the three drugs that were found at lethal levels in her body.  There were many others at "prescription levels" which does not mean that they were prescribed to her.  Sometimes I think we have made good progress since then.  Sometimes not.  




*

airport life

Yech.  Airport Chinese food.  I know better than to take my chances with a place called Wok n' Roll.  I had coffee and a granola bar for dinner.















Last time I flew, about four months ago, I missed my plane because I was sitting here in the waiting area fooling around and not paying attention.  Although I was here in plenty of time, I got distracted, and ended up having to wait for another flight.

This time I have stayed focused the entire time, checking my watch every few minutes.  This time my flight is delayed.  I really hate airports.