Awkwardly Social

In addition to freelancing this weekend (I will be so happy when people stop dying and/or the Obvious Big Awards Show deadline for death is reached), Seth and I continued our quixotic search for a new place to live.

The requirements are, we thought, not that big a deal, especially since I just recently decided that I don’t care if I live in Silverlake anymore.  I’m not completely sick of it, but I’m pretty close.  A friend of a friend suggested we look downtown, and this friend of a friend got on the phone with me and talked me into it.  She was very persuasive.  I’m glad she wasn’t trying to sell me Amway, I totally would sold my soul.

So I did some Craigslist hunting, got drunk at a downtown diner, and we went open house-ing.

The first place we saw was Penthouse 10.  I immediately fell in love.   It was three stories, open floor plan, had a private rooftop deck that was two stories, it was way below what we are spending now, and it was quite possibly the closest thing I’ve seen in real life to where I imagined fancy rich people who lived in cities would live.  It was that good.  We also looked at Penthouse 8.  Identical to Penthouse 10, except it was 80 square feet smaller and $285 cheaper.  I don’t understand downtown.  I mean, they’re basically giving these places away.

We were discouraged by the lack of parking in the building, so we went down the street to another open house and I almost threw up we were up so high.  I took a picture of the roof of my dream house from the roof of the vomit tower.

Then I slowly backed away from the edge and wiped the sweat off my palms.

We spent two hours in Penthouse 8 and Penthouse 10.  I was sold.  We were approved.  Then we went home and started talking about living downtown and how walking Lula alone at night might be sketchy and how we loved the space but it might not actually be big enough to contain all the shit we’ve both accumulated in our lives.  It was sad.   I might have cried.

Then this morning I told Seth I didn’t care, I wanted to live there and if they would agree to let us move in on the 15th for half month’s rent that month, I wanted to do it.  So, we put in our offer.  And we were shot down.

So, here I am, thinking about that rooftop deck and all the parties I won’t have there.  Whatever.  *sniff*

At least we had sex in there, so we know what that’s like.

For the past week, I’ve been watching movies for the Obvious Bigtime Awards Show (that I won’t mention by name, lest someone find me and fire me or something…) and all of these movies have one thing in common.  They are being watched because someone involved in the making of the movie croaked this year.  I did this 5 years ago for the SAG Awards, and for some reason that didn’t really bother me.  Maybe because I wasn’t in my 30s yet.  Maybe I used to be a heartless Hollywood hack.  Or, maybe because now I’m watching movies that I originally watched for one dude being dead, and now the other dude is dead and fuck me, watching The Muppet Movie is a real bag o’ laughs when everyone in every scene is fucking dead.  Even goddamned Kermit the fucking Frog is dead.

I watch the movie in fast forward, and say, dead, dead, he’s dead, she’s dead, camera-man dead, writer dead, director dead, dead, is he dead?, not dead, dead, dead, dead.

No one else is allowed to die. I know it’s going to get crowded down here, and traffic in Los Angeles is a bitch already, but I can’t take it.  No more death.  No more legacies.  Let’s just all stay alive a little while longer.  At least until the Obvious Bigtime Awards Show is over.

Here we are again.  Last year was a reading bust. Let’s just move on, and imagine this will be the year I get back in the groove, shall we?  Past reading lists can be found here.

4. The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn (2/7/09)  I was close to hating this.  It felt like it could have been a gossipy juicy memoir of the pain of going through an intense cooking program, but instead it felt like a sanitized news story that you’d see in the back of Parade Magazine.  Skip it.

3. Magical Thinking : True Stories by Augusten Burroughs.  (1/30/10)  Loved this.  I liked Dry, but I felt much more connected to the writing in this one.  Just an excellent collection.

2. Just trust me, I read a book here.  I don’t want to give the author’s name or the title because we’re friends in real life and I know he has a google alert for his name, and I don’t want him to read my blog.  I loved his book.  Adored it.  I highly recommend it.  I just don’t want him to read the other dribble I’ve leaked all over the web here, because he’s a real writer, and I find myself slightly shy and embarrassed about the shit I plop on this page. If you want to know the title, I’ll tell you.  Just e-mail me.

1. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.  (1/2010)  I started reading this in 2009 so I’m tempted to put it on last year’s list, but then that would fuck with this year’s total, so, here it is.  First book of 2010.  I loved it.  I think it’s well crafted, well realized and the only part I felt cheated on was Callie’s reveal to her peers that she was now Cal.  But I forgive that.  Highly recommend.

You know, where people stop being polite and start being real?  Oh, welcome.  Welcome to my bathroom where I was pulled Christmas Eve for tears and melt downs.  Welcome to my boyfriend’s parent’s living room where someone who wasn’t 3 years old threw a temper tantrum.  Welcome to my favorite restaurant where everyone started to go a little Lord of the Flies for no particular reason other than apparently everyone is full of hate in this hate filled season and wants it to go back to the way it was.  Let us not forget, however, the way it was had tears, screaming, and a long cold season full of spite.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks emotionally, but I’m happily grinning and bearing it.  My WASP upbringing and my current foray into pyschotherapy have both taught me many things.  Coping with booze (WASP), pretending to enjoy yourself if you’ve agreed to be at the event in question (therapy), keep it to yourself if you don’t like someone and talk about them behind their back with people you do like (WASP, therapy), smile (WASP, therapy), pass the potatoes with a tinge of passive aggressive sweetness (WASP) and cry in your bedroom alone with your pillow over your face so no one asks you what’s wrong or knows how much you hate them and you can keep keeping on like everything is fine until the next time you have to share the joyous holiday season with them (WASP).

My family has their issues, but at least we don’t talk about them.  At least we just keep it to ourselves so we only feel badly when someone sees a crack in the fake smile veneer.  I hate all this out in the open discussion of everyone’s feelings.

I get it!  You don’t hate me!  You just hate that I’m here instead of someone else!  Awesome!  Let’s eat some cake.  I’ve freshened your pillow cases and sound proofed the guest room.

I met the ex-wife this weekend.  It was fine.  I was overly smiley and gracious and felt like an idiot every time I talked to her like I was talking to a small child or a distant aging relative.Then I got sick during the graduation ceremony (nerves, morning sickness?) and threw up in my mouth almost not making it to the bathroom.  I had to buy a ginger ale and a bag of pretzels to settle my stomach.  It was kind of gauche to be walking around a test kitchen of amazingly beautiful pastries made by the graduating class, munching on Snyder’s of Hanover mini-twists.

We are staying in an insanely huge room overlooking Lake Michigan, Hermes and Michigan Avenue.  It’s lovely. But the view I’m most interested in is here.  Yeah.  That’s the webcam overlooking my stupid dog.  She’s the big dog in the small dog area.  Poor ol’ Lu, couldn’t handle the large dog area.  She seems fine.  I miss that stupid rat.

We’re off to the art institute, and then some shopping.  I like Chicago.  It’s snowing.

I’ve been unemployed for a week now and I’m sort of reveling in my housewifely duties.  This is odd because I hate doing things like calling people to schedule appointments and going places to drop things off or pick them up.

I’ve scheduled the maid. I’ve dropped the dog off at the groomer.  I’ve called the pest control company to come check that there aren’t any dead rats in the attic.  I’ve taken Seth’s suit to be hemmed and cleaned.  I have the cable company coming to fix up the guest room with cable for the kids.  Called my anxiety prescription refill in, even though I hardly feel anxious.

So… basically, I’ve done absolutely nothing.  I’ve scheduled people to come in and do some things.  Or taken things places to have things done to them.Which, makes being a stay at home non-mom super awesome!  This may come as a surprise, but I didn’t know that the modern housewife in Los  Angeles doesn’t actually do anything, which makes me think I might kind of like this gig…

All that free time to, what?  Um.  Write, I guess?  Work out?  Go to the myriad doctors I have scheduled?  Volunteer?

Um…  I cannot fucking wait to go back to work.

When my sister and I were kids and we’d get the stomach flu, my mom would pull out the spaghetti pot, the biggest pot in her culinary repertoire, for us to barf in.  We would get better and the pot would get washed out and eventually put back on the stove filled with water for spaghetti nights and we’d all collectively forget that one of us had been using it as a bile bucket.

I made a big mistake the other night, only partly my own fault.  As you’ve probably read I’ve been having some issues with my pee hole.  I’ve peed in lots of cups.  I’ve been declared bacteria and STD free and yet, still the horrible sensation of having a UTI.  It comes and goes, and this is what puzzles the doctors.  Yet, they still give me antibiotics just in case.  My gyno, who I love, gave me a single does of Flagyl to take to try to knock it out once and for all.  I didn’t take it that night because you’re supposed to take it with food, and I stumbled through the weekend waiting for my test results to come back.  They came back on Wednesday but one of the tests she said she would do hadn’t been done, so I thought, fuck it I’ll just take the damned antibiotic.  This was after a meal and two glasses of wine.

Cut to 4 hours later when the vomiting started.  And kept going for 6 hours.  With 15 minute rest breaks in between violent upheaval of broccolini and chicken breast and an Eggo waffle.  And two glasses of my favorite rose.  Seth got so worried that he called my doctor’s office, got the on call doctor to call in a prescription at 4:30am for an anti-nausea drug.  If you’ve never taken one you won’t know that, um, you don’t swallow it.  At least not with your mouth…  Yeah!  Fun for the whole family!  I took it (mmhmm… up the butt) and it had no effect.

By this point I had given up on yakking into the toilet.  My bathroom is always freezing and I was going into flop sweats after every heave, so I moved to the guest room with Seth on the couch near-by to listen to my incredibly loud wretching.  Lula laid next to me, worried.  I hugged a spaghetti pot.  At one point Seth took the pot to empty and wash it out, and returned it smelling of Palmolive.  I handed the pot back to him after a vomit spell and asked him if he minded rinsing out the soap smell, it was making me nauseous.  Which, funny, right?

I finally fell asleep at about 8:30am, woke up and heaved the last tiny bit of bile left in my stomach and fell asleep.

So… apparently what no one told me other than in passing was, if you take Flagyl with any alcohol, you’re going to get violently ill.  It’s um…  stupid to take antibiotics with alcohol anyway, but I didn’t really think about it because I’ve been on antibiotics before without any trouble.  Granted, I usually waited until the course was almost done, and I read somewhere that alcohol really has no effect on their ability to kill bacteria.  Which, might have been written somewhere like the New York Times, or, it might have been written on some non-doctor’s blog.  I don’t know.  Don’t judge me, I’ve got mental problems.  Also, I am retarded.  Yes, I am a total fucking moron, but come on, shouldn’t someone say when they’re giving you this drug, DUDE, YOU WILL WISH YOU WERE DEAD if you take this pill with alcohol.   It mimics the affects of the drug they give to alcoholics to keep them from drinking.  Guess who’s glad she’s not an alcoholic!  Also, guess who hasn’t been drinking!  Yeah, haven’t had a drop since that night.  Not planning on having any drops until this whole thing is resolved.  One thing though, there’s nothing like pain to make a girl want to drink.  Mental or otherwise.

So, short story long, I have an appointment with a urologist.  I’m reasonably sure this is only something old men do, have urology appointments. But whatever, man, I need my sex life back.

Also, I feel no shame about washing out my bile bucket/spaghetti pot, putting it back in the cupboard and serving chicken and dumplings out of it when my boyfriend’s kids come to town.  Because that’s what family is all about, the collective mis-remembering of the alternate uses for a spaghetti pot.

(How awesome would it be to actually have a picture of me being bathed in a spaghetti pot, goddamn my parents for not doing that. So irritating.)

As my last week of work winds down, please check out my tumblr page.

I’ve been posting photos, reblogging photos, scouring the internet high and low in search of  inspiration for my next project.  I have about three weeks off, give or take, and I’m hoping in that time, with the help of my therapist, I’ll be able to sleep again and write again.

Last night was so bad that after taking two of Seth’s (super strong) xanax and one of mine, I was still wide awake, alternating between cold sweats and burning up.  I finally got up and went into the guest room with Lula as my spoon and fell into a deep sleep that the bright late morning sunshine woke me from.  Seth and I normally sleep really well together, but the anxiety of this impending time off (no money!) and his family coming into town, and my family being so far away and yet still so dysfunctional (my sister and I had a long text conversation where we decided we were the only perfect ones… my therapist is going to have a lot to go over this week… can’t wait, I hate it when I have nothing to talk about in therapy), where was I?  Oh, yeah, stress.  I have it.  My friend at work calls it white woman stress.  Like where we stress about how we’re going to pay for our $900 Chloe boots now that we’re unemployed.

A prime example of white woman stress is when my phone was stolen a few weeks ago and I had a total crying melt down in the middle of furniture shopping because I realized all of the texts that I had saved from the early days of my relationship with Seth were gone.  Lost forever.   Then we proceeded to look at a sofa that the floor model was $26,000.  Yeah you read that right.  Ha.  We won’t be buying that really comfortable gold plated sofa made of baby skin.  Anyway…  I’m SOOOO stressed.  I can’t afford a $26K sofa.  Waaaaaaaa.  Ugh.  Shoot me now, I’m a lunatic.

So, last night felt really bad that I couldn’t just fall asleep in my loving boyfriend’s arms and instead had to resort to the guest bed with my stupid smelly dog.  White lady problems.

Anyway, I’m collecting images for inspiration, I’ve got big ideas and a little bit of time, let’s just hope I can get all this other stupid shit in order so I can sleep at night.

I miss writing here.  I’m thankful that I’m starting to unfreeze writing wise.  It’s not showing up here yet, but eventually the ripples will reach here.

I did some cooking today.  It was nice.  I had music on in the kitchen and the knives seemed sharp and the oven worked.

I have done a ton of shopping in the past week.  For myself.  This is twofold.  My clothes are all tattered and worn because I don’t go shopping for myself.  I lost some weight.  I only like to buy clothes when I’m around this weight.  I realize this all kinds of fucked up.  I am in therapy for many reasons.

I am moments away from Thanksgiving dinner.  With relatives of Seth’s I’ve never met.  I feel no anxiety.  My therapy is working in some ways.  Meeting new people?  Not as anxious making anymore.  Except for the impending ex-wife meeting.  I will be meeting her at Seth’s daughter’s graduation from pastry school.  There is maybe a pie in the face joke in there somewhere, not sure where.

I’m off for four days.  It feels glorious.  Then after next Friday, I’ll be on the dole again.  That doesn’t feel so glorious.

Happy Thanksgiving.  I’m thankful for many things this year, but mostly I’m thankful that Seth and I are still completely in love.  It’s a feeling I hope never goes away.

So, after my barfing Monday morning, there was some groaning and leaving work early and lying about, all accompanied by what I assumed was a raging UTI.  After some calls to various doctors, an antibiotic was prescribed and I took to my bed.  With your niggling thoughts of pregnancy dancing in my head.

I remembered that my sister once had a UTI whilst* pregnant, and that of course, made me think that, oh-ho, I MUST be pregnant.  Because UTI’s are a symptom of pregnancy.  Because my sister once had one concurrently.  This is how retarded I am.

Two days later I was still in agony, so much so I wasn’t able to go running for two days straight.  Some might think that was a convenient way for me to puss out of running, but those people are only partly right.  See, if I don’t run, I don’t sleep.  And guess who gets crazy if she doesn’t sleep!  Ding, ding, ding.  That’s right, this girl.  So after some haranguing by Seth, I called Callie (at her new office, which, I assumed would be a logistical nightmare which is why I didn’t want to call her, which is because I’m extra phone averse when I’ve got a double dose of the no-sleep-crazies) and she fit me in today.

First of all, this is a woman I’ve only seen twice now.  But she’s so extremely huggable-looking, I wanted to cuddle up with her and take a little nap in her lap.  Don’t mind me that’s just the crazy talking.  Sort of.  But I resisted and just undressed below the waist for her.  (She asked me to!  And I left my socks on.)   They tested my urine, and it was totally clear, Also, I’m a clean catch champion.  The nurse started to explain what clean catch was and I was all, stop right there, sister, save your breath, I know how to clean catch!  She smiled.  Weakly.  So, Callie rooted around in there and see if there was something else going on, like, I don’t know A BABY and took a slide from the baby making region and it too, was totally clear.  There was nary a baby or bacteria to be found.

Basically, I have nothing.  Except phantom pain that keeps me from running which keeps me from sleeping which keeps me from being a normal human being.

I have a shrink appointment on Saturday.

*Who was it that hates it when people use whilst, was it you Schmutzie?  If it was you, I’m kind of sorry, but I have an excuse!  I’m tired!  And while seems so boring when one is tired.