Awkwardly Social

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.