Awkwardly Social

We went to Berkeley last weekend for a little wedding getaway.  I spent two years thinking I went to a wedding on the Berkeley campus, so I was very confused when we drove by the campus and didn’t recognize it.  Which is when I remembered the wedding was at Stanford.  I get all of my California schools mixed up.

I do not do well with air travel.  I get to the airport too early.  I scrutinize the pilots and flight crew too harshly.  I pack too much.  I wear the wrong outfit.  I am a total mess. When I discovered xanax, my world changed.  Then a nice commenter told me xanax is not good for ladies trying to get pregnant, so I talked to my doctor and she told me it was fine if I was in the first two weeks of my cycle.  I bet you can guess which part of my cycle I was on when we went to Berkeley.  Not the first two weeks.  I think Seth contemplated divorce, and/or a seat assignment change.  After a complete post flight air train clusterfuck of meltdown proportions, wherein I wondered if Seth was trying to drive us off the Bay Bridge because he’d had enough of my whining, we arrived at our hotel.

We stayed at the Claremont, which is a Northern California dead ringer for the hotel in The Shining.  I wouldn’t say we went to bed mad, but uh, sometimes my moods are not easy to get over.  For the person on the receiving end of them.  My whole entire family is nodding their heads and saying a little prayer for Seth.

The next morning things were looking up as we ate an enormous breakfast at Rick and Ann’s, browsed books at a little bookshop, and walked around the town all amped up for the Colorado v. Cal game.  College towns are magical to me.  I think in my next life I’d like a little house, a tenured position at a small liberal arts college and many sordid trysts with students half my age.

I had the best deep tissue massage I’ve ever had at the spa.  But the spa itself… It was of another time.  Kind of janky and weirdly decorated, no dry sauna, a scary looking jacuzzi and some kind of waterfall shower that freaked me out.   But that massage made up for it.  If you are in Berkeley and want to drop a little dough and you don’t mind a weird doctor’s office type waiting room, see Michael at the Claremont.

We had dinner that night at Chez Panisse - Alice Waters is a genius.  We eat out a lot in Los Angeles, and Campanile is probably our favorite restaurant, but man, sorry Mark Peel, Ms. Waters has you beat.  I’ll be dreaming about that meal for a long time.

The next morning we had plans to get up early and play tennis.  The courts looked so pretty, and we actually woke up in time for our reservation, but we canceled our court because we decided to drive up the coast and see Stinson Beach and some Redwoods.

The drive to the beach was very Highway 1.  Windy roads, steep drop offs, beautiful views and hundreds of tourists.  We got to the beach and I spent a good thirty minutes in the bathroom, um, doing stuff a person usually likes to do in their own bathroom.  It wouldn’t be a vacation if I didn’t get sick!  After a scan of the beach we thought would be deserted,  we decided to head to less touristy pastures.  The redwoods.  Which is when we got caught behind a tour bus.  And we realized the vision of deserted redwoods and lonely beaches was something we would only see in our fantasies (maybe ones that included tenured professors and half my age students!) and we headed back to San Francisco.

A trip over the Golden Gate Bridge brought us back into the city and we motored up steep streets with pretty Victorian row houses, ate French fries and chicken pot pie at an old hotel bar, shivered at the fog rolling in and headed back to the airport.

We’ve been back five days and it wasn’t until yesterday on my drive from the valley back into Hollywood when I looked over the sprawling city cloaked in smog, concrete overpasses and iconic buildings surrounded by the bad architecture of the 80s that I was reminded why I love Los Angeles so much.  It’s a real big mix-up of good and bad, right and wrong, pretty and ugly.   Kind of like me.

And as I screamed an obscenity at an idiot cunt in Audi who cut me off at my exit, I thought to myself, “It’s good to be home.”

I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m having “trouble” getting pregnant.  I mean, I’m not pregnant, but it’s not really that much trouble.  And for some reason I get really irritable when I have to say, “I’m trying to get pregnant.”  Because that makes me feel like a failure.  There is no try, damnit!  Do or do not!  So when my friend told me I should do acupuncture and that she has a really great person, I was like, ok….  Skeptical glasses going on.

I called the acupuncturist a couple of months ago, and we traded phone messages, but I never actually booked an appointment.  So when old Aunt Flo showed up this month, I was like, fine, I’ll do your magic, lady!  I’ll puncture my soul to bring forth good baby mojo. Bring it!

Which is not what I said to the acupuncturist.  She asked why I wanted to try acupuncture, and I told her, begrudgingly, “I’m trying to get pregnant.” I booked my appointment.  Filled out a long questionnaire that had a lot of questions about the color, density and frequency of my stool, my vaginal discharge (oh mercy) and my stress levels.  Anger, check!  Depression, check!  Anxiety, check, check, check!  And fearfulness, check baby, check baby, one two!

When I got to her office, I was sort of bedraggled and tired.  I laid down on the treatment table, told her about my sex life and my mood swings and she told me a few things about diet and my exercise regime (no more Shredding for me!  yay! I still get to jog, though, so not completely off the exercise hook) and she said that from what she saw on my questionnaire and provided my gyno will do a little blood work and a fallopian tube procedure to rule out anything hormonal or mechanical, my stress levels are probably the most detrimental thing to my fertility.  That and the fact that I have an old husband.

Then she told me I had to quit drinking coffee.  Hmmm.  I might have felt all of these emotions at that moment - rage, anxiety, depression, fearfulness.  Coffee and the occasional margarita are my only vices! I am squeaky clean, lady, don’t take away my coffee!  She smiled and said, “I know, it’s very delicious, I drink it myself.  But I have 2 children at home, so I am allowed.”  Bitch.

Then we got to the low acid diet, and the herb and vitamin regime and I was like, enough!  I get it, I get to have no joy in my life, just poke me with the needles already! And she did.  She poked me with what she called the “tiny baby needles.”  And the only one that hurt was the one on the right side of my stomach.  Sort of a pinching from the inside kind of hurt.  It was unpleasant and weird but not terrible.  Then she poked my head, told me to close my eyes, relax and breath.  And she left the room.

I don’t meditate.  I cannot relax when there is hippy dippy music playing.  My feet were freezing.  The sun was peaking in from the window at the top of the room at that annoying brightness level that isn’t too bright but is still bright enough and all I could think about is how I wished I could put something over my face.  I tried to adjust my body position and felt like the needles were ripping my guts out.  It was the opposite of relaxing for me.  But I laid there, counting down from 100 - the only way I know how to quiet my mind and my lady finally came back in.  She smiled and asked me how I felt.  I was like, oh lady, you have no idea what you’re in for with me.  “Not relaxed?”  Dude, so not relaxed.   She said, “Well, it’s a process.  We’ll get there.”  I was like, ok… If you say so.

The rest of the day I felt like a complete bumbling mess.  I dropped my computer bag in the nurses office while getting my blood work.  Like from waist height, just dropped it.  I tripped and threw all of my paperwork down while getting out of the elevator and then dropped my sunglasses and my keys trying to pick it all up.  When I got home, I couldn’t stop jabbering and Seth was like, uh, what happened to you, you’re a manic mess.  And I was like, I have all these herbs and I can’t drink coffee and you need to get your sperm tested!

I am still pretty manic today, but that might be the three green teas I’ve had.   I almost just wrote as a final sentence, I LOVE YOU!  But that would be weird, so, let’s just close this with, hey, yoga meditation people, how do you do it?!