 Beneath the Surface |
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Another busy weekend! On Friday night, some friends and I went out for Vietnamese food. I loved my spring rolls and my grilled shrimp vermicelli salad. We went out to a martini bar and had a few drinks, but it was so smoky that I started to feel like I was developing SARS, so I left. On Saturday, I went to an arts and crafts fair and bought some pretty handmade jewelry. We didn't stay for long because my friend's mom was about to have a stroke in the heat, so there wasn't a lot of time to push the baby around in her stroller, though I did monopolize her for as long as I could. When I got home, I edged and mowed and blew and weeded my yard and sweat poured into my eyeballs. It was a really hot day! I planted some red petunias in my flower boxes because the caladiums were on their last legs. My house needed some color. That night, I went to a function at my old school, and I could not even believe the nostalgia that washed over me, going into the bathroom where I got in huge trouble in like the third grade for sitting on the sink and where we changed for basketball or cheerleading practice every day after school. Everything really looks exactly the same. I saw a few old teachers but was shocked out of my reverie by being mostly just startled to see that today's young mothers dress exactly like the college kids I saw at the bar last week only with more expensive FMPs. I was like, is this a school auction or the street corner? What? These were not the mothers of yesteryear. They were all aerobicized within an inch of their lives, and their husbands were dropping hundreds and thousands of dollars on paintings, sunglasses, trips to the mountains, furniture, you name it. It made me very uncomfortable so I consoled myself by shoving Mexican food into my cakehole and guzzling Bud Light. I got up on Sunday morning and headed to the grocery store where I stocked up on healthy Core foods yet again. I really believe that this plan would be going along more swimmingly if I didn't insist on gorging celebratorily every damn weekend. I'm going to have to work on that. My mom came over to help me measure my windows, and we decided to try to doctor my kitchen light fixture because I somehow screwed it up and can't get it back on. We stood on stepladders and chairs and at one point I actually stood on the sink as we tried to doctor it with our screwdrivers and strained our neck and arm muscles and cursed a lot. We dropped a screw under the fridge in the process and proceeded to pull out both the fridge and stove in search of it which proved to be somewhat traumatic. I am at a loss to describe the filth contained underneath. There were a good four inches of black dust under the fridge, and the stove has been housing pieces of dog chow, a rigatoni noodle, an unopened block of baker's chocolate, and a broken Pringle for God knows how long. Possibly three and a half years. And let's not even discuss the pet hair. How a proud germophobe like myself has lived with these conditions is beyond me. I actually felt faint. I was so afraid that there would be cockroaches that I had to go outside and take some deep cleansing breaths, but she swore that there weren't any. We swept and vacuumed and scrubbed and replaced the appliances and I sort of feel like a new person now. Go ahead and pull out your fridge or stove and see what's under there. I double dare you. After all that, we still didn't fix the damn light, but at least I can sleep better knowing that my kitchen floors are no longer the hidden home to the bog of eternal filth and desecration. And let me tell you what, I went to Home Depot with some friends yesterday, and my faux wood blinds have been ordered! They were $90 each for four 71-ish-inch by 34-inch-ish windows, for a total of $392 (with tax). I have twelve months of zero interest to pay that off thanks to my brand spanking new account, so it should be a breeze. I am feeling really good about this purchase. I almost got the faux-grain-ish ones for $65 apiece, but I opted for the smooth ones at my blinds expert friend's insistence that the smooth ones brand closes tighter and is better for efficiency and privacy. I have decided that there is no better afternoon snack than a fresh homemade fruit salad made of diced granny smith apples, strawberries, pineapple, and bananas with a little light string cheese for some protein. YUM. I went to a university gospel choir concert yesterday, and the singers blew the roof off. They were wonderful and it made me want to get my sorry, lapsed ass to a black church as soon as the next Sunday rolls around. They clapped, they danced, they closed their eyes, they rocked out, and the audience members would stand up spontaneously rock out, too. It was really, really loud, and really, really fun. The kids obviously took such joy in what they were doing and had a lot of love for the music and each other. It got me thinking about faith issues, and I think that one of the positive things about faith is how it really can unify people, and these old spirituals are just gorgeous. I would go to church every Sunday even though I don't even know what I believe in (if anything) if I could hear music like this. Muffet's entries, starting here, make my eyes water, my throat close, and my chest ache. These are beautiful words. It feels intrusive to read these intimate words from a complete stranger. I take from them a strong desire to call my mother every hour on the hour and tell her how much I worship her and how much I need her. I only hope that I can be there for my mother one day, far, far from now, like Muffet is being there for hers. Elizabeth is another writer who has recently opened a vein. And there it is, her pain and her loneliness, spread out so artfully and hauntingly. I've had the feeling before of "Oh, shit. Did I just write all of that down and admit it to myself and then did I put it on the Internet?" But somehow, sometimes, it helps. It helps to know that people are reading it and sending you good vibes through the universe. That sounds so stupid, but it's true, at least for me. I am proud of her for writing this out and giving her pain words. It's like Shakespeare says in Macbeth: "Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak, / Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break." It's true. I've thought about that quote so much over the years, especially in keeping this journal. Giving words to your sorrow makes it less acute, makes it dissipate, makes your heart break a tiny bit less. Or it helps it to break more, which at least is helping you to move through the flood of that pain instead of keeping it inside while it burns a hole in you like battery acid. Anyway. I want to give Elizabeth a huge hug and tell her how much she is loved and that in some ways, there is at least one person out there who understands, that she is not alone. That I have had so many of these same thoughts in my own way but could never find the words to express them the way that she amazingly has. I want to make the chocolate peanut butter balls that she taught me how to make and feed them to her while we watch the musical episode of Buffy and sing about walking through the fire. I guess all we can do in the darkest of days and the most fractious of times is reach out to each other, so I'd like to reach out to her, because I want her to know that knowing her is an inspiration and that I'm lucky to call her a friend. About this time in ...
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