5.30.2005

Adventures in Babysitting

Did I tell you guys that I have stepsiblings on this (my dad’s) side of the family. In my day-to-day life I have always been an only child, but every Christmastime when I would come here to my dad’s for a visit, I temporarily became the youngest of four. I have two older stepsisters who are now both married with child(ren) and a stepbrother, only two years older than I am, who is not married and hopefully has no children. He lives in town with my dad and stepmom, as does the oldest of the two girls, the one who I am closest to.

This stepsister is currently on vacation in CANCUN (bitch) with her husband for a week. So, her ten-year-old daughter is staying with us. With me. IN MY ROOM.

Dun dun dun DUN!!!

Like I said, I’m an only child. For the past two years, I’ve lived alone. I liked this. I like privacy and being able to eat dinner in my underwear. I like having quiet time where I can just sit and not speak to anyone for long periods of time, all the better to work out in my head my plan for eventual world domination.

Hey guys! Guess what? Ten-year-old girls do not give you privacy. They do not give you space. They sure as HELL do not give you silent time for world-dominating-plan-working-outs.

But! Guess what ten-year-old girls do like? They like sneaking up on you when you are on the phone and poking you in the ribs, with both hands, from behind! And they like watching Full House and Family Matters, for hours on end! And they like noticing and pointing out every single flaw on your (apparently haglike) 25-year-old face and body, such as zits and dry elbows and that place on your ankle that you somehow keep missing every time you shave, and which now resembles Harry from Harry and the Hendersons!

Yes! They enjoy doing all this and more!

In summation: I am slowly going insane, and I might just take you all with me.

Now, this girl (MK) is the oldest of the grandchildren, so we all have had a lot of discussions about her and her development over the years. It is openly known, in my family, that she has always been a very sweet and polite kid, but that she is rapidly approaching the Junior High Age of Annoyingness and Bitchery, and so it is the responsibility of all of us stepsiblings to keep her in check and try to keep her from becoming some stereotypical preteen nightmare amalgamation of eye-rolling, thongs, and tube tops.

The clothing thing is working out fine. Her mom, my stepsister, has been really good about refusing to buy her the ho-bag clothes that are so prevalent on American preteens nowadays. Instead, she insists on keeping MK outfitted in longish shorts and flip-flops and t-shirts that actually cover her stomach. So, bravo on that point.

However, the BITCHERY AND POUTING have grown by leaps and bounds since I saw her last, which was only last Christmas! Yea gods, if it should keep increasing at such an exponential rate, I swear I will go postal, and quick.

So, you guys will be happy to hear that I have made a friend in town. She is related to my stepsister’s husband and is 22 and very fun and we have been watching lots of scary movies, swimming, and taming the wildness that is MK together. A few days ago we all went roller skating, on a weekday, at like 10am when the place first opened. It was surreal. Just as I remembered it, the roller skating rink was dark with gazillions of strobe lights and arcade games, only now it has MTV-style pop-rap music blaring while you skate, not the 80s synth-pop of my childhood.

However, it’s like riding a bike: you can take the girl out of the skates, but you’ll never take the skate out of the girl! We zoomed around and around and took photos of each other falling and sang along to the terrible music and tried not to be humiliated by the ever-present 9-year-old boys who skate like they were born on a rink and whizz past you going about 90 miles an hour.

One sad incident I must tell you about: I went up to the high-school-aged boys who were DJing and requested “more Britney Spears, for my little neice” (which was of course a total lie, as it was for my new friend and I, but never mind that), and they answered me back with a “Yes, ma’am.” MA’AM???!

Dear god, the horror, the horror. I am now old enough to be a Mrs. Robinson figure to a high-school boy.

They went on to play one song by Britney and then segued right into “Brick House.” This, my new friend and I decided, was either a nod to the decade in which I was born (’79, thank you!), or an homage to the flattering fit of my bitchin’ t-shirt, and I would like to think it was the latter. Please let me continue to believe this.

supine @ 3.24 pm |

5.20.2005

Nobody puts Baby in a corner!

Busy week, folks. Busy busy busy. This was a week in which I scrubbed mold off the tiles around the pool, drove a golf cart for my dad for his 100-hole charity golf fundraiser, did some painting, started learning to cook (under my stepmom’s tutelage), and found out that I remain un-knocked-up.

Yes, that’s right, there was a Pregnancy Scare. It was scary. I was late, and more than fashionably late. One WEEK late. Which sucked. Each day that ticked by periodless, I got more and more perplexed, until one day I looked at the calendar and realized that a week had gone by, which was officially Very Late, so I got Very Scared.

That night I had a huge headache, which usually signifies the onslaught of my period. John called for a chat and I told him what was going on. He was pretty much like, “Um, shit,” and I was like, “Yep.” I mean, what else can you say at that point?

Now, I have been lucky enough to never have had a pregnancy scare before. I’ve had friends in high school and in college who did, and who had varying results. It’s always awful and scary and stressful, and I have always been hugely thankful that I never had to go through it myself. But now my time had come.

So on the morning of the seventh day of unbleedingness, I finally had to tell someone. My stepmom and I were hanging out in her big bathroom. She was dying my hair and I was being really quiet and tense and finally I blurted out, “I AM A WEEK LATE, HOLY SHIT WHAT SHOULD I DO?” And she was awesome. I mean, she put the hair dye bottle down slowly and was like, “Oh, nooooo, T. Oh nooo. Don’t tell me that.” But then she snapped into action.

Stepmom: Okay. We will go to Target and buy a test as soon as we’re done with this.

Me: I don’t know how this happened! I mean, there was no, you know, instance that I can remember that might have caused this.

Stepmom: We can’t tell your daddy. I mean, we just can’t. It would kill him. He would just die.

Me: Oh, my god! I am not going to tell him! That’s not even…no. That is not going to happen.

Stepmom: Okay. Because he would die.

Me: SO WOULD I.

Stepmom: Okay, good.

Me: So…what if it’s positive?

Stepmom: There’s a place in Atlanta we can go. We’d have to stay overnight. We’d have to tell your daddy we were going on an overnight shopping trip.

Me: There’s nowhere in town??

Stepmom: Nowhere.

Me: Holy shit. I AM SO MAD. How did this happen?

Stepmom: Well, you had sex.

Me: I am never having sex again!

Stepmom: Oh, come on. Sex feels good.

Me: Okay, ew. I can’t talk about this.

Stepmom: Whatever.

So when the hair dying was over we went to Target and bought a test. Hello, these things are EX. PEN. SIVE. (Women just get screwed left, right, and center, don’t we? Mmmmm hmmmm.) The perky checkout girl was all, “How are you today?” and then, “Have a great day!” Psycho.

My stepmother had an appointment to get her nails done right then, so while she was doing that I went into the bathroom and peed on the little stick. The “pregnant” box immediately started turning pink and I began to drift off to my happy place, but thankfully by the time the three minutes were up, it had faded back to white and there was definitely no line. Hallelujah! Angels, rejoycing, etc! I went out to my stepmom and gave her a thumbs up.

And thus, it came to be that I found out I was not pregnant in the bathroom of a nail salon. Never let it be said that I lead a mundane life.

Furthermore, of course I got my period, like, four hours later. Bastard uterus!

John was all, “Oh good. Of course, I wasn’t really worried. Were you??”

Bastard!

supine @ 9.20 pm |

5.14.2005

Hey y’all! (from southwest Georgia)

Thank you for all of your kind and supportive comments, everyone. I was pretty nervous and sad about moving, but now that I’m here in Georgia I feel much calmer about everything. I’m sure I’ll love school once it starts (I mean, it’s a full-time program in painting. I don’t exactly have anything to complain about) and once I move into an apartment and meet some people and become, you know, not friendless.

So, I have arrived at my dad’s and stepmom’s house. I am homeless and unemployed and living in a small southern town that is famous for its supply of both peaches and pecans. Industry, y’all! Progress!

The drive down from DC was reminiscent of the journey in that obsolete computer game others of my generation have come to know and love. Yes, I am speaking of OREGON TRAIL. In the sense that the trip took about six months, required us to fjord the wagon across a raging river, fix a busted axle, and lose one family member to a snake bite and another to “consumption.”

O, the journey of the crossing of the USA! It is filled with so much pain and bitter times. And by bitter times, I am specifically referring to the night spent sharing a motel room with my dad and stepmom in Spartanburg, South Carolina. You just have not lived until you have woken up to your dad reciting law mumbo-jumbo to himself in the shower at 7am.

Actually the drive was not too terrible. It was just LOOONG – two full days. Mostly because my dad is a strictly speed limit kind of guy. I drove as much as I can without making myself berserk, and every so often he’d lean over to check out the spedometer, recoil, and say, “Gettin’ a little fast there! Gettin’ a LITTLE FAST.”

Thank god almost all my stuff fit into their car too. I had to leave behind one trash bag (yes you read that right. What can I say? I’m pure class) of “random papers and knick-knacks,” (that is how I labeled the contents on the Post-It I had taped to the outside of the bag) but my mom can send that to me soon.

Thank god part two that my stepmom was successful in petitioning my dad to stop off at the big mall in Atlanta that has a Sephora. Sweet lovely consumerism! I love buying makeup. I only wear it at night, but I love trying it on and buying it. (Is there a name for that? It must be some really innate, instinctual thing, going back to cavewomen finding and hoarding the good boulders and branches for decorating their cave dwellings.)

Of course no road trip with one’s family members would be complete without the inevitable conflicts that arrive from spending every minute in such close quarters. I am referring of course to bodily functions, specifically farting. Isn’t the father figure of every family famous for his farting? (Wow, a lot of alliteration in that sentence.) When I was younger and took a lot of trips to the beach with my dad, stepmom, and stepbrother, who is two years older than me, most of the humor relief on any given trip was directly resulting from farting.

You could always tell when dad was responsible, because he would crack a window right before the sonic boom hit. Very selfless of him. There would be about a ten-second lag time, and then one of us backseat dwellers would start wailing and gnashing our teeth in agony. My stepmom claims that she could always distinguish my dad’s farts from anyone else’s olfactorily, which is just gross. Seeing as I was a preteen girl and therefore hideously self-conscious, I never actually allowed myself to fart in front of others. I think I’ve been holding one particular one in for like fifteen years now.

Speaking of farting, it is an ongoing discussion between John and I now. The second time he stayed over at my apartment, we were just falling asleep and he was like, “Did you know you fart in your sleep?” Thank god the room was pitch black, because I think I blushed from head to toe. But I’m cool, you know; I played it off.

Picture it: my apartment, lying in bed in the dark.

J: Did you know you fart in your sleep?
Me: Ha ha ha! I’m pretty funny.

{ten second pause}

Me: I DO NOT. TAKE IT BACK RIGHT NOW YOU LYING LIAR. I HAVE NEVER FARTED IN MY ENTIRE LIFE.
J: Ha ha ha haaaaa! You do! Ha haaaa! It kept me up all night long! It was hilarious!
Me: {on the verge of tears} I HATE YOU I WANT TO DIE RIGHT NOW.
J: It’s okay, I was just kidding.
Me: You were? I mean, of course. Of course you were. I don’t have digestive issues at all.

{ten second pause}

Me: {drifting off into sweet sleep}
J: I totally was not kidding.
Me: ARGHHHHHHHHH.
J: No, I was! I was kidding! You didn’t fart at all!
Me: Dude, YOU were the one who was farting all night long. I practically fell asleep at work the next day, I was so tired from being kept up all night long.
J: Oh please. You are the worst liar.

{pause}

Me: JUST SAY THAT YOU WERE KIDDING AND THAT I DID NOT FART IN MY SLEEP.
J: I was kidding.

{pause}

{both of us crack up}

J: No I wasn’t.

{I stop cracking up}

{Repeat this cycle about fifty times until we fall asleep from exhaustion}

Ah, l’amour

Anyway, classes begin in five weeks, so I’ll have a few weeks to slug around the house with my stepmom (who is sick and has retired already) before I actually move to an apartment in Savannah. It’s nice. I can hang out with her and my dad and it’ll be the long-awaited Period O’ Sloth I had thought the week at my mom’s was going to be.

And John and I are having an actual, successful, long-distance relationship at this very moment. We have talked every day. It has been four days. Four days down, two years to go! Woo, totally doable! Cakewalk, in fact! Har har. AND, we still have not farted in front of each other (at least during our waking hours), so the bloom is not yet off the rose.

supine @ 8.01 pm |

5.9.2005

How to make ten days feel like ten minutes

1. Give yourself ten days of living with your mom in your hometown, expecting that you’ll spend them watching TV and leisurely packing to move four states away.

2. Forget that over the course of the last two years you have actually made a lot of really excellent friends, all of whom will want to see you for various meals and parties and gatherings, thus ensuring that you will be

3. Driving/Metroing all over the metropolitan area to fulfill various social engagements, while still leaving to time to

4. Take a five-hour road trip in a normal-sized car with three other adults, plus a baby in a car seat, to see your cousin graduate from college. This will entail

5. Spending a night and a day in southern Virginia, sleeping at a place called “The Budget Inn” which resembles another well-known motel called “The Bates Motel.” Take a lukewarm shower and shiver under your threadbare cover next to a nightstand with NO CLOCK RADIO.

(Also, the car ride gives you enough time to memorize every single Wiggles song, ever. “Fruit salad! Yummy yummy!” will be stuck in your head until the day you die.)

(Furthermore, you forget, for the 9,678th time, that you are Irish, and basically have the melanin of Powder. You neglect to put sunblock on your bare forearms and get a frigging SUNBURN, in 75-degree weather, on the three inches of skin exposed beneath your cardigan sleeves. Feel pathetic and extremely Caucasian. Say to your boyfriend, “Look at what a honky white cracker you’re dating,” as you point to your flaming red wrist, and laugh when he calls you his little gringa.

6. Spend one day hiking and picnicking with your new sort-of boyfriend at a nearby mountain, after getting the two of you incredibly lost on the drive there, because you have sworn that you knew the way but you are actually AN IDIOT, although he is incredibly nice about the whole thing and does not get mad but instead says, “Of course I don’t mind - it’s fun hanging out with you, even if it’s just driving aimlessly all over the county.”

(At this point you have still not packed, even though you are supposedly leaving the state in five days.)

7. Spend Sunday looking at houses with the sort-of boyfriend and his realtor and his uncle, feeling very weird and pretend-grown-uppy, because the last time you looked for a place to live for yourself, your main priorities were 1–Does the neighborhood have a lot of gunfire, and 2–Is there room in this apartment to fit both a bed AND A SOFA, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

(You are not moving in with said boy; you are only tagging along in the house-hunt. Do not be frightened, Internet peoples! I have not become fully domesticated yet!)

8. Get peer-pressured into testing your crappy high school Spanish out on the boy’s Spanish-speaking-only uncle. Say to him, “Qual es tu color favorito?” ("What is your favorite color?") while the boy and the realtor struggle not to laugh outright. Blush like a tomato.

(The uncle is a good sport. You now know that his favorite color is blue (azul). Yours, you tell him, is green (verde).)

(Curse you, public school education! Why am I such a language numbskull?)

9. Vow to start studying Spanish in your free time.

10. Spend a blissful night at the Motel 6 IN YOUR TOWN (if that is not seedy, I don’t know what is) with the boy, because he too is living with his mom while he looks at houses to buy and you need privacy for those long discussusions about Cartesian geometry and earth science, and by that of course I mean premarital relations.

11. Wake up feling dirty, but in a good way.

12. Meet your dad and stepmom for lunch downtown. Your cell phone rings four times in one hour, which is more calls than you usually get in a month, so you feel special and beloved. However this means more running around and social engagements and one-last-times with various disparate friends.

Boo hoo…NOT. I know. Everyone should have such problems.

(However, as of now it is Monday night, and I leave Wednesday morning, and I have not packed one damn thing.)

What this boils down to

You guys, back when I was employed (two weeks ago), I spent all day, every day, on a computer. Some part of that time would be spent checking my email and looking at and commenting on you guys’s blogs. But in the past nine days, I have not been on a computer for more than about an hour, total.

It is a completely weird feeling. My email is all crazy backed up and I have not been going to see any of your sites or doing any posting, at all. I am really sorry if I haven’t written people back like I said I would! Please don’t get mad! I’ll be back soon.

I am actually getting really sad/scared about moving now. I mean, all this time I thought I hated DC and that I’d be just thrilled to go, but now that it is down to the last days here, I’m getting really morose and emotional. I have no clue why I ever imagined it would be easy to leave all my friends. I am even going to be sad about leaving my mom, and she is mad as a hatter. For real.

Plus I really like John. I really really really like him. Things just keep getting better and better with him, and even though it is sort of crazy that we’ve only known each other for three weeks now, we are going to try and do the long-distance thing. Apparently flights between DC and Savannah are like $150, so hopefully this is a relationship that can be maintained.

I want it to work so badly. I just feel so good when I’m around him. I really like myself when I’m around him. He makes me feel beautiful and funny and smart and kind, and a girl can get used to that, you know?

I am trying to remember, way way back a year and a half ago when I applied for this program, what it was that I was intending to do with it, so that I can focus on that and remember what I’m making this huge change for. I’ve sort of lost sight of that goal in the midst of all these details of moving and saying goodbyes and wrapping things up, and I need to focus on that again. I need to trust whatever it was in me that orginally set this whole adventure into motion so that I don’t stay bogged down in all the things that are ending now. I don’t know. It’s all just making me very pensive.

So, that’s what is going on in my head lately. Once I get to my dad’s house in Georgia, where I’ll be for a couple of weeks at least, I’ll have a lot of spare time to get back into reading everyone’s sites again. I hope you guys are doing well.

supine @ 10.07 pm |

5.2.2005

You’re going to want to slap me, I can tell already.

Well, things are still going swimmingly for me here in Crushville. J and I are hanging out all the time and it is so lovely that I frequently have to hold back from bursting into song (specifically, “You light up my life") when I am around him.

I know, two sentences in and you want to barf already. Honeymoon-stage couples are SO annoying. I get that, seriously. I remember when I was studying abroad in England my junior year, and I hadn’t had a real boyfriend in forever. I was visiting a friend who was studying in Prague, and he caught me staring at this total PDA couple and said something like, “I know, don’t all these beautiful springtime European couples in love just make you want to punch somebody in the face?” And it’s true, they did make me want to punch someone in the face. Them.

However my friends will not listen to me cheese about J anymore so I must turn to you, the good people of the World Wide Web. Hear me now: J is friggin awesome! He makes me feel like a natural woman! I want to marry him and have his babies!

After my, um, two years of grad school four states away. Yeah…

God, it is so weird to be back at my mom’s house in the suburbs again. She is being really unusually nice so far, but still. Everything happened so quickly. My boss threw a party for me Thursday night. The few people from our office, our accountant, and my beloved former boss and coworker came. This coworker lives in San Diego, CALIFORNIA, people, and came out to DC for the party. That is some love, right there. Both ways, the love goes.

So we all went out to a bar and there were cards and photos and hugging, and a check from my boss from his personal bank which means that he spent actual cash money on me, not company money, which is a sign of the second coming. So take note and take cover, or whatever it is that is appropriate in this situation. (I am Jewish so I have no idea.)

I do not mind telling you that one, and only one, round of tequila shots was taken by everyone present. It was my departing wish.

Then my current officemates went home (pussies!) (Just kidding! That is a very dirty word!) (But I use it all the time! Am like a sailor in that way!) and I stayed and had dinner with my former boss and the San Diego lady. They were delightful as always and I just love them.

(Sometimes I wish I had never left that job, but then I remember that it was for a big scary defense contractor, and then the nightmares begin anew and I am forced to retire to my corner with my blanky so that I can experience the flashbacks in all their horrific, seizure-inducing glory.)

Soooo, then Friday was my last day of work evah! Or in DC at least. It was very quiet at the office. My boss raced in bright and early and asked breathlessly if I was hungover. To humor him I said yes, but truthfully the tequila he had bought was so super-frigging-primo that it went down like buttah, so I wasn’t really hungover at all. I am a sport.

After work I had to pack. J had offered to come help me pack and initially I balked, because I am an only child and am used to privacy and the thought of someone, especially a relative stranger, seeing all my stuff gives me the creeps. But a totally weird thing happened. While I was telling him no, I realized that I actually missed him and wanted to see him that night.

This is a big step for me – usually I go on a first date with someone, and if they call wanting to go out again within, like, a week, I’m all, “What? I just saw you. Please! We’ll get sick of each other!” So for me to have seen him Tuesday night and then be missing him Friday is surprising and nice. I am glad to discover that I do have a heart after all, and that it’s not dead and black.

So he came Friday and packed up everything in my kitchen, and if that’s not cool then I don’t know what is. Then we went for Indian food, my last time with my old pals at the takeout place.

It was also my first time actually eating there, since I usually grab my takeout and run home to watch the Golden Girls or something equally embarassing that people who live alone tend to do. It was delish. I said goodbye to my takeout pals, but I don’t think they understood a word I said. I hope they don’t go bankrupt now that I am not there to eat their chicken tikka masala every week.

My mom and stepdad came to help me move all my stuff out at 8:30 (in the morning! yes!) on Saturday. It went fine, considering I was asleep for most of it.

Saturday night, on the phone with my friend W:
W: Oh, what time did your mom show up to move you out today?
Me: 8:30 in the morning!
W: Ouch. So you kicked J out at…?
Me: 8:15.
W: Ah, I figured as much.
Me: Yep.

And so I no longer have my own fun downtown apartment and must write to you from Suburbland, Maryland. It is pretty funny to be 25 years old and have to ask to borrow the car. I feel like I have regressed, developmentally. Man, I hope the “Clean up your room!” conversations come next. I totally cannot wait.

supine @ 10.05 pm |
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