if you’re hurting so am i

Sunday morning and afternoon

A short, non-chronological list.

Newspapers and scones and coffee and eggs with stuff in them and mangoes and silly movies. Pillow fights. Listening to rain and not having to move my car and not having anywhere I have to be. Crazy, fucked-up little dreams that I’m only now starting to remember, in bits and pieces. Hangovers that you don’t mind, because they’re like sore muscles after a good workout and you feel like you’ve accomplished something. Coming outside into sunshine and really noticing it for once.

In short, a brief - and much-needed - respite from the shitstorm that has been my life recently. Naps. Snuggling with puppy.

Sunday Evening

On Sunday nights, there is always a great division among the masses. Some play Trivial Pursuit, and some play pool. Mostly, I’m a pool-playing mass-piece. However, the TP is going on in honor of her majesty Sjet, whose birthday it is. I could not miss that! Not ever! Alisha and Angie and Patrickopie and Ida are there. I don’t remember who wins. It takes a damn long time to get our food. Angie begins answering every question “Fish and Chips”.

Eventually, I go over to pool, just as Josh and The Girl are arriving for TP. PWe and HSM and Jaye and Safety Cowboy and le Pratt and CF and Frank and Ko (Coe?) and Simon are at pool when I get there. (I arrive just at Gratuitous Ass-Grab-Thirty.) Brooke shows up, and she and I seclude ourselves in a corner for one of our semi-annual “State of the Brooke and Freesia Union” conferences. We are looking very cute.

I get home, and spend a bit of quality time on the phone with Ernie. I don’t think there’s anyone who knows me like he does - we’ve been friends so long that we’ve kind of got each other figured out in a way that I didn’t previously know was possible. He has this innate way of not only seeing through the tangle that I create around myself, but of showing me how to see it too. He can make my most complicated of problems simple by showing me that the complications are all in my head. With one sentence, he totally alters the way I look at my life. This is why I love mah Ernie. Apparently I used to do the same thing for him. I talk to him on my cell phone in my room with the lights off. I feel kind of like we’re having a sleepover. I’m so tired that I fall asleep ON my cell phone. (That’s going to leave a mark.)

Monday Morning

I feel terrible. My head is throbbing and I am dizzy and nauseous, and it can NOT be because of the drink I had at pool. (I always get scotch, but I actually stepped back and drank it on the rocks this time. Just to be safe.) My head is swimming. I briefly consider staying home. I decide against it.

Monday Afternoon

Afternoonboss thinks I have a concussion. This is very interesting to me, because I’ve only told her part of the story. (You don’t want to admit to any more debaucherous behavior than you absolutely have to.) However, if she’s right, that would explain a LOT of things about the last half of the concert. Inconsistencies that I sort of just accepted at the time but which now are making me wonder. Things that happened that really, given what I’d done that night, should never have happened. I begin to feel like much less of a lightweight. Of course, I don’t actually go check it out, because I’m at work. Oh well. The body heals itself in marvelous ways.

I leave work early to go to an interview for Mad Science. On my way, I get my first ticket. EVER. Of my ENTIRE STINKING LIFE. Of course, parking across from the ferry terminal is always a sketchy situation at best, but I really manage to screw myself. (I spackle my own crack, as it were.) I get into a turn lane that is transit-only. As I’m trying to back out of it and into a lane I can legally be in, some asshole pulls in behind me and traps me there. So, I wait for the light and I turn - and then almost go the wrong way past a Do Not Enter sign. I am really flustered, so I take a moment, re-orient myself, and make the proper turn. I pull into a parking space and see the flashing lights of a motorcycle cop behind me. At this point, not only do I feel like shit, but I pretty much want to crawl into a hole and die. Luckily for me, the cop is a really nice older gentleman. He asks if I’ve ever gotten a ticket before - and when I tell him that I haven’t, he explains to me how best to go about the whole ticket process. He is very kind, and very respectful, and he makes a lot of encouraging comments about how occasionally, good safe drivers make mistakes while he happens to be watching. He leaves as I’m filling my meter. I have ten minutes until this interview, and I have completely lost my cool. I lock myself in the car and have a brief meltdown, while I re-apply the makeup that I’ve just lost. I can only thank my lucky stars that he didn’t turn on his siren. I have become a rather unpredictable bundle of raw nerves.

I make it to my interview on time. Brooke works there, and I am so glad to see her that I really have to restrain myself from leaping up to give her a hug the minute she steps through the door. We do a group interview, and then have a brief “teaching audition” in front of each other. The boys are sweet, but neither of them has a performance background, so I feel like that puts me in a pretty good place. Of course, I just have to figure out what the fuck to do with my job - as of this moment, I can’t even do Mad Science because of my prohibitive dayjob schedule. I need to get this situation figured out QUICK. It’s starting to drive me crazy. You know how when something is bad in your life, it’s easy to preoccupy yourself with it? Allow the bad-ness of it to seep into other parts of your world? I’m doing that right now, and the rest of my life is too good for me to allow myself to taint it. Something has got to change.

{Editor’s note: Gentle readers, I hope you all appreciate the formatting I’ve done on this post. Movable Type doesn’t give you the handy-dandy buttons when you’re using a Mac, so I had to do it all by hand. This is especially impressive when you consider how little will I have to do anything right now. See that? I just did it again!}