…the who cares girl…

My mother sounded very excited when she called me this morning. “You’ll never guess what I did last night!” she cried.

“What?”

“I read your blog!”

She’s avoided my blog for years, claiming that any angst I was blathering about would make her upset.

“What did you think?”

“Well…I love that rainbow sweatshirt!” she exclaimed. “Where did you get that?”

Happy 4th of July, blog-logee-doodoos. I’ll be spending my holiday…puzzling.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “So, it’s okay for you to blog about your nervous breakdown, but I can’t tell your aunt?”

“That’s different,” I said. “She’ll gossip about it…”

“No she won’t! She–”

“And anyway NOBODY READS MY BLOG. Nobody. That’s why.”

“I was on your youtube,” said my mother over the phone today.

“Oh yeah?”

“You haven’t put up anything new in a while.”

“Mmm hmm.”

“Some of those videos have a lot of hits!”

“I don’t really care about hits,” I said, brattily. “I just want people to look at my art.”

“Oh.”

“But…” I added hastily, “I keep the hooping videos on there because that was fun, and I looked good…”

“You still look good,” she reassured me.

“Yeah but I was tan…”

“You live in Seattle.”

Later I told the Boy, “I think it’s hilarious that of all of the different things I have online, my mother looks at my youtube, which is the most edited…”

“You mean censored,” he said. We’ve been researching a lot of graffiti and anti-consumerist art together lately for inspiration.

“Yeah. Censored.”

The phone kept ringing all week, and it was my mother nearly every time. I’ve been going through a phase of intense apathy mixed with an incredible lack of energy, so I didn’t answer the phone, didn’t call her back. This afternoon the phone was ringing again, and there were a couple of numbers I didn’t recognize but with my mother’s area code, which the Boy joked was my mother calling from her neighbor’s house. Then she started calling the Boy’s phone. After begging him to call her back (he refused) I finally called her.

“Oh, thank God,” she sighed. “Remember when you used to not answer your phone, what you were doing?”

“What was I doing?” I knew very well what I was doing.

“Drinking!”

“I’m not drinking,” I groaned, re-adjusting the blanket covering my lap and shifting slightly from my horizontal position on the couch to reach for more cookies. No, there’s no reasonable explanation for my three-hour naps, snarfing of sugar, and complete lack of interest in anything creative. It’s not a hangover. Not even depression, really. Just: MER. Or even: merp plerp blee-terp.

We watched documentaries on skateboarders today. Skateboarders make me moist. Especially the old school footage. I can watch that shit for DAYS.

mcginnis05, originally uploaded by ondiraiduveau.

“Some of those pictures are really good,” she said. “The composition is nice, they’re artistic…but some of them you need to take down. They’re too suggestive. Sexually suggestive…”

“I’ve removed a lot of them. You probably haven’t checked in a while…”

“No, no, I was just on there a few weeks ago. Looking at your party pictures. That one of you and the big blue person…”

“Mmm hmmm?”

“That’s a great picture!”

Rainbow Snoopy 002, originally uploaded by sparklerama.

My mother was telling me she’s a little ashamed that she enjoys “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” so much, but only because “they say the Lord’s name in vain so often“.

“I think Jesus will forgive me for watching it,” she added.

She also told me that she loved “The Hangover” movie. “It was so funny!” she exclaimed.

Just when I think I’ve got my mother all figured out, she throws me off again.

Double hoopin’ in the backyard.

My mother and I got into a little argument over the phone last night. She was telling me her views on me taking Celexa while pregnant–again. I was tolerating the stories about how when she was pregnant she “didn’t even take aspirin” and how “there’s been a huge increase in autism and there must be a reason for it” and how, if the drug is affecting my brain, what could it possibly be doing to my unborn child’s brain? I was tolerating it mostly because we had just had this exact same conversation the day before.

She crossed the line, however, when she said that taking antidepressants was “the easy way out.” That’s when I got mad.

“Easy way!” I shouted. Okay, maybe just raised my voice slightly. “I’ve been to therapists, counselors, and read every book out there on dealing with anxiety. This is not the easy way!”

I mean Christ, I’ve been battling the anxiety demon for years. That’s the primary reason why I quit drinking (next month it will be two years). Don’t you think if there was a non-drug cure for panic attacks, I WOULD HAVE FIGURED IT OUT BY NOW?

This pregnancy/meds dilemma is giving me more anxiety, so I’m trying not to obsess over it. I can quite comfortably not think about it all day long, until my mother brings it all back again. I love my mother, but she drives me crazy.

In other news, today is the last day that I’ll be in my 20s! Maybe I should take some self-portraits. Sniff.

The Fantasy Shoes arrived yesterday, thanks to the happy little UPS man. I know what you’re thinking. All that obsessing, fussing, whining, and endless Internet searching…for those?

Well yes, of course. Welcome to my woooorld. I’ve had “Shoes” in my head all morning.That’s not a bad thing.

Yesterday on the phone my mother asked me if I was drinking again. When I asked her WHY, she said she was browsing through my Burning Man photos on Flickr and saw this one, and was concerned regarding the comment (by Stacey–thanks a lot, Graham Crackers) saying “J. looks like he’s drunk off his ass!” and then my reply, “No we were sober at that point”.

Well we were, and anyway I’ve already truthfully told my mother specifically what drugs I ingested at Burning Man, and NO, I’m not drinking again, good Looooord.

“You wouldn’t be the first person in the world to fall off the wagon…” she said.

First of all, I hate that term, and second of all, NO THANK YOU, I figured out a long time ago (January 2008, to be specific) that life is too short to be hungover all the time. So there. Case closed. Sheesh.

Speaking of alcoholics, my parents have taken in a stray 56-year-old alcoholic (he’s been sober now for 4 years) and he’s sleeping in my bedroom, so that means when I go to Boise next week to quit smoking I get to sleep on my parents bedroom floor! YES! Sigh. That’s going to be gggreeeeaat–listening to my father snore all night. I had better bring ear plugs.

Self-portrait with seat belt.

We’re back (from outer space). 211 photos on this trip, not even close to the 370 I took at the Pride Parade, but you know. I’m more inspired to take photos of drag queens than trees, and that’s okay! We picked the girls up at the kennel last night on our way home and they were freshly bathed and alive and happy, so that was good. The women working behind the counter were very sweet–no sign of the bitch that checked us in on Saturday. Maybe she only works on the weekend.

Last night we were both worn out from camping and driving so we ordered vegetarian pizza for dinner. I talked to the Broad and my mother on the phone and filled them in on the camping trip. My mother is depressed because she recently had to sell her car (the only new car she’s had in her entire life) because the interest payments were too high and my father’s been mostly out of work for the past year. She’s also depressed because their house is infested with bird mites, and apparently they only feast on female flesh.

“It’s a sign,” I told her. “Time to move.”

I’m trying to convince my family to move to Spokane. They refuse to move to Seattle (they think it’s too rainy here), but Spokane is where the Boy’s parents live and the weather is very similar to Boise, and it’s only a 4 hour drive from Seattle instead of 8 hours and therefore my mother would see me a lot more. More importantly, she would see her future grandchildren a lot more.

She told me that she looked at my new blog. She said it looked very “professional”. I bragged that I did it all myself (I paid someone to move the entries from Blogger to WordPress but everything else was me). She said she read the comments (!) but “couldn’t” read the blog entries themselves.

“I don’t know why, but I just can’t do it.”

“It’s because you’re ashamed of me,” I said.

“No, no, that’s not it…I don’t know what it is…”

I keep telling her that I’m going to be the female David Sedaris someday and she certainly likes the idea of me being a published author but maybe not a non-fiction author, who can say. Heigh ho.

I started going through the 211 photos last night but I was too tired. I’ll post them later, after work. I have to start getting ready for Work Gay now. Gotta look cute for my gay!

雪 彩虹, originally uploaded by dORA*.s.

Yesterday my mother called and said, “I have something…bizarre to tell you.”

“Uh oh,” I said. “Let me go outside and light up a cigarette.”

“Well, get it out of your system!” she shouted.

“That’s right! After Burning Man I’ll come stay with you for a week and detox…again. Now tell me what happened.”

She told me that she had gone to the coffee shop to see one of her many little friends (she has gym friends, coffee shop friends, dog friends…) and one of her coffee shop friends had told her, in hushed tones, that she had been frantically trying to reach my mother on the phone because she had gone to the hospital and died and while she was dead, had seen my mother standing beside her bed, telling her that her daughter, S., would be alright.

“That’s heavy,” I said. “What does it mean?”

She’s not sure yet, but her and the friend exchanged phone numbers to further explore the subject. As usual in our daily 30-60 minute phone conversation we covered 50 different subjects, rapidly, but this time I added something new.

“I’ve been thinking, I want you and dad to write your memoirs for me.”

“Why?” she asked suspiciously.

“Because I don’t remember anything unless it’s written down…that’s why I’ve been keeping diaries my whole life. I’ll come up with a question and answer format, like, what are your favorite memories, stuff about your marriage, you know…”

“That’s not a bad idea,” she said thoughtfully. “After my mom and dad died, and Aunt Pat died, I had some questions.”

I always have questions. Trouble is, I can’t remember the answers. She also told me, on a different subject, that guilt is a “great motivator”.

The Boy snorted when I told him this later. “Guilt is the inability to forgive yourself,” he said. “If God forgives me, how can I not forgive myself?”

“Oooh, that’s good,” I said. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

So I wrote it down. Hello, blog! Today I am going to see my Crazy Doctor to tell her that I recently upped my Celexa to 20 mgs, and admit that after 8 months I have returned to the Filthy Habit of smoking cigarettes (sigh, cough, wheeze). The good news is, now that nicotine is flooding my system again, desire to snarf copious amounts of ice cream = zero! We went to 31 Flavors last night, and the Boy guessed what I would be getting (one scoop of mint chocolate chip, one scoop of something chocolate).

“I don’t even want chocolate!” I said happily.

“Who are you?”