the wrong side of the bed

Warning: I am going to be using the word "snap" an awful lot in this post. Can't be helped.

When I was in high school, my friend Clare and I would go through silly little obsessions. We pretend to be in love with Sting and our friend Adam. We drew pictures of woodpeckers all of the time. * We drew pictures of people with mohawks almost as frequently. ** We wrote ongoing stories about a blue stick figure and the characters in his life, like a cat named Dr. Sandoval.

We made many trips between Houston and Austin both together and separately. There used to be a warehouse with a drawing of a turtle snapping on the side. We didn't find the drawing terribly convincingly, so we would try to draw better snaps. Snaps are hard to do. You should try.

When I was in college, I briefly dated this girl name Jenn. She sat in front of me in my sociology theory class. We also new each other from the college radio station. She was a bit of a player, or absolutely a player, well before that word was popular. In class, she would sometimes grab my foot and hold it. She told me that, while she wasn't all that into me, she felt at ease opening up to me in was that she didn't with other people. Could have been a line because she was good at those things. At the time, I was also dating this guy who told me, straight up, that he loved me but was not in love with me. He often asked if I understood the difference.

Jenn and I both had shirts with snaps because we were hipsters and that was sort of the thing to do. She asked me to tear her shirt off, snap! snap! snap! She would also do this to me. It is something that thrills me to do. I currently have two shirts with snaps, and I highly recommend you yank my shirt open when you see me.

Try this: draw a snap right now. Do it. Now pull my shirt open and see what happens. Be prepared. Outcomes vary, but are never good. I could be yours forever. I could be bitter and angry. But, could you do it anyway?

* Our English teacher insisted that we always talked about woodpeckers, which we did not. This did, however lead us to throwing woodpeckers into all of our conversations. We would draw pictures of them over and over. We researched bits of trivia. Anytime she looked our way, there they would be. We did not like that teacher much.

** No real reason for that.

Labels: childhood, friends, memories

i don't know for sure what made me think of these two and a half things

1. the boy i had a crush on in high school sang "nightswimming" during a choir concert. he would laugh when i was sarcastic even though the other boys were determined that girls were not funny. i cannot tell you how many times i listened to that song.

2. the same kids were almost always in my classes, thanks to tracking, so i am not sure how this happened, but it happened in eighth grade. i'm kind of remembering that we did some kind of class jumbling thing for a few weeks. we were working on group projects for our social studies or history or whatever class. in my group there was a kinda goth, kinda skater boy in my group, and i did not know him at all. there was also a girl named melody and a kid of some sort who i cannot remember.

i knew melody* because she had the locker next to mine in gym. she wore matching bras and underwear. they were always satin and dark colors like burgundy and forest green. she also wore thigh high stockings with garters. it was very hard not to watch her changing. this was during the same period of time that i would change clothes without ever actually fully undressing. so, yeah, i remember melody.

the kinda goth, kinda skater boy was kind of dismissive of me because i was such a dorky loser. from about 6th grade through my first year of college i wore the baggiest clothes that i could find in as many layers as i could tolerate. thank the heavens for grunge or high school would have been so unbearable as to have done me in. melody was nice to me because she knew me from gym, but the boy acted like i wasn't there and didn't really care about my input. without any contribution (or suggestion, because i was very shy) we ended up naming our country after the album green. after that we made ecology a big theme for our country.

do you remember those binders that had the extra, flexible plastic layer so that you could slip photos our paper into the outside? am i describing that well? at my school mostly only girls had them, but this goth skater kid had one. there was a picture of a girl that i knew and it turned out was his girlfriend. we had a very awkward conversation establishing how i knew her. my sister was briefly hospitalized for depression when she was in high school.** all of the kids and their families had a therapy session together once while my sister was there, during which his girlfriend confessed to her mother that she drank "a beer." according to my sister, she did a lot more than that, but, seriously, you don't end up in some kind of weirdo psychiatric treatmenty kinda place for being 13 and drinking one beer.

after he found out about my sister, i was suddenly much cooler.

1/2. there was a statue in my hometown that was supposed to be someone standing on the shoulder of a giant, but it was really more of a statue of a child coming out of the armpit of a man with his arms outstretched in the air. when we were driving around, as teenagers do, my friend clare and i would sometimes sing the relevant bit of the song "king of birds." we knew, don't worry, that is not the origin of the saying.

* i just tried to google melody by what i remember her first and last name to me. i'm not finding her. maybe her name wasn't melody... i did have a my little pony with that name, so maybe i am getting them confused.

** she didn't really need to be hospitalized. about a year later, there was a big scandal about those kinds of hospitals engaging in scams to get money from insurance companies by accepting patients that were not actually in need of care. whatever. it is still a good story, i guess. an even better part of the story is that my sister, while initially delighted to be there eventually exploded during family therapy saying, "it's dorotha's fault i'm here! dorotha's the one who should be here!"

Labels: childhood, music

it was nice out when i got home from work, so i went on a short walk. it took encouragement from my friend sean who assured me that people weren't going to wonder where i was going if i set out rambling along with no goal in mind. yes, i get that no one cares about what i am doing as much as i do, but i also get that sometimes they do. the missed connections section of craigslist, for example, leads me to believe that sometimes strangers are watching. there is also the evidence that i notice other people and make snap judgments about them. while my soul mate could be out there stalking me from afar and then posting about it, it is more likely that some little troll like myself is staring at me and mumbling accusations and criticisms under her breath. despite all of this, sean was convincing and i went for a walk to nowhere.*

i'd like to say that on the way back i saw something that made my whole day seem worthwhile, but i didn't. i did see some pretty yellow leaves that reminded me of the church parking lot that i used to pass on my way to campus. it had very slick, black asphalt. the accumulation of yellow leaves, especially when it rained, made a nice contrast. when i saw these leaves and remembered the other leaves i also remembered another parking lot. when i was in high school, our parking lot had yellow lights. classes started at 7:25, but i always got to school well before that because i was compulsively early to everything when i was young. it was often just dawn when i would get to school. i loved the way the lights looked against the sky. i especially loved it if the lights went out when i was in the parking lot. sometimes i would wait in my car until they did.

when i was in elementary school, just like every other kid, i loved new boxes of crayons. crayola were the best because they weren't too soft and because they had enough pigment for the colors to be dense and vibrant. when we did chores for money, i would use mine to buy new 64 crayon boxes. my parents, my dad especially, did not like this because we always had plenty of crayons, but there is really nothing like a brand new box. i would pour the crayons out onto the floor and arrange them in different groups.** all blues, all oranges, all reds. then i would rearrange them. blue, orange, red, blue, orange, red. i would put the brightest blue next to the brightest red and the darkest blue next to the darkest red. or i would put a bright yellow with a dark purple. i would arrange yellow, green, blue, purple, red, orange. then i would move orange to the front. i would do this for hours. then i would test the colors on paper and rearrange them again. sometimes a color that looked dark was actually pale when you used it (cornflower). sometimes a pale color was much denser than it looked (periwinkle). i would spend hours determining which color was my favorite in different groups and which was my favorite overall. spring green gave me a weird, uncomfortable feeling. instead of making a crayon that color, why not just use less pressure to draw? raw sienna and burnt umber sounded more mysterious than i thought browns should. i would use up those two crayons quickly because i had to check them a lot. is it still named raw umber? is it still just brown? how can i tell which is burnt and which is raw? i didn't like warm colors much at all, and not surprisingly, the only red i could handle was a very cool magenta. i struggled with the oranges. they all looked so similar so none outshone the others. i didn't care for yellow either, but my favorite was goldenrod, even though it was named for a flower that made me sneeze. things like "green yellow" and "yellow green" made me wonder why there wasn't "red purple" or "purple blue." i think there may have been a "blue green" but no mirror "green blue." i liked the blues and purples the best. indigo was nice. midnight blue was nice. it was between the two. "midnight blue" seemed very romantic to me while indigo seemed a fuller color. i really did like indigo the best, but would try to believe and try to make myself believe and really want to believe that i liked midnight blue better. sometimes it worked and sometimes not.

i used to draw pictures of myself over and over again. i drew myself in a dress with big puffy sleeves because, like anne of green gables, i thought they were fancy. sometimes i would just draw a doll that was really a drawing of myself, but i knew it didn't look much like me so i would pretend to myself that it was trying to draw something else. instead of giving myself brown hair and peach skin and hazel eyes, i would use only the greens, for example. i would line them up from yellowest to bluest. then i would start a part of the drawing, always the hair first. when i was done with that, i would switch to the next crayon. next feature, the next crayon. i would rotate through as many times as it took. if i ended up having two things next to each other that were both in the same color then that is how it had to be because there were rules.

there isn't much point to this, but i feel like i am supposed to pull it all together into a lesson. mostly i was just thinking about the color yellow, which i have changed my opinion of since i was a child, and crayons. i guess that i could say that a friend told me to do things i enjoy, but that i have a hard time thinking of things i enjoy. the same friend also told me to make a list of things i like about myself. i said that i appreciate color and he rejected it. i'm supposed to say that i am smart or not a fuckwit or whatever. but, i enjoy colors and i am glad that i do. it is something i like in other people. no one else in my family really does. i would say that my dad is indifferent to it, my sister is confused by it, my mother is terrified of it, and my brother is accepting of it.*** honestly, my mother would live in a clear world if she could. my dad could survive equally well in a hot pink and lime home or a navy and gray one. my sister would chose to live in a monochromatic world, preferably maroon or forest green. my brother, perhaps because his wife is from san antonio and he lives in new orleans (two very brightly colored places) is the most comfortable and daring harried other than myself.

on the flip side, i think i am scared of order and uniformity. blank surfaces and empty spaces make me nervous. a navy bedspread, beige walls, a mahogany nightstand. there are not enough places to look! i could stare too long at one thing and not have something else to pull me away. i need a variety of shapes and colors to fight for my attention. i can fixate on one thing too much. i can become obsessive. look at all of my collections! when i start i can't stop. imagine having all of my focus on you. as pleasant as it may sound to have a dorotha devoted to you, it is not actually pretty. better that i should have many of you to sort through. 64 of you.

still don't know how to end this post. here.

* i came up with a reason in case anyone asked.

** i can't remember if this is my story or sean's. once, at the toy store where we worked, a little boy was playing in the vehicle section. he was putting all of the buses together. when his mom saw this she started shouting, "he's grouping! he's grouping!" which i think would have been more impressive if he weren't pulling them from a bucket of nothing but buses.

*** i get that it is weird to refer to color as an it. i mostly mean that my family doesn't think much about color, but if they did, they mostly wouldn't. but, color is not an it.

Labels: childhood, introspection, trying to be positive

in elementary school, if we finished our work early, we were asked to quietly put our heads on our desks. my head was often on my desk. our desk tops were "wood", our chairs were plastic, and the legs were metal. with your ear on the desk, you could kicked or hit the different elements and hear different sounds.* it was something to do and was sort of calming. the desk was cool against my face, but it would become warm and i would have to find another spot. other kids would do this, too, but i continued the practice well into middle school. high school was out of the question as i was weird enough already. i missed it. i would have put my head on the cool desk and kicked the leg of my chair. sit quietly. don't put your head down. don't fall asleep. in some classes i would read with my book on my desk, in other classes i had to hide my book in my lap so other kids wouldn't know i was reading.

i have work to do today. i have people to call, meetings to arrange, paper to file, spreadsheets to update. all i want to do is put my head on my desk.

* is this why i enjoy getting mri's?

Labels: childhood, work

this is the kind of thing that makes me really wish that i had been diagnosed with something other than anxiety when i was in college. this story is pretty much what happened to me. i was out of my gourd when i would drink while on paxil. it felt awesome, but caused my friends great deal of concern. and i wanted to drink a lot.

this thursday, the 29th, is the anniversary of my diagnosis with epilepsy. i am happy about this because it was the day that i was put on medication to stop my seizures and the day that i finally was put on the path to kicking effexor. i wasn't allowed to stop taking it until they were sure that i was going to tolerate the lamictal. they didn't want to get me all screwy with my body chemistry, i guess. so, it probably took me 6 months to actually be rid of the stuff. i think i might have been taking something else, too.

i just remembered that i started seeing a counselor when i was in high school. i remember begging my mother, even though she agreed readily. i thought she was going to say no. i'd been hinting around at it for a couple of months and she had even said that there must be something wrong with me.* i wanted to go because i was having those weird episodes that i assumed were anxiety. i would get really confused in class and i complained of having deja vu** all of the time. i even complained about feelings of unreality and that the light would get really strange and that i couldn't see properly.*** i probably could have been diagnosed properly in high school. anyway, i will stop being all cranky and bitter. instead i am planning to treat thursday as a celebration of sorts. so yay for me! i told some of my friends that i am expecting greeting cards.

* okay, probably some of what is wrong with me is anxiety and depression. my mom had previously mentioned that i seemed like i had problems with both at earlier times in my life, but i don't remember having seizures before high school. i mean, maybe i was having seizures, but they were milder or something. anyway, the first time my mom suggested that i might need some sort of therapy was when i was five. i cried a lot and had insomnia when i was little. my mom said that if i didn't cheer up, she was going to send me to a psychiatrist. i don't know.

** feelings of deja vu are common for people with temporal lobe epilepsy. it is "classic". i wonder if a doctor would have caught this.

*** unreality and mild hallucination are also common. i remeber that it always got lighter when i had a seizure (in the early days). i would get weirded out because everything would get really bright but washed out looking. some people have visual hallucinations and some people smell things that aren't there. some people can have full on hallucinations, but i am not so lucky. that would probably be scary, but so much more impressive. i just lose all sense of place. dang, i am so boring.

Labels: childhood, epilepsy, happy?, mom, things are relative

i don't know about boys. a kid* from my high school called me at 3:55 in the morning last night. yeah. we had a class together my freshman or sophmore year, i can't really remember. he was a nice boy, but very odd. we sat in the corner with a girl named julie. we all used to write funny little poems about history because the class** was so boring. i used to think steven had a crush on me, maybe. once he started telling me how great i was and i told him there was a wall between us (that is actually what i said). honestly, he was a pretty nice guy. anyway, he called out of the blue at 3:55 AM. he told me that he is in madison, passing through to milwaukee to see a sick relative. it was an odd conversation. as soon as i picked up the phone, he said he was sorry for waking me up and i probably had to worked tomorrow. yes, i said, i gotta make a living.

anyway, the conversation was quite odd. he mentioned some friends of mine that he had seen after we graduated from high school, but they were all references to events immediately after high school. he also asked me if i remembered working at randall's***, which of course i did. after all, i am the one who worked there, and he is the one who did not. i said that i hated ironing my uniform before i would go to work. he said he likes a crisp collar.

he told me he was applying for an assistant manager position at one of those horrible check cashing places*, and i said they were evil. he said if he got the job, he would stay in madison, but otherwise he was just passing through. he also said that he had worked in houston for a while for "internet companies" but that he left town on bad terms and that there were people angry with him. he said he had gone to school in indiana and that he had been in the navy.

it was quite odd. at the end of the conversation, i said, "well, don't stalk me." he said, "what?!" i said, "don't stalk me." he said, "you are allowed to call one friend from high school at 4:00 in the morning." i said, "don't stalk me."

thing is, he must have known i lived in wisconsin. probably found me on the internet. was coming through town and thought he would find my phone number and call me in the middle of the night. don't you think that is sketchy?

the other weird thing is that i mentioned chip, the kid from infinite eruption, who i wrote about in my last post. i said that i had just found him on the internet. it turns out that steven didn't know him. he said something about how i must have liked chip in high school. i didn't, i just knew chip from elementary school through 12th grade. and i thought the name of his band was freaking hilarious. at one point i think my friend clare and i were going to pretend to be groupies. i guess i am a bit weird, too, as i googled chip just the day before. who doesn't google old friends? i guess the difference is that i don't call them at 3:55 in the morning.
* he is a kid in my head, but i suppose he has actually aged at the same rate that i have.

** another boy in that class started out as my friend, but then he took to calling me a feminazi all the time. what the fuck?

*** a grocery store owned by mormons. they wouldn't sell alcohol or cigarettes. it was explained that this was because they were a mormon owned store. they did, however, sell caffeinated beverages.

**** at the cash store, you are cash-worthy with us.

Labels: childhood, fucked up, really really weird

not that i forgot these, but today i remembered some things from my childhood.

the first is from elementary school. there were kids, mostly boys, who would find a social pariah of some sort, mostly ugly girls, and sneak up behind them to deliver a message from on high. a tap on the shoulder. "i love you," they would say, "in god's way." meaning that, though hideous and unpopular, they were forced to love you, but only the way that god might, in that he loved all of his children. needless to say, i was loved quite well by my elementary school classmates.

the second is not scaring, but funny. there were two music groups from my high school. one was a duo, a year ahead of me, who played folk music and called themselves the "peyote siblings." the other was a band made up of boys i had been in school with since elementary school. they were called "infinite eruption." i saw both groups perform at various events, but one stands out. at a party for high school kids in the park near my house, chip*, lead singer for "infinite eruption", performed wearing green lipstick. needless to say, his hairy was stringy.

* shit! i had chip's last name in this post, but then i googled him and found him on the internet. i don't want him to stumble on this post. anyway, google tells me that chip is in grad school now, pursuing an MFA in creative writing.

Labels: childhood, music, texas