rebellion

i have a mental retort for everything right now. i feel snotty, like i need to act out and be a bit of a brat. why? because this weekend proved to me the kind of life i want and cannot currently have, am absolutely not ready to have, how powerless truly caring about somebody else makes me feel and how FUCKING PISSED OFF i am with myself to feel that way right now. i react the way i always do, by trying to isolate and distract myself, ihavemyownlifenow, listening to the sound of my own breathing and discerning the ultimate peace in that.
as usual, i need to fucking relax. i am also shamefully fucking resentful that no one else seems to be as overtly agitated as i. these are the aspects of my personality that i cannot stand. if i wasn't also a fucking exhibitionist, i would wisely keep these traits off the computer.
driving home from the overnight shift in grey watercolor this morning. traffic was horrible and i kept nodding off and veering out of my lane. pulled off in federal way and took a power nap in a parking lot to the sound of staccato rain on the car roof. dreamt that i was in a dimly red-lit arcade and he and i were bouncing a rubber ball back and forth. started off benignly, but then he began hogging the ball, purposely throwing it askance, always able to catch it neatly as i fumbled. i was getting frustrated and irate. part of me wanted to walk away and let him, as it were, play with his own fucking ball, but i didn't. i was trying to remain cool, laugh it off, try not to feel too incompetent. i woke up gasping, completely disoriented, my head resting against the steering wheel, the windows fogged. i could not have made up a more succinct metaphor of my current mental state than this fucking dream. and dreams that are so blatantly indicative rather unnerve me; i drove the rest of the way to seattle feeling alternately disgusted, depressed, and vexed. of course, i know i'll be fine, since i just smiled over the word 'vexed.'
went to my 3rd AA meeting tonight, an atheist forum. much, much more accessible philosophy: as someone there put it, "we're just a bunch of fuck-ups who drank too much." but there was also an uncomfortable overtone of everyone needing to justify their atheism, which reminded me of too many high-school evenings over coffee and cigarettes and nonage and autonomy and the meaning of life. hearing adults restate their beliefs gives me the impression that they're only trying to convince themselves. again, prickly attitude on my part. i've enjoyed AA thus far not because i need personal ballast and affirmation, but because it's an amazing way to hear about other people and the similar things they're going through. the most valuable thing i can do is get out of my own fucking head.
the cherry trees are blossoming. other trees are already dropping big red flowers on the wet pavement. walking down the side streets by myself, passing people walking dogs, everyone smiling. today i finally found minced dried papaya in washington, for fuck's sake! i had been looking for almost four years! there are shit days and good days. so why does it seem to take longer to recover from good days than horrible ones?

perspective

went to the western veterinary conference this week. herein, feel free to recall prior las vegas scurrility, then cube it.
went to work on sunday; left early, realizing whilst changing from scrubs to civilian garb that i'd started my period. arrived at airport, learned flight had been cancelled, wasted 5 hours at sea-tac reading trashy magazines and eating salty crap. the flight i ended up on was completely full. a woman in front of me babbled the entire time to the man across the aisle from her about everything from her Little Dog Who Is Really Her Child to her podiatry ailments. landed in vegas at midnight. checked into the tropicana. my key didn't work in the door. i singed my hair whilst lighting a cigarette. hauling my archaic (heavy) laptop with no wi-fi. the room had a mirrored ceiling above the bed.
monday: too tired and crampy to attend 8am clin path lecture. walked to the mandalay bay around 9. decided that vegas is the absolute cruellest place to be hung over, which i wasn't: everything is appallingly reflective and bright and noisy and shadeless, with a perpetually unclean smell like a tavern carpet. passed my first pile of human vomit at a bus stop. the lectures were fun. lymphatic cytology and spindle cells and osteosarcoma and caudate epithelial cells. this is the facet of vet medicine that dilates my pupils. the mandalay bay (a ridiculously sprawling place) was also hosting a several-thousand-attending real estate convention, so queues were fucking horrible. i waited 20 minutes to pay $3 for a soda. breakfast/lunch ended up being a bag of corn-nuts and free candy from the exhibit hall. dark by the time i returned to the hotel. the tropicana has an aroma of cheap coconut suntan lotion. the strip hasn't changed since last year. neatly arranged escort fliers stuck into signposts, phalanxes of tourists who come to abrupt stops in the middle of the sidewalk, obese midwesterners squinting at the buildings and shrieking groups of girls in whore-garb and block-length hummer limos and too many backward baseball caps to count. i bought beverages and canned soup at the walgreen's. returned to hotel and watched the local news like a fucking nun.
tuesday: completely unmotivated. surly. body is rejecting uterus. went to dystocia and protein-losing enteropathy lectures. again, very engaging speakers, but a lousy attitude on my part. won $10 playing 2 cent poker at the paris casino. that is probably my favorite casino here. made me crave france. realized that 4 years ago i was in the actual paris, and now i am in this obnoxious caricature, surrounded by people who will probably never see the real thing. the bathrooms are beautiful. i took a picture. another likeable trait of vegas: that silly fountain in front of the bellagio. i used to be revolted by it: how disgraceful, such waste in the middle of the desert! but it's pretty fucking cool, and the throngs of grumpy pedestrians all slow down and watch and everyone seems much nicer for a few minutes (even when they played celine dion).
wednesday: up at 6 to check out and catch a bus to the parrot-handling workshop. once off the strip las vegas is a very flat, brown, disgusting place. it reminds me of what, say, wasilla alaska would be- minus the trees, and mountains, and "ahhh-laska"-ness. strip malls, uniformly squat and dusty homes with rock yards, occasional palm trees that appear to be shrugging dejectedly at the futility of it all. the bird class was fucking cool. the lecturer is a co-author of 'birds for dummies.' he helps run a parrot refuge/sanctuary in colorado. he talked for a while, then we got to handle different birds with different personality idiosyncracies. the first one i got was a feather-picking lorikeet named goober. goober proceeded to bite me multiple times. back to tthe mandalay bay. spilled cold lentil soup (eaten out of can; it really wasn't too bad) down my sweater. spent the afternoon in ER seminars. went back to the paris casino. won $20 in nickel poker. the paris casino, i'm telling you! trudged back to the tropicana to retrieve my bags. my plane didn't leave until midnight but i was at the airport at 8:30; there was no further need for me to slog around vegas any longer.
it was so unbelievably lovely to be back.
i have been contemplating exactly what it is about vegas that renders it, in my mind, soulless. not just the strip, which is a clusterfuck of artifice, but the outlying areas as well. it is: a complete lack of permanence. there is a pervasive desperation about that place. it is the same feeling i get when i am in a very small town and the residents have a rather lonely air about them: everyone wants to get out, do something else, be someone better. it is eerie to be in that sort of environment and attempt to feel comfortable.
worked the overnight last night. it was busy until midnight. the doctor went to bed and the other tech watched an asian soap opera while i did the new york times crossword. she went home. i watched 'private benjamin.' at 6:30am a cat came in who'd had her ass eaten by raccoons. i didn't leave work until 8:30. i'd boarded the cats at work while i was away; the hour-long drive home consisted of helix yowling, tiresias defecating in his carrier, and hecatomb escaping her carrier and slinking around on the floor of the car. it had snowed in seattle. as of this afternoon the north sides of roofs were still white. the air is much cleaner here. it is nice to have proof through experience that i have a place in the world where i truly feel at home.
happy weekend awaits...

peurility as distraction

i filed for divorce today. now i have to figure out how to serve the papers. i will call his parents tomorrow. this will be horrible. i wish i could just hand my life (this aspect of my life) over to someone else to slog through. i suppose i should be a fucking pro at the whole divorce thing, but i honestly don't recall much detail of when i dealt with this prior. it was extremely convenient to not have him anywhere around, i remember that. it was also convenient that his parents ended up paying for everything. i am almost $300 into this current debacle already.
today has been brilliantly sunny and unusually cold. my parents' house was pelted with broken tree limbs last night. i walked downtown with my ears frozen, decades of alaskan living for naught. there are people here with scarves wrapped around their faces, which made me smirk... i have drank enough tea to stay warm today that i am urinating pure water by now.
i am also growing agitated by the grim reality of my fiddle-de-fuck-it of capricious money spending. not only the 'neccessities' like a new lair, a gasping vehicle, and a dee-vorce, but fucking absurd things like CDs and swap meet jewelry and expensive undergarments. emotionally i am needing my pleasure zone stimulated, as it were. i don't indulge these sort of things very often, i remind myself. start placing bets on when i'll be bankrupt (with a good soundtrack and fancy bloomers) starting NOW!
apparently the way your earlobes connect to your head reflects your sociability. connected=introversion, if i am correct. the same has been said about the backtilt of one's thumb as if, say, hitchhiking: the further back, the more gregarious. i am moderate in both aspects. if i broke my thumb would i be more extroverted? it would depend on how it healed.
in turkey they hitchhike not with the thumb, but by "dribbling an imaginary basketball."
last thing i chose to listen to (thereby disregarding the redundant classic rock on sirius): secret machines
last thing i bought: peppermint ginseng tea
last thing i read: a vancouver travelogue
last thing i ate: red seedless grapes
last time i laughed: alone in the stairwell of my apartment building after realizing that it smelled like a meat cigarette, and then contemplating a meat cigarette
last non-walking voyage: the bus on madison, eerily blue-lit
it is illuminating to compartmentalize one's life into these snippets of minutae. every time i read another person's answers to such things, it provides a much better window on their personality than a carefully worded description would.
it is back to my pleasantly uneventful evening and retrieval of laundry from the creepy basement.

my god, she can't possibly be that neurotic

so i have spent the last hour fumbling about my stupid blog site, wondering why the fucking page wouldn't open. switch to netscape and ahhh. i should have known.
what i was planning to write was: i am very happy overall. i feel that giddy lalala crushy glow that i had essentially written off as an emotional option. that inane elation, however, is peppered with agitated fits of self-sabotage. the few icky things in my life keep seeming to intrude, amplified, sending me into a tailspin. i then start to doubt my jubilance. i think, this is too good to be true. this is seeming too fucking easy. i must be being played. he knows me well enough to know what i want to hear. i shouldn't put myself into as completely open a position as i have. i am setting myself up to be devastated. and so it goes. even as i write this i recognize my lunacy. i am being paranoid. i am not trusting happiness because nasty regretful depressive guilty self-disgust is so much more understandable.
i am not editing at all. detachedly, i am curious how coherent this will be.
work at tacoma: busy, fun, competent. grim theme du jour: anemia. the foxhound with the goldenrod sclera. (euthanized.) the golden retriever with the splenic hemangiosarcoma. (euthanized.) the cat with idiopathic white gums... i left before finding the outcome of that one. the dalmation projectile-vomiting after 2 seperate enterotomies. the bouvier with the amputated rear leg and the very nice owner. wrestling with a 140# mastiff. the moon is waning. it was cauled in mist on the way home. my apartment is always very warm. it smells like incense even though i haven;t burned any. i bought another bevy of plants yesterday. it is nice to come home to green things.
5 things i want to do before i die (in no order of importance, and undoubtedly among hundreds):
-snorkel
-eat something from a street vendor in thailand
-see a drive-in movie
-take someone i love to pere lachaise
-go to graceland
these all involve travel, sort of. i suppose i should quit my jobs and re-prioritize. i always hoped that i would know when i was dying, that i would have enough time to Plan. i would hate to be victim of some abrupt accident and have so many things unaccomplished, not to mention people having to look through my disheveled aftermath: the embarrassingly bare journals, the unwashed sheets, the old newspapers with every crossword completed and surrounded by doodles of grouchy faces. i would love to leave behind a dog-eared, thoughtfully underlined work of literature, but it may end up being a trashy magazine in the loo instead.
"you've become a sweet taste in my mouth" tina turner sings. jesus, she read the undercurrent of my thoughts exactly.

tonight has proven to me how dastardly Explorer really is.

the 4th dervish dance

26 hours of work in 36 hours. it is fun to be busy. the weather was beautiful and dogs were outside getting into fights, being hit by cars, battling porcupines. cats are generally much smarter (except for tiresias, my blind cat, who i caught mid-pee on one of my shoes when i got home tonight). today was especially insane. laughing hysterically about dog smegma. (it is a frequent benefit of ER work.) the kitten who was almost euthanized this morning but ended up improving as the day went on. the lab who was wagging her tail as she tried to bite me. the pug vomiting undigested, unchewed sausage in the lobby in front of several horrified customers. the woman who called twice, frantic because she was certain her daughter had poisoned her cat and needed to know how to sterilize the litter box in case the urine was toxic. having a cigarette in the back parking lot as the people at the car wash next door blared 'billy jean'... and realizing i somehow knew all the words. one of my coworkers gave me a rose for valentine's day. i had forgotten all about that... another benefit of ER work; the days all blend together, sentimentality be damned.
a severely neurological cat was at the clinic yesterday. the owner okayed a necropsy after we euthanized. i had never seen a brain post-mortem. i am not squeamish about many things but this actually made me cry; what made me disturbed by the whole thing was the cat's face being right there. once the face was covered i could separate the animal i'd been petting and talking to with something that was incredibly fascinating and intricate. the mandibular muscles were peeled from the skull; the skull was sawed (with an actual handsaw), leaving bone-sawdust. a cat's brain is only about the size of an unshelled walnut. i sutured the gap closed. a learning experience, no longer a cat named Bo, i had to keep reminding myself, but it still freaked me out. i felt like a bit of a pansy. i remember the first time i saw a euthanasia. i left the room bawling. part of my brain has to disconnect to be able to function through the fucked up aspects of my job. i feel like a callous monster when i remain 'professional', like a snively twit when i let it get to me. i asked blair (the doctor) if they teach any sort of 'balancing' class at WSU. he said no.
on the way home tonight i saw a car ablaze on the side of the freeway. i had never seen a vehicle actively engulfed before. it was rather beautiful. several firefighters stood beside it, merely watching.
i was cantankerous when i got home last night (exhausted) and decoupaged my medicine cabinet with a tattered mc escher poster. decoupage is fun because, if done properly, one uses their hands and gets slimy and has fun strands of glue to pick at afterwards. my bathroom still smelled like sour paste in the morning. now it looks, dare i say, pretty damn cool... in a dorm room kind of way. my landlord is refreshingly blase about apartment alterations.
i am seated next to the coffee grinder. coffee is another thing, like meat, that generally smells far better than it tastes.
i just reread that sentence. i am babbling in print. a wiser moment would have that deleted. i think i shall just end this instead. i blame tiredness, as usual.

"the trouble with resisting temptation is you may not get another chance."

i have a bit of a problem with tunnel vision. i focus on one (or very few) thing/s, making my universe clausterphobic enough to feel manageable, and if any of those things goes minutely awry, i'm devastated. i especially tend to sabotage relationships this way. the beneficial thing about working too much: i get huge scheduled chunks of time to not have to think about myself and my internal dramas.
alternately: i work so much that i am always at least somewhat exhausted (whether i realize it or not; i frequently view sleep as an inconvenience), which makes me a bit unreasonable and neurotic.
or there is no external explanation; i'm simply wound too tightly.
worked at tacoma today. 9 hrs stretched into 10. i spent the last 3 at the microscope. that is definitely my favorite thing to do in veterinary medicine, but i eventually staggered away with a headache. cells are the most beautiful things up close. it is gratifying to have visual proof of the world making sense. every symptom has a monocellular source. i sound a bit flaky right now, but thoughts like these make up for all the indignities i see at work, like the dangerously anemic dog that the owners, for religious reasons, are refusing to do any transfusions on. (jehovah's witnesses, apparently. "why are they bothering to have their dog here in the first place?" i said, not trying to subdue my scorn. apparently keeping the dog all alone in a cement run, where it has been alternately barking and vomiting, is acceptable.)
"can you hear me knocking" is on sirius. definitely one of the best rolling stones songs. i never liked the stones until recently... unlike the traffic song in a posting prior, this song is best meant for driving speedily, getting fucked up, or having insane sex. no wallowing, no indeed.
for as busy as the tacoma ER usually is, the ER in olympia has been rather crickety of late. monday started off frantically; everything either declined treatment or was euthanized. by 3am the doctor had gone to sleep and i was alone in the clinic, wide awake, that peculiar combination of being full of ideas and motivation but too unfocused and hyper to execute any of them. i ended up doing my divorce paperwork and playing with the cat someone had abandoned at the clinic over the weekend. the owner hadn't been reachable since saturday and she;d been almost overly inquiring before then. i ended up calling the sherriff's dept in the morning to see if they could do a welfare check on her house. she was elderly and on disability, and her neighbor had already called us and accused her of poisoning her cat. (these sort of scenarios are fairly normal in the olympia area. it is a fun place to work.) the doctor awoke and told me about her dream. i drove home in traffic, the sun in my eyes, smoking to stay awake, singing aloud.
*
the above quote is from laurence peter, whomever that may be. that may well be my new m.o. it is a bit more cerebral-sounding, at least, than "fuck it."

sunshine. walking through my slice of the world with my sleeves pushed up. it smells like spring. i was feeling very giddy this morning. looked at pictures from europe. i don't really look the same to myself. it feels like no time has passed.
the solitary dark cloud in my life is my marriage. i want it done, over, forgotten. i am living on borrowed time until everything's settled; i'm paranoid that everything i now have and experience can be taken away. i drove to olympia for work and picked up ($20) paperwork at the courthouse. dissolution of marriage, one petitioner. read part of the sheath in the beautiful sunshine, feeling panicked. the terminologies are both lofty and vague. to file will cost an additional $250. why is it so fucking easy to get married and so fucking difficult to get divorced? shouldn't it be the other way around?
tis better to never marry at all. that much is obvious.
but lest i sound oblivious: currently having only one really crappy thing in my life is a new low. life is pretty damn savory overall.

my epigram is bright orange with a black arc

that link doesn't work.
today was zesty. a saucy-walk sort of day. no reason. it started off marginally: frequent trips to the loo (that no one wants to read about) kept me lair-bound for much of the morning. then i decided to drive to everett. i have never actually been in the town itself. i have neglected the areas north of seattle in general. now i know why. everett is a hillier tacoma, which is not a compliment. the downtown area seemed pretty quaint, with stately old brick buildings mingling with overly ambitious arenas, but the outlying areas were overrun with low-slung '70's strip malls and houses with trash-filled yards. i took a wrong turn and ended up in a field of tall yellow grass by the port, semi trucks on my ass. it was spitting rain. even the occasional bright spashes of paint seemed grey.
returned to seattle, thinking that king county is the only refined area here, until i recalled the horse-sodomized man who ended up dying from a perforated colon. that was in king county. enumclaw, which sounds like what it is, but still. gary ridgeway, the green river killer, was from king county also. and ted bundy. so fuck it. washington is a rather creepy, backwards place overall. don't even get me started on how peculiar the east side of the state is.
so i was waiting for a bus in ballard tonight and look up to see a woman i worked with at emerald city, the ER in seattle. we were good friends when i lived here. when i was whinging a few posts ago about how no one's probably here anymore, boo-hoo, she was one of the people i thought of. we hugged. rode the bus to downtown together. made tentative plans to get together in a couple weeks. "you made my day" i told her. a lot of my recent stressors are unraveling on their own accord. it is a fucking nice feeling.
'dear mr fantasy' is playing. traffic is a great band. this is a song that would be equally appropriate for driving, wallowing, seducing, and laughing. how many other songs like that are there, really?

exhale

i am now watching some girl's backpack, so i will be here for a while. it is always so warm in here. they play satellite radio; usually it is decent, but tonight it's a melange of disco horror. the Man Who is Always Here is. i wonder what his story is. he's probably in his 40s, middle-eastern descent, perpetually inert by the window. i wonder if he has a family, if he;s new in town, if he's a putz like me without wifi siphoning at the homefront. i feel self-conscious when i see him here now, because he may very well think the same of me: 'there's that frizzy girl again. doesn't she have a life?' there is something deeply pleasant about this place, though. i am sitting on a couch surrounded by humans, drinking tea, nowhere to be. this is a fucking novelty. i feel very lucky when i realize that this is my life now.
i visited my mother on monday before i went to work. it was the first time in years that we'd had time together without my father around, bitching at her every five minutes. she seemed somewhat depressed about the move. still hasn't found a job. my father is embracing the role of the bullying martyr. he keeps carping on her to find something, implying that she's idle, as though she didn;t spend the last several years being his unpaid slave for his photography business as well as working full-time. this is the first time my mother's had time off, time to herself, in far too long. i deflected the guilt she attempted to foist upon me: "we moved to olympia to be closer to you, not so you'd move to seattle". i reminded her that seattle is only an hour away; yelm was 40 minutes. alaska was 2400 miles. i worry about them. i hope my mother stands up for herself more. i hope my father learns to mellow the fuck out. i have this horrible feeling that, of all the shit they've been through together, this may be what would break them. it was poignant to see the furnishings i'd grown up with in their rented house. their cat ignored me. they live on 3 acres. the stump by their front door has delicate mushrooms growing out of it. mushrooms fascinate me. "i hadn't even noticed those" my mother said.
i was on a bus today that was stopped mid-route because the fucked-up guy wouldn't disembark after the driver ordered him to. i believe the police were en route. i was about 10 blocks from my eventual stop and it was absolutely pouring. i got off and walked. got home sopping wet. it was actually rather fun. the ceiling hasn't leaked today.
'sexual healing' is playing, and i can feel the surliness returning. some songs shouldn't exist.

inhaling

my droning solliloquy of tuesday was spontaneously erased, which is probably for the best. i have been in a sour, self-indulgently morose mood for the last few days, comically culminating in abrupt bawling for no concrete reason whilst listening at top volume to a very good song in my lair this morning (A Song With a Past, as it were). i felt both silly and refreshed afterwards. i haven't really emoted for the last month. this is a bit unlike me; i usually tend to be a bit of a drama queen. perhaps dramatic tendencies tend to dissapate when there is no audience?

i picked up the last of my rubbish from yelm on monday while he was at work. driving on the familiar roads put me in a bit of a panic; my hands were shaking. i had to keep reminding myself that i have my own life now, a life i am allover more happy with. the house was trashed. the empty boxes i'd left on the front porch a month ago were still there, wilted by the rain. inside smelled like old food and stale air. geddy (the cat i left with him) was shrieking for attention. it was as though he'd not been there for weeks. i had already mapped out how to get the last few things as quickly as possible, not bothering to glance around; i was out of there in five minutes. that was undoubtedly what prompted this last bout of despondency. utter bewilderment that that was ever my life; disgust that he obviously hadn't gotten his shit together; pity over how lonely geddy seemed; annoyance that once again, i am reminded of how much of my life i feel that i wasted. i would respect tony a lot more if the place had been warm and lived in, that he was moving on in the world he created before he ever met me. seeing things as they were only amplified my revulsion. i don't miss him at all. i feel like a fucking asshole to admit that.

the subsequent mood comes from being lonely. i was fantasizing about coming home and just holding someone. not him. someone who was warm and soft and already asleep, someone i could sidle up next to and just hold. someone who would hold me. i sound like such a fucking girl.

meanwhile, i have been blowing through all the money i spent the last year (and 50+ hr workweeks) saving. the apartment, the car... and music, which i have been buying again for the first time in months. bought my airline ticket to vegas today for the vet conference. i will be there in 2.5 weeks. it will be nice to feed my brain. i detest las vegas. revision: i detest the strip. i hate only seeing tourists, ignorant and obese and squinting stupidly, or locals thrusting escort flyers at me. i hate the fucking excess. i hate old people compulsively wasting their retirement on slot machines. i hate loud boys in backward baseball caps getting drunk on watered-down free alcohol, and the constant noise, and $3 vending-machine sodas, and women tarted up in shoes they can't walk in. perhaps off the strip it is another world entirely. i would hate to live there.

music-wise: the new soundtrack of our lives is in the auto right now. at first listen i dismissed it as talented but generic pop- definitely more upbeat than their last 2 albums. but it has grown on me. "midnight children" and track 13 are currently the songs that stand out the most. before that i had been listening to phish's 'story of the ghost' relentlessly; i stole it from the lacey library almost a year ago. phish albums tend to build momentum as they play; the last half is almost always superior. when i think of this era, it will be that album, and air, and donovan's version of 'codine'.

i am nervous about this deleting itself, and i don't know how to save it, so shall continue in a moment.