Thursday, May 29, 2008

dreaming: better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but only barely

First and foremost, Sid, if by some strange chance you have found this blog, for the love of cheese, look away now. Just stop reading and go find something else to do. Please.

I had some weird dreams last night, and they weren't your standard "oh, how STRANGE" kind of dreams, oh no, that would be too simple. In the first, I had sex with Brad Pitt. And I don't even find Brad Pitt to be attractive. If it had been a lucid dream, I assure you it would have been Alan Rickman as Severus Snape. Most assuredly, it would have been.

But yeah. A sex dream. A STARKY FIRST. The worst part is, in the dream, I was still married to Sid. Fuckin' A, I cheated on my husband in a dream. If it's any consolation, which it isn't, Brad Pitt was cheating on Angelina Jolie, so it kind of evened out.

I woke up feeling awful. Because I cheated on my husband in a dream.

Believe me, I know it makes no sense.

So when I feel back asleep, I dreamed I was pregnant (ooh boy, that can of worms again). I'm not going to get into specifics, because it's really unimportant, but goddamn it, I was so happy. That's what sticks out to me. I remember telling someone that I was having twins, a boy and a girl (which is another can of worms, believe me). And I was happy, did I mention that? Truly, genuinely happy. Despite all the problems that were happening in the dream, which very closely mirrored my real life worries, I was smiling and not faking it. I was hopeful in a way that I have not been in a very long time, and that I fear I will never again experience in this life.

When I woke up, I seriously thought I might be sick. I felt like such utter shit, it seemed like vomiting was the only way to express it besides tears. And I am done with crying over stupid shit like this. Done, I tell you. There is no use crying over something so idiotic. There is no use dwelling on it. There is no use in even thinking about it for another second.

So I move on. To what, I have no idea. I'm still searching for that.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

the Sadim Touch

You know, the opposite of the Midas touch. Apparently I have it.

Seems whatever happened to our crappy old lawn mower rendered it beyond repair. And I so desperately wanted to believe that I could fix it that I put off buying a new mower. Well, the grass - more precisely, the weeds - reached thigh height and I started getting nervous.

In a town this small, nothing goes unnoticed. Everyone on Liberty Street knows that I am a recluse, and that when they see me out of the house...it's a cold day in hell. They will actually comment about it to my face. Everyone in this town knows who I rent this house from, and they know where she lives, and they know that if something's amiss at Manson Homestead, they get better results when they bypass talking to me and just go straight to the lady that cashes my rent checks. So I knew it was just a matter of time before someone called her up and complained that the crazy, shut-in cat lady on Liberty Street was trying to see how tall she could get her grass before the city got sick of it and came to mow it for her.

Believe you me, as much as I would like to have the stooges from the city mow my grass while I sit on my shrinking ass and watch, I saw what they did to the foreclosed house next door. They scalped that yard. Thank you, but I can push a mower myself. Sid and I spent way too much time spreading grass seed last year for anyone to come along and scalp our (finally) beautiful lawn.

Anyway, like I said, the grass was thigh height, and I knew that if I didn't soon work myself up to do something drastic, like buy a new mower, the whole neighborhood would be ringing up the landlady, demanding my blood. I wasn't just putting off buying a new mower because I couldn't bear to spend the money, but because I knew I would have to use Sid's car, and that meant taking off the stupid cover and getting pollen and birdshit all over myself.

But I did it, and it was even worse than I had imagined. It's rained a lot lately, and that cover did fuck-all to keep the water and dirt out. That car was caked in yellow pollen. It was embarrassing, even to me, and I usually don't worry myself over the dirtiness of a car.

But that's not the best part. Oh no, the best part was when I got to the store and picked out my new mower, and had the guy bring it out and put it in my trunk for me. He says, "You know you got ants in here?"

Yes, you read that correctly. There were ants making a nest in the metal framing around the trunk. I feel no further comment is necessary on this, as thinking about it makes me twitch.

So I get the mower home, get it out of the trunk, and get it assembled. I fill it up with oil and gasoline and I'm psyched. I put together a lawn mower! I'm independent and industrious! Yay starky!

And then I couldn't get it started. I primed that thing, and yanked at the pull cord for a good ten minutes before I decided that one more failure would result in me taking a mallet to this spiffy new mower. In desperation, I went across the street to beg help from the neighbor man.

He started that thing on the first goddamn try.

It's the Sadim Touch, I'm telling you.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

an unforseen side effect

I am finding out that all the weird things about me that always sort of defined who I was are not really me at all, but my hypothyroidism. And now that that's not a problem, I get to go through that whole teenage phase of "finding myself" all over again. Because this has apparently been going on for years, unnoticed, I do not know who I am without symptoms.

Take, for example, my sex drive. Nonexistent. Never had any libido to speak of. Ever. It didn't bother me, it was just who I was, and I accepted it. Well, now that the synthroid has had time to render some major changes, I'm finding out that hey, you know there really is something there.

And my god, I'm freaked out. This is the strangest thing to me. This is like being 12 years old again and going through puberty. It's alienating. I don't know my body anymore, this isn't the one I'm used to. My husband is coming home to a wife he has never really met before.

For the past few weeks, I've been taking my pill every day and seeing gradual improvement, and I was totally okay with having a chronic disease. It didn't bother me. I was not my disease, you know, it didn't define me as a person. And I'm finding out that I was, and it did.

It is extremely humbling.