Right now, I’m broke. Brokety-broke. Broke-diggity. I mean like, dust in my bank account, holy shit how am I going to pay my half of the mortgage kind of broke.

It’s my own fault—obviously the money fairies didn’t come nibble away at the pile of coins that used to glimmer so charmingly [...]]]>

Right now, I’m broke. Brokety-broke. Broke-diggity. I mean like, dust in my bank account, holy shit how am I going to pay my half of the mortgage kind of broke.

It’s my own fault—obviously the money fairies didn’t come nibble away at the pile of coins that used to glimmer so charmingly in the middle of one of Wells Fargo’s finest vaults. I had money; I spent money. I neglected to set aside enough of a cushion to get me through the drought I saw coming, but how bad could that drought be? This year it was pretty bad for a whole host of reasons I just backspaced, because my temporary poverty is not very interesting.

What I think is more interesting is the fact that I have let myself fall into this state of benign neglect that I am having really an astonishing amount of difficulty shaking myself out of. It’s a cycle of the type you might call vicious, and it’s starting to feel actually malignant.

I am too poor to leave the house, so I don’t put on real clothes (EVER. Yay, freelancing!), and I don’t fix my hair and I haven’t worn makeup in—well, it’s been a long time. This slides down to the point where I rarely shower, which coincides with the fact that I haven’t looked at myself in the mirror which means that my eyebrows—I can only imagine—are taking up most of the real estate of my forehead and I have a handlebar mustache that does not suit me and my hair has become a bird’s nest in eight different shades (sadly none of them are silver yet) and my fingernails look like they belong to an eight-year-old girl who plays Guerilla Soldiers in her backyard which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that I am a little bit vain about my hands because they are, like Jo’s hair, My One Beauty.

So I feel like a hot mess. Despite the fact that my worth as a human has nothing to do with the state of my eyebrows. There is something about the inability to maintain a personal grooming standard that goes beyond physical attractiveness and strikes right at the heart of my sense of self. And I dislike it.

Unfortunately I am helpless and hopeless at addressing my hot-messitude on my own, because that’s one of the problems I generally throw money at to fix and—well, you know. So I can’t leave the house. And I can’t open up my own home-based escort service to pull in a little extra cash. So I sink lower and lower in my decrepitude but who cares, because my dogs love me even when I look worse than they do after a mud-puddle adventure and E almost never wrinkles his nose or looks away, aghast at what he’s shackled himself to.

I keep swearing that the very first thing I’m going to do when I get a bucket of money is laser my name into the side of the moon. And THEN I am going to spend an ENTIRE DAY at a salon being told I am the most beautiful girl in the world both inside and out, in my soul and over every inch of my skin while they polish me to a high-gloss shine. But since I hate that shit, probably I will just go get my eyebrows fixed and my cuticles weed-wacked and try to pretend this never happened. Come soon, money. Come before someone actually sees me looking like this. I will wait for you in the shower.

You begin to experience the withdrawal effects, but you’re also [...]]]> Okay. So first, you taper the dose of Effexor you’re taking. You do this slowly, because there are physical side effects that occur, among them the “brain zap,” as it’s called. Jennette has a very good explanation of why that is here.

You begin to experience the withdrawal effects, but you’re also experiencing a lessening of the actual benefits of being on an antidepressant. You’re remembering why you went on antidepressants in the first place. You’re remembering that the world is a difficult place, and you are the WORST.

But! Once you’re on a low-enough dose of effexor to not cause Dangerous Side Effects like Trypo-trippin’ or Sera-WHOA-nin Zoomies or whatever the fuck it is you’re supposed to be afraid of (I wrote it down; I simply cannot remember any more. Is it too much effort to remember or does my brain now have tiny pinholes where smart things used to be? I am going to forget I wondered about that), you add in the antidepressant you’re switching over to. It is, in my case, Celexa.

So you’re going off one, but you’re going right on another! That’s super-great! You’ll be fine! But before you get there to that promised land, you reach a sweet spot where you’re totally off the Effexor but you still have not begun to experience the helpful antidepressant effects of your new drug.

I call this The Killing Time. At least now I do, and I think I’m allowed to. This is the time when you may have once thought you had it all together but honey, you are about to get torn apart. This is the time of wanting to kill everyone around you and since you’re not feeling very logical you’re thinking about starting with yourself. This is the time where everything goes to hell, including your basic handle on hygiene and your ability to not cry a lot at the drop of the hat or avoid cliches.

This is when I cry while I’m proofreading. Just steady, quiet crying and steady, salty proofreading. Work has to get done. Cry and proof, honey, cry and proof. This is when I try to hang up some new curtains and I scream when I drill the hole wrong and throw the drill on the floor and lose my shit because my life is over and I am worthless. This is when I need to be encased in carbonite and left alone until my brain chemistry straightens the fuck out, because no one needs to deal with this—the cat, the dogs, E, me. Nobody needs to see this. It is unnecessary! I am writing a strongly worded letter.

It’s chemical, pure, awful, 100 percent chemical misery. That doesn’t help a lot. I have so much good stuff going on in my life. I have so much to be happy and grateful and thrilled about.

I WANT TO BE HAPPY AND GRATEFUL AND THRILLED, DO YOU HEAR ME, BRAIN?

And that is this week’s Effexoreport. Stay tuned for next week, when someone with my blog admin password logs in to shut the place down and post the explanatory police report.

I [...]]]> It was when I was thrift store shopping that I remembered that one of the things I want to do when I get a wheelbarrow full of money, besides purchase a nuclear-powered stove and get my name etched on the surface of the moon, was get a tummy tuck. Flat-out, straight-up plastic surgery.

I knew I’d want one even before I got weight loss surgery. My stomach has always made me uncomfortable—I remember thinking as a teenager, when a friend confessed that she had let the boy she was making out with put his hand down her pants, that I could NEVER, EVER do that. He would TOUCH my STOMACH. The idea filled me with revulsion.

My own body, filling me with revulsion.

There’s so much wrong with that. There’s everything wrong with that. I don’t know how to explain how much there is that’s wrong with it. I don’t know how to fix it, either, except to do the same thing I did. I went and got weight loss surgery, because I thought my size and my shape and my fat were repulsive.

And I thought I had come to terms with that. That whatever problems I have, they were not the sole consequence of being fat, and that being fat was not an ugly thing or bad thing, that being fat was having a particular physical description, not a moral failing.

So see, weight loss surgery did make me a better person after all! We are all beautiful unique flowers with beautiful bodies and precious souls.

Except that I want to go get a tummy tuck because I think the stomach I have left over, from having been twice as wide as I am now, is ugly, unappealing, will actually physically repel anyone who glimpses it.

The idea of anyone looking at my stomach makes me so uncomfortable I can hardly sit still. It is difficult to continue to type this, to continue to talk about this idea. To confront the fact that the way we deal with the things we dislike about our bodies is so often to find a way to fix it.

I want to be fixed. There it is. Weight loss surgery was a way to fix my body, tattoos are a way to fix my body, saving up six thousand dollars and letting a doctor whack off the skin he calls “excess” and hauling it all up like he was pulling up a pair of panties for me—that will fix my body. Until I figure out what else needs fixing, and how much it’s going to cost to fix it.

Sometimes I feel like despite of All The Adversity, I still manage to comport myself as a fairly adult member of society. I’m generally responsible and reasonably with-it. I pay my bills, I floss, I change the sheets weekly, I keep up with the laundry and the dishes. My deadlines are all met [...]]]>

Sometimes I feel like despite of All The Adversity, I still manage to comport myself as a fairly adult member of society. I’m generally responsible and reasonably with-it. I pay my bills, I floss, I change the sheets weekly, I keep up with the laundry and the dishes. My deadlines are all met and my to-do lists, for the most part, have neat, straight strike-outs marching down the page.

That’s pretty damn good, I think. But then you meet my dog, and you think huh. That is a dog who thinks he is a little person, and can get on the couch with the rest of the people. That is a dog who does what he likes. That is a spoiled rotten little dog. Luckily he is the cutest dog the world has ever seen, or boy oh boy he’d be in trouble.

Those are all true things. He sits, he shakes, he lies down, he will not go through the front door until we say Okay, he stops at every corner until we give him the go ahead, he knows fetch, and give, and drop it, and down and uh-uh, kisses!, get him!, and no. He’s working on roll over.

But Crommy is also allowed on the couch and in the bed. Crommy gives kisses like he’s trying to take your face off. Crommy jumps up. Crommy barks when he is worried. Crommy thinks you should cook him a hamburger. Crommy sounds like a badly oiled door when he does not get his way—he creaks and cries and he suffers. Oh, how he suffers. Oh, how we don’t understand the pain he is enduring, when he does not get what he wants when he wants it, and oh how badly he wants it—we’ll never truly understand. Luckily what he usually wants is love. He wants to be next to me, on me, in my arms, looking into my eyes and expressing all the adoration he has in his heart for me, and for hamburger. For such a small dog, he can carry around a lot of love.

Part of this is my fault—I’ve never owned a dog, until my little bug. It never occurred to me that dogs shouldn’t get certain privileges. It did not even cross my mind that I shouldn’t snuggle him every time he wanted snuggling because I would be engendering in him a feeling that he has rights and by god I am taking those rights away when I do not drop everything to give him what he needs, without which he shall die.

Part of this is not my fault—no, seriously. He never begged—until he spent extended time at grandma and grandpa’s house, the magical land where treats rain from the sky and a sausage is cooked special for the dogs every morning and dogs can jump up and never have to sit before they get a treat or their dinner. He didn’t beg until Eben started working at home and sharing his chicken nuggets, I promise you that.

And I’ve tried very hard to teach him manners, but he is half Boston Terrier, and those suckers are excitable. Seriously. They are all like this, all the Boston Terriers in the world. They jump and run and they creak and whine and are tragically neurotic and there is very little to combat that particular personality trait. Or at least very little I’m willing to do, because yes. He’s not crate trained because the noises of tragedy broke my heart and yes, he sleeps between E and I every night, and also he steals the covers.

And when I meet people with perfectly behaved dogs, or when Crom jumps up or he gets anxious when a stranger comes in and won’t stop barking or he won’t quit mooning around the house like we’ve grounded him or he won’t just settle down, I feel like I’m a bad person who broke her dog.

But he’s also one of the best things that has ever happened to me. There is very little in the world that is like the unconditional love that a dog is willing to provide you. He is so smart, and so loving. He is playful, and silly, and when he bursts across the field in flat-out pursuit of the ball you just threw for him, the joy in every line of his body fills me with that very same happiness. When he is only content when he’s finally curled up against my hip with his chin on my leg, I am content too. He is ridiculous and he makes me laugh every day and I love that little dog more than I love most things. I think I’m probably coming to a place where I am okay with what that says tabout me as a person.

I surprised myself yesterday when I realized I’ve written two books. That’s not, like, a lot of books. It’s a very small number of books, in fact. It is more than one, which is its distinguishing characteristic, but it’s a lot less than, say, fifteen.

But two books feels like a [...]]]>

I surprised myself yesterday when I realized I’ve written two books. That’s not, like, a lot of books. It’s a very small number of books, in fact. It is more than one, which is its distinguishing characteristic, but it’s a lot less than, say, fifteen.

But two books feels like a respectable number of books to have written. Manuscripts to have finished. I sat down, and on two separate occasions, plus a lot of bonus occasions for editing, I sweated through several hundred thousand words. Sometimes I wonder why my hands ache and my forearms are tight and I get this pain in my wrist, but that’s only because I am very forgetful and even not so bright, sometimes.

Two books is huge, though, considering the fact that even though I wanted to be a writer when I was a kid (I have this whole story about discovering that books were written by regular people and that I, too, could be one of those regular people and how it was a magical discovery that changed my whole life, blah blah blah) but I never wrote a word when I was a kid. Maybe a couple of words. Maybe a page or two. I was not one of those kids who was always scribbling, who wrote forty-three books in crayon and stapled them together and kept them in a trunk.

I wrote a soap opera for some friends when I was in high school. I think about two pages of a story to impress a boy at some point. In college, I wrote creative essays and some poems. After college, I wrote about a chapter of something I was calling a novel except it was really a lie because all I ever wrote was that chapter but I kept revising it and making people read it. I started to do a thing called Online Journaling that everyone calls blogging now, and that was my major creative outlet. Wait, creative should be in quotes. “Creative” outlet. There we go.

For whatever reason, I had this conviction that I was a writer and that I wanted to write when I grew up and that I was really totally great at writing, but somehow I never managed to write a single goddamn thing. And yet I applied to graduate school to get an MFA in creative writing and they let me in—on the basis, if I recall, of that single awful chapter of that pretend novel I was pretending I was writing.

In school, in my very first graduate course, I wrote a truly terrible not-memoir, which was basically me rehashing all the online journal posts—blog posts—I had been writing about moving to San Francisco to go to grad school. It did not have a beginning or an ending but I decided to call the first page the beginning and the last page the ending and hope no one noticed. It was called “tectonic” because that was a pun. Then I wrote a short story and it was a miracle! Because I started something and finished it and it was—bad. It was pretty bad. (Every once in awhile I pull it up to try to revise it and then I laugh a lot and put it away again.)

Then more stories. And I finished them! And I got one published! And I cried! And I thought, holy wow, maybe I am a writer! Check this shit out, yo! However: I didn’t write unless I had an assignment. And having to write a thesis-slash-novel almost killed me. I wrote the same chapter over and over and my long-fiction workshop professor kind of hated me and then hated me more while he summer-advised me during which I gave him the same chapters over and over again and then I threw my hands in the air and ran away crying and dropped out of school. But I came back. And I took another long-fiction workshop and then another and somehow, I wrote that thesis, and when I sat back and looked at it, I realized I had written a book. A book!

It wasn’t (still isn’t) a good book. But I wrote it. And then I didn’t write anything again for about four years, I think, except an occasional online journal entry (blog), and then a blog about weight loss surgery.

Then, I wrote a book about weight loss surgery. It took three years to write that fucking thing and I cried a lot during it because it is hard to be honest about how awful you can be and the horrible mistakes you’ve made. And in the end, I wrote a good book. I know it’s good. It’s honest and it’s the best I could do to say important things about body image and weight and the psychology of fat. I am proud of that book.

And maybe that’s what broke me. Because I’m writing again. That eleven thousand words is now about 16,000 more words on the young adult novel I’ve been writing and it’s almost finished, I think, close to it anyway, and I’ve written four more short-short stories and there is a feeling inside me that is very akin to happiness and satisfaction or maybe even joy. I can call it joy, I think. I’m going to go ahead and do that.

Two books, a lot of little stories. I haven’t written much for how old I am and how long I’ve thought about writing, but feel like maybe I really am one of those regular people, the kind who make books.

One of those days where every single thing in the whole wide world is stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid. You are stupid and you, and you and you and especially you and I hate you all, but that’s okay, because I hate myself even more, okay? Okay then!

I laid in bed for [...]]]>

One of those days where every single thing in the whole wide world is stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid. You are stupid and you, and you and you and especially you and I hate you all, but that’s okay, because I hate myself even more, okay? Okay then!

I laid in bed for an hour after the alarm went off and the dogs were supposed to stay with me and snore and make me feel better—that is their job. But they went off to pad around the house and wrestle and growl and Ogre was probably peeing all over everything and the room was too bright to go back to sleep and I hate everything especially sunshine and dogs and these pillows and life.

E came in and threw my pants at my head. “Come on,” he said.

“No,” I said, and rolled over and put my face in one of the stupid pillows.

“Get up,” he said, and pulled the comforter off of me. The dogs jumped up on the bed and started wrestling on my head.

“I hate you!” I said. I was filled with a great sense of injustice and rage.

“I don’t care,” he said. “Get up. Get dressed.”

“No!” I said, and then “Okay, okay!” when he reached for my feet because he is cruel and doesn’t understand that tickling is not a proportionate response.

I got dressed sullenly and stomped down the stairs. Ogre was wearing his winter coat with the fur hood and bouncing around. Crom was staring patiently, fixedly at the door. E handed me the keys. The dogs quivered at the front door when we opened it, and then exploded off the stoop like we had shot them from a t-shirt cannon when we said “Okay.”

We drove to the park. We threw the ball for Crom across the field of snow, and he took off in a gallop, his feet not touching the ground at all. Ogre leapt across the drifts like a fat gazelle and rubbed his face in the snow and spun in circles and looked delighted to be alive. Crom shot back and forth across the field in single-minded pursuit, his heart full of the joy of the fetch and return. Everything was bright and clear and the mountain was close enough to put in your pocket and E turned to me and I was going to punch him if he said, “I told you so,” because I could feel myself grinning when Crom leapt high and neatly plucked the ball from the air.

But he said, “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” and I said, “Me too.”

If I stick to my schedule—and I am dorky enough to have carefully written out a schedule—I will be finished with the second rewrite of my memoir come Saturday afternoon. On my schedule, there is a note that says “SUN: Day of Rest.” And then a space, and then below that, “MON: Line [...]]]>

If I stick to my schedule—and I am dorky enough to have carefully written out a schedule—I will be finished with the second rewrite of my memoir come Saturday afternoon. On my schedule, there is a note that says “SUN: Day of Rest.” And then a space, and then below that, “MON: Line edit begins. “ And if history repeats itself, as frequently it does, I will finish the line edit fairly rapidly, ask various people for feedback on my manuscript, and then panic and sit all alone in the dark for two years without touching the thing again.

It’s getting a little embarrassing, how long this thing is taking me. I know I shouldn’t compare myself to other writers. I know that that is a short ride to a long hell inside my head. I know that beating myself up for being lazy, or scared, or scared and lazy all at once in a dizzying strawberry swirl is no use, at this point, and I should quit worrying about how it looks that I’ve taken so long and quit imagining that I’ve done something wrong, and just get back to the writing. That’s the important bit, right? Of course it is! The play’s the thing! Fucking etcetera.

I am so tired of writing this book that is about me and all my interesting opinions (note: they are not that interesting). I could write something else! But I’ve got to finish this book. Why? I just do. I have to write down all the stupid bullshit I have in my head about weight loss surgery and the math and the duringmath and aftermath. I will incorporate feedback and edits promptly and with great efficiency. And then my agents will take it off and do magical agent things and come back with some kind of news for me.

I am assuming it’ll be “bad” news (because everyone knows that publishing rulez), because it’s safer that way, and because then I don’t have to think about all the non-writer things that happen when you publish a book, like “having to talk to people” in the name of “self-marketing.”  But if someone wants to publish it, I will have a party, I will not lie to you. It really would totally rule.

However, if no nice publisher with many good qualities is interested? I will by-god self-publish the thing even if that means I Xerox it and then throw it up in the air on a windy day in a crosswalk, and then I will burn something in effigy—a pair of my fat pants? A pair of my skinny pants? A small eskimo child clutching a pine cone? Something symbolic, I dunno—and then I will move on with my life. I will stop being stuck in this run of 9 or so years of my past that I’ve been wallowing in for so long, and I will find new things to think about and new things to say and new things to care about.

I will write fiction again. Oh my god, I can’t even tell you how lovely that sounds. Imaginary things about imaginary people and imaginary events. Shit will blow up and animals will speak in tongues and the pillar of the universe will tremble and I can go back to being self-absorbed in smaller doses, like on facebook and in blog posts and twitter, and all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well. Ish.