Archive for the ‘happiness and craziness’ Category

One of my very favorite things in the world is that I have been adopted by a sweet, loving, utterly crazy dog. She is a Neapolitan mastiff who belongs to my sweetheart’s brother, A. A is never home–he has work, school, a new girlfriend–and she was terribly lonely, and I took over feeding her and giving her a treat every night and in that way, I won her heart. When I come into the house, she is so excited to see me that her entire back end wags and her tiny little tail goes whap whap whap whap . She rubs up against me and weaves around my legs and between my knees like she is a cat, except she’s almost as tall as my waist and weighs a hundred pounds, so it works out rather less well than it does for a cat.

She is neurotic, anxious, and insecure.

There is nothing in the world weirder than revisiting your past in great and glorious Technicolor surround-sound. I am working on a project about my weight loss surgery, about what came before and what came after, and I am spending a lot of time sitting down and looking through things I want to call relics–my old blog, my body of work posts on elastic waist, the countess emails I wrote when I was thinking about it.

Pictures, lists of measurements, a Word document I found on my computer that listed all the ways my life would change and all the things I would do that spoke more of the great bone-deep unhappiness I was filled up with than any determination or hope or ambition.

I was such a different person, two hundred pounds ago, three years ago. I am also exactly the same.

I’m writing again. Wait, let me say that with proper emphasis and maybe you will hear the awe and wonder and excitement that surrounds every word in that sentence with a sparkly aura of amazement and glee (and even notice the little shadow behind it that says quietly in a mournful Eeyore voice “but for how long?”): I. Am writing. Again.

I am writing words, that combine into sentences that comprise paragraphs that come together to fill up page after page with prose, that I wrote, that traveled from my head down through my neck and split up at my shoulders and zoomed down through my elbows and came barreling down my forearms and out my fingertips which move like lightning across the keyboard, every day.

Every day, for real. A thousand words, I am aiming for, and a thousand words I usually get, though sometimes less, but also sometimes more than that.

I like to think of myself as a happy-go-lucky kind of gal, spontaneous and full of fun, up for any excitement, flexible, inventive, turn-on-a-dime and ready to go. It’s a vibrant and dynamic way to be, to be always poised for something good and ready to take advantage of it; it’s the way I want to be. It’s a way I try to be, and in my off time, on a weekend when the hours stretch ahead lazily like a cat, it is both a good way to be and something I am good at. Let’s go take over the world! I shout. And we do. Sometimes we stay in a dark room and play EverQuest, but that’s okay too.

As it turns out, however, I’m not always good at it. When I am faced with many tasks all of them due at once, sometimes all of them due at once three days ago or before I was born, all of them huge, all of them daunting, all of them starting to throb and throw up steam and tick like they are going to explode if I don’t attend to them immediately, with some slightly less-urgent but no less important tasks scrabbling in between, making impatient squawking noises and spinning round like whirligigs, I shut down.

It has been, officially and by the numbers, exactly one year since I finished packing up the U-Haul truck that was sitting in the driveway in front of my San Francisco apartment, slammed down the back door, and got on the road to Utah. Packing frantically, hauling all your crap down a long hallway and down a steep driveway and around back of the truck and throwing it up onto the bed and running back inside for more and having arguments about what fits where and how, and why the other person is crazy go-nuts and should just be quiet, that doesn’t leave much time for introspection, for the I am leaving beautiful San Francisco and my beautiful apartment and my friends and my job and everything I know to move to Utah? freakout.

God, when you put it that way it sounds completely insane. Exchanging California for Utah? For Utah? Really, for Utah?

More or less officially, I am out of work. I had a contract job as a proofreader at an advertising agency; they wanted me full time, and to run the department. I said I can only do part-time! They took me on, anyway. When I didn’t change my mind about working for them full-time, they went ahead and hired someone full-time, but told me that I’d stay on part-time. Except, as it turns out, there are no great and greasy gobs of extra proofreading work to be thrown my way, so after a couple of weeks of “not yet! start your part-time schedule next week!” I have been officially told that there is no work for me, and they’ll call me when that changes. If it changes.

I’ve got some proofreading jobs that I do at home in my underpants, and I am pursuing some Leads, vis a vis some more writing jobs which I would also perform in my underpants.

Because E is ridiculously awesome, but especially so at work, they rewarded him. I am as shocked as you are–an employer recognizing that an employee goes way above and far beyond? An employer who says holy crap, dude, your sense of responsibility and commitment and dedication is magnificent, is inspiring, is beautiful to behold and we do not think that the money that we provide to you in the form of a paycheck is enough to acknowledge the fact of your awesomeness. An employer who says here is a bonus, because you deserve it and are very attractive and have many good qualities. Hooray!

E has been working his ass off doing wonderful things for his little company, and they said thanks with a very large travel voucher. You tell us where you want to go and what you want to spend it on–a hotel, a safari, airfare–and we will make the arrangements for you.

Do you ever make contingency plans? I mean, completely unnecessary panic-button plans for the very off chance that, say, the earth is hit by a meteor, or the robot apocalypse suddenly boots up, or the revolution has come and you think that you’re going to end up against the wall? I have many well-detailed plans for many very specific scenarios, and I can tell you with a certain amount of confidence that I’m the lady you want to follow in the event of the blackening of the sun and the rise of the zombies.

It’s been a semi-conscious hobby of mine for a long time, to consider escape routes from buildings in case of a raid by rabid wolves or how I would carry us all to freedom should the earth suddenly drop out of the bottom of the Wells Fargo building and we plummet into ahellmouth of some kind.