The Things That Stay With You

· My best friend Jamie is terrified of the song “Mairzy Doats”. She told this once years ago, and for some reason it’s filed away in my brain under Useless Bits – Do Not Delete.

· One drunken college night, my dear friend Em turned to me and said (read: slurred) with utter sincerity, “You have really great eyebrows.” It was one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received, and about the only thing I remember from that night.

· My best friend in 3rd grade was Carrie B. She transferred to another school the next year, and we didn’t see each other again until high school – even then it was in passing, and that was over 10 years ago – but I still remember her phone number.

· The only thing I can remember from Physics my senior year of high school:

I don’t even know that it means, but thank you, Mr. Burkhalter.

· My high school friend Angie T.’s favorite word is “plethora”. She used it in every HS paper she ever wrote.

True Stories

(First, two posts in a day two days in a row?? Sweet Jesus, it's a miracle!)

Now, may God strike me a bald, shrivelled old lady if one word of the following is untrue.

1. This will make him sound maybe a little gay, but J is into vintage clothing. I’m not knocking him – I think the style and tailoring of clothing from the 40’s and 50’s is amazing – but it’s not terribly often that a straight, non-metrosexual male expresses interest in these things. (I also think it’s funny, since this is the same man that will wear his favorite, nasty $4 Wal-Mart old man house shoes out in public unless I beg him not to.)

Anyway, several years ago, I decided to get him a vintage shirt as a Valentine’s Day gift. Quality vintage clothing can get expensive, and I was on a very poor college girl budget, so I saved up and researched online and found a great shirt at a price I could afford. I emailed back and forth with the owner of the site, Amanda – she was very helpful, and so nice when there was a problem with the shipping.

Valentine’s Day arrived, and J came to visit me for the weekend. I was so excited to give him his present, proud of all the thought and planning I put into it. He opened the box, exclaimed over the shirt, and then picked up the business card I’d included for [Shortened Version Of Distinctive Last Name] Vintage, the site I’d made the purchase from. As he read it, he got a weird look on his face.

Me: “What’s wrong? Don’t you like the shirt?”
J: “The shirt’s great baby. Um, do you know who runs the site?”
Me: “Her name's Amanda. She was awesome and really helpful. Why?”
J: “Uh, remember how I told about my ex-girlfriend Amanda? And how she moved to [large city] to open her own business? I never told you, but her last name is [Distinctive Last Name].”
Me: “……you are fucking kidding me.”
J: “I am not.”

I pulled up the emails I received from her, and sure enough, there was her full, VERY distinctive Jewish last name in her email signature. She was the one that got him into vintage clothing in the first place. Of all the hundreds of online clothing vendors, why did I have to pick his EX-GIRLFRIEND’S?!?!

2. There is a blog that I sometimes read by a chick in the Houston area. I found her because she’d listed some bands I knew and liked as her favorite music. A few weeks ago, she posted a few pictures, and some of them included people we know (at least by face and name, if not personally). I told J about the pics, and he asked whose blog I saw them in. I told him, and mentioned her name, and – you guessed it – turns out it’s a girl he briefly dated several years ago. She’s married with children now, but STILL. WEIRD.

WTF with me finding his exes?!?! Did I marry a manwhore, or is it just a really, uncomfortably small world?!?!

I made my usual Starbucks stop this morning – I usually go through the drive-thru, but the line was incredibly long, so I parked and ran inside.
There, in line, was an alternate-universe version of my high school sweetheart. My stomach did a little flip-flop, until I realized it wasn’t him.

Sean was my first love, and our relationship, breakup, and continued friendship tinged with the gray of “Should we get back together or not?” totally colors my memories of my senior year in high school (a year that, because of that, I would not re-live for all the money in the world). It took me a year, a few rebound relationships, and a LOT of bad dates to get over him, but I admit that he still and always will hold a tiny piece of my heart. Isn’t it always like that with First Loves?

I haven’t seen him in about 6 years – it was a New Year’s party right after J and I got engaged.
I hear through the grapevine, and my covert Google ops, that he is married and living somewhere in one of those “I-“ states, I think (or is it Michigan? I don’t know, somewhere cold.) Despite my predisposition of distaste for my exes, I really, truly hope he is happy.

So I’ve been thinking about him this morning. It was all I could do to keep from going up to that random guy in line and giving him a huge hug. But I don’t really want to see him again. I just want to kind of put it out there in the universe:

Hey, Hooha.
I hope you’re okay.
Love, Mbobber

I am not a real make-uppy girl, but I am totally trying this out this weekend.



And yes, I totally stole this from I *Heart* You

I finally got my birthday present from my best friend Jamie in the mail a few days ago.
That lovely, lovely girl got me an awesome gift: a Starbucks giftcard, and assorted supercute notecards and Post-Its. She included the note, “Per your Oversharing post, please do not tell me the ways in which you might use these. I’ll just trust that you will enjoy them.”

I love that chick.

The Drunken Baker Strikes Again!

This morning, my coworkers are the happy beneficiaries of homemade banana nut bread and orange cranberry cream cheese swirl bread. Yum!

*********
I am excited that it’s Friday – am thinking of taking a bit of vacation time and leaving a little early, even. Despite some of the usual work bullshit going on, and my previously mentioned funk, I’m in a good mood today because my plans changed at the last minute and will not have to go out of town this weekend.

“Why Gin, what plans do you speak of?”, you ask.
That would be the plan to travel to Mississippi to celebrate my sister’s high school graduation. Which is no longer occurring. Because she is a dumbass and failed algebra, despite the fact that she has long been identified as gifted, had only 2 core classes to complete this semester, and was finished with her school day at 1:15 each afternoon. Instead of this being a situation where everyone agrees that my sister is being an idiot and making bad decisions that have potential to fuck up her entire future, it has turned into a bunch of finger-pointing between my parents and the extended family she’s been living with this year. So while they all are playing Pin The Blame On The Shittiest Authority Figure, my sister is not graduating. From high school. In Mississippi. The dumbest state.

And I hate to say it, but in a way it is a relief that I don’t have to go deal with all of That and all of Them. The past several months, we haven’t been able to talk to any of that side of the family without it turning into a Big Dramatic Thing; it’s like if The Jerry Springer Show and The 700 Club had a lovechild.

So instead of getting into it, hillbilly-style, with my aunts, I will spend the weekend laying around in my pajamas and spending our economic stimulus check (WOOT!). Heaven.

I hate that my last post is just hanging out there, all sad and vulnerable, so I’m putting something else up just so you don’t think I’m still suspended in that state of mind.

I told J about everything, and I feel better. I gripe about him sometimes, but he really is pretty amazing.

He said he knew I’d been sad, he could see it (and I thought, “Wow, I guess I wasn’t faking it as well as I thought”, and after that I thought, “He’s my husband – I shouldn’t feel like I have to fake anything for him.”) I told him I was sorry for being such an ass to him over the past several weeks – I channeled my Sad into Mad, because that felt more productive. Does that make sense (or at least sound familiar) to anyone else? Like, “I can sit around and mope and be a weepy mess and get nothing done, or I can re-channel this into anger, which is at least a kind of energy, so my house and my life doesn’t totally fall apart.” And so that’s how I’ve been operating for the past 2 months, and Dude, no wonder I’ve been so tired – staying mad about essentially nothing all the time is hard fucking work. So (like a fool), rather than unburden myself, I held it all in and snapped at him over every little effing thing. My lovelies, hear these words and take them to heart: That is a stupid thing to do.

So we lay in bed the other night, and he held my hand tight as I cried and told him everything I’ve been holding on to. He asked why I hadn’t told him sooner, and that’s a question I still don’t have an answer for. I guess I was just afraid that saying it out loud would make it more real somehow. He admitted that he will never be able to feel as intensely about these things as I do – as a man, his experience is (and always will be) different. He suggested that I talk to our very good friend Erin, who has suffered an ectopic pregnancy, and has 3 beautiful little girls. I’m shocked that the idea had never occurred to me (and the fact that J could admit his inadequacy, but suggest someone who could better understand, made me fall in love with him a thousand times more).

So I’m feeling mostly better. I am convinced, though, that depression is like soap in a sponge – no matter how many times you clean it, you can never quite get it all out.

My dear chickens, I’m sorry for the relative blog silence over the past couple of weeks. I’ve still had a Cloud Of Blah hanging over me – just can’t seem to shake it. So I haven’t been writing anything lately because it would all be tinged with whininess and martyrdom and Poor-Pitiful-Me-ness, so I abstained rather than drag you down into The Suck with me.

But.
The thing is, this blog is my space to purge, to rant if I need to, to blindly wave my hand around out there and hope someone catches it and holds on. I’ve debated whether or not to post about this – would it be thought-provoking or just self-serving? – but I’ve already learned that holding it in for the past couple of weeks hasn’t made me feel any better, so I’ll get it off my chest in hopes that I can find some relief; that I can breathe easier and sleep better at night.


1. My birthday was yesterday, the same day as Mother’s Day.
When I got off The Pill last summer and J and I started trying to get pregnant, I looked ahead at this year’s calendar (planner that I am), saw that my 26th birthday and Mother’s Day coincided this year, and took it as a Good Sign. I had daydreams of handing my mom a surprise Happy Mother’s Day, Grandmother! card, a Hallmark commercial come to life. All I really wanted for my birthday was to be pregnant.
Instead, for 12 hours I cooked and cleaned and cooked again and cleaned again and cooked some more for
1) my parents, who fought on the way to come over and have lunch with us, so they sulked and pointedly ignored each other for 3 uncomfortable hours, and then
2) my in-laws for dinner (7 of us in all), and they would not leave until I turned off the TV, stood in front of them, and said “Good night!” at 9 p.m.
It was not the birthday I’d hoped for.

2. This is something I have not even told J.
My hormone treatments consisted of several different meds – Clomid, estrogen, progesterone – to induce/encourage different phases of my cycle. One of the last months I was doing it, after J and I had had our dutiful Babymaking Sex at the appointed times, I waited, I pee-tested on two different occasions, no dice. I went to the doctor, told the nurse I wasn’t pregnant, and she told me to continue with my Prometrium to induce a period. I did, and when my period started several days later, it was heavier than normal. Much heavier. Significantly heaver.
When I went back in to the doctor several days later, the physician’s assistant asked how my treatments were going – I told her about continuing the Prometrium, and she looked at me, then at the (same) nurse, shocked. “You should have come in for a blood test before you started the Prometrium again – you still could have been pregnant.” And her saying that out loud voiced my darkest fear, what I couldn’t even admit to myself – what I still can’t admit to myself. Maybe I did it. To myself. Because a stupid nurse made a stupid mistake.
I just walked out, numb, and cried the whole way home. When my next month of treatment failed to get me pregnant, I called the doctor’s office and told them I was taking a break.

And here we are.

It has taken me hours to get through writing this post. I really hope it brings me some comfort, because I don’t know what else to do.

I do this thing where I appear organized and busy – I have several piles of Important-Looking Papers, highlighted and redlined, and clipboards holding more stacks of calendars and chart. I have different-colored notebooks for each of the different meetings I attend, so my notes aren’t lost. I have flow charts that I have printed out and highlighted with green, yellow, orange, and pink, for the progressing stages, and posted on the walls of my cube. I have my Phone Voice, which is slightly harried, but still friendly and polite. I have multiple email replies, Excel spreadsheets, and PDFs open at once – look at me, I’m multi-tasking! But don’t be fooled – I’m only trying to distract you from my ineptitude.

It is 3 p.m.
I have been so busy doing stuff all day; I nearly forgot to eat lunch.
And yet I still feel like I have gotten nothing accomplished – even my sandwich is only half-eaten.

Poop.