Up for Air

Why did I ever think I could pull off an 80-hour workweek? I wonder if this has anything to do with the reason why I’m sick for the third time this month. Oops, I’ve already wasted too much time. Must get back to work. I’ll be back when I get my life back. Sanity? Not sure that will be returning any time soon.

Don’t You Hate When That Happens?

File this under “Why Me?”:

Tell me if this has ever happened to you. You’re feeling run down, and are pretty sure you’re getting sick — which is really great timing, because in two days you’re going on vacation to your uncle’s beach house. Maybe it’s for the best, you’re thinking, because the forecast says it’s supposed to rain every day next week, anyway. If you’re going to be sick during a vacation, at least you’re not cooped up indoors while the sun is gloriously shining outdoors. Nonetheless, you want to do everything you can to beat it, so you make yourself some soup. Chicken chili to be exact, because that’s the closest you have to chicken noodle soup. You grab yourself a bowl and start pouring the steaming-hot chili in from your saucepan. It’s chunkier than you realized and it starts plopping and splashing everywhere. Before your reflexes can kick in to do damage control, a blob hits you right below your left eye — and it BURNS. So you drop everything and start running your face under the faucet, because you’ve burned yourself way too many times to not take the proper precautions. But, alas, it is too late. You have developed a teardrop-sized blister beneath your lower lid. How cute: it looks like you’re crying but you’re not! Oh, well, at least your scar from last summer’s burn will have a matching accessory.

No? Are you sure? Doesn’t ring a bell? Because I would have sworn this is something that happens to everyone. Kind of like the time my boyfriend popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate my new job, and the cork bounced right off my eyelid. We’re not together anymore. I can do enough damage to myself without the help of others, thank you very much.

Time to Make the Donuts

It’s National Doughnut Day! In honor of NDD, I wanted to post a picture of me with Mr. “Time to Make the Doughnuts” Guy from Dunkin’ Donuts that I took back in the day before digital cameras. No, I wasn’t 12 at the time. I’m just that old.

Of course, that involved finding the photo, which meant going through bags of photos that were never put in photo albums. But first I had to find these bags of photos, which you’d think would be easy, since I just spent the last weekend clearing out every closet and drawer in our entire apartment. But as it turns out, when you clean out your place so you can actually find things again, you end up not being able to find anything because you can’t remember where you so neatly put these things.

Finally, photo in hand, I popped it into our trusty old scanner which, it turns out, is old, but not so trusty. My computer refuses to recognize the piece of equipment, so I have to use Ryan’s computer. You’d think it would be as simple as pressing the scan button on the scanner, wouldn’t you? But it’s never that easy. And, doesn’t it figure, Ryan has removed the software icon from his system tray. Fun. So I have to go poking around his computer to find it. Sorry, Ryan — I swear I wasn’t snooping. And…. Presto! Now can I scan the stupid photo?

I launch the software, but it won’t open. Naturally. That’s okay. I’m resourceful. I’ll just take a picture of the picture. But where the hell is my digital camera? Again, I put it somewhere in my massive clean sweep last weekend, but where, I have nooo recollection whatsoever. Bastard. Well, I guess I can take a picture with my iPhone, right? Oh, how naive of me. That would be easy — and life, my friends, is never easy. My iPhone has been giving me all kinds of trouble ever since I got caught out in a downpour without an umbrella. I needed to keep my iPhone out, because I had no idea where I was or where I was going, and was going to rely on the Google maps application to show me the way. This, because my friends were making fun of me for printing out maps and carrying them around with me when I have a perfectly good iPhone that will do the same thing. Except, that is, when it’s raining. This is why I never like to depend on technology. Because. You. Can’t.

So back I go to dig up my camera. A-ha! But it’s completely dead. Gah! So now here I sit typing about my trevails, pissed off about donut day, and waiting for my camera to charge. Really, the photo isn’t worth the trouble — at all. But when you’ve invested this much time into something, don’t you  feel like you’ve just got to go through with it? Like, I would never be the type to call off an engagement after a year of planning the wedding even if Ryan were pulling a “Jon and Kate Plus Eight” stunt of “showing women his car.” Is that what we’re calling your junk these days? Seriously, you’re half-Asian. It’s not that big. Nope, I’d likely go through with the whole ridiculous affair and then file for divorce a day later. If you can’t get a refund, you might as well enjoy the party, right?

So, without further ado, I give you Fred, the Dunkin Donuts mascot, who, I might add, was really, really creepy. He kept muttering about Pavlov’s bell, which I suppose makes sense, given the indentured servitude of his commercials.

Fred, the Dunkin Donuts guy

BTW – they’re giving out free donuts with a cup of coffee purchase today. I myself prefer Krispy Kremes (sorry, Fred), and they’re giving out donuts without having to purchase anything. I would run out and get one, but something tells me it just wouldn’t be that easy.

Aesop, Revisited

The other day, I was walking my dog and admiring all of the flowering trees. I never look up, because when I do, I end up performing a face plant due to uneven sidewalks, potholes, trap doors, holes to other dimensions — what have you. I went down just a week or so ago, right in front of the fire department. Oh, but didn’t they have a good chuckle? It was all in good fun — at my expense, of course. Something about having to perform a rescue operation right in their driveway. Yes, I’ll have a good chuckle, too, when my lawsuit check comes in. All the way to the bank, biatch. Who, me? Sore sport? If it weren’t for my twisted ankle and bruised ego, I’m sure I would have seen the humor, too. (Never mind the fact that I almost fell down the subway stairs and tripped two more times that same night. Sadly, I was completely sober. Fucking heels. I mean, er, damn city sidewalks. Did I just ruin my chance of suing?)

But this other day, I was finally coming out of a grumpy spell, due in part to all the little blossom petals drifting down in my path like confetti. And then, I slipped. I skidded right across the  sidewalk, like I had stepped on a banana peel. Since I was out walking my dog, my initial thought was, oh, please, please don’t let me have stepped in dog shit. Wouldn’t that angry little Asian lady feel so vindicated? Well, I guess my prayer was answered, because it most definitely wasn’t dog poop. It was a dead baby bird. I just skated down the sidewalk on the slimy insides of a mashed baby bird. Now isn’t that a modern-day fable? Hilarious, really. Wasn’t there a movie where every time someone wished for something, they got it, but at the gruesome expense of someone else?

Since that day, I have seen dead baby birds all over the sidewalks of my neighborhood. I’ve been counting. We’re up to 8 now. Either avian flu or west nile has taken over Brooklyn, or everyone and their mother is hoping to God they didn’t step in dog shit, and God is having a grand ole time answering their prayers.

Missing: One Head with Hair

I panic when I have to talk to people I don’t know, and end up saying things like, “Excuse me, I have to go find my hair.” That’s what I ended up saying at my boyfriend’s 20-year high school reunion last weekend.

He went to a prestigious all-boy’s prep school in Boston, so of course everyone there was Ivy-League educated and married to very successful women. As it would turn out, I got “stuck” talking to a literary agent who just so happens to be looking for books from writers like me. This would be an opportunity of a lifetime for anyone else. But instead I said to Ryan, “Please don’t leave me alone with her. I’m afraid of her.”

She and her husband sat down beside me just as Ryan was getting up to use the bathroom. “So, Jill…” said her husband, Chip.

I glanced up at Ryan in horror, jumped out of my seat and blurted out, “I’m going to the bathroom.” Not, “Would you excuse me one moment?” Just “I’m hitting the bathroom, so leave me alone.” So very debonair of me.

It obviously took him aback, because he said, “Oh. I’m so sorry.”

Realizing Ryan wasn’t going to leave without me, I recovered enough to say, “Oh, no, not at all. What were you going to ask me?”

“Oh, I was just going to ask you what you do,” said Chip.

“I’m a writer,” I said. Then turned around and walked off.

Later, his wife, the agent, sought me out. Turns out, she’s looking for health writers. That’s funny. Because I’m a health writer!

“I looooove neuroscience,” I gushed. “Did you read ‘Stroke of Insight?’” I don’t know why I asked, since I hadn’t read it yet.

“Yes, I did,” she said.

“That is, like, my dream book,” I said.

“Yes, well, minus the fact that you’d have to have a stroke first,” she reminded me.

“Right, right…” Then I went on to explain to her that I had absolutely no ideas for a book, and why I wasn’t qualified to write a health book, anyway.

And that’s about the time I said, “Excuse me, I have to go find my hair.” She didn’t seek me out for the rest of the evening, or even ask me for my card when I left. I can’t even imagine why.

How Not to Be an Optimist

Last week, my hairdresser was explaining how, one day after buying a dozen eggs, she yanked open the refrigerator and watched the carton fall to the floor — all 12 of them shattering. “I knew I should have put them away properly but instead I just shoved the whole container into the egg rack.”

Instead of being disgusted with herself, she started laughing. “I was chasing yolks across my kitchen. You wouldn’t believe how slippery those things are!” she said. “I had to sit down on the floor — I was laughing so hard.”

Meanwhile, that morning, I had experienced my own trying moment when I walked my dog to the park. There, my German shepherd squatted as if she were going to do her business, then decided it wasn’t a good enough location. She did this little fake-out two more times until she found a suitable spot to use as her toilet al fresco. While I was bent over picking it up, a jogger ran up to me. “Your dog go over there, too!” she said angrily.

“No, she…”

“Bad dog owner! Making mess of park! You pick up.”

“There’s nothing over there. I swear. She just went here.”

She continued to scowl at me. Obviously, she had nowhere else to be. “Your dog go all over!” she spat.

“Um, I think I’ve got it all. See?!” I said, holding the bag of dog shit up in her face.

I dangled it back and forth in front of her nose, but what I really wanted to do was throw it hard enough at her head that it would make a nice mud masque for her hair.

“Over there, too! You no pick up!”

Obviously, the swinging pendulum of poop did not hypnotize her into submission like I was hoping.

Fellow dog owners watched on, unsure which of us was the bad guy. The woman did not speak English very well, and I had no idea how to explain to her that my dog was simply pantomiming using the powder room.

“I appreciate your vigilance, really, but I think I’ve got it taken care of, all right? But I do thank you SO MUCH for your concern,” I said with a tight-lipped smile that conveyed something else entirely. I guess that settled it, because she ran off, muttering about bad dog owners.

A sympathetic dog owner tried to comfort me by saying, “Yeah, sometimes I try to make a big show of picking up my dog’s shit.”

“Gah! I shouldn’t have to!” I said.

Trying to change the subject, he said, “Well… it’s a beautiful day out.”

Before I could edit my response I blurted, “Really? Is it?” This poor guy. I barely even know him and now I was making him uncomfortable. I walked away and fumed for a good 20 minutes.

When my hairdresser told me about her eggs later that day, all I could think was, now why couldn’t I find the humor in my situation? I’d been working all week on a series of articles about how to be an optimist, and I was not following my own advice.

Determined to find the funny, I decided that I would try to tell my story to Ryan the next day.

“That would have pissed me off! You should have thrown the shit in her face,” he said.

And that made me laugh. I guess some of us just aren’t capable of being upbeat in the face of a, um, shitty situation.

Couples Therapy or Anal Sex

So I was recently asked to participate in this year’s NYC Lit Crawl, which is just as it sounds — a pub crawl where literary-type drunkards (and aren’t they all?) are supposed to drag ass bar to bar without getting lost, and then settle in quietly to listen to a bunch of us mumble our way through a reading. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, but it’s a success in San Fran and they’ve already done it here once, so who am I to judge?

I just know that back in the day when I still had it in me to schlep from bar to bar, drinking every step of the way, there was no way I would be orderly or respectful or anything short of loud, obnoxious and belligerent until I threw up on someone and was sent home. Actually, I haven’t vomited on anyone since college, thank you very much. I  moved on to much more ladylike pursuits such as flinging my bra across the room of an eating establishment or mooning an entire wedding party. It was the rehearsal dinner, so technically it doesn’t count. I like to think I helped them prepare for the worst. You just never know what’s going to happen on your wedding day.

Anyway, my editor at YourTango asked me to do the reading. This is the email she sent to cajole me: “I was hoping you could read from your couples therapy essay, or if you’re super brave, from your anal sex Q&A (which our readers love, by the way).”

Hmm… couples therapy or anal sex? How do I choose when they’re both so non-revealing and not in any way subject to judgment? And how revealing is it that I think it takes way more bravery to tell a roomful of strangers about your couples therapy experience than it does reading a gynecologist’s step-by-step description of how to have anal sex? Lewdness or feelings? Lewdness or feelings? I’d rather go with the lewdness, please.

The only problem, of course, is that reading a Q&A out loud is so very dullsville, even if it does have words like lube and anus in the same sentence. So I’ve agreed to read from the couples therapy piece, you know, for the sake of my audience. My drunken audience. And if I end up puking on any of them, I swear it will be from nerves, not the tequila.

Brazen Bridezilla Commits Crime of Passion

Don’t you hate it when the thing you really want to write about can’t be written about because of the people who read the things you write about? Alas, another time, in another life, at another more anonymous URL, perhaps you will hear my tale.

Then there’s the other story I’d like to share that I probably shouldn’t because it may or may not have involved some illegal activity on my part. And when you’re thinking about having your wedding at the place where the possibly illegal activity may or may not have occurred, you probably shouldn’t go flapping your gums about it. Suffice to say, had I been caught doing this questionable thing that, illegal or not, the owners probably wouldn’t have taken too kindly to, the headline would have read something to the effect of “Brazen Bridezilla Commits Crime of Passion.”

In my defense, I didn’t realize it was illegal at the time. And, if I may be so, well, brazen, they kind of gave me no other option. Besides, my mom was with me. So the fact that she went along with it means that she’s just as crazy as me, or it couldn’t have been all that bad.

Later, as I was trying to tell my dad about it, I stopped and said, “I know it sounds really bad when I try to describe it…” And he, shaking his head, said, “Yes, it does.” Then I said, “Yeah, but, it’s kind of like doing X, Y, and Z. That’s not illegal, is it?”

“Yes, Jill, that is illegal, too.”

Man. I looked at my mom who was trying to look contrite.  “Do you think this means I can’t wear white to my wedding?”

Wedding-Fueled Anxiety and Insomnia

About a month ago, Ryan proposed to me (I said yes). Things were wonderful until a week or two later when I started to do some preliminary wedding planning. I figured we’d just set a budget, choose a venue, set a date, and then put the whole thing on hold for awhile. No big deal, right? Well, as soon as I started looking into locations, I became overwhelmed by the cost, and so irritated that even if I suck it up and drop $20-$30k on five-hour event, venues still impose all these restrictive policies that make it impossible to find a single place where I’d like — and can afford — to get married.

I know what you’re thinking: uh-oh, bridezilla has reared her ugly head. But I am actually voting to elope. It’s Ryan who wants the big day. I’d prefer a $20k roof deck. So what has the result of all this been? I am in my third week of insomnia.  I have banned all mention of the W-word. But even that hasn’t helped. Because, as any of you who have experienced more than a few days of insomnia knows, the fear of not being able to sleep replaces the original anxiety that was keeping you awake in the first place. I have tried melatonin, wine, Benadryl, wine and Benadryl, wine and Benadryl and meditation, melatonin and meditation, and Xanax. The Benadryl is beginning to lose its efficacy (hence the wine chaser), and after a few days it gets me so amped up and aggro that I feel like I’m going to kill someone. I fantasize about killing someone. So no more Benadryl. I slept with the Xanax, but felt so stoned and detached the next day that I wished someone would kill me.

The thing is, I know I can sleep. I’ve been doing it every night for 35 years. I just need to break this ridiculous pattern and convince my brain to let go of the worry and dread that now accompanies bedtime. So yesterday I went to a cognitive behavioral therapist, hoping we can kick this anxiety thing to the curb. Of course, as I know, he tells me that these things can take months and suggested, in the meantime, a little Ambien. Hell, why not? As for the W-word, I consider it a huge step that I’m even writing about it here. Since I’ve got something else keeping me up at night, I figure what’s the harm? Bring it on. Next on my wedding to-do list: find a wedding planner who will do it all for me.

Why Women Still Do the Bulk of Housework

I caught Ryan spitting on the kitchen counter the other night as we were clearing the dishes. It was like one of those rare, never-before-caught-on-tape moments — male rituals in the wild. He then rubbed it into the counter with his napkin, assessed his work, and spit again. “WHAT are you doing?” I asked. “You’re spit-shining the counter?”

“It hasn’t been cleaned since I moved in here (which was in 2000),” he said, smiling. So proud.

“Um, correction. You haven’t cleaned it since you moved in here,” I said. “And that does not qualify as cleaning,” I said as I whipped out the Windex.

He began laughing.

“You are disgusting!” I shrieked. I wanted to be mortified, but I couldn’t stop laughing either. Secretly, I was impressed that he even considered the counter dirty enough to clean. In any other household, it might be considered de-evolution. But in my household, this was progress.