A Post for Year's End

I'm a terrible blogger.

I was better at it, and enjoyed it more, back when I wrote without thinking about it. Now I think instead of writing; how annoying. Worst of all are these posts after a long absence, in which I feel irrationally obliged to write about everything. I try, run out of time halfway through, and then abandon the post to moulder in blog-limbo for all eternity.

I really ought to be working right now, but I can't make myself do it. I've been wearing other people's contact lenses for at least a year now. I never get enough sleep. The light in my office is dingy and yellow; it flickers or I imagine that it does. I've been late to work every day but one in the past month. I should be writing an English curriculum, but I can hardly form a coherent paragraph. None of these are real excuses for blogging instead of working, but that's all right.

---

Things are good; things are bad.

The bad: Aforementioned sleeplessness. Too much nightlife. Social anxiety disorder, as always. Unable to get my shit together. Money problems. Loser brother. No time to myself. No hobbies or friends. Boyfriend possibly bipolar. Boyfriend's computer died during final exams, so he's monopolizing mine. Choppy fucking sentences. Is this the exhaustion talking?

The good: Job marginally less boring. Good office-mate. The possibility of escaping via grad school. There's an English-language style and usage guide on my desk. Going to Hawaii for the holidays on M.'s mom's dime. M.'s finding some success throwing parties, but this also counts as bad. I'm watching movies again. I even made it to the theater to see No Country for Old Men. Physically healthy and fit. Following the U.S. Presidential race has provided me with constant entertainment.

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What a discomfiting experience going home has become. My real Thanksgiving bore little similarity to the one I imagined, but I still left San Diego feeling shell-shocked, and I took days just to feel normal again.

I think it used to bother me less because I went down there more often. Things changed more gradually. Now, it's as if everything is changing in snapshots taken a year apart. My mom has twice as many gray hairs as the last time I saw her; my dad's wrinkles are noticeably deeper. My childhood dog, well into her teens, seems exponentially more decrepit with every passing year - and she's been decrepit for a while. Each time I go back, the subdivisions encroaching on my parents' rural enclave have crept a quarter-mile closer.

The old friends who are left down there have changed. The married one bought a condominium with her husband and is talking about having children. Another one has become a fervent evangelical. Kat, the globetrotter whom I expected never to settle down, appears to have settled down in SD and bought a shiny, new downtown apartment. Moreover, after years of flitting noncommittally between men and rejecting relationships in favor of independence, she was thinking about starting a serious relationship. Namely, a serious relationship with my ex-boyfriend, C., whom I dated for five and a half years. I wished her well, and I can't say I was surprised, but I still think the whole situation is more than a little awkward.

Most upsetting, though, was my grandpa, whose mental faculties seem to be deteriorating in a step function. It's not Alzheimer's, and I don't think it's any standard dementia, but Thanksgiving dinner with him was painful. He's been close to deaf for as long as I can remember, but now he has trouble talking as well. My grandma thinks it was a small stroke: he looked frustrated trying to convert thoughts into speech. His sentences trailed off; he rarely formed a complete thought.

He was born in 1920. He's a very old man. Physically he's relatively healthy and active, but I could tell he was thinking about death when he said at the dinner table, "All I want is to see this family back together." He was talking about an old grudge between my grandma and my estranged uncle, Chris. The details are not really important, but they involve money, property, and above all, pride. Chris won't forgive my grandma; she won't forgive him. One result is that my grandpa hasn't seen two of his grandsons since the early nineties. I hear there's another one, a girl, whom none of us has ever seen.

My grandma and dad couldn't have been less understanding. "Why don't you ask Santa Claus? Maybe he can arrange that for you," said my grandma, and my dad snickered. My grandpa looked like he was going to cry. He repeated, "All I want is to see this family back together."

Later, when my dad lay slouched in front of the TV and my mom and grandma putzed about the kitchen, my grandpa moved seats and sat next to me. "I put you in charge," he said. "I can't do it myself. I don't hear so well, so I can't call them on the phone. They moved houses, so I can't drive up and find them. There's nothing I can do." It took him many minutes to get these thoughts out. He whispered, fully aware: "I can't hardly talk no more."

I'm in charge? Shall the social-anxiety poster child succeed as family peacemaker? It's a burden I don't really want, but maybe I'm best suited to it anyhow.

That night, I set to work on Google. There were too many people bearing my uncle's name, and even more with my cousins' names. The search seemed fruitless, so I tried finding the oldest of my uncle's kids on Facebook. Of the ten or so matches to my cousin's name, one was a freshman at my dad's alma mater in LA. It's probably him.

I imagined the message I'd send him - "I think you're my cousin" - and cringed. How should I approach this? "Your grandfather, whom you probably don't remember, wants your dad to make peace with his mother." Or, "Come see grandpa before he goes." Facebook is awkward enough without my using it for such a weighty errand.

I have a calculus final next week. Then, on Friday, I go to Hawaii. I'll think more about this when I get back.

Bracing Myself for Going Home

I'm going back home for Thanksgiving. I want to see my family, I guess, but anything over 48 hours in my old house verges on the nightmarish: sleeping in the old four-post bed where I used to have panic attacks and nightmares as an adolescent; breathing in the same musty room-smells; waking up to the blare of Michael Medved on the radio--more than two days of this is enough to convince me I'm crazy or depressed.

M. was supposed to come with me, this time--I've already been twice to visit his mom in Wisconsin, after all, and SD is a hell of a lot closer. But he's throwing party #597660 that Friday and probably would have found an excuse out of it anyway. Ordinarily I'd spend most of my time with my one friend from undergrad who got herself trapped in a hell-on-earth grad program down there, but she's (justifiably) taking the opportunity of vacation time to flee elsewhere.

It's kind of sad, but I have hardly any friends left in my hometown. My ex-boyfriend C. un-facebook-friended me, which strikes me as childish enough that I'm justified in ignoring him. My old friend Annika is now married to a douche who apparently guilt-trips her for daring to eat dessert, never mind that she's waifishly thin as is. And she's so thoroughly swallowed the idea of being an extension of her husband--ostentatiously, judgmentally--that I rarely enjoy her company anymore. A few others have become so evangelical that I don't think I could spend time with them without resorting to the sort of self-censorship I ordinarily reserve for conservative family members or young children: "Of course I don't share a bed with my boyfriend!" "Gosh, that movie was shi...I mean, bad."

Holiday schedule:

Wednesday: arrive, go to doctor's appointment, lie in bed thinking about human mortality

Thursday: sleep until 2pm, go to grandparents' house for standard turkey dinner, marvel at all the burned stuff, watch fox news, drive home, try unsuccessfully to call boyfriend, stare at ceiling until sleep comes

Friday: sleep until family wakes me, go to see the dead sea scrolls, listen to mom lecture me about religion, come back home, write depressive whiny blog post, try unsuccessfully to call boyfriend, call annika to make dinner plans, learn that annika needs to cook hubby a meal tonight, stuff self with leftover turkey instead, stare at ceiling feeling sorry for self until sleep comes

Saturday: sleep, stuff self with leftover turkey, get close to vomiting it out with flight anxiety, re-pack, fly home at night and slowly recover from brief episode of induced depression

That should cover it.

In the meantime I am watching movies, exciting to do after a long movie-drought. Recently I've seen Repulsion, Shadow of a Doubt, Dial M for Murder, Pan's Labyrinth, My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski, and Tim Burton's version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Apparently I have a very dark taste in film.

M. is swamped with yet another publication, yet he doesn't really let up with the manic party-planning. He takes meds for depression, but I'm beginning to suspect he's closer to bipolar spectrum or something similar. And he's once again unmedicated. That said, though, we're getting along well for the most part; three years and counting.

Inferno

My mom called this morning to tell me that the house may burn down today, and, sure enough, it may. Hell, the whole goddamn county appears to be up in flames.

"Is there anything you want me to take with us when we evacuate?" she asked.

I thought for a moment, then asked her to take my journals, a lifetime's worth stuffed in a cupboard next to the bed I'd slept in since the 6th grade. It's been many years since I've written in them, but I still hesitated for a second, feeling a pang of the adolescent fear that she might read them.

I remember having to evacuate when I was in 8th grade; we fled through unpaved back-roads and stayed at my grandparents' house. Went to school the next day unsure whether I had a house to come back to. It turned out that we did, but the flames had claimed a swath of our land near the top of the hill, singeing the tool shed, turning some of the neighbors' homes into so many piles of charcoal.

This time, I don't know where my parents will go: it seems my grandparents' house is in danger, too. They can't find my brother, but I suspect he's all right--probably in a different evacuation facility with his 16-year-old girlfriend.

Ah, SoCal, what a paradise!

Customer Service

One of the employees on the train actually pushed my boyfriend, for no discernible reason other than because he (M., that is) happened to be carrying a bicycle. Then, when M. asked him incredulously if he (the train employee, that is) was pushing him, the gentleman responded with a harder shove that almost threw him off-balance. And a muttered threat: "The next stop can be yours if you want it to be." Huh?

In all fairness, a train choked with drunk, screaming Giants fans is "hella" annoying, to borrow the local parlance. Especially when all you're trying to do is read the news or study some calculus after a long, boring day at work.

This weekend I'll be in the Sierras with my parents; Uncle Tomas, his wife, and my two little cousins; and my uncle David, his new partner, and the three-year old kid they just adopted. The last time I saw my uncle, in December, he was single and talking to me about how he doesn't want to have kids. He changed his mind awfully quick.

In the meantime, I have another party to go to tonight. Yawn.

Time-Fill

The longer I've lived away from this place, the more depressing it feels when I come back to it. There's something soporific about it; somehow I sleep twelve hours a night and still wake up tired. I lost my driver's license a few weeks ago at an "underground house" party, so I can't go anywhere, held prisoner just as I was seven long years ago. At least, I console myself, I should have time to work. I need to work. Goddamn it, why can't I work?

When I'm here my head fills with dark thoughts. There's too much silence and pitch-blackness here, not the busy whirrings and beepings and blarings of the city but silence, the kind of silence that is filled with the ghosts of one's own creation. As a lonely adolescent I imagined grinning skulls and rivers of blood; I thought I was going crazy. I wasn't really going crazy. My madness was only atmospheric, but atmosphere can prove a mighty oppressor.

My boyfriend won't even give me a call to help fill the silence. My first night back here I dreamed he left me for a willowy nymphet with long, straight, black hair, ageless, bathing with her sisters in the surf of some tropical beach. "I'm sorry," he said, "I love you, but life's too short," and walked out to meet her on the sand. I'm not a lucid dreamer, so I did not doubt it was all real, and felt so terribly sad. I woke up in a panic. How pathetic! I was probably whimpering in my sleep. Only a dream, it's true, but this place brings out my worst thoughts, and today I think he ought to die for not bothering to call me.

If I still lived here I would blog daily in order to stay sane and it would make a dismally boring blog.

My parents live in a world that is separate from my brother's, which is in turn separate from mine. I can be in this house with all my family and yet it is as though I am alone. My parents live in an anachronistic, Eisenhowerian world wherein a shot of brandy in the eggnog is too much, where the word "shit" is met with gasps and giggles, where Michelle Malkin is a genius, where ten o'clock is bedtime, where "secular" is a bad word, where Rummy did a heckuva job, where Reefer Madness speaks the truth about marijuana, and where my boyfriend and I share an apartment but surely not a bed--God forbid.

My brother, meanwhile, occupies a penumbral sphere that is like a nightmare within my nightmares. Instead of going to school he works the graveyard shift at a big retail store, making minimum wage. In the morning he comes home and sits in front of the computer, talking to invisible, underage Myspace girls with monikers like **LuVz2Kiss69**, listening to death metal and watching porn with the shades drawn. Then, when he has a night off, he goes to lame, red-cup parties with less-invisible, still-underage Myspace girls, and in order to work up the strength to talk to them he swills long island iced teas, doubtless mixed strong with Ketel One and its kin. Then he drives home, I imagine. And as I've said before, he's dangerously depressed. Fuck, wouldn't you be dangerously depressed? (I know all this, by the way, only because my brother was stupid enough to use the computer in my room without deleting the history, thereby enabling me to find his Myspace page: I am a nosy bitch.)

All of which is a long way of elaborating on my point that my family is so divided and unlike that being here is like being alone.

And yet it's somehow distracting. I can't work. I would work far better at home with all its pleasant distractions--the cats purring while kneading my stomach with their pink paws, my boyfriend spinning records and offering beer, the drunks cursing one another on the street below, my newlywed flatmates yammering in French while cooking dinner. That, I can work with. I can't wait to get back to that.

In the meantime, I am trying to write a painfully long, poorly conceived post in the hope of going to bed soon after its completion and thus avoiding all thought. Have I succeeded yet?

Not yet? Very well: more then.

At the underground house party where I lost my driver's license, I stood in a long line waiting for the bathroom. The guy standing next to me struck up a conversation with me, something about censorship in China. (I love this city.) But soon we were interrupted by Random Guy #2, who for some reason took an interest in my place of origin.

Random Guy #2 (pointing at me): You are from the Midwest.

Me: No.

RG#2: Europe.

Me: No.

RG#2: Manhattan.

Me: No.

RG#2: LA?

Me: No.

RG#2: Washington, DC?

Me: No.

RG#2: Bay area?

Me: No.

RG#2: Vegas?

Me: No...

RG#2: East coast?

Me: No...

RG#2: California.

Me: Yes.

RG#2: Fresno?

Me: No.

RG#2: Central Valley?

Me: No!

RG#2: Bakersfield?

Me: No!

RG#2: I give up.

Me: San Diego.

RG#2: That's basically LA.

Me: No, not really.

Random Guy #1: What a tool.

Later, downstairs, I was privileged enough to hear the following conversation between a couple of meatheads:

Meathead #1: So dude, she was, like, totally hot.

Meathead #2: Like, wow.

MH#1: I know, like, yeah.

MH#2: So, like, whaddidya do?

MH#1: Well, I was like, and she was like, her boobs were like...

MH#2: Fuck yeah.


Now have I succeeded? It's late; I think so.

Worry

My sense of dread is back. I had lunch with my advisor today, and he seemed worried that my letters of recommendation would be the death-knell of my application. Naturally, this made me even more anxious than I already was. The fat, murky question mark that hangs so drippingly over my future looks ever fatter and murkier.

I bought GRE study books yesterday. I opened one up last night and there in its introduction it recommended an absolute minimum of four weeks' worth of study. I'll have exactly ten days. My life, of course, is a sloppy amalgam of near-hits and near-misses (do "near-hit" and "near-miss" mean the same thing? Be damned, you English language), with a good dash of poor foresight thrown in, so by necessity there must be at least one extra confounding force. This time, its name is Sam.

Chris moved out last night, after a month and a half of escalating passive-aggression wars, and lo! Our instiutional alcoholism runs deep, for we have traded a sommelier for a goddamn bartender. Sam, our new roommate, is my boyfriend's good friend from his old high-school bartending days in the industrial Midwest. M. borrowed a car to meet Sam at the airport today, and immediately--in the early afternoon!--they hit the bars.

My worry is this: M. has poor impulse control. Sam, a bartender by trade, will persuade him easily to share his hours, drink heavily, and spin records late into the night. These activities will be particularly likely to occur over the next week--i.e., the zero hour--as Sam goes searching for jobs in bars and M. happily follows. As I am nervous of disposition, their reveling at late hours will mean sleep deprivation and more anxiety for me. Catastrophic exam results may follow.

In the longer term, I worry how this will affect my relationship with M., which is unbelievably healthy for the moment but which could credibly deteriorate under stress.

Even were I to get into the masters program, I live paycheck to paycheck and cannot even conceive of how I would pay for it. So I worry about money. Yes, I know: welcome to the human condition, Penitent.

Looking beyond myself for a moment, I worry too about my family in Southern California. My brother, it seems, is in a depression so severe that his physician warned my parents that he was a danger to himself and recommended that he be institutionalized for a week. He agreed, instead, to some kind of intensive outpatient treatment, but I worry.

My mother worries, but her solution is to pray. To pray very, very hard. I did not want to irk her on the phone and tell her that her prayer, with all its fervor, was far more to her benefit than to my brother's, but I did say: "Medication works. You need to get him to take medication."

Imagining myself in his place for a moment--which I suspect, at its core, to be a psychological world similar to mine, but ten shades darker--I see how group counseling could be oppressive in itself. How the dingy institutional settings, the self-awareness of dysfunction, the judgment read into a ring of strange faces, could depress someone mightily. On the other hand, I told my mother, I have seen what good psychopharmeceuticals have done for my boyfriend and for my friends.

My parents are being idiots, though. "I don't think he should go on medication," my mother said. "He's been drinking alcohol, and alcohol could react with the medication."

"Then get him on something that doesn't react with alcohol."

"I don't know about that. I also think he should be doing the counseling so he can get over his alcohol problem. You know, your grandmother's sister was an alcoholic and she killed herself, and I'm worried that he has her genes. And alcohol is a depressant, you know, so it is probably making him more depressed."

I hadn't known that about my grandmother's sister. My family doesn't talk about such things, at least not with "the kids." But I realized on the phone with my mother today that my parents' teetotaling is so fanatical that it's dangerous. It means they tread in ignorance. That my mother sincerely thinks my brother's occasional drinking is as much of a danger as his suicidal state of mind is plain crazy. Has it not occured to her that alcohol might be a way he copes with his unhappiness, not a cause of it? That it might be a way he copes with a social anxiety that's much worse than mine? That, independent of depression and drunk driving, alcohol need not be a problem? That a single great-aunt with alcoholism is probably a statistically insignificant predictor for addiction? And so on.

Then there's the news. Reading anything about Iraq makes me feel ill. I did not exist during Vietnam and I wonder how it compares. My advisor, who did exist during Vietnam, works at a conservative think tank and he thinks Iraq is worse, that this country has been torn apart even more by this war than in that earlier era, draft and burning monks and 4 dead in Ohio and all. I don't know if he's right, or if comparisons matter.

Well--time's a-wastin', and there's yet more worrying to be done.

A Call to Action

All right. That's it. The time has come to shake off the detritus of this latest useless year and give some form to this sorry life.

I remember when I was a teenager, 16 and shifty and dating A. in secret. My parents didn't know about A. at first, but nevertheless they were worried sick that I would fall, like the fragile daughters of lore, into the arms of some leather-clad bad boy and from then on all would be lost. My grades would plummet, I'd spend all my money on makeup, and soon I'd be out at the lot parties with the bad kids, doing wipits and making out with the football team. My mother bought a book called Reviving Ophelia which was all about the crisis of adolescent girls--eating disorders and depression and promiscuity and drug abuse and all that good stuff.

As it was, my mother misspent her money on that book. I dated A. for the rest of high school and far from threatening my good marks, he was doubtless a stabilizing force. My parents bought into the talk-show hysteria and they were wrong, at least about me. Not that anyone should find that surprising.

I've been reminded of this lately because these days, M. is the one who shoves me toward action. It's largely thanks to his persistent bullying that I have decided, at the last possible second, to apply to graduate school this winter.

"I can't do it this year," I protested. "My recommendations will be laughable. I don't have the prerequisites. They will throw my application in the garbage."

"Well, so what if you're not good enough?" He said. "You'll never be good enough. So apply now with all your flaws, or admit failure. I think you have a chance. I have never had the prerequisites for anything I applied to, and who cared? Do you want to be working in that office all your life?"

That did it. I won't admit failure, even if I fully expect it. And my job brings me no joy. So here I am, scrambling to arrange standardized testing dates and letters of recommendation, a "statement of purpose" and emergency meetings with my Hoover adviser.

M. is applying to a Ph.D. program now and the odds are stacked neatly on his side. The chair of the admissions commitee owes him both a good sum of money and a fat favor. And unlike most masters students, M. will be published in a big-name, peer-reviewed journal soon. In this case, envy is no sin: it is a call to action.

By the way, and this is wholly unrelated, my French housemate just made a vat of thyme-infused ice cream for her husband's birthday and I hereby declare it dangerously delicious.