We had an enormous, highly entertaining, and successful open house this weekend. I discovered that not only do we know a hell of a lot more people than I thought we did, to the point where I was walking around introducing myself to my own guests: "Hi, I'm Sara. I live here. And what's your name?" but these people also know each other in some kind of cosmic game of connect the dots. Like, SMW never actually met B and N, but they are soon to be clients at her place of work, and that sort of thing.
It was easily the largest party we've ever had and really just wildly successful as a social gathering, but the problem is that several people very kindly brought us tasteful housewarming gifts that I did not label with black permanent marker immediately, and thus I have no earthly idea who they are from. So if you brought us a lovely silver picture frame or some bottles of wine from the local vineyard that we like so much, for God's sake stand up and identify yourself so I can thank you properly.
In other news: I am out of sorts again. I think it's the heat; today after our awful frustrating staff meeting--in the unairconditioned office in 100 degree weather--I was so desperate I just got in the car and drove north. Had no place to go, and had to turn around and go back in time for my afternoon clients, but I needed to move, needed the illusion of reaching for the cold. In times of stress I sometimes think, I'm just biding time till I head north, and I try not to think like that, but when I feel hemmed in by the heat and the endless summers down here I sometimes can't help it.
I've been dreaming of Lex again; vague, shapeless, menacing things that leave me dissatisfied. It must be the heat.
Tonight I saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding with EP from work; she because of Joey Fatone, and I because of the Greek part. I'm feeling a little...stunned, I guess. I've grown up feeling somewhat acultural--perils of a weird kid from a not-so-close family. It's a purely subjective feeling, obviously. I'm southern, I'm Catholic, I was a band kid, and so forth. I've had the option of belonging to plenty of cultures, and conscious rejection of those offered is a culture in and of itself. One does not need an enormous ethnic family in order to claim a background. But I had no idea how much of that movie I would recognize. I'm Greek on my father's side, but I'm not culturally Greek--my mom makes spanakopita, but I taught myself from a recipe in the Life and Arts section of the paper. I know about ouzo (that shit is nasty), and I have a vague recollection of dyed red eggs on Greek Easter, but I don't speak a word of the language and I don't like lamb all that much.
I look like everybody in that movie. My family looks like everybody in that movie. The cheekbones, the noses, the skin tones, the build--Toula is a dead ringer for my aunt K. The sign of the cross with three fingers to represent the Trinity, the doilies, the horrible shell lampshades, the old women in black, the dancing, the yelling, the Greek Orthodox services with their interminable standing and chanting, the eating, and the accent, my God, the accent. When the father spoke, I heard my great grandmother, my own Yiayia, saying of the Hubster-to-be, "He a smart boy? Get good job; not just take you to McDonald's."
I felt bruised at the end of the movie, because it was so familiar, and yet so not mine to claim. I'm a Greek pretender; a wannabe. I say, "Only the dead don't eat," and try to feed people, but I can't even spell "opa." It's like being homesick for a place you've never been, or a person you've never met. It's not my culture, but it could have been, and I feel cheated.
Last night I dreamed that I had sex with Anna Nicole Smith in a bathtub.
Why?! Why can't my subconscious give me Angelina Jolie or Vin Diesel like a normal person? I haven't had one erotic thought toward Ms. Smith in my whole life. (Well, I have now. And I'll never be clean...)
Okay, I think I'm over my little hissy fit of yesterday. Grudgingly, I concede that other people may have lives about which I am not informed.
"Gakking" a "meme" (I'm down with the lingo, I am):
Things I can't do (that lots of people can):
1. Wear fingernail polish without inducing a panic attack
2. Follow any type of sport with any interest
3. Watch sitcoms
Things I can do (that lots of people can't):
1. Run a marathon
2. Make spanakopita
3. Put your idea into words
Things I like (though my demographic group is supposed to hate them):
1. Highlander movies
2. Children's folk songs
3. Getting enough sleep
Things I hate (though my demographic group is supposed to like them)
1. Volleyball
2. Seinfeld 3. Ani DiFranco and fucking Dar Williams, like, white hot fire of a thousand burning suns aaaauuuugghhhh...
These things are available at regular stores, but I go out of my way to get the schmancy variety:
1. Port
2. Local organic tomatoes
3. Insoles for my running shoes
I'm the only one among my friends who likes these things:
1. Staying inside vs. going outdoors on the weekends
2. Shipwreck songs
3. Sour patch kids
Now hold on just a damn minute here. Francesca and Speranza are the same person?! Fuck! Why don't I ever know these things? And I didn't think I had a real strong opinion about the whole pseud/sock puppet issue, but it turns out I do. I think they suck!
Okay, am I really upset about this? Obviously, no. I've had only glancing interactions with, uh, either of them. I'm not buddy-buddy with anybody who knows them really well, and it's not like anybody has to send me a memo here. In retrospect, there were plenty of clues that I was ignoring. But, irrational though it may be, I still feel weirdly betrayed.
I met a fan! I met a fan! Aaaugh! I don't know if she wants to be identified for location purposes, but I met her! Wooo!
Okay, seriously? It was great. I have one or two fannish friends where the personal content of our emails is as high or higher than the fannish, and there's one blast from the RL past who recognized me on a Sentinel list, so she knows I'm a slasher, but I've never before met up with anyone with the express purpose of talking slash. It was so cool. I was crazy nervous driving downtown to meet her (Me: "I wonder if I should wear long pants. It's too hot for jeans. But what if she's wearing long pants? Am I sweating?"), and kind of freaky and tangential at first, but she was extremely sweet and laid back and wearing the same kind of shoes as I was, so eventually I calmed down, and ended up having a wonderful evening.
We saw The Fast Runner, which I had already seen, but had no problem seeing again. I enjoyed the movie very much the first time around, but I think I appreciated it a lot more the second time. Having a better idea of the story allowed me to notice how integral each individual scene was--there was no wasted time in those three hours. Plus, I could recognize the characters, which transformed a big chunk of the early scenes from, "Yep! That thar sure is a bunch o' Inuit!" to meaningful character development. After the movie we went and hung out in a local diner, where, I kid you not, our waiter looked exactly like Lex. Same bald head, same facial profile, same build, same walk with the chin up and the shoulders back, giving him that same sweet space between the shoulder blades...We over-tipped him extravagantly.
So that was Saturday.
Sunday was collapsing under the cumulative weight of seven or eight days of sleep deprivation and extreme bitchiness and going to bed at 7:15pm.
Today, in the "Wish I Wasn't Fucking Psychic" file:
I have this client BM who I've been seeing for a little over a year, although he's doing really well and I plan to discharge him soon. He's been accompanied to probably 80% of his sessions by his dad, AM. Dad is one of those people that you have to work pretty damn hard to form a rapport with: concerned, a little tense, a little self conscious, a lot reserved. He's also sweet-natured and polite with occasional flashes of goofy, self-effacing humor, and the times when he's shown respect for my clinical judgement or expressed personal wishes mean a lot to me. They've been out of town for the past week and a half or so, and during that time I dreamed about the family twice. Joked with the Hubster and JD that I should email AM, as I was getting a little worried. Decided not to, as he probably would have thought I was a freak and a half. I saw BM and AM this morning, and related the story with the dreams. AM gets this look on his face and says, "Well, it's strange that you mention that, because our younger child was diagnosed with cancer last winter and she just passed away."
She was little--maybe 18 months old. It's a terrible thing, and the family is so reserved. I worry about them.
You know that scene in The Wedding Singer where Adam Sandler's character is helping Drew Barrymore's Julia choose her own wedding singer, and in the course of it he ends up performing his original song for her? The song goes something like: (sad plinky guitar) I don't feel so great/my life isn't all that hot/because I am sad...SOMEBODY KILL ME/JUST PUT A BULLET IN MY HEAD/PLEASE KILL MEEEEEEE/OH GOD PLEASE LET ME DIE...
That's what work was like today.
So now it's a little after 4pm and my late kid cancelled, so I cut out about two hours early so I could come home and lie in my chair and drink beer. It's possibly the best idea I've had all week.
We spent the weekend in Las Vegas at another computer convention -- a considerably larger computer convention than the one in Milwaukee -- and I think I'm still a little jet-lagged. Or, that's how I've decided to explain my extreme pissiness the past couple of days. Vegas was...fun, I guess, but I'm in no hurry to get back there. They call it the City Without a Soul, and I agree. There were strikes against me, I'll be honest. I don't like to gamble. ("Just take twenty dollars and play off that!" people kept telling me. Okay, twenty dollars? Is forty cans of delicious, caffeine-filled coke I could have had). I don't like big cities or crowds or the night life, and I can only really drink for one day before I panic about hydration. So I knew going in that it wasn't going to be the Best Trip Ever. But Vegas...Vegas is fucking hot, and I say that as a child of the Deep South. It's like, you're thirsty all the time, but the tap water tastes like sulfur. Inside the casinos it's freezing, but outside your cheekbones sweat. There is no hotel porn, but hawkers hand you adult flyers at every street corner. There's liquor in the Walmart, but no vegetables anywhere. I'm not anxious to go back.
Good things about Vegas: We caught Tragically Hip in concert, and it was a fantastic show. I was falling-down tired and recognized maybe four songs in the entire show, as I have not yet worked my way up to their more current albums, and it was still one of the best concerts I've ever attended. An hour and a half straight of pure energy. Canadian energy at that.
I saw Signs there. Not everybody likes this movie -- xen, I'm sorry -- but it kicked me right in the gut. Not so much because of the Treatise on Faith, but because it picks up what I saw as the theme of M. Night ShhyeahIwishIcouldspellthat's previous films: what if all the stupid little pieces of my life made sense? What if there was, not necessarily a higher purpose, but at least a pattern? And what I particularly liked about Signs was that it didn't fall back on a superpower. Nobody's seeing ghosts, nobody's a modern day Achilles. The movie doesn't hinge on the kind of "rejected outsider whose special powers emerge as a result of his trials" cliche that Jessica speaks so strongly about. The pieces just fit.
Marathon training starts next weekend. I can't wait.
A couple of months ago Kat was saying something about the way she visualizes the calendar year. A cursory search didn't turn up the link, but as I recall she says she pictures the months in a 2D, linear fashion, where January is the start of the line and December is straight ahead at the far end, and this always causes her to need some mental readjustment come New Year's, because she has to jump back to the start of the line to January again. (Kat, I hope I'm getting this right). I remember the entry sparked a synapse somewhere--it had never occurred to me to wonder how other people conceptualized the passage of time. My own mental representation of the calendar is that of a flattened oval, the shape of a quarter mile track. The winter months stretch over one short end (here in the south we have short winters), spring runs down one longer side and rounds the curve into summer, and fall tracks on around the other long side to meet winter. Picturing the year by itself, I see the track from above (The Year 2002), but when I think of where I am along that loop it's like the camera zooms in and down until I'm running the track myself. August: bright and hot with the curve rushing away toward fall. September: warm, blue sky at the start of the long, mild fall stretch. December balances grey and wet on the top of the curve, and by January we're already picking up speed toward the straightaway.
I guess it's a little Zen to think of the year as a continuous loop. I don't know; it gets a little overwhelming sometimes. It's all too easy to imagine hitting the wall midway through the summer leg of the track, for instance, and spending the rest of my life in August. Like right now, when it's about 115 degrees at 5pm and I can't imagine running if my life depended on it. Marathon training starts again at the end of this month. I wish we'd turn the corner into fall a little faster.
