Pre-opera

Tonight I'll be putting on a black dress and going out with my mother and grandfather to eat dinner and see The Flying Dutchman. I'll even enjoy a margarita out of plastic stemware during the intermission.

Yesterday, Gavin and I went to the library to pick up my books for class, and arrived just in time for Toddler Storytime. I felt like such a proper parent. Afterwards, I spent most of my day reading Name Me Nobody, which was a very nostalgic trip back to high school in Hawaii - if my high school days had involved shoplifting diet pills. My assignment was to evaluate the figurative language in the book, but a more bluntly written piece of fiction you couldn't ask for. Somehow I'll have to write a paper on the couple of metaphors in the text. Or maybe I'll be talking about the lack of figurative language. Bluntly.

This last stage of my weight loss journey is taking an incredible amount of force and willpower. My metabolism has thrown up its arms and given up. I will try to keep going. Fraction of a pound by bloody fraction of a pound, if needs be. Sometimes I wonder when a hobby becomes an eating disorder, but I don't think I'm quite there yet.

But I'm lonely. I miss Mike, and I'm sad that we can't find the time to go out to dinner for our anniversary.

Working girl

 
Yesterday I spent my first whole day working in the library. I opened up, checked in books, put the newspaper on their wooden rods, made hundreds of xeroxes, and talked with my very funny friend/boss over lunch. I showed her pictures of Mike and she said, "That's that cute guy from the movie theater!" Small island, huh?

 
By the end of the day, my boobs were painfully backed up. Gavin hurled himself at me as I came in the door, and I dropped to my knees and caught him. I think I'm in store for a lot of world's-best hugs throughout the years. He had a hard time nursing off all the milk, but slept like a rock through the night with a full belly. I frowned at the scale in the morning when it told me I had gained back one of the 2 pounds I had lost this week, but one look at my breasts told me where it was. I twirled around to admire myself in the mirror with comic book boobs, then hopped into the shower. As I was shampooing, I spotted a clumsy B-52 cockroach stumbling along the top of the shower nozzle. He dangled by one foot, trying to reach a bead of water, and I had just enough time to say, "Hey, stupid, use two legs!" before he fell on me. He survived my shrieks and flurry of limbs, and in the end I dropped a hair ribbon into the tub where he was paddling and pulled him to safety. He sat on the edge of the tub licking his legs clean until I flicked him in the butt and told him to get lost. Stupid roach. The cats are much better pets.

cutting distractions

I need to get my shit together. I deleted a few e-mails and stopped logging into IM, and now I can breathe again. With regret, maybe, but I have other things going on that need my attention for now.

Mike gets to be the haggis bearer. This is a warm, reekin honor, and I feel proud. He'll dance his highland, drink his scotch, and deliver the chieftain of the pudding race to the hungry Scots. That's good for him.

$100 for a textbook. Yes. $100 for an object to thump myself in the head with for the next semester. 

I'll survive.

I've got to admit...

... it's getting better.

A fruitless trip to the mall. I tugged on a fitted leather jacket in the Harley Davidson store and admired it while Gavin kissed his reflection in the mirror. We didn't accomplish much today, but I did my good deed when I discovered that the clerk at 7-11 had given me too much change and I went back in to return it.

Mike spent the afternoon with his band, but came home to get his work uniform. He dropped off a copy of Napoleon Dynamite, so I guess we'll get to see what all the fuss is about. I thought about Brooke as I examined the character on the cover.

School starts tomorrow. I don't actually have class until Tuesday, but perhaps I'll be going to the library, where I can chat with the philosophy undergrad I work with.

I can't see what's wrong with me...

I found my Heavy mix, the tape I listen to in the car when nobody is with me because it would be too much like them watching me drive naked. I'm not even that much of a music fan, but this mix of Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, and Janis Joplin can shine me up until I become a smooth blur.

I arrived at the library this way, and then went into my work trance. There wasn't a bad thought in my head, nothing outside of the job at hand and the people around me, until I clocked out and walked into the evening several hours later.

Ok, fine, I'm hurt. I'm mad and isolated and unable to summon up any kind of sympathy. Mike has no words to offer me. I don't know what I want him to say, but his tight lipped shrugging and helpless "I love you?" only make me more angry. I don't know what to do but ride this out alone, feeling like a sulky teenager - me against the world - pathetic and ridiculous and inconsolable. I need to take myself by the shoulders and shake it off, because this can't go on.

The work begins

My first day in the library. I enjoyed several hours of training, learning how to retrieve media for patrons and how to shelf things back again. I enjoyed the low stress and easy pace of the work, allowing my mind to wander.

It wandered to last night, when my mother and I drove into town to pick up a man we had never met, the husband of an online friend of mine in Seattle. The fellow was definitely one of Our People, and we enjoyed a fun evening at Walmart (he needed stuff, I'm not that bad of a host). It was a shame to see him go, but someday he and his wife may return together to tear up the town with me.

My mind wandered to this morning, to the mostly-positive pregnancy test which thoroughly shook me, to the onset of my period, which ended it all. I can't say exactly how I feel about it at this point, but I'm ranging between tears of grief and sighs of relief.

But I filled out forms, read up on policy, took a tour of the building, and only thought about my knee when I bent down low to shelf a book. I ran to the car, just in time to join Mike on his trip to the dentist. Gavin was asleep, but his lip was swollen and cut where he had fallen on cobblestones at the mall. I fed him ice cream as Mike got the bad news about his broken tooth, and we drove home, quiet and ambivalent about the day.

And I don't feel like eating, and I wish I could be alone, one of the rare moments I wouldn't mind curling up on the floor with big headphones on and rage away quietly. But I'm hopeful, and tomorrow will be ok.