Nothing like wearing your Oscar shirt to a fancy Mexican restaurant.
people
She Said “If”
Elise and I have been dating since Valentine’s Day, 2002 with no interruption. We are so evenly matched in every aspect from pastimes to taste in movies to scholastic aptitude – that it’s hard to believe that we were meant to wind up with anyone but each other.
Our relationship has been full of many stories, but today’s is actually about an earlier encounter. Our first, actually.
Half a year before we started dating, on Elise’s first or second day of college, the theatre produced two brief shows to introduce the program to incoming freshman. Elise, having performed and produced theatre in high school, attended with her roommate Kat.
I was in both shows, starring – however improbably – as the romantic lead in each. They were my last time acting onstage in college.
In one show I was moody and dark, but in the other show (a farce) my character was essentially me – effervescent, flamboyant, and terrible with women. Elise might have first seen me on stage, but the character she saw was me.
At some point in the evening – maybe during the show, or maybe after, I’ve never gotten it right when i tell this story – Elise leaned over to a friend and whispered, “If he’s not gay, I’ll marry him.”
A lot has ensued in the five years since that sentence but, so far as I know, it’s still true.
(For the record, I believe my first comment may have been, “I don’t know who’s cuter, her or her roommate,” which leads to other, even more amusing stories.)
It’s hard to believe that our relationship has now stretched to envelop the entirety of Elise’s collegiate career, and my entire professional life, and has followed us into our first (rented) house as adults, but that’s how time works.
Bleary-but-Wide Eyed
It is in the general vicinity of freezing outside, and the incursion of said temperature into our house is the only thing keeping me awake and alert at the moment. And, in my least wakeful state the only two things i can really manage are playing guitar and blogging, and it’s way too cold to play guitar.
Elise went off to have breakfast at Ikea and shopping in other heated buildings, leaving me to suffer alone from my refusal to turn on the heat before Thanksgiving. Because, underneath this 25-yr-old wrapper i am clearly a stingy old lady living from pension check to pension check.
I want to start winging my way around the NaBloPoMo sites in order to try to catch a little of every writer, but Eden over at Fussy is not done updating the big list of urls (at least, i don’t think she is, because i’m not on it yet, which is OKAY), and the OCD Godzilla inside me says that’d if i start surfing now i’d just have to start over later when the rest of the participants were added. I’ll do whatever you say, OCD Godzilla, just please don’t step on my cold little house or make me talk in overdubbed English.
In the meantime, NaBloPoMoer Lane has created a NaBloPoMo randomizer that will satisfy your endless curiosity about what people would write about every day anyhow.
When i first followed that link i thought, hmm, Lane, that couldn’t be the Lane who i used to read on Trianide, who i loved because she had a webcam but wasn’t a whore, who took amazing photos, and who loved Fiona Apple, could it? This Lane is living in a completely different hemisphere. Surely not the same Lane. Well, from a quick glance at Trianide it turns out it that it is the same Lane! NaBloPoMo: Bringing people together.
Does it count as using the heat if i go downstairs and turn on the oven to cook something but then huddle in front of it to absorb its warmth? It seems like a suitably in-character thing to do if i’m going to keep acting like a batty, frugal, old lady with OCD. And possibly dementia.
Richard
My headache began a few days ago as a pair of too-wide yawns. The first flexed the right side of my jaw a little too far, and with the second there was a slightly audible crackle of bones being uncooperative. “Stop trying to unhinge your Jaw,” Elise said, “you don’t have to eat those rabbits all in one piece.”
Yes, my girlfriend is amusing.
The ache persisted for a few days, and by last night it was on the move – the pain slithered in to my mouth, up to my temple, and down the side of my neck. The ache became the headache, which in turn became one of the top three worst headaches of my life. (Another is here).
The headache is so persistent and distinct that I feel as though it is some separate entity – a symbiote – inflicting its will on me. It is like Spidey’s black suit, attached to me at the jaw, trying to envelop my entire head so that it can control my brain.
For sanity’s sake, I have named it. Meet my headache, Richard. You can call it Rick for short.
This is an important distinction for me: I am not my pain, and visa versa. I refuse to walk into work defined by a headache, or anything else, for that matter. On the outside I am committed to being my same vivid self, no matter the interior conditions.
(I would compare this to stepping onto the stage, but that analogy has the negative connotation attached to it from the time I tried to sublimate my 103 fever for a dress rehearsal but wound up with Bronchitis and Pneumonia. Because, you see, a fever is not just a symptom, it’s a condition, and you are your conditions.)
I’ve been surrounded by lots of headache sufferers in my life – a certain ex convinced it could be a brain tumor, and two former bosses whose headaches increased sensitivity to light and destroyed appetites.
My thinking on the matter is that pain is just a perception – just another sense. And, in the same way you can tune out a droning noise or adapt to a familiar smell, you can work your perception around pain. Certainly, some pain is of a source and magnitude much too high to ignore; after all, you can’t exactly tune out a jackhammer.
Richard will not be reaching jackhammer significance in my life. Because, unless some part of my is cracked or broken or abcessed, Rick is just an illusion of my perception. I can tune out Richard just like screening a call. He could just be an itch, or a tickle, or a gnat.
Richard has no magnitude because, there is no Richard. He’s just a yawn that got too wide. As easily as he interrupted my sleep and made me late for work he is banished back into the ether from whence he came.
Buckled Up
Though we are ostensibly in preparation for a trip a third of the way across the country, our major concern today was synching up our respective twin black iPods to our respective computers. I’ve just now finished getting all my 10,984 songs and hundreds of playlists set up how i want them, thirteen hours after i began.
Flying on airplanes inevitably makes me think of seatbelt buckle belts. I covet them, but they don’t really go with my personal style. I wonder if you could trick the attendants into thinking you were strapped in if you wore the airplane-style one?
I don’t know that our St. Louis excursion will be interesting on the same level as my similar trip to California, but expect a few dispatches between now and our return to Philly on Sunday evening.