I simply cannot get over how different my days are without another person in the house. It’s almost like my mind is quieter. I remembered to take the DVDs back to the store. I return my ice packs to the freezer the second they go limp. I bought some lovely Bosc pears and arranged them in our normally stark fruit bowl. I had time to take all of the garbage to the curb’ even the stuff hanging out in the garage. I wrote last night, transcribing and editing the car salesman story from the handwritten stuff in my journal. I have exactly three days to get it done and revised and ready to hand in for workshopping. That’s a bit scary, right there. I’m still tempted to hand in the Baby Story and be a cheater.
I have never lived alone. I directly went from my mother’s house to a psycho bitch roommate to living in sin with Esteban. Wait, that’s not entirely true. For one semester at college, I had a private dorm room. By outward appearances, it was lovely’ a cool loft bed, a mauve rug with coordinating bedspread and beaded pillows, Chinese paper lanterns everywhere strung with white Christmas lights, a mahogany louvered room divider, a nice reading nook with an $8 Goodwill chair covered with a $39 Pier One throw, and black and white photography prints on the walls.
Looking back, it was actually one of the loneliest periods of my life.
I had just broken up with the hottie and most of my friends were living off campus. The girls I knew in the dorm thought I was an idiot for breaking up with the hot blonde who played guitar in their favorite cover band (whenever I read that phrase, my mind automatically continues it ‘Crystal ship’ they do a Doors show, you’d be really impressed, in fact, it goes a little like this&AO8AvwC9AO8AvwC9- The Dead Milkmen broke my brain.), so it was nothing but cold shoulder. My other group of friends had all pledged Phi Omega. I had declined the invitation (too busy with the student government thing and also dating two boys) in the fall and by spring, they were all completely absorbed in their own affairs. Likewise, I drove home most weekends to hang out with Esteban, therefore I had removed myself from an enormous part of college social life. Also, I took a meal plan that was not centered around the cafeteria, therefore there was no mealtime bonding over the mysterious Salisbury steak.
In essence, I had voluntarily cast myself in the role of commuter student who happened to sleep in a dorm four days of the week. And for the most part, I was ok with this arrangement. You would have thought that given my solitude, I would have been pulling A’s in all of my classes, but quite the opposite. I rarely went to classes. I had a horrible schedule that semester, full of classes that I couldn’t stand (hi, advanced algebra? You suck!). Ironically, I was kicking ass at my job on student government mostly because I didn’t want to go back to my miserable little concrete cell. I remember at least one week where I drove back to school and then did nothing all week but work my office hours and go to my meetings and drive around to the old cemeteries on the Wisconsin River and stare out at the wide expanses of water after which I then drove back home on Friday afternoon. In fact, at the end of the semester, when I panicked and went to my Chemistry professor and asked him for an incomplete, he told me that he’d never even seen me in class (not entirely the truth, but very shamefully close). I actually WAS attending Algebra classes, but despite my best efforts, it eluded my poor right brain and I kept getting D’s and F’s on the tests. In the end, I F-bombed everything but my English class, lost my all of my scholarships and free ride for poor performance, and moved back to Green Bay dejected and feeling like a complete failure.
And to this day, I don’t know exactly what happened. I mean, I can repeat the facts, the history, the dates, but I don’t understand why it went down that way. If you think it sounds unlike me, you’re right. It just doesn’t fit with my type A personality. I sort of think I was depressed, but I don’t really know why. Sometimes I think it was because I was left to my own devices and became this effervescent mushroom, a sort of weird Suzy Coed Jekyll and Hyde. I was still doing the dances, the fund raisers, the weekly RHA governance meetings, making posters and the like, and yet there was just this longing to get back to room 164 and sit in the semi-darkness and read anything but my textbooks. I still don’t know what to make of it all, but it makes me sad to think about it, to think of how much longer it took to get back into a good school because of that academic stumble, of how I now owe the government a luxury automobile (imported even!) because the scholarship people gave their money to someone more deserving, of how much of everything that was wasted by that stupid five months.
Stay in school, kids. Don’t be a dumbass like Weetabix. And also? If you’re all artsy fartsy, get a damn Algebra tutor instead of the expensive calculator. (I had to retake Advanced Algebra to graduate, so I got a tutor and suddenly had the magical click happen in my brain and got the second highest grade in the class. Not to mention graduated with honors and with a distinction in my major. Yay! Happy ending!)
So yeah, the alone thing. I’m still not sure what to make of it. When I tag along with Esteban on trips, or make my own solitary ventures out into the world, I am perfectly happy to wander around singularly exploring. I can eat in a restaurant by myself without being too upset (as long as I have a book). And these short bursts of Home Alone-isms’ it’s sort of refreshing in a way, like writing with your left hand. But all the time? I don’t know that I could handle it. I think it would creep under my skin. I think I’d get sad. I think I’d end up sitting in the dark, listening to The Cure’s ‘Disintegration’ and subsisting on just tea with equal until the tell-tale dark circles appeared under my eyes and I started to write really bad poetry with slant rhymes and images of pasty white girls in Victorian dresses..
I got a flu shot today at work and am pretty sure that I’m going to die from it (because what if I’m allergic to eggs? Wait, this sounds familiar. Oh yeah. It is.) and if I die alone, who will stop Tilly from eating the face off my still warm corpse? Sure, I’m getting incredible sleep in an empty bed right now, but there are giggle fits, no mini-blast furnace raising the temperature under the covers to 140 degrees. I’m the only one there to appease the cat and thus when I have nasty cramps, there will be seventeen pounds standing on the small of my back in the middle of the night, kneading it like bread dough.
Homer’s love interest Candy in John Irving’s The Cider House Rules said that she didn’t do well alone. I think that might be my problem too. I don’t do well by myself. I’m not afraid of it… I just think it’s like duck walking a long distance. Not pretty.
Ok, enough with the Happy Hour at the Estrogen Martini Bar shit. Esteban’s coming home tomorrow, so perhaps I’ll stop being such a head case.
One of my other weird solo home things: since Esteban isn’t in the bedroom trying to sleep when I wake up in the morning, it means that I can turn on the overhead light while I get ready, which is a real treat, because normally I get dressed in the dark (yes! It takes quite a talent to look as good as I do considering that little fact, non?) . And then two days ago, it occurred to me that I could also turn on the television as I got ready (one of my favorite things to do in hotel rooms) and watch music videos. And this morning? The Madonna and Britney song, where they’re sort of dancing but mean weird angry dancing like in the ‘Beat It’ video but also lesbo-yay. And then the simulating masturbation with the cane?
What is up with the cane, Madonna? Did you break your hip? Maybe you shouldn’t be doing the weird acrobatics around that empty bed frame (which were, um, not sexy). I really care about you, Madonna. You were the first concert I ever attended and you allowed me to say that I saw the Beastie Boyz before anyone even knew who they were. We have a history. We were both like a virgin (except, well, I was probably a little more like one than you were, but you know). And I totally understood the whole MTV music awards kiss. I mean, shee-it, Madonna, I EXPECT the unexpected with you. The tranny in the Justify My Love video with the long fingernails? Cutting edge. The burning crosses in Like a Prayer? Beautiful. Paddling the Chihuahua dog in ‘Human Nature’? You just have layers that go on forever. But this new video? First you’re at a club and then wandering around a condemned building with crazy lathe mazes and then a room that has trees with fallen leaves in it? And it makes you rub your cane on your can and then do some more dancing that is fighting and also somehow yoga? I think it might be time for an intervention, Madonna. I’m just saying.
Go talk to the boys from Outkast. Their ‘Hey Ya’ video has made me want to have their babies. And also involved a cane, but did not make me squeamish.
Appropo of nothing, when my leg wasn’t all wacked, I could totally do the Madonna Gap yoga pose, but not the Missy E split. I haven’t yet figured out what that means, but I have a feeling it means something.
You can use the following line to pencil in your own joke about having ones legs open:
I got an email confirmation from a reputable source that the Verizon Guy is batting for the other team. My Can Do boyfriend! This is almost worse than losing Starbucks Guy!
Pardon me, I must now go drop my cell phone in the river. Followed by a single red rose. And a single bitter tear that I was not born with a penis.
