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A bed person is someone who wants to recline at all times. When lying down is not an option, we will find a way to remain seated, preferably at an angle, and if we have to stand you will never not find us in a deep lean.
I read that actress Rachel Bloom uses a caddy to hold her laptop so she can work from the bath. I salute these trailblazers.
What it comes down to is this. I am simply a person of comfort and excess. As my dear friend Kulap says, “You refuse to apologize for living a celebratory life.”
However, five years ago, when Barbara sent me a friend request on Facebook, I hit ignore so hard I almost broke my hand.
I’ve tried many times to describe what I heard that night, but it really was more of a soundscape. It was Gremlin-esque mixed with a haunted howl mixed with the groans of exhaust from an old truck on its last legs? Nothing quite captures it.
The kind of girl who doesn’t immediately chime in after you say something to provide commiseration or fill the silence. Cool girls tend to not lift a finger when it comes to social lubrication. It’s as if because they’re so comfortable with themselves they don’t recognize the feeling of discomfort and therefore lack the natural instinct to put others at ease. A trait I deplore.
Her admission made me so happy. Cool people have anxiety! I don’t! I’m just a depressive! I win!
Cool girls aren’t easily ruffled by unsolicited, off-the-wall personal revelations. Because they don’t really care. And that’s what’s at the heart of my anger toward these mythical unicorns. It’s as if they equate caring with weakness. And I do care. I care deeply if someone feels upset or embarrassed or left out. I not only care, I take on their emotions in what some would describe as a codependent form of trauma bonding. With friends and strangers alike! And this girl couldn’t be bothered to throw me even a “Mmm hmm.”
We are wary and often resentful when they introduce younger blood and try to get us on board with a gal in her late thirties or early forties. Those young upstarts can GET THE FUCK OUT, WITH THEIR ZERO EXPERIENCE OF THROWING A WINEGLASS IN SOMEONE’S FACE DURING A WINTER WHITE PARTY AND NO PRECEDENT OF PUSHING A FRIEND’S SEVENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD HUSBAND ONTO THE BAHA SHELF OF A BEVERLY HILLS POOL, ALMOST PARALYZING HIM FOR LIFE!!
I will no longer feel shame over a pleasure I don’t feel to be a guilty one! Life is hard.
I paid no attention to my mom’s childrearing techniques from her dog-eared copy of Raising Your Spirited Child. I was too busy screaming at the fellow nine-year-olds in our neighborhood who hadn’t learned their lines for my backyard production of Cats: The Sequel (rights pending).
But as I’ve gotten older, I can see now that anger was actually just the tip of the iceberg. It was often masking sadness. The sadness of publicly failing at my dream job. The sadness of cheating on a loving college boyfriend because I didn’t know how to extricate myself. The sadness of my mom dying so young. The sadness of how far we haven’t come.
Anger demands you DO and sadness requires you be. For all my inherited comfort with anger, I find sitting in sadness to be excruciating. Anger is so much easier! It’s a quick release and it feels good in the moment, but it can really hurt people, which also hurts me. But if I can manage to sit in the uncomfortable feelings that lie beneath, even for a millisecond, I am offered a tiny gift. The gift of a pause. And in that pause a crack of light comes in and I’m able to see things a little more clearly.
I thought of my mom’s legacy. Of my own. And how, hopefully, as generations pass, the way in which we process trauma transmutes and the defeat of the grandmother becomes the anger of the mother becomes the sadness of the son. And so on. Maybe that’s progress.
I repeated what a cognitive behavioral therapist once told me to repeat in difficult situations: “This is the moment I find myself in.”
My therapist said I should spend some time thinking about why I feel these posts are aimed at me. But I probably won’t. Because THEY KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING.
I do have what feels like hundreds of memories of pounding metal tent stakes into the cold ground while the sun was setting and my dad was asking if we had seen my mom, who had wandered off moodily the moment we arrived and hadn’t been heard from since.
I connected to this thirsty and wildly over-the-top positive disaster of a human who said things like, “Uh, yeah. I did take a whore’s bath last night. I had a one-night stand and didn’t have time to shower. So did I rub some dryer sheets on my pits and splash some water on my hush in the bathroom of an Au Bon Pain? Yes, I did.”
Max Blum was a gay character who defied all stereotypes. He was a sloppy mess, lazy as hell, and as unkempt as could be. He was incredibly whiny, very nasty, hilarious and dry and mean and needy but ultimately a sweetheart and everything you hope to see in one character.
The character of Max touched a lot of people because his sexuality was nowhere near the focus of who he was. He was proud to be gay, but was also just as insane and selfish and rude as the rest of the characters.
Toward the end of that two weeks I sent him a text that said, “I WISH HAPPY ENDINGS HAD BEEN ON NETFLIX AND FOUND THE AUDIENCE SCHITT’S CREEK DID.” To which he responded, “ANNNNND SHE’S BACK! I AM AT PEACE KNOWING YOU ARE FULLY JEALOUS AND RECOVERED.”
In the episode where Penny finds out she can speak Italian when she’s drunk, we drank so much orange juice as mimosas and Elisha ate so many racks of ribs we threw up for the rest of the day. Elisha was game for anything.
You have either seen Happy Endings and love it beyond measure (the fan base is equally rabid and furious it was canceled), or . . . you’ve simply never heard of. (PLUG: it’s on Hulu.)
If we get divorced, make no mistake, there will be no “conscious uncoupling.” There will be zero attempts to abide by this bizarre and insane trend of staying dear friends with your ex and vacationing together with your kids and your ex’s new, younger girlfriend. NO THANK YA!!!!
ANYTHING THAT GOES wrong is my fault, and anything that goes right (quite a bit, actually) is in spite of me.
In the car after one such afternoon I ask him what he wants to be when he grows up and he replies: “A stranger. A stranger who sits alone in a movie theater eating popcorn and no one talks to them.” Huh. Now, obviously this is my dream career as well, but for a two-year-old it implies something is off.
However, when my mom found an empty bottle of white zin in my closet, I had no choice but to blame it on Bill. She didn’t believe me, though, because she had found alongside it ANOTHER pack of photos of us drinking it. My mom said at that point what bothered her more than the alcohol was that I was dumb.
“How will Santa get in?” my Jewish son asked.
I attempted to build a janky, cheap panic room in the crawl space in my older son’s room, but after a certain point, the contractor stopped writing me back (probably after I asked if it could also look “cute”).
He will follow up these conversations with a grim text: “THE MOST THAT HAPPENS IS OUR BODIES DECOMPOSE AND BECOME NUTRIENTS FOR THE SOIL. LOVE YA!”
My mom will never know about the time at age three when Henry Bear looked around one night and said to me, quite casually but with pointed disdain, “This house is a fuuuuckin’ mess.” He wasn’t wrong.
When replying to an email or a text, we know NEVER to use only these four letters: “OKAY” I find a period at the end of “OKAY.” to be even more shattering. Others tell me to take small comfort in the period, but either version is a DEVASTATING response. And when I get a “K”???? A lone “K??” I’m done for the day. I pack it up. You might as well be saying: “I TRULY DESPISE YOU AND WISH YOU EVERY ILL AVAILABLE TO US AS HUMANS. IN FACT, I HOPE YOU END UP RIDDLED TIP TO TUSH WITH AILMENTS SO GRIM, THE NEXT TIME WE COMMUNICATE I’LL FEEL TOO BAD FOR YOU TO EVEN GIVE YOU AN ‘OKAY’ BUT THAT’S ONLY
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Don’t say to a fellow housewife: “Your titties are social distancing, bitch” (Porsha Williams). Actually, PLEASE DO, this is a delightful slam.
Don’t offer anyone with chronic pain or a critical illness any treatment suggestions based on something you “read.” Assume and have respect for the fact they are doing all they can.
Similarly, I’m over this well-meant but rather insufferable demand that we all practice mindfulness all the time. In these times?? In 2020? You want me to be present for this?? No thanks! I will be practicing mindlessness, please and thank you. Let’s all make a pact to live our worst lives.
And here I thought this routine had the same kind of lovable quirkiness as Zooey Deschanel’s bangs and glasses. Turns out, in both cases, people were over it.
