Lawyerish

Soapbox Derby

You know how sometimes Tyra Banks tells a contest on "America's Next Top Model" that she's "restin' on pretty"?  By which Tyra means, of course, that the girl is just sitting there dead-eyed in front of the camera on every photo shoot, but mostly she's gotten away with it because she's naturally drop-dead gorgeous?  Well, for the past several months, I was in a prolonged non-running, non-exercising-whatsoever period, during which, it's safe to say, I was restin' on skinny.  By which I mean that I was sitting on my kiester eating lots of brownies and letting my gangly Scandinavian genes do their thang.  And, remarkably, it mostly worked, and the scale didn't budge and my clothes still fit, and I've eased my way back into running without much fanfare or negative effects.  But that doesn't make it right.   

(Please note, I'm not by any means claiming to be drop-dead gorgeous -- HAHAHAHA, no -- or paper-thin, and I recognize that a woman referring to herself as "skinny" or possibly even as "thin" is a treacherous thing indeed, which kind of gets into my point here, so stay with me.)

The problem with restin' on skinny is that it simply isn't healthy.  I felt like donkey butt when I wasn't exercising -- physically and mentally fatigued, sluggish, foggy.  I didn't feel great about myself, either, regardless of the fact that I could still button my pants.  I felt flabby and bloated and just...blrgh.  But I couldn't talk about it, because most people (outside of Hollywood/the modeling industry) would consider me to be on the thin side, and therefore I have no standing to talk about wanting to work on my body or improve my diet, lest I be accused of having a raging eating disorder.      

A year ago, I wrote about the wacky eating habits of girls I've known at different times in my life, and I've alluded a few times before to my rice cake-eating days from when I was a dancer.  Well, in addition to that, last week Jonniker wrote a very smart piece about the tension between society's confused attitudes toward weight and women's bodies (i.e., don't get fat! but don't get skinny! don't eat too much, but don't be anorexic!) and how we often ignore the undeniable truism that eating less and exercising more are good for you, whatever your shape or size or goals.  I don't have much coherent to say beyond her point except, "Well...YEAH" (but I'm going to blather on for a while anyway).

These various ideas are connected in all sorts of ways that I hope are clear (because when I reread the beginning of this post, I have no idea what restin' on skinny has to do with anything, but there it is and I don't feel like revising this now), but my general sentiment on this whole topic is that (1) we women have got to find a way to move toward a happy medium with regard to our bodies, that medium being a place of liking ourselves enough to neither starve nor stuff ourselves; and (2) if we can reach that place, we can all MOVE ON and think and talk about other things, more important things, and we can, I believe, foment powerful change -- how about working toward universal health care, better child care options, lower carbon emissions, and a general ban on the Pussycat Dolls for a start?   

I really do think that all of this crap we're thrown by the media from the moment we're born -- all the images of perfection that are meant to make us feel imperfect so that we'll buy the things that promise to get us closer to the ideal that isn't even real in the first place -- is part of a general effort to keep women down.  (Yeah, The Man keepin' us down, yo.)  I'm not a conspiracy theorist in general, but I don't know how to look at it any other way. 

Sure, I am enough of a girl to enjoy beauty tricks and tips and fashion ideas to some degree (especially on the Internets, because around here I can turn to bloggers I like and admire for recommendations and tips that are well-written and smart, and I don't have to wade through piles of ads to get to them), but you know what?  We don't need to spend THAT much time (or money, cripes) figuring out how to look pretty.  You figure out what works for you and you run with it, and maybe tweak it every once in a while.  That is, if all we do is page through women's magazines, we might look cute but we're not going to advance any great causes or discover a cure for cancer anytime soon.  And yes, I'm overstating the case, but the reality isn't far off.

(I also don't mean to sound like a total killjoy and I'm sure you're all yelling "HYPOCRITE!" right about now since, as reflected in the general content around here, I enjoy pop culture to an extreme degree and I've been known to write about clothes and products.  And yeah.  That's right.  I'm a hypocrite, etc.  And certainly my choice to spend time watching "The Bachelor" is to the detriment of my own lofty ambitions of writing the Great American Novel and building a school in Vietnam and inventing the one thing that everyone needs but they don't know it yet so I can make a bajillion dollars on QVC -- but, you know, after all those years of overachieving through high school and college and in ballet, I am TIRED, and I want to watch some reality TV.  Thank you.  I'll save the world in a minute; for now, I'm just going to recommend ways for someone ELSE to do it.)

Perhaps more importantly, at least on an individual level, we control what images and messages we see and which of those affect us.  We don't have to buy fashion magazines; we don't have to compare ourselves to Nicole Richie.  Yes, the images are all over the place.  But they're not EVERYwhere.  They're not in the trees or the sky or the New Yorker or at the Met.  And we're less likely to be susceptible to them if we're taking the best possible care of ourselves -- if we're eating well (healthily, everything in moderation) and exercising (not obsessively, but enough to break a good sweat a few times a week), we're more likely to FEEL great about ourselves, no matter what our size. 

We can contribute to that feeling of goodwill by filling ourselves up in other ways -- volunteering or joining a professional organization or calling Mom or playing a game of Scrabble.  If we fill our lives up with things we love, especially things that connect us to other people and to a greater purpose, we won't hunger so much for a life -- or a body -- that isn't our own.    

Insomnia

Last night I laid awake for hours.  It was the usual thing, me convincing myself that someone would throw open the door at any moment and open fire on my husband and me.  The bedroom door rattled with the wind and I huddled, sweating, under our hefty down comforter, sick with fear.  As I've said many times before, I've been having these restless, fright-filled nights for decades, not every night but often enough that it's not that notable.  And it's always been the same fear -- the burglar, the gun, the violent death.  I'll probably never know why my anxieties manifest themselves in this way -- is it a premonition of how I'll die?  Is it a reverberation from some past life (or death, really)?  Is it because I used to watch "Murder, She Wrote" with my mom sometimes? 

This time, of course, there was an easily discernible cause for my panic.  Monday was a reminder that, even when we feel the safest, our security, and our very lives, can be shattered in an instant.  I have absolutely nothing original to add to what the rest of the world has said in the past couple of days, but I feel like I have to say something.  In fact, I wish I could *do* something.  If I'd become a mental health professional as I intended to when I left home for college, I could go down to the campus and provide free counseling to anyone who needed it.  If I were involved with a church, I could get a group together to drive to Virginia and minister to the wounded and the bereaved.  Instead, as a lawyer, I'm a useless corporate drone with nothing to offer except my thoughts and prayers.  It doesn't seem like enough.

Well, there is something I can do, although I am sure it will come to nothing:  I can loudly advocate for gun control laws.  Better yet, I can urge Congress to repeal the Second Amendment.  I absolutely believe that no one in this country needs to own a gun outside of law enforcement and the military.  No one.  The right to life should trump any antiquated notion that we, as private citizens, may need to defend our country on a moment's notice.  Which, of course, we never will.  And to counter a couple more stock pro-gun arguments, we don't need people hunting (it's not like we have to shoot our food to survive), and we don't need people defending their property rights with bullets.  We simply don't need guns in the hands of anyone who wants them.  Or anyone at all, period. 

At bare minimum, since this country would probably overthrow any administration that dared interfere with its perceived God-given right to bear arms (grf), we have to do better with gun control.  Asking to see a few forms of ID and doing a basic criminal background check isn't enough of a hurdle to people who (legally) buy guns -- to say nothing of the scores of guns that are illegally bought and sold.  How exactly does a criminal background check assure that the guns being purchased won't be used for criminal purposes?  And why must we allow not just access to any old guns, but access to handguns and semiautomatic weapons?  You don't need a Glock or an Uzi to shoot a deer, after all. 

It just doesn't make sense to me, that we make it so easy to purchase something whose sole purpose is to take away life (and yet a large segment of society wants to make it more difficult for women to get abortions -- funny, that). 

I could go on for days, but I realize this isn't the most cogent discourse on gun control and there's so much more to say about the whole thing, so I'll just shut up now.  I should probably just stick to writing about "The Bachelor" and people who annoy me on the subway and leave the social commentary to people who do a better job of it.  But I do intend to take some action, or at least write some strongly worded letters.  Take it up with my Congressman and anyone else who will listen.  Maybe making my voice heard will help me sleep at night.        

Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?

Nothing good has ever followed the phrase "we need to talk."  So many bad conversations in my life have started that way, in fact, that when someone utters those four awful words in a movie or at another table in a restaurant, my stomach starts to clench up, my breath quickening as the bile rises in my throat.  An ex of mine, who made something of a hobby of periodically breaking up with me with no prior warning, used this as the opening salvo every time.  For reasons that remain mysterious to me, we usually ended up getting back together; but even after pasting things back into some semblance of a relationship, the words "we need" would send me into a catatonic stupor as I steeled myself for the wash of pain, the hollowness of being unwanted, even if what followed was "more cat litter" or "to take a weekend trip to Rome." 

Years before its use in breakup-speak, "we need to talk" was the way my parents would broach difficult subjects, ones that made me want to stuff my ears with cotton and scrub out my brain with SOS pads, like puberty or my desire to quit the drill team.  The latter came the summer after ninth grade, when I decided I didn't want to spend another year of high school prancing about in short skirts as the marching band honked out "Everybody Walk the Dinosaur."  Instead, I planned to add more ballet classes to my extracurricular schedule and become a complete social outcast.  I made this intention clear to my parents, and they laid low for a week or so before springing on me the "we need to talk" which was followed by a we-support-you-but-you-have-to-do-the-right-thing discussion in which they informed me that I would be the one to call the band director and break the news to him.  Somehow, my parents knew this was punishment enough for me -- not that I needed to be punished, exactly, but I had to understand that quitting wasn't going to be THAT easy.  And it wasn't.  The band director picked up the phone and I immediately started bawling.  I choked out my name and then wailed, "We need to taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalk." 

Another horrid combination of syllables is some variation on "this isn't what I expected of you" or its life-sapping cousin "I am disappointed in you."  (In fact, one of these is probably what the band director said when I finally snorfled into the phone that I was quitting the drill team.)  Any sentence that is delivered with a slight shake of the head, a furrowed brow, and a grim curl of the lips, a combination denoting {shudder} disappointment fills me with the same leaden hopelessness as the need to talk.  Worst of all, it is often delivered after an announcement that we need to talk. 

My entire life has been spent trying to avoid letting other people down.  It is possibly both my best and my worst character trait.  I've spent countless hours of my life obsessing over things I've done or am about to do or may have forgotten to do, my innards hog-tied with the biting cords of anxiety at the mere thought that I might not live up to someone's expectations.  I might have forgotten my homework (never happened, not once) or thrown together a diorama the night before it was due (maybe once, but I pitched such a panic-fit that my mom made it for me and I still got an A) or, I don't know, let out a malodorous burp in someone's office (which they wouldn't notice except that my face turns so red it must look close to eruption) -- no matter how minute, if something I've done might be disappointing to someone else, I would rather be flattened by a crosstown bus than hear about it.  Because, trust me, if it's worth discussing, then I already know.  And my disappointment in myself is more than enough for us all, 'kay?   

On a related note, one way of spreading my insecurities out like a rug and tap-dancing all over them is to ask me at some crucial juncture and/or about something exceedingly important:  "Are you sure?"  Because up until those sounds came floating into the air from your mouth, yeah.  I was 100%, absolutely, no question about it sure.  I was cocky.  I was congratulating myself and imagining our inevitable victory and the fame it will bring us all.  But NOW?  Now that you've questioned it?  Well, um, maybe, yeah, I THINK so; I mean, I looked it UP, and I double-checked the calendar and I reread the rules and I swear that's what Bob said, too, and you know now that I'm thinking about it I maybe should look it up again, just in case, or maybe we should call someone but gosh don't quote me on that and I could be wrong here or maybe the rule said the exact opposite so we should spend some more time examining case law from every state and Guam too and I'm going to go try to drown myself in the toilet now.

Honestly, writing this is giving me heart palpitations, so I've just got one last one, and it relates tangentially to yesterday's entry.  A sickening phrase if there ever was one:  "I heard what you said about me."  While I'm as open to gossip as the next person, the idea that the target might find out that I had an unflattering opinion of them, that I might indirectly hurt someone's feelings or simply that I might be perceived as mean or hurtful?  Oh, it's not good. 

In junior high, when I was in the clutches of awkwardness -- the large plastic glasses, the spiral perm, the not-yet-grown-into features -- and when girl-friendships suddenly became far more complicated than ever before, my peers somehow caught onto my paranoia about being thought the source of gossip.  Just to mess with me, one of them would come up to me in PE with piercing eyes and mutter, "I heard what you said about me."  Even if I had never met that girl before in my life, my synapses would fire to the point of overheating as I searched for some snippet of conversation that might have involved her.  I'd beseech her with a stammered, "I didn't mean it!  I'm so sorry!  I don't even know what I said!"  And just as I started to break down in tears, imagining my fate as The Friendless Girl in the Corner, she would smirk and say, "Just kidding!" and prance away to rejoin a giggling horde of girls who, in actuality, couldn't care less what I had to say about any of them. 

It's just like those public service announcements used to warn:  words can hurt.  Be careful how you use them.  

Thanks a Lot, Mr. Graham Bell

Whenever you do one of those getting-to-know-you things like The Book of Questions, invariably you're asked what bygone era or time period you would have liked to live in.  I always have trouble narrowing my answer down, because there's so much good stuff to choose from -- I could be a swishy-skirted 1950s housewife or a 1940s film noir heroine or, best of all, a pioneer woman in the manner of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  But then I start overthinking the whole thing, reminding myself that I would have felt trapped in a pre-feminist world, so I would have ended up a Valium-addled alcoholic in the 50s; my waist isn't small enough (nor my boobies big enough) for the 1940s and 50s fashions; and the pioneers didn't get to bathe much, nor did they have jeans, which: no, and so at some point I just give up and say I'm happy in the present.

One thing, though, that seals the deal for me, if I absolutely have to choose, is that back in the pioneer days, they didn't have the telephone.  I really, really hate the telephone.

The phone represents, in one molded plastic casing, the three most acute of all my neuroses:  my resistance to spontenaity or surprise; my risk aversion; and my fear of offending.  Thanks to caller ID, much of the surprise element that I so loathe about telephonic communication is eliminated; even so, numbers can be scrambled or blocked, so a good bit of the time I still have to screen calls.  Every time I think I know who might be calling from a blocked number and I pick it up, I get burned -- usually, if I'm at work, it's a legal recruiter, which is the law firm world's version of a telemarketer call.  At home, thanks to the do-not-call registry, we are relatively free of solicitation calls, and the rest can easily be screened; if "Alabama" is calling, as it has been for the past three weeks, several times a day, I know I'm not going near it. 

The risk aversion -- more specifically, the fear of disseminating faulty information, or otherwise sticking my stinky foot into my stammering maw -- is the worst part of the phone experience for me.  Even if I initiate a call -- which I also hate doing -- there's still that chance that the person on the other end of the line will ask me something to which I don't know the answer, or bring up some unexpected topic.  And then I will sit dumbfounded on the other end of the line, sweating my ass off and wanting to die a precipitous death. 

I've gotten better about this, since part of lawyering is thinking on one's feet, but I still get heart palpitations when someone catches me off guard.  It's often tempting just to slam the receiver down and pretend to have been cut off somehow -- gee, I have NO idea what happened! -- and then look up an answer or consult with someone else before returning the call.  Or hide.

Instead, I use time-buying techniques ("That's a great question!  I think you may have a point there, and it's interesting that you bring this up, and that...uh...brings up an important...point...to...bring...up...") while my brain churns out images of my soon-to-be-penniless-and-alone existence as a result of my failure to promptly and accurately answer this one damn question.  Thankfully, I have learned that "let me get back to you on that" is a perfectly acceptable response, unless someone has just asked you your name or whether you've ever been convicted of a felony. 

The fear of offending is mostly tied to telemarketers or recruiters, in the sense that I cannot -- cannot -- simply hang up on someone, no matter how unwanted their call.  Well, maybe a heavy breather.  But an actual speaking person?  I have to let them do their spiel, and I quietly wait until they reach their first question (sometimes this lasts for several minutes, which seem to stretch on for days -- let's hurry this up, I have things to do), at which time I finally, politely and firmly, inform them that, thanks, I am not interested.  This is probably worse than hanging up immediately, since now they've wasted five minutes on someone who was never going to give them a sale; but...I feel bad.  It's rude to just hang up!  I can't do it!  Can't!  They might not like me!

The other thing is, when making a call, my greatest fear in the world is that someone won't know who I am.  In a business context, this is not an issue, since you always get to say who you are AND where you're calling from, and usually you get to explain a little about why you're calling before the other person gets exasperated or puts you on hold or transfers you fifty times.  But for personal stuff?  Lord. 

I always think that I'm interrupting the other person, that instead of ignoring the phone, they have picked it up just as they set the kitchen on fire or in the middle of the most intense, uh, you know of their lives, and it's going to be all my fault if their house burns down or they don't get to...finish.  I'm always convinced that I'm the last person they want to hear from, as though they will recoil in horror from the receiver, or possibly throw it across the room.  HER?  NOT HER, FOR GOD'S SAKE, NOT NOW.  Or!  I worry that they won't even know who I am.  They'll be all, "This is WHO?", again recoiling from the phone at the sound of an entirely unfamiliar voice. 

Horrid.

Of course, I've managed to have some great phone conversations over the years, and I've been known to chatter for hours once I get past that initial, hair-raising few moments.  And as much as I adore the written word, there's no substitute for hearing someone's voice and getting to respond immediately and interrupt each other and hear their appreciative laughter. 

Still, if pressed, I'd have to say that I either have to stay in the present, with all its carefully devised phone-avoiding technologies in place and, DEAR GOD, its beloved e-mail, or in some era in which I could communicate only by smoke signal, carrier pigeon or, oooh, maybe telegram.  Of course, my telegrams would be about a million dollars apiece, since I am incapable of brevity.  They'd be worth every penny, though, so long as I didn't have to open my mouth.

The Delirium Chronicles

Less than 48 hours after I took the bar exam, I was hunched over a steaming bowl of ramen in a back-alley noodle shop in Tokyo. 

Possibly the best thing about suffering through three years of law school -- followed by the most horrifyingly intense ten weeks of your life, ten weeks of cramming arcana from every conceivable area of law into your head in the hopes of getting maybe thirty percent of the questions right on a two-day, twelve-hour ordeal of an exam -- is the excuse to take a blowout trip once it's all over, before you commit yourself to working for the rest of your life in a potentially unfulfilling, grindingly stressful job.

In my case, I traveled with a group of friends for a couple of months around Southeast Asia.  We went to Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand, with a brief stop in Tokyo on the way over, hitting everything from cities overrun with motorbikes to hill towns of stilt houses to sleepy fishing villages on white crescents of sand.  I kept a (paper) travel journal, which I recently unearthed, but scrolling through Nothing But Bonfires' accounts of her recent sojourn has brought up even more memories than I committed to paper; she visited so many of the places we did, and her beautiful writing captures the clamoring excitement of exploring new and wildly different parts of the world for the first time. 

My post-bar trip happened in a rare pocket of life when I had absolutely no responsibilities -- a time that only comes when you're in between things, floating in that space where nothing requires your attention or nags at the recesses of your mind.  A time when you can concentrate only on what lies before your eyes, on the new experiences you're having and the people you're meeting and the food you're eating.  Or at least, that's how it should have been. 

Before we left, I went to the campus health services and got all sorts of shots to ward off exotic diseases like Japanese encephalitis and typhoid (can you believe people still get typhoid?  it seems so...medieval).  Since we were going to lots of rural and beachy areas, the doctor also prescribed an anti-malarial drug, Lariam, one that is specially made for the ultra-evolved, extra-potent mosquitos of the Mekong Delta and the Gulf of Thailand.  The doctor kept calling it a "prophylaxis" (hee) and as he was scrawling out the prescription, he asked me if I had a history of psychosis or any family members who suffered from schizophrenia or severe depression.  I said I didn't. 

A few days before we left, I started taking the pills, as the medicine was to build up in my system for a while before we went off into the wilds of Indochina.  I packed the little orange vial along with our heavy-duty anti-diarrheal meds and my 50-gallon drum of sunscreen, and we were off. 

Tokyo and Hong Kong were a blur, a blur of jumbled technicolor neon and steamy hot humidity and bullet trains and a horrific encounter with a chicken foot, and then we got to Hanoi, which is easily -- aside from my couch and a perfect circle of Cyprus trees I once found in a vineyard in Tuscany -- my favorite place on earth.  The lakes and the temples and the yellowed French colonial architecture -- all of it.  And the food, oh GOD.  The food. 

At some point in that first week of the trip, I started having these insanely vivid dreams, more vivid than fever dreams, involving furious riots of color and intense, life-threatening situations or wrenching interpersonal struggles.  I knew that malaria medicine could cause wild dreams, so I didn't think much of it.  I was also still jet-lagged and felt tired and a bit off in general, so when I started getting unusually cranky, I figured it was fatigue-related (I get cross very easily when tired).  Don't get me wrong -- I was still having fun.  It was just that, every day or so, a flicker of yawning hopelessness or a breeze of paranoia would pass through my mind. 

Then, on a thirteen-hour overnight bus ride to Saigon, I had my first hallucination.  I was sitting sideways in a double seat, my head bouncing against the window. I'd somehow managed to sleep for a while in spite of the growing discomfort of being cramped and thirsty and/or having to pee for more than ten hours.  Through the window across from me, I saw layers of red and pink and orange expanding over the charcoal sky, illuminating puffy morning clouds and outlining distant limestone crags and casting a glow over the silently shifting rice paddies.  And then I blinked, and it was dark again.  The bus was rumbling through the blackness.  Dawn was still hours away.

Then the phantom motion started.  You know how, after you've been on a boat for a while, you get back on land and still feel all...drifty?  Around nine o'clock every night, from Saigon on through Bangkok to Ko Pha Ngan and Ko Tao, I would get this sort of dizziness/vertigo/rocking sensation that made me feel as if I were constantly walking on an unmoored pier over a storm-tossed sea.  Just as our group would be kicking back with a couple of beers after dinner, it would start, and I'd stagger unsteadily back to the room, wracked with nausea, leaving my friends to their revelry as I curled up on the bed and spun into sleep.

As time went on, I got increasingly moody -- paranoid about my boyfriend and our relationship; depressed about where my life seemed to be headed; worried that I wasn't as much fun as I should be, that I was bringing everyone else down.  I had crying jags and obsessed over how I always managed to ruin everything.  The dreams got worse, and I started waking up crying or calling out or sweating through the sheets.  The hallucinations continued; I saw the design on a shower curtain come to life one night, and things took on an aura of light or color in otherwise dark spaces.

Even so, there were still moments of transcendance -- one afternoon, a bunch of us were riding on a longtail boat from a secluded beach in Thailand back to where we were staying, when the sky opened up into a soul-soaking rainstorm.  A white gull soared overhead toward the lush green peaks of the island as the gray clouds seemed to envelop us and the raindrops pocked the surface of the sea.  As our boat puttered through the turquoise water in the downpour, we all looked at each other, huddled under sarongs as the water ran down our faces, and laughed til our stomachs hurt.

Months after we got back and scattered to our law firm jobs and my horrid symptoms subsided as the medicine left my system, one of my traveling companions emailed me a link to an article about Lariam.  It was about a class action suit being brought by people who had suffered debilitating and distressing side effects from the drug -- from paranoia to vertigo to dizziness to hallucinations.  I read it, slack-jawed.  It described my experience exactly (although I had it comparatively easy; people have actually committed suicide as a result of the horrific psychological side effects).  Somehow, on the trip, I'd never made the connection between everything I was feeling and the Lariam.  I guess I'd thought that, since I didn't have a history of mental illness, the drug couldn't cause those things.  But no.  It can.  And it did. 

Thankfully, the next time I went to Vietnam, I knew to avoid Lariam at all costs, and to bring the right guy the second time around.  And that made all the difference.

Oh, My Achin' Head

I spent the majority of last night wailing and writhing on the cold bathroom floor, trying to keep my head from exploding all over the apartment and ruining our painstakingly refinished wood floors.  I had been at work, reading cases and doing some online research -- nothing out of the ordinary -- and around 7:30, I suddenly got this crazy twitching in my eyes and words kept disappearing and reappearing on the screen in front of me.  The flashing morphed into bulbous, floating spots and I figured my day was over and headed home.  I managed to get home on the subway as I grew increasingly dizzy and disoriented.  I thought perhaps I had strained my eyes from too much computer use, so I closed my eyes and pressed inward to quell the wild spasms behind my lids.

When I got home, I curled up on the couch and pressed my face into the pillows to stop all the wild visual disturbances.  There were flickering lights around the periphery of my sight, vibrations like live wires arcing and dancing on the ground after an ice storm.  And then the headache came. 

I thought I had had migraines before; I've had to take to bed in a darkened room and let out soft, indulgent moans from the vice-like grip of a bad headache before.  But now I know those were wimpy little wuss-headaches.  This.  This was a migraine. 

The pain began at the top of my skull, prying through layers of bone and down into my brain like a searing probe, stabbing further downward until it pierced my left eyeball.  I literally shrieked and clutched at my skull, as though I had to hold the pieces together to keep them from shattering into the air.  It was unbelievable.  I tried to go to bed, but the dark wasn't enough.  The pain became so severe that I crawled to the bathroom and was violently ill for a couple of hours. 

I swear, as an adult, being sick to my stomach seems much worse than it did as a kid.  It's not just like a little pukey feeling; it's like a full-body wrenching that starts just past the tips of my toes, travels up every fiber of every muscle in my legs, and contorts my internal organs until they are beyond empty. 

Of course, with all the life forms in the house, my sweet husband, who was trying so hard to help and take care of me, spent most of his time wrangling the animals -- the dog in particular was thrown into a fit of discombobulation (we were in bed!  why aren't we in bed now?  what's mommy doing?  what's all that noise?  what's wrong with mommy?  pant, pant, pant) and kept racing around the apartment.  At one point, I couldn't stand the air currents moving over my body from anyone else breathing, let alone running about, so I growled something indecipherable and shoved everyone away from me and slammed the bathroom door to be alone in my misery.  And, God, was it ever misery.  It was like something out of a Gothic novel, except I was wearing raggedy sweats instead of a consumptive, filmy white nightgown.

Finally, when I was sure my body was wrung out completely, I crawled into the guest bedroom (closer to the bathroom), whereupon the dog leapt up on me and started licking my face and the cat started kneading my hair and skittering around the comforter and I laid there helplessly, at their mercy, as the pain drained me of all my faculties.  I somehow slept until morning and awakened with a grim, scarred feeling in my brain.  I could feel my eyes scraping around in their sockets.  My stomach felt scooped out and achy. 

I stayed home, of course, and went to the doctor, who told me I had a textbook migraine and that I can expect to have them periodically from now until -- get this -- I am postmenopausal.  Isn't that fabulous?  And there's nothing I can really do, and no one even seems to know what causes them or why the nausea comes along with them, and yadda yadda yadda.

After a lengthy nap, I lurched outside with the dog just as our block's Halloween festivities were getting warmed up.  We just bought our place this past January, so this will be our first autumn/winter holiday season here, and already I can tell it's going to be great.  This is the first time I've lived in a neighborhoody area in the City, an area with actual families and a block association.  My corpse-like body felt a little rejuvenated by the sight of the teeny dinosaurs and fairies toddling about among the jack o'lanterns and cobwebs. 

Of course, this is still New York with its uber-neurotic parents, so our block's newsletter had urged people to hand out "healthy, low-sugar" items to trick-or-treaters, which:  NO.  I mean, come on!  It's Halloween, people!  Sure enough, as I was walking around, I saw that some buildings had one bucket of candy and one bucket of something that sucked, and the moms were pushing their kids toward the latter, saying things like, "LOOK, Bailey, RAISINS.  You LOVE RAISINS.  MMMMMM, RAISINS."  I wanted to go over and put a heaping load of candy into the kid's bag.  Because, really, I'm all for keeping kids healthy and fighting obesity and all, but you can do the whole foods macrobiotic diet 364 days a year.  Let your kid be a kid for one damn day.

Meanwhile, I'd gone out and bought three bags of candy, thinking that the trick-or-treaters would wander through each building and get loot from every apartment.  Apparently not.  Instead, they just go from stoop to stoop or doorman to doorman, where people are sitting outside with candy.  So.  Ooops.  We're going to have Tootsie Pops, Reese's Pieces, and Twizzlers for months to come.  Or, well, maybe not months.  They probably won't linger in the cabinets as long as our raisins do.

Dreams and Nightmares

Last night I dreamed that I was at my parents' house in Georgia.  It was nighttime, and I was sitting in the living room by the large windows that look out into the woods behind the house.  In the dream, I looked out into the darkness, way out to the lake beyond the trees, and I saw someone swimming toward the house.  Somehow, I knew that the swimmer was coming to break into the house and kill me.  I jumped up from the couch and ran upstairs to the den, where I picked up a black Slimline phone and called 9-1-1.  When the operator answered, I gave my name and my parents' address, and they told me someone would be right there.  As I hung up the phone, I heard the back door crashing in. 

I woke up with a start.  I was frightened, but I had an unusual feeling of safety, because I knew I'd made that call to the police in time.  I lay there, the dog breathing against my stomach, and listened to the rain tapping on the windows until I drifted off again.

When I fell back asleep, I dreamed that I was boarding a flight.  It was one of those small jets they use to fly short hops, and somehow, in the dream, I knew that it was going to crash.  Sure enough, we started to take off, but then we reversed direction and slipped backwards like a paper airplane in a downdraft.  The top of the fuselage peeled off as we fell to the river below.  But somehow, suddenly our fall slowed and we drifted down to the water with the grace of a feather on the wind.  All the passengers looked at each other and laughed and smiled, and then we gathered our things and went on our merry way, and I ended up hanging out with a couple of bloggers and it became a whole new dream.

What's significant about these dreams is that I've had the same ones a thousand times over, except usually in the "someone's coming to get me!" dream, I pick up the phone and I can't dial it, or I dial the number but slip and hit the wrong button for the last digit, or I manage to make the call but then I can't speak.  Every time, I move as if I'm swimming through mud; I feel the urgency, but I can't get my body to respond.  And in the plane crash dream, usually I am watching a crash from the ground and I know what's going to happen, but I can't do anything about it, so I just stand there and watch all those people dying.  Or sometimes I am on the plane, sitting toward the back as the nose tilts down at a more and more severe angle and I hear the wind screaming past the aircraft and I die in a fiery wreck. 

Other fun recurring dreams I have include the one just about everyone I know has, where you're about to take a final exam and realize that you never showed up for the class; you didn't know you were registered for it, or no one told you it was required for graduation.  Gack!  For me, the uber-nerd, it is the ultimate nightmare.  Then there's my dream that I am somewhere official -- school or court, for example -- and I don't have any shoes on; I run around frantically looking for my shoes and trying to keep people from noticing that I am barefoot.  Or the ballet dreams, which usually involve me standing in the wings, about to go onstage, when I realize I don't know the choreography or I don't have my costume on. 

Clearly, I am a total head case.

I am baffled as to the reason for the shift in my dreams last night -- why did I suddenly have control over the situation, when generally those dreamworld scenarios are so fraught with distress and powerlessness?  Hopefully, it means something about having some greater sense of myself, some level of comfort with my life and my place in the world.  I can't say for sure, but I hope it continues.

On a completely unrelated note, my subway line is like Solicitation Central.  I swear, every frickin' day when I am going to or from work, I get at least one, but often two or three, people selling candy ("Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen.  I am selling candy not to raise money for a basketball team but to put some money in my own pockets."  It's the same EVERY time.), playing the bongo drums, or dancing.  There's this pack of kids who do this sort of dance/gymnastics routine where they set up a boom box and then flip around and bounce off the ceiling and stuff, which is quite a feat in a crowded subway car so I usually give them a buck.  But really:  EVERY DAY.  It's a bit much. 

Then there are the wraithlike homeless people who come wandering through the train, and MAN, are some of them pitiful.  This woman staggered in the other day who was barefoot and wearing some kind of tattered rag of a dress, her hair looking matted and brittle and unruly, and she was using a five foot long tree limb for support.  She looked ROUGH.  And I mean, she didn't even know where she was.  It was horrible.  She obviously needed to be in some kind of institutional setting, but who will put her there?  How will she get any help?  Where's she going to go?

Generally, I prefer not to be bothered on my commute; but sometimes you see people who are just so bad off that you just can't imagine how they got that way, or why they're simply roaming the street in that condition.  We do such a shameful job of taking care of people in this country, in this land of obscene wealth and wastefulness.  I pay a damn assload of taxes every year, and what do we get for all that?  No universal health care.  Unreliable social services.  Inequality in our public schools.  And more than half a million dead Iraqis. 

Shit.  What a downer of a post.  Sorry, y'all!  I didn't mean it to turn out that way.  I just start writing and see what comes out, and...well, there it is.  Heh.  I'll try to bring back the funny next week!  Um.  Have a great weekend!

You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby

It happened again Saturday night.  Hours before dawn, I was jarred awake by a nightmare that ended with me being shot in the chest at close range.  I laid frozen, pinned to the bed as if I were truly bleeding to death, gasping my last precious breaths before everything went dark.  I knew I was awake and had not, in fact, been shot; nevertheless, my fears took on that familiar, smothering quality,  I began to think about the handful of people who have keys to our apartment.  Would they come bursting through the door at that very moment, intent on murdering us in our bed? 

Then I realized that I had a dire need to pee.  DIRE.  For the bajillionth time in recent memory, I scooped up the dog and shuffled around the apartment, checking everything for signs of entry, and then hustled to the bathroom.  I did manage to drift off when I went back to bed, after my husband talked me through my fears, helping me dismiss them as unfounded and managing not to mock me for my paranoia.  And then the dog woke me up at 7, needing to go outside -- payback for me doing the same to him hours before.

I have come to the realization that my brain is doing this -- this middle-of-the-night onslaught of adrenaline via horrific dreams and irrational fears -- for a reason.  I think it is because I am afraid that I might be too happy. 

Everything has been going along rather sailingly of late.  In the past year, we've bought an apartment that we love, gone on some fantastic trips, enjoyed quiet weekends and time with friends and family, welcomed our nephew and several friends' babies into the world, seen some measure of success at work, and done a tremendous amount of running.  We're healthy and so are our families.  We spend time doing things we love, like reading and writing and watching goofy reality TV and playing games and eating good food.  (I told y'all I was boring.)  My relationships with people I care about have deepened.  And I've discovered some fabulous new friends in the most unexpected ways.

The times in my life when I've experienced the most anxiety have been times like these, when things are clicking along nicely.  I become convinced, consciously or not, that I am inviting unimaginable tragedy upon myself simply because I am content.  The phone will ring and I'll assume I'm about to receive the news of a loved one's death.  I'll look around the subway and think about how someone might open fire or ignite an explosive at any second.  I'll feel off for a couple of days and wonder if my body is harboring some dread illness that will leave me wasting in a hospital bed, my family and friends looking piteously at my shriveled form. 

This strange inability to embrace my own contentment without fearing some cosmic retribution comes from a different place than my other neuroses of inadequacy and obsessiveness, although it's not unrelated to those feelings.  This is almost like a version of so-called Catholic guilt (although I'm not Catholic), wherein I convince myself that my happiness is unearned; I am unworthy of it, and therefore deserving of punishment for enjoying something that is not rightfully mine.  On top of the organized religion overtones, the media plays into this, too -- how many times have we heard Barbara Walters intoning a narrative about someone who was on top of the world, loving life in every way, only to have his world shattered by a rare disease/freak accident/devastating loss?  We've accepted this spin as gospel -- or at least, subconsciously, I have -- to the effect that you'd better not get too comfortable, because the proverbial rug could be pulled out from underneath you at any time.   

In my day-to-day life, I'm not paralyzed by these fears; I don't mean to make it sound as though I'm a paranoid freak, darting behind parked cars or constantly glancing over my shoulder.  For the most part, I just go through my routine and try to take notice of the moments of beauty that happen among the mundane progression of the workaday existence.  But at night, the light is replaced by shadows, and beneath the darkness lies the fear of loss and destruction.  How do I keep the fear at bay?  How do I sleep without the interruption of doubt and its concomitant need for vigilance?  How do I remind myself that my happiness does not put me in some debt to the universe that must be repaid with sorrow? 

Enter Sandman

This morning at 3:48 am, someone buzzed our apartment.  I heard it from the depths of a dream; the angry sound ripped through the apartment and yanked my eyelids open.  Oh my God, I thought.  Someone's in the building.  They're going to break down our door and kill us.  (Somehow, my brain made the leap from buzzer to entry without the necessary step of someone actually buzzing them in.  It made perfect sense at the time.)  I imagined a scene of mayhem, my husband and I scrambling from underneath tangled covers, huddling against the bed, begging for our lives as a masked man slammed into the room, waving a gun. 

I strained over the thrum of the air conditioner fan for sounds of forced entry.  But the compressor cycled on, drowning out everything else.  I had no choice -- I had to get up.  Somehow, scooping the dog under my arm and padding about the darkened apartment in my underwear seemed infinitely less vulnerable than lying in bed quivering, waiting for the armed goon to appear.  I skulked around, checking under every piece of furniture and in every corner -- for what, I'm not sure.  I steeled myself and tiptoed down the long entry hall to the front door, where I slid the peephole cover aside and peered out.  Nothing. 

I went back to bed, knowing that the night's sleep was over for me.  My heart rate suggested that I had rocketed out of bed and sprinted up and down the stairs a few times.  And suddenly, my brain unearthed the most annoying possible thing in its adrenaline-soaked drive to keep me awake to fight or flee:  "BUILT THIS CITY.  WE BUILT THIS CITY ON ROCK AND ROooooooOOOOOOLL!" 

(I know.  Something must be going around.  I swear, I'm not making this up -- Jonniker and I are metaphysically connected.)

My brother and I have long agreed that this Jefferson Starship turd is the worst song of all time.  We arrived at this conclusion during a night of heavy drinking, after someone suggested that "Rock Me Amadeus" was the most vile tune ever to grace the airwaves.  And yeah, it's bad.  But it doesn't beat Grace Slick and what's-his-name (who was that dude?) and their "knee-deep in the hoopla."  This song has a much more pernicious ability to weave itself into your dura mater and throb as a constant backbeat to your thoughts.  The invasion can last for days.  Every once in a while, one of us will send the other an email with "BUILT THIS CITY" as the text.  Or my brother will lean over in the middle of a gravely serious performance -- like when we went to see "The Seagull" at Shakespeare in the Park a few years ago -- and whisper "BUILT THIS CITY" and then I have to stifle my laughter for an entire act.  My brother sealed my sleepless fate when he left his comment on my music entry the other day.  Yeah.  THANKS A LOT, BIG BROTHER!

The weird thing about the buzzer last night (note to building:  get a doorman!) is that two nights ago, I was also rudely awakened in the wee hours of the morning, this time by a phone ringing.  Our phone is in the living room, a fair distance from the bedroom, and this wasn't our usual ring tone.  My cell phone was off.  We don't have neighbors on the other side of our bedroom wall.  The hell?  After that shrill interruption, I naturally had to get up, dog tucked under my arm, and check the security of the apartment.  Because, you know, the burglars -- they come through the phone these days.  (Well, we knew I was insane about middle-of-the-night intrusions already.  Logic does not play a role here.) 

So now for two out of the last three nights, I've spent several sweaty hours  clutching the duvet and praying and hearing "BUILT THIS CITY" cycle through my neurons, and most of all waiting for my horrific fate to unfold at the hands of an attacker who likes to announce himself by phone and/or buzzer before coming to maim and dismember me.  Do you think it's time for an Ambien prescription? 

Too Little, Too Late

There's a moment in the movie "Shopgirl" in which Steve Martin and Claire Danes see each other for the first time after things had, inevitably but painfully, fallen apart between them.  They've both moved on and are in much better places, with much better people.  It's plain that they still care about each other, and are glad to see one another; in a sense, you can feel their relief that what they had, what was so excruciating for her and unsettling for him due to the inequality of their demands and needs, is finally behind them. 

They speak a little awkwardly, but sincerely.  And then there is a pause, and Steve Martin looks at her meaningfully and says, "I'm sorry for the way I treated you.  And I did love you." 

For a fleeting second, Claire Danes looks at him with as much surprise as if he had just slapped her across the face; an expression of deep, remembered hurt passes through her eyes, and then she composes herself and smiles affectionately at him, but with tears in her eyes.  She walks away from him with the confidence of a woman who has what she needs, what she has always needed -- what she never got from him.

This tiny scene broke my heart a thousand different ways.  How is it that someone can withhold from you everything that you need -- a need that can be fulfilled with the slightest gesture or phrase -- even as they claim to care for you, only to turn around and offer it to you at the very moment that it is Much Too Late? 

I have been in that relationship, and it is possibly the worst emotional space to occupy.  It's lonely and frustrating and devastating.  You give everything of yourself and the other person accepts it unhesitatingly, while they give you a crumb or two in return -- or maybe whole chunks every once in a while -- but they never give you enough.  They make you believe that you are too demanding to ask for equity in what you give and what you receive.  You are jealous or insecure or needy simply for wanting their love unconditionally.  You are controlling or obsessive for trying to form the relationship into something that will give you what you need.  And so you swallow your feelings, your truth -- you tamp down every impulse you have to ask for more from them, when more might only be just enough -- and you try, above all, not to rock the already rocking boat. 

For four years, beginning in law school, I stayed in that place; I tried not to rock that boat.  I thought the relationship was worth it.  I thought that, one day, we would emerge into calmer seas.  I thought he would come around to see things my way and to treat what we had with the respect and attention that I did.  It wasn't all bad; we had lots of great times, times that I thought made the rest worthwhile.  But we also had lots of awful times -- or more accurately, I had lots of awful times.  Times of wondering whether he truly loved me or whether he was always just on the verge of leaving.  Times of accepting his grave transgressions of our relationship and of my trust as manifestations of his damaged psyche, which I was sure I could repair. 

And then, gradually, it became less and less acceptable and I became more and more aware that I couldn't fix him or us.  I realized that other people in my life, friends who received much less from me in return, gave more of themselves than the person who I thought meant most to me.  As I realized this, the pain eased; I knew what I had to do. 

It was a horrible and lonely process, extricating myself from the relationship, like an addict detoxing in the confines of a padded cell.  He was shocked to the core by the turn of events; my continued presence had been taken as a given.  As he lived in the new space of my absence, he began to look at himself and at the wreckage of our years together.  And he began to change.  But it was too late.

Months later, when it wasn't just too late but Much Too Late -- I had more than moved on; I had regained my self and found everything I had been missing and realized that the "happiness" I thought I'd had when I was with him was a veiled, muffled happiness in which who I really am had been kept at bay -- he wrote to me.  He told me how he had loved me even though he hadn't always shown it, how he realized that being with him must have been difficult, and how he wished he had done things differently. 

This revelation was almost as cruel as the withholding of it in the first place.  Here was what I had needed to hear all along, and now he was giving it to me on a silver platter when it simply didn't matter anymore.  It ripped the almost-forgotten hurt and loneliness of that place, that relationship, back up to the surface, like a fish being jerked out of the water, the hook searing through its mouth, the harsh air a shock to its body.  The confession begged the question, why now?  Why not ages ago?  But in a way, it was a continuation of the same -- it came from the same place of selfishness as the neglect and the duplicity and the distance.  It was a way of saying, I won't let you forget me.  I won't let you move on. 

But I did move on, and I have never looked back.  I have what I need, what I never got from him.  I walked away with that newfound maturity, the grace and solidity that comes from fulfillment.  And the serenity that comes from knowing that I will never have to live with the knowledge that I gave of myself only when it was much too late.