pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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FUN AND GAMES?

(7 AM) Last night was cold and windy, with lingering gusts from our bad morning storms, and Fiddlergrrl said that our state reminds her of a menopausal woman—always vacillating between hot flashes and being cold. I like that.

Fun? After the Ginger and I had been apart for a month and had not seen each other since I walked in on her with Dickboy, after we had sent a month's worth of emotionally empty informational emails back and forth to each other:

G, I have unpacked all of the kitchen boxes and separated our things. I will not be @ the townhouse this evening. If you want to pack then, let me know when you plan to be gone. B

When I whined about this fact to my pal Zulu, she looked at me impatiently and said, "Well, what do you want her to tell you? The answer is simple. She fucked him because she wanted to fuck him. She didn't think she would get caught, but she got caught. End of story."

Games? That is sort of where I am with Buzzcut and all her processing. It seemed so straightforward to me when she first presented moving to intimacy: either we fuck or we don't fuck—and we ill be friends either way. But instead of either expressing our desire for each other or deciding to just be friendly, Buzzcut keeps vacillating between acting or not acting on her desires. And she processes. And processes. And processes. And I just have so little patience for it.

I am much more of an evaluate-your-options / consider-all-possible-outcomes / make-a-thoughtful-decision / be-willing-to-revisit-it-if-you-find-you-need-to / then-fucking-act-on-it-already kind of gal.

The year I spent in couples therapy with the Ginger (after her first affair in, 1998) was excruciating and by far the most processing I have ever voluntarily endured outside of the annual chorus business meeting (which, mercifully, is over in about three hours and includes a Kentucky Fried Chicken and other scrumptious potluck fare).

Buzzcut and I slept together, what, five or six different times but, even if you square then multiply this total, you won't come anywhere close to how many hours she has needed to process this fact. And I just have no more patience for it.

I want to be her friend, but I told her yesterday that I need to abstain from processing with her. ...

Bleah!

Definitely Games. During my morning catas, I was thinking about a game my sister Penelope and I used to play. We called it dictionary and usually played it under the covers with our flashlights (and stop thinking dirty because it wasn't like that!)

The rules were simple. We opened the dictionary to a random page and tried to find a word that we believed the other could not define.

(Hmm, maybe this is why I am much better at defining a word than I am at pronouncing it. Or maybe that's because I am an introvert and my nose is in a book a whole lot more than my mouth is engaged in conversation.)

Truth is, I should probably just pay more attention to how you pronounce a word when I look up, huh?

I remember, in sixth grade, someone used the word epitome and it took me days to figure out that it was a word I would already come across in reading—only I had been saying "epi • TOME" in my head. Funny.

Fun and Potential Games. Have been trying to decide what I think about going out on a date with a therapist. Many of the therapists I know are really neurotic—high-strung, as my grandmother would say. And, while I am sometimes find quirky behavior charming, this reaction is entirely subjective.

Here is my stereotype of therapists: They are largely Nervous Nellie Volvo drivers who are overly cautious about changing lanes or parking their cars or backing their cars up or parallel parking their cars or pulling their cars into a garage or remembering for more than two turns how to make their cars move forward or backward or how to just plain drive their cars effectively—whereas I had a father who used to be a cop and so learned cop-level defensive-driving skills and feel completely confident behind the wheel and fail to understand such nervousness at all.

Of course, I also had a father who sat for hours working with me to figure out a formula that would allow us to, after disconnecting the emergency brake on one side of the car, accelerate to a precise speed, yank up the emergency brake, and execute a perfect U-turn....

Two friends fit the neurotic description above in at least one way, and I find this trait endearing in both of them.

So here's a leetle story: Farmgrrl called once (from her Volvo) to ask why I sent her down a godforsaken road with ugly tract housing and construction cones and how this could possibly be a shortcut to the airport when she had been driving on it forever, and I think I said something along the lines of "oh sweetie, I did not realize that aesthetics were a requirement for your trip," but found the whole exchange to be absolutely adorable.

But anyway. The question on my plate today is this: Could I date a therapist?

Filmgrrl says that one of the things she loves about me is the fact that I pause mid-sentence and dig around for the precise word that will best convey my meaning.

This is probably a residual stuttering symptom rather than a charming pause—a stutterer's brain processes information faster than it can send the words to our mouths, after all, which can make us tongue-tied (especially when we're nervous)—but, if I know that someone is going to process the psychological meanings behind my words before I even get them out of my mouth, then won't I just hesitate to speak even more? Or, gawd knows, maybe I will just never say anything at all!

I am joking, of course. But also not.

When I was an undergrad, Piper, a stunningly beautiful grad. student with thick wavy hair down past her waist—someone who looked like she should be standing on the shores of Ireland in an intricate velvet gown, singing and playing a lute—asked for volunteers for her behavioral psychology experiment.

She was studying desensitization and using snakes in her experiments. And let me say that I REALLY dislike snakes. I've had too many close encounters with water moccasins and rattlesnakes and copperheads over the years and look over every log before stepping over it now and know to lift rocks toward me in warm weather in case one is under it (as they often are in the dirty South)—but Piper was just plain beautiful and smart and very much my type, so I decided to seduce her— which means I signed up for her study and commenced to flirting. And boy was she a good flirt back!

Turns out she was married to a much older and distinguished professor who preferred sleeping with so-called rough women—the kind he would never marry—and that they had an open marriage.

So the day came when I was sitting in the experiment room staring at slides of snakes in between flirting with her and, eventually, the moment came when Piper said over the loudspeaker that it was time for me to step into the next room and pick up a snake.

I pondered my options: Well, if I don't pick it up, will she sleep with me? If I do pick it up the snake, will she sleep with me? (All my calculations having the same goal, obviously.)

So, long story short, we eventually reached the point where she did want to sleep with me and did share her body with me and I can say with certainty that alcohol has never made me as drunk as I felt when I slow danced with her and the smell of her Opium perfume—a scent that, to this day, will turn my head. By this time though, I recognized that she was quite possibly the most fucked-up person I had ever met and that she showed all the signs of being a stalker—a word I am pretty sure did not even exist back then—so I backed off despite the fact that every part of my body besides my brain was leaning into her with a force that kept me awake at night.

And I have associated psycho behavior with shrinks ever since.

SINGING IN SHOWER: Tainted Love"(and yes, as a matter of fact I was doing a happy dance in the shower this morning)

READING: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart • Olga Broumas's Rave: Poems 1975–1999 • Muriel Rukeyser's Life of Poetry • and just started Anne Waldman and and Lisa Birman's Civil Disobediences: Poetics and the Politics of Action

LISTENING TO: Barricades and Brick Walls by Australian singer Kasey Chambers (Barricades and brick walls can't keep me from you. You can tie me down to a railroad track. You can let that freight train roll....)

10:28 a.m. - 2005-03-09

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