pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UNDERWIRE ALERT. QUICK! RAISE THE TERRORIST THREAT LEVEL TO RED! (No. 333 � Wednesday � 3 May 2006) I finally rolled into my driveway after a day of traveling and, as my pal Musicgrrl (who picked me up from the airport) said, �I can tell you�re completely exhausted because your voice sounds different.� Yeah. Mostly though, it�s probably different because my reconstructed shoulder hurts like hell from hauling a suitcase and laptop all over New York City. Filmgrrl and I left the East Village around 10:30 this morning and I have pretty much been traveling ever since. Took the subway to Grand Central Station (after reading a scene in Carole Maso�s Ghost Dance that occurs in Grand Central Station), then hopped the express bus to LaGuardia. Sat around reading after my underwire alerted security to the fact that I have big tits, then sat in Atlanta for two more hours before heading home. Musicgrrl picked me up, then took me out to dinner, where we had a nice long talk before we pulled up to her house and discovering that the driver's door on my cute little electric blue beetle bug was completely bashed in. We�re in the southland though, so a nice Asian father and daughter team came running up as soon as we arrived and the daughter said, �Is this your car? We have been trying to figure out who owns it. My mother was doing a U-turn earlier and crashed into your door. We are so sorry. Here. Look. Here�s our phone number. Call her tomorrow and we�ll make this right.� Wow. � As any struggling artist who isn�t supported by daddy knows, the bathtub isn�t necessarily stuck in its own room in low-income NYC apartments, but is instead dropped somewhere in the general vicinity of the kitchen plumbing, and usually smack dab in the middle of the kitchen or living room. Shuli�s bathtub is beside the kitchen sink and in clear view of any point in the apartment (and, if I lived there, I would make a fold-up tabletop that fits over the tub that I would remove only when I needed to bathe). Filmgrrl and I stayed there last night to take care of her cat because Shuli currently thinks that she owns her building and is in a medical facility where the kind doctors are happy to remind you that you are really just another poor New Yorker who doesn�t own squat. Poor Filmgrrl. She is a good friend of Shuli�s and went back again today in the hopes that Shuli will have taken enough meds to remember her. (No dice.) I kept thinking about Kate Millet�s Looney-Bin Trip�especially because Shuli visits Kate out at the purple barn occasionally and they both insist that people with mental imbalances should be allowed to choose whether or not they take medication that blunts their brilliance. I sort of agree with them�to a degree�but this is a complicated subject for me because I grew up with a mother wrapped whole rooms of our house in tinfoil or plastic wrap and followed her children through the house rubbing magical witch hazel potions on us (to keep some evil something away) or dragged us behind the azalea bushes as she waved a butcher knife dangerously close to our eyes because she was convinced that some government agent was somewhere in our yard�or, sometimes, conspiring with her children. And she spun some magical roulette wheel that told her which family member was currently the evil one (and believe me, you did not want to be the person behind door number one). And, eventually, she shot herself�in large measure, because she was no longer medicated. My family made the horrible decision to involuntarily commit her twice�a legal procedure that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. So yeah. Kate and Shuli see the meds as blunting their brilliance, but it seems to me that mental illness is the real culprit here, not the meds, and that what they interpret as brilliant through their particular lens is perceived by most people as just plain crazy. And the meds offer a less-than-perfect way of helping them to survive in a world that does not value difference�and, sometimes, without being locked up. So yeah Shuli. Mania can convince you that you're filled with brilliant perceptions and it can allow you to crank out while reams of writing (been there, wrote brilliantly), but it can also convince you that people's mailboxes are telling you to kill your neighbors�and more than one person with a paranoid schizophrenic disorder has done just that. And the fact of the matter is, you are not brilliant when you are off her meds. Instead, you are an out-of-control woman who overflows your bathtub until the ceiling below you collapses and then stands in the middle of what's left of the floor of your apartment screaming until the police haul you away. Or you're the woman who sets her own floor on fire. Or drags her frightened neighbors from their apartments after informing them that you OWN the place. � (5 PM Thursday afternoon.) Now I�m at work, but heading out in a minute because I have to illustrate a kid�s book tonight. Pottergrrrl e-mailed me a few times recently. Funny, I temporarily forgot all the things that frustrate me about our interactions when I thought about how good she felt in my arms, but sit didn't take long for her to remind me again of just why I need to stay far away from her. I realized today that she �kitchen-sinks� me (i.e., she takes one event and extrapolates an elaborate pattern that includes every perceived sin I've ever committed, says "you ALWAYS do X or Y, Writergrrrl," and then lists everything she resents instead of addressing the topic at hand. Most of the items on her list are things she never even told me about at the time, but she has apparently been walking around resenting me for them. Example: We were having brunch with her daughter and soon-to-be son-in-law many months ago and she said that she had never tried bacon but likes the way it smells. Her daughter and I were eating organic applewood smoked bacon BLTs at the time, and we both offered her a taste. She took a bite of mine and then said "wow, that's really good" and I said, "yeah, bacon is one of the many reasons why I will never be a vegetarian." Then her daughter talked about how much she loves BLTs and I said I'd make Pottergrrrl the perfect BLT this summer, when my homegrown tomatoes are ripe. End of topic. Months pass. Then pow, today she accuses me of trying to coerce her into eating unhealthy foods such as bacon, because I am, essentially, an unhealthy and clueless woman. Seems to me that she is prone to taking two seemingly unrelated events and extrapolating one big flaw out of them too. Example: I overslept one Monday morning after we�d been up late. I was supposed to be on the road by 5 AM in order to arrive at work by 9, but was thirty minutes behind after hitting the snooze bar a few too many times. And, apparently, I overslept several weeks earlier too. Her conclusion? I am deliberately trying to undermine my job in an effort to get myself fired. Now I am as logic-bound as the next INTP and find myself sitting on my hands to avoid saying "specious reasoning! that's specious reasoning!" when such ridiculous words come out of her mouth. But she only gets frustrated if I try to point out how illogical her arguments are and says she can't talk about such things with me � which I guess is good, since she just reminded me again of why I don�t have a single good reason (other than once-hot sex) to talk with her at all. It's a real Redbook "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" kind of fucked-up thang, only we were anything but married and did just fine so long as we limited ourselves to fucking each others� legs till we turned to Jell-O. Things got crazy fast when we started talking though. Ah well. In other news: 1. a CD of American lesbian composers That's a list of my new and enticing purchases. And now whee! I have lots of reading to do after I finish these watercolors and lots more to write about New York, but haven�t had time to even think yet, so I�ll just have to write more when I come up for air. 5:31 p.m. - 2006-5-4 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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