Test Prep

I am doing the only test prep I know how to do - I am drilling and killing myself on what it is, exactly, I must say to the doctor this afternoon to convince him that my tubes need tying.

The relaxed jocular Kelly didn't work. You can't say, "Trust me, Doc, if you knew me well enough you'd stop me from reproducing at any cost." They just don't have a sense of humor about these things.

What I'm really preparing is my response to the inevitable request that I seek therapy. Will I get on the couch (do they still have couches?) to buy myself a shot at saving thousands on birth control? Is this conceding to the bullshit sexist assface jerks? Do I, perhaps, need therapy after all?

Times over the past month I have displayed signs of craziness:

1. Anger Management

I was riding my bike through harvard square yesterday at like 5:30pm. There was a wall of people thicker than that thing they are erecting in Iraq. I was up on the sidewalk because some stepchild of the big dig has slithered into cambridge and there are cones and ropes and boards and cops directing traffic all over creation. Not that I ever go fast, but I was going exceptionally slowly, barely moving. Some bespectacled dinosaur born wearing a cravat had just bought a copy of The Economist (ahem, take note: I was going slowly enough to see what magazine he bought) and had his little harvard head stuck in his magazine and was backing up without looking. So I yelled, "Heads Up!" He stopped, did not back into me, and was unharmed. I felt like this was the best possible outcome. I continued on, toward the end of the roped off section where another cop was telling cars what the green light means. The Economist runs up behind me and says, "Excuse me, little girl, but did you bother to consider that riding your bicycle during rush hour might not be the most intelligent thing to do?"

Pause.

Did he just call me "Little Girl?" !!!

Then he goes on to say that if I had blown a horn, he would've known what that meant. But "heads up" means nothing to him. (And it's my intelligence in question - who the fuck is confused about the phrase "heads up?")

So I reply, all sweetness and light, "My voice is free; a horn costs like twenty bucks."

And he says (this is priceless,) "You aren't willing to invest twenty dollars in my safety?"

And I say, "I would be willing to invest several hundred dollars to watch a Clydesdale have its way with you and then drop your old rich white ass in a port-a-potty so I could tip it over at the top of beacon hill and watch you, in a fantastically horrific shittumble, gasp for your last shitty shitty breath on this earth that feels sorry for ever creating you."

Okay I didn't say that. But the fact that I THOUGHT it might suggest to some that therapy is in order. ...And make that SEVERAL Clydesdales.

2. Eating Disorder

My house is dysfunctional in many ways. Particularly charming are our truly disgusting eating habits. I don't like to call people pigs...but, um, we're pigs. A common utterance is, "Oh, I'm not eating anything, you guys can eat but I just ate." The list of things consumed directly following that phrase, trekking into our mouths in direct opposition to the outgoing breath that carried the words, could fill a ream of paper. Just last night I was keeper of the "Oh I'm not eating" torch. I sat through almost the entire meal, sipping my wine, enjoying the company, having already eaten but glad to have a nice dinner conversation with my household.

This is how it starts. It's a normal meal. We have rice and vegetables and some leftover grape leaves heated up. Wine and a salad. Then...out comes the hummus. The feta cheese. The Irish cheddar. The grated Asiago. The pita chips. The wasabi peas. The eighty seven different sauces. The chocolate covered nuts. It ends up here:

The pot full of rice sits in the middle of the table and we dump everything we have yet to eat in the middle of it and go at that thing with our forks like savages. I can't resist! I am physically unable to sit at that table and not pick up a fork at this point. There is something way too wonderful about diving into a pot of food with friends and eating the shit out of it.

So, I had dinner twice...once consumed standing up...out of a trough. This might be reason enough to seek help.

3. Schizophrenia

My neighbors are conspiring against me. They descend upon me in choreographed swoops like a swarm of over privileged bats every other week or so. I live in the richest, whitest, most thoroughly annoying neighborhood in Cambridge and their trust fund sense tells them that I am not one of them. (Or it's the times I sit in my shorts, barefoot on the porch, drinking beer and talking too loudly. At least I'm allergic to it, which is my best chance to fit in.)

So the unifying principle of their conspiracy against me is that I don't belong, and then they divvy up the duties. They are the suing type, so I'll change the names. The responsibilities go like so:

Ellen Fitzgerald has spy duty. She is the decoy. Feigning neighborliness, she knocks on the door occasionally to inquire about seemingly innocent things. "Oh, is that your little car over there? How nice." "What are you all, friends or...?" "It's so nice to have ethnic people in the neighborhood you know we're terribly the same around here usually." (No fucking lie, she said that.) "I looooove low income people, I have a lot in common with my garbage man, more than I have in common with anybody from harvard, I'll tell you that!" (Again, direct quote.) "Make sure you button up that gate, we get the riff raff around here sometimes. Plus it looks nice closed, and, everyone likes to keep them closed." "Are you planning to stay only the semester or are you permanent neighbors?" "Any vacation plans?" Etc etc ad naus.

Doug Wastenhoff is "The Enforcer." His job is to make sure we don't bring anyone's property values down by violating any important neighborhood rules. Leaving snide ass notes about how one should properly park one's car figures prominently in his job description. If, after trash day, the trash container is not whisked immediately from the sidewalk, this unsightly mistake is addressed in one passive aggressive manner or another by the enforcer. In the event of snow, he is very important. The second that snow stops falling, he must run at high speeds to my door to reiterate the shoveling policy. A perk of his job is that his dog gets to shit in my yard when he thinks I'm not looking.

And, finally, the bitch with the dog. I don't know her name. But her job is to walk around and look like her cunt is made of diamonds, giving everyone dirty looks and leaving whiffs of Chanel no.5 in her wake. She makes people like me want to move somewhere else, and is therefore indispensable to the conspirators.

Let's review.

I need therapy for lots of reasons, but I'm pretty sure that only solidifies the fact that reproducing is just not a good idea in my case. No couch for me, not on account of my totally sane and reasonable baby-proofing desires anyway. The Clydesdale thing...maybe.