better now

Moving the party from my head to the deck

Living alone has its privileges.  I no longer need to mutter under my breath about the goddamned laundry spewed on the floor, or the empty roll of toilet paper that is never changed by He Who Uses the Last Shred.  I can eat olives and melba toast for dinner with no apology and there are no razor-thin shards of man hair littering my sink.

But sometimes, it sucks.  Like when a light bulb breaks in its socket, and I don't know how to get it out.  Or when the grass reaches the height of the tower of Babel and I can't see through to the street.  Or when demon-possessed raccoons catch on to the shameful fact that I leave my garbage bags on my deck until Trash Day, and they aren't scared of my hisses, my toy trucks, my shortlong, or my hastily brandished broom.

Witness:

I heard a noise outside, and witnessed this out my deck window.

"Get!" I hissed,"Scoot!"

And then he became comfortable with the fact that I am apparently an in-adept human.  With bad hair.

And despite the fact that I'd belligerently hurtled four different-coloured hot wheels cars at him, and despite my mop and my shrill threats, the cat started slinking toward me, staring at me in the eye the whole time.  Raccoons are not a benign cousin of the cat, they are unabashed KILLERS OF TERRIFIED HOUSELADIES, let me tell you, and this mother effer was not scared of anything.

So I went on Twitter.  And announced the Threat on My Deck. Meg Fowler came to my rescue: hot water, girlfriend, and eggs. Won't hurt him, but he'll book.

There are now four mis-targeted eggs on my brother's work truck, and hot water sloshed all over my deck.  A triumphant raccoon is eating extracted garbage happily outside my door.

I'd take mustache hair in the sink over this, any day.

Resignation

I was frazzled on the way to my first meeting in San Francisco.  Though I always leave plenty of time to allow for traffic and potentially delayed aircraft, my cab ride from SFO to Pacific Avenue took just under two hours.  In normal circumstance, it should take 25 minutes.  The cab driver never let on that he was lost, until he started mumbling in disgruntled Spanish and I noted that we passed Folsom for the fourth time in twenty minutes.

"Are you lost?"
"No, no, sista!"
"It's never taken me over an hour and a half to get from the airport to the city."
"Pacifica!  Is this way, this way.I know."

The meter crept up toward the seventy dollar mark and I started sweating in my sleeveless shift.
"You are lost,"I said, desperately wishing I spoke Spanish,"Nous sommes perdus?"  Spanish is Frenchish, kind of?

By the time I exited the cab, wrangling the fare down by thirty dollars on account of our concentric circles around the San Francisco city perimeter, I was twenty seven minutes late to my meeting and my electrified bobby-pinned shotlong was flapping ominously in the breeze.  I strategically placed my sunglasses to tuck back the fragile tendrils and consulted my angrily red-beeping blackberry.

"Hi Kristin" An email from my Nanny, who was Nolan-less for the day -- he was with my Mom."I've been working out my monthly bills and I'm having some trouble paying them on $ 1280.00 a month.  I've been unable to find a second child to care for and I've been borrowing money for food from my Dad, which doesn't seem right.  I asked him if I could move back into his house to save on rent, but he didn't seem happy about it.  I need an extra $ 520.00 a month to pay my bills.  I know it must be hard as a single Mom with a house and a kid, but could you ask R for the extra money?  If not, I need to find another job.  I don't want to, I love Nolan so much, but I don't really have a choice.  Have a great day in San Francisco!"

I stopped in the middle of the street, ridiculous in tottering heels and with sweat pouring down my arms and out of my crisped hair and I looked up at the asshole Universe.  The  $1280.00 per month that I pay Tiffany -- for four-and-a-half days a week -- is a wicked stretch as it is.  I cannot do any more without selling the house and moving into a moldy tent on the sidewalk.  And yet I totally understand: how can she live on that, in one of the most expensive cities in the world?

I went into my meeting with shellshocked eyes, a hideous hairdo, and a palpitating nervousness.

*** 

To make matters slightly more crunchy, I'd decided to resign from ParentDish a few days before.  I've written there for two years, and it opened countless doors, provided reliable income when I desperately needed it.  But more and more I'd realized that the post quotas were draining me of all semblance of a life outside the computer, that I'd become overwhelmed with the feeling that my tenure had run its course there.  And I am relieved to have left, and I have some small gigs in the sidelines I'll tell you about in a bit -- but even with the crazy trolls and commenters with CAPS LOCKS and righteous indignation about everything -- I still feel overwhelmingly sad to leave that place.  It's a record of my life in tiny snippets, a mass of pixels from when I was crushed until when I felt whole again.

***

My hair still sucks and no, no pictures until the situation is fully rectified.  In the interim, if you are an optimist, I have kicky front layers.  If you are a pessimist, I have bangs on the left side of my head.  In other news: I am thinking very seriously, in part because of all your encouragement, of maybe trying to write a book.  It seems absurd and insane but I've never been one to shy from targeting the impossible.  I need your help, though -- on the ludicrous assumption that you might pay to read my words on actual paper -- would you rather see fiction or non?  I feel like this is a Choose Your Own Adventure Tale, and you'll help dictate what I attempt to do next.  It might be insane enough to work.

Half a head

My fingers were itching to write tonight, about the package that came in the mail today.  It was a plan yellow envelope, addressed to Kristin D.  Inside: three CD's, hand labeled in man-scrawl, one in French, two in English.  A haphazard postcard tumbled out, along with a two-page handwritten note.

"I am very glad we met," he wrote,"You have a spirit in your eyes I have not seen in a long while. I would like to know you better."
His written English is tinged with French, I can hear his voice in the handwritten words and I am sorry I felt so platonic.  He is eager, he has lovely eyes, and he is insanely thoughtful.  I wish I could dig out the passion and smear it arbitrarily, where I feel it's best deserved.  I think it's an inherent flaw deep inside me, that I am always attracted to the boys over the men, the tattoos and confidence over the earnest and stable.

But I can't write about it, because I only have half a head of hair.  Obviously, that's a bit of a distraction.

***

There has been a smell in my house for about a month.  At first I thought Nolan might have stepped in some haphazard dog shit during one of  our many rambles in the woods -- and then I thought, maybe skunk poop, maybe squirrel?  I emptied the trash in the bathroom, scrubbed underneath the sink, and stuffed about four thousand lemons in my garburator.  At lunch today, I went for a forty-five minute run (rocking out to so many of your suggestions; I'll post the compilation soon but let it be said that I am so proud of the wicked-awesome taste of my readers)  When I came home I was slick with sweat, my arms prickly with the heat of mid-May sun -- and when I unlocked the door to my house -- holy shit, there was a full on stank.

The heat of the day undoubtedly elevated the problem, but now I was on a mission.  I threw out:

• one limp cucumber
• one jar of salsa, topped with green-grey mould
• one container of festering soy-milk
• a half-finished carton of soy yogourt that Nolan had unwittingly stuck back in the fridge.

I pine-soled the floors and ran around in circles trying to identify the fetid.  As a last ditch effort, I put a pan of water on the stove to boil and spritzed in some Prada perfume.

Then I sat at my desk to resume the proposal I'd been working on prior to my run.  But the dirty feet smell kept perpetuating, so I went to the stove to investigate why the perfume was not overpowering the stink.  My stove is a gas range, something I'm not really accustomed to, and I probably had the flame up too high.  I leaned over to smell the Prada bubbling in the water and WOOSH!  Half my hair disappeared in an instant.

"Holy shit, holy shit!"  No one was in the house but me and my brother's gaseous lab, the smell of burnt hair suddenly filled the entire space and negated the previously overpowering damp shit smell. 

"Oh my fucking god."

I drew one hand up to the left side of my hair.  My fucking shoulder-blade length, blond, semi-thick hair.  It's been damaged for awhile, I've been highlighting it since aged 18, and the combination of flame and product literally disintegrated half of it.  Half my hair is gone, but only on the left side.  I am not sure I can properly convey my level of disturbance.

***

I have meetings in San Francisco all day Thursday.  I have no idea how to explain why half my hair is three inches long, and the other half is eight.  I refuse to have short hair (I am tall, skinny and strong featured, I need long hair to convince the world I am a woman) and yet, I can't even put the left side of my hair in a ponytail.  Maybe it's a good icebreaker, the lack of one side of hair?

***

In other news, I and my unbalanced head finally found the source of our troubles.  Neatly lined up underneath the sofa cushions where he watches cartoons, are four or five kinds of cheeses and several kinds of fruits, in various states of petrification.

"Nolan!" I said, when I discovered it,"Why did you stick all this food in here?"
"Birdie want it," he said non chalantly.  But he did not protest as I hucked it out the window.  Neither did he notice that his Mother has an unintentional asymmetrical hairdo.  With little black ends. 

One smell is gone, another has just begun.

You got tickets to the gun show, baby?

If you have birthed a human being, and also possess an indescribable penchant for relaying your life online, you're a Mommy blogger.  It doesn't matter if you post minimally about your child, and maximally about your own life: you have birthed a human being and have chosen to write about it: therefore you're subject to very harsh criticism.  Any kind of criticism will do:  accusations of exploitation, narcissism, selfishness.

I purposely don't have any ads on this site, I want to avoid any kind of notion that I write about my life for profit, even though I knowingly write for the profitability of my own ego.  Bloggers are an opinionated, egotistical bunch: we would keep online journals if we didn't want for spectators.

Nolan turns three in August, and I have been thinking a lot about his stake in my need to write, my need for feedback and validation.  I've wondered if I should stop writing about him altogether: if his right to privacy outweighs my need for a witness. 

But no matter how objective I try to be, I can't help but think: my thoughts here, my record of my life, will be valuable to him.  How can it be a betrayal, the fact that I am open with my thoughts?  How could it be to his detriment, the fact that he will someday read about the intensity of my love for him?    How could it not be cool to look back on this journal and see a record of his weekends in living colour, set between the lines of descriptive text?

Running at low tide, among crab shells and barnacle-crusted rock, cherry-fragrant breeze swirling over a silent ocean.

Throwing rocks over the side of the dock, after a meal of szechuan garlic beans and rice with peas.

The bangs are too short, the result of a haphazard trip to the kiddy hairdresser.  I call them dork chic, my brother calls them Never Do That to Him Again.

Multiple generations, and a big fat lab.  I'm not afraid to share it.

I hope you dance, but if you don't, I'll still love you

I'd never had problems making friends, so it didn't occur to me that I might have trouble.  But I stood in the foyer of the main entrance of the High School that day in 1990, and I knew things were different.

I had corkscrew curls, painstakingly gelled, with a whallop of a wave teased and hairsprayed into pinpoint submission on top of my head.  I wore jeans so tight I couldn't breathe, a purple-and-blue striped Esprit sweater, and Keds.  I looked around hopefully at the teeming masses of students: preppy button-downs, faded Levi's, purposeful arm links and orchestrated laughter.

My taste in music was Iron Maiden, I was a Scorpion in a sea of Hootie blowfish.  I tried to make smalltalk, I busted out my big words, I tried to be funny whenever opportunity presented itself.  I didn't have a single friend for the entire tenth grade.  But before I died inside, in Mademoiselle Jordan's grade 11 french class,  Carrie rescued me.

***

There was a boy we both loved, tall and dark with studious glasses and hockey arms.  He called us the Two Tall Freaks and we giggled inappropriately, interpreting his disdain for secret interest.  One night we got it into our heads that if the high school boys didn't appreciate us, the Bar Men would, and we started stealing Carrie's Moms blazers: donning them in the hopes they would make us look older.  Using laminate and a knife blade, I manipulated our driver's licenses to make us legal.  We left our shorter friends breathless in the car as we made our rounds in downtown bars, drunk on unprecedented attention.  Fraudulent male lust made us worthy in a way we couldn't create ourselves.

***

Seventeen years later and she is curled up beside me in yoga pants and a low-cut blue shirt, platinum blonde hair framing a tired and still-beautiful face, confidence built of a hard life: a husband's suicide, a neice's death.  She is warm and beautiful and in her eyes is acceptance: she, maybe, knows me better than anyone else on the planet.  She has seen  every wart I've ever had, and still loves me.  The value of that is indescribable.  She has a baby now, born on the same day as my son, two years later.  She has a handsome husband and a pristine house in the wealthy suburbs.  She is perfect and sweet and grateful for what she's been given, despite the fact that she has earned all of it.  I work hard to keep the ugly jealousy at bay.  Parallel doors, sliding, re-opening.  She stuck her foot in and kept the doors open, wedged in, while I got distracted and chased the man with the tattoo and the toque.  She got on the train, waved through the window, yes, but boarded a train I could never get on.

***

"Are you going to get it?" she asked.
"No. It's him again."
"He just called fifteen minutes ago, he must want to talk to you about something.  Get it!"
"Should I?" I eye her warily, and pick up the phone sitting on my lap.
"Yes!"
"He called me at 1 AM on Wednesday,"I say,"I am pretty sure he just wants to get laid.  I'm not in."
"Get it," she commands.

I pick up the phone while she smiles encouragingly.  I banter a bit but make it clear I'm not a pushover.  When I hang up fifteen minutes later she says: "Ooh. You're good."
"I played the stupid game for a long time.  There are advantages to being second prettiest."

We sit on the couch with our wine and talk about babies, boys, and lost and discovered dreams.

"You have the chance to be happy,"she says,"Take it and run with it."

It was easier to believe her 18 years ago.

In three landscapes

I'm still hazy from the night before, the aftermath of burnt cheese nachos digging a hole in my tongue.  Girlfriends are a great distraction: the night was filled with cover-up laughter, butternut squash ravioli, champagne in a shiny silver bucket.  We stayed up until 5:32 AM, and when everyone had left I pulled the pockmarked quilt to my chin and watched silent blue TV, feeling like a ghost in my old city, three houses away from the place I called home only one year ago. 

***

"Can I see Jordi?" I'm wretchedly timid when I ask the question.  A blue Gatorade sits in my coffee cup slot,  Wilco providing a wistful soundtrack in the CD player.  Mel has given me her car and my cell phone has one line till death.  I have no chattering little boy beside me, I feel fraudulent and slightly fragile.
"I'll be here till one."  He is curt but the implication is there.  Yes, you can come get him. 

The dog is mercifully unchanged: enormous white ears and scrupulous black eyes, asking me, "You human?  I thought you don't come round no more."

I take him to the dog park close to downtown, where he behaves shockingly, stealing biscuits in the melting mud and brown grass. The sky in Calgary is huge and promising: here, you can be anything you want to if you have the right boots.

"Jordi, come here," I urge, and he promptly ignores me, lazily sauntering over once he has ended his sniff of the dog shit in the green can. "What's that on your neck?"
He is wearing a silver pendant that says "I love NY" on his dog collar.  Something not put there by my ex, something not put there by a male.  I resist the urge to unchain it and throw it in the growing mud puddles.

***

The airport scene is as crappy as always, bludgeoned by Mel's good-intentioned presence.
"How are you, it's been a long time,"she says, and though he has no reason to dislike her, he snaps away from her, angry at her attempt to touch his arm.

"That went well," I said after, because compared to most drop-offs, it had.
"Really?" she asks, incredulous.  "Really?"

***

The phone rang this morning.
"Looks like I'll be moving there in the fall,"he says, and at first I am overwhelmingly relieved, for our son.  And then, for a minute, I can't breathe. 

Broken City

God, Internet, not to get all dramatic on your pixelated asses, but I am having a blog crisis again.  It happened every few months at my old blog, and in this new one I promised myself I'd be less personal, more story-oriented, leave so much more to the imagination.  But when I arrive at this open slate, this empty text box, the words seem to tumble out of their own accord, relegating my inner moderator paralyzed.  I feel like so many times, I say too much.  And all those other times, I say something kind of wistful, negative.  I don't think I will shut it down again, not yet, anyway, but the question is always posed behind my forehead somewhere: what do I hope to gain from this blog?  What is the point in baring my soul to strangers?  In many ways, it's healing, but in so many ways, it's kind of insane.

I can be a little bit funny, did you even know that?  I haven't written a funny post in a long time, and it feels like a shame.  I laugh uproariously at least once a day, but by the time I have a minute away from work to post a blog entry, I seem to revert to the melancholy. 

***

I want to tell you about my weekend in Calgary, about birthday dinner with my insane girlfriends, about taking my ex-dog for a walk in the dog park, where he misbehaved shockingly and ate all the biscuits from a nearby pet-training class, but I'm not sure I have it in me tonight, so can I leave it to you?

I'm making an Ultimate Mix Tape, called 33, which I hope will remind me of this year and the last one.  I found a new song, recommended by Tamara last week, and I've been blasting it endlessly in my Jeep ad nauseum.  I want to make the Ultimate CD, one I can listen to every day of this year and not get sick of it, and I'd love your input.  What song signifies 2007/2008 best for you?  I'm going to add it to my iTunes and hope for writing inspiration, and maybe I'll send t you a copy of the final compilation.  If you want.

Happy

I am swamped-busy right now, and might have time to post tonight -- but in response to a number of emails I've been getting I just want to say: I am not sad!  Really, I'm a pretty happy, well-adjusted person, grateful for the innumerable awesome things in my life.  I tend to write late at night, as an introspective and healing and contemplative process, and please remember that what I post her is maybe 1/750th of myself.  Maybe 1/973rd.  It's a pebble in a lake, a flake in a snowman.

I'll perhaps dish about the weekend in Calgary when I am not buried in proposals and presentations, and in the meantime, here's some pictures.

A sprinter and a lolloper, guess which is which?

Spirits and the spirited.

One other thing: one of my all-time favourite bloggers, Rebecca Woolf of Girl's Gone Child is going to be in my fair city at Sophia Books tomorrow night to promote her new book, Rockabye.  I've met her before and she is fairly awesome and her writing is spectacular. Vancouver area bloggers/readers care to join?  I have the feeling you'll love her.

Stirred

In the early days, he smoked so much pot he talked like he was half asleep.

"Heeyyy."  Every lazy syllable he uttered rolled out of his mouth like he'd been savouring it too long in his mouth,"Heyy there."

I thought it was hot, dangerous, his lackadaisical sexiness, and I went out of my way to learn his music: strange angry bands: Monster Magnet, 10 Foot Pole.  I began to love them all for his sake.  When he asked me whether I was into the snowboarding scene, I arranged an insta-trip to the Mountains with my brother, pleading with him to teach me to shred like I'd been riding for 10 years.  The first day, I had green-and-purple bruises covering every inch of my skinny ass.  The second day, I was teetering and angry.  By the third day, I called my interest.

"Of course I can ride,"I said,"Let's go this weekend, and make sure you can keep up."

He conquered jutting, angry cliffs with expert precision and there was something about his defiance and confidence that ingratiated me deeply.  He looked like Kurt Cobain, slightly messy blonde hair and piercing eyes.  He even wore flannel shirts. 

We were together, on and off, for almost eight years.  I hurt him so badly and so terribly I'll never talk about it on this blog.  I am deeply ashamed to this day.

***

In the mail this week I received an envelope, white with neat black cursive, from a street in Northeast Calgary.  I opened it quickly, his girlfriend's tight prose thanking me for the baby gift, several pictures of their gorgeous newborn son looking every inch like his father.  I smiled wistfully, remembering our first date, the time he brought me to a party filled with aloof snowboarders chugging dark beer and listening to Angry Youth music.  I was so nervous I got wasted, knocking over a carefully orchestrated wall of beer cans.  I was the square head preppy in a sea of oversized jeans and custom bindings; they smiled and tolerated me because he was clearly intrigued by something...perhaps by the fact that I was his polar opposite in every way.  I wanted to be as free flowing as he was, as disinterested and confident as they were.

***

I grip the back of his head, knowing it's wrong.  His hair is thinner, his face rounder, he has the same long scar under his left eye, from the collision with an out-of-bounds rock from 2001.  But there is exquisite comfort in the familiarity, so familiar and beautiful that I'm reckless, fearless of the consequences.

"I'm sorry,"I gasp,"And I'm not."
"I still think about you,"he whispers,"Every day."

Inevitably, she finds out, though in the landscape, it's not clear how.  She is understandably furious, they have a newborn, she has always been wary of our friendship borne of memories and sex. 

I am ashamed and offensive.

"But I had him for eight years and I..."
"You,"she spits,"are a selfish bitch."
I cannot say anything, because she is right.

I wake up and can't shake the dream for the entire day.

Flailing

A local number chimes on my cell phone, and I try to distract Nolan from engaging in conversation with a studious hipster absorbed with his black macbook while I fumble through lip gloss, big boy underwear, and scattered receipts in my blistering cesspool of a purse.

"Hello?" I am safe to use an informal greeting; I don't have any clients in my own city.
"Hey.  How do you spell your last name again?"
I pause.  He had text messaged me early in the day, bantering about me buying him dinner if he promised to sport a g-string.  He has a nice bum. I'd responded, declining the g-string invitation but asking him when he wanted to meet again, and I hadn't heard back.
"I don't know if I should tell you," I said finally," You'll google me and find stuff you don't want to find."
"I want to find!  Did you write about me?"

I'd told him I did, but that it was in a secret place, and though I promised the link, I got cold feet and didn't follow through.  But I think, if I had, he'd be OK with it.  I've pegged him as an exhibitionist.   He would love the houseladies.

"I may have," I hedged,"I may not have."
His laugh is throaty and infectuous and I take my son's hand as he reaches for his cooled chocolate soy milk.
"Hey, I'm going to play lacrosse tonight,"Justin says,"But I have a few hours before I have to go.  Other than that, my week is shot, and I have to be in Toronto all next week for meetings."

I ponder.  I was horribly good at the hard-to-get game back in the day; I credit my precision-crafted wiliness for landing  the vast majority of my long-term boyfriends.  Feign callousness, they will come.  It's sadly true.

"I can't," I say finally,"My parents are having a dinner thing tonight."
"Oh." he sounds disappointed,"I'm done at 10:30, would that be too late?"
"I'm a night owl,"I replied,"Why don't you call me when you're done?"

***

I went home, cardboard latte cup empty and carrying a new shirt dress; I have been running and my legs are toned, the only firm place on my body.  I want to exploit them while I can.

He called on his way to lacrosse and then again at 11:36, when he was done.  That could only mean a booty call, and for that I am not ready.  I didn't pick up.

***

I don't want to psycho-analyze every detail of the Single Mom Dating Scene.  But it's messed up, you know?  I have to be picky, I have to plan in advance, I have to think of my son first and nothing is fly-by-underpants, like it was when I knew what I was doing.   Justin is the first man I've met in five years who creates butterflies in my pit, but I don't want to cling to that, I want the goddamned morphed caterpillers to fly elsewhere.   I was OK on my own, doing just fine, I'm not sure I want to open myself up to any kind of emotional remorse.  Plus, I'm aware of my own ridiculous flakiness.  Is the effort worth the dismay of the knowledge of inevitable incompatibility in a month or so?

I texted him this morning, I'm sorry I missed your call last night, and so far no response.  My gut tells me he might be a player, my heart says, please don't put me in a position where I might break again.   I am relatively presentable, on shiny days I can be smart, but the fact that I am almost in my mid-thirties with a pre-schooler dictates a distinct disadvantage on the Ideal Girlfriend spectrum.  It's nights like these I am overcome with an overwhelming urge to email the ex,"What we had was special, can't we bury it, start over?" And yet I know this notion is insane, on every level.

I'm a serial monogamist, not a dater.  Sometimes, it seems, the risk might not be worth the potential reward.