Judge-Mental

 

Dating apps must be bad for karma because the task of chucking someone out based on how they look makes me feel like shit. Sometimes the decision is easy, like when a man’s profile picture is a selfie taken from his belly button, and he looks like someone who spends a lot of time on the dark web.

After judging their picture, it’s off to the one to three sentences they write about themselves. Some don’t bother, which is a shame because I have to make up who they are in my mind completely, and I go to extremes, either giving them a long rap sheet or plaque for best-person-of-the-year. 

One person wrote, “I am looking for a woman who isn’t evil.” He looked like the kind of guy who’d punch someone in the face in line at a water park for not saying ‘excuse me’ after bumping shoulders; volatile, short-fused, and oddly particular about manners.

Once there’s a match, we move to messaging. I am conscious that most people don’t spend hours at night reading and their days scribbling notes of funny thoughts or observations to use during a carved-out writing time when their kids are at their dad’s house, so it’s alright if it’s basic.

When someone asks how my day was, I give an anecdote from the day. On Tuesday, I got some good mileage telling people how I accidentally set a bag of groceries on fire when I placed the bag on the stovetop. I came back from the car with the remaining bags, and my kitchen was full of smoke. 

One person replied, “You’re sexy,” and it made me hate him so much more than the person who replied, “neat.”

One guy blocked me after asking me what I thought about the app, and I wrote, “My cousin recommended this app after I told him the one I had used was full of disgusting perverts. In the previous app, 90% of the men looked like convicts, and in this app, it’s more like 70%. I haven’t gone out on any dates yet, but I have one set up for Sunday, but honestly, I can’t tell if that guy is part of a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme.”

It was too real, or too negative, or maybe he is a part of the cryptocurrency influencer community.

I canceled the date for Sunday because my horoscope has been adamant about me listening to my intuition. After I reread the message chain between us, there were multiple red flags that I might be repeating an old pattern. He was (1) an artsy guy, who (2) talked about the many irons in the fire, one of which was (3) just about to take off. Reading that third one sent a shiver down my spine. My sister even agreed, “He’s almost 50, that mother fucker should already be flying.”

It’s hard to be so judgmental, and it feels gross to have negative emotions for someone I don’t even know. I think I could be carrying the negativity around with me.

I was substitute teaching in Special Ed last week. I was instructed to sit on the right side of the class, where the “biters” sat. One of the aids showed me a horrible scar on his forearm where a kid clamped down on him earlier in winter. The boy they said did this looked like a cherub-angel-child, and I loved how he’d smile at the moving clouds and delight in a swaying tree branch.

The kid I sat next to was nonverbal, and he went onto his iPad and pushed a button that said, “ugly.” My gosh, that was hurtful. Then he did it again. I listened to The Telepathy Tapes, so I was led to believe this kid could be thriving in an alternate dimension, and he’s seeing my higher self with all its judgmental warts and decided to read me. I put my sweater on to protect my forearms, but it turned out to be unnecessary - he stopped slagging me off.

I read people’s reactions to The Telepathy Tapes on Reddit. There are two distinct camps among the people who are willing to write about it. I can’t say I fully embrace either side, but it is interesting and cool to think about.

While on Reddit, I received a notification that someone replied to a comment. I don’t comment on Reddit, but my daughter does. She was defending Taylor Swift and damning some guy named Scooter who screwed her over.

When I asked her about this guy, she clenched her teeth and told me she hated him. I said, “Don’t you think you should save your hate for someone you have a closer connection to?”

She said, “Fuck Scooter.”

So I said, “Yeah, fuck that guy,” because were family, so I hate who she hates. Maybe that’s a better use of my hate, and helpful for my karma.

Hold On

 

I make a point of not giving advice because I’m utterly terrible at it. Once a friend confessed to me she was cheating on her husband and was doing cocaine regularly, and I suggested she listen to Hold On by Wilson Philips.

So when students come into my office, with a wide range of personal problems, I listen thoughtfully, and the most I say is a generic plea for them to keep at it and stay strong. Lately, I’m finding I have to do this with coworkers who are forced to pivot careers after recent budget cuts.

A colleague came into my office to chit-chat about her situation, and she stopped mid-sentence after doing a double-take when looking at my whiteboard. She asked, “Are those tampons?”

Lined up on the little silver tray at the bottom of the board were four tampons I forgot to put in my purse. She said they look like dry-erase markers anyway.

The school has free period products. I take pads and tampons from the gym too. The pads from the gym are a last resort, but they’ve come in handy during a pinch. They are about an inch thick and very sad in length. You better not shift in your seat wearing one of them, or it's bound to be disastrous.

Kiki saw the complimentary products in their smartly packaged cardboard containers, lining the bottom of my tote bag, and said, “You’ll take every tampon in town that isn’t nailed down.”

This made me laugh, but I defended myself and my choices. “Darling, these programs are meant to be used. Women should always have access to these products. Besides, I pay a lot of money for our gym. This hardly makes up for the stretches of time when I don’t utilize my membership.”

Over the last month, I was way too busy to go to the gym, although it would have helped with stress management. I passed out final exams in one of my classes and told my students I’m absorbing their stress because I had a cold sore, and my eye started twitching.

I’m sure a helpful hippie woman could easily diagnose me, but I’m a walking sponge of other people’s energy. By the end of the term, I’m interacting with 120 students daily, and I get to a point where I have my period twice a month. I enjoy maybe two days where I’m not PMSing. There’s got to be an easy fix, like sunglasses or a lead vest.

I read Chelsea Handler’s latest book, and she has the opposite problem. Where I will start my period if I’m around anyone on their’s, she has the power to give women periods from being around her. She calls herself an alpha-period, which makes me the most beta-period. I used to call myself superwoman from this strange phenomenon, thinking I’m tapped into the divine feminine energy, but maybe I’m just way too easygoing.

During the two-hour test, I read my book and kept an eye out for cheaters. My God, is that the most uncomfortable and sad situation to find myself in. My sister was texting me, too. Every day, she lets me know about her most recent bowel movement. I think it’s because she’s a nurse. After I give her congrats or condolences, I tell her about mine. She genuinely cares. We always conclude that everything is better when we eat three prunes a day.

She told me about my brother and his family visiting last weekend, and I told her about the kids and I visiting our parents and little sister. Over the weekend, we all ate dinner at my aunt's and uncle’s house. I told my uncle, “If you know of any single men to set me up with, I’m ready.”

He might have been looking at my cold sore when he replied, “Oh, ok.”

Then I went on describing the perfect person I was looking for, and he thoughtfully listened. When the get-together ended, we said our goodbyes. I grabbed my purse with a hundred tampons and queued up Wilson Philips for the car ride home.

Sometimes the advice you offer others is exactly what you need to hear yourself.

Eavesdropping on the Past

 

I found my sixth-grade journal and showed it to my daughter, who was dealing with some friend drama, to show her it’s normal. We laughed over an entry where a girl I hung out with told my friends I looked like I drooled - I ended it by calling her “the biggest bitch in the world.”

There were more juicy stories, like when a kid embarrassed me in class for “flirting,” and I proudly told him to “stop picking his butt.” The funny part? I remember the boy, and I thought he drooled.

Almost every entry was about a boy I liked, complete with details, only to declare two pages later that I liked someone new. Looking back, I was mesmerized by guys who looked twenty and probably ended up in juvie instead of finishing high school.

My kids cracked up over a three-page entry about how fine Brian Austin Green was. I forgot I was such a boy-crazy kid. I remembered professing my love for Eddie Furlong after watching Terminator 2, and my brothers and sisters teased me endlessly. I’m pretty sure that guy ended up in adult juvie.

Last week, my daughter and I went to dinner at a pub. She wanted to try poutine, and Google sent us to a place called The Fat Rabbit. It smelled delicious, like spilled beer.

We sat in a booth. There were partitions between them, like an old train car. When we walked in, the woman in the booth next to us smiled, and we said hello. Her guy was getting drinks and joined her after we sat down, so I never saw him.

I couldn’t help but listen to their conversation. They were on a first date. She talked about her son in college and that she took a break from dating, but she’s getting back on the horse. Then the man said his wife of twenty years filed for divorce two days earlier.

I felt bad for the woman; she finally musters up the strength to put herself out there, only to end up with a guy still in the infirmary tent after a grenade blew up his life. Now she’s his Florence Nightingale, pulling him through the night so he doesn’t drown in twelve beers and sad songs. His grief became hers. I guess thats how to cope, offload pain in small doses until it’s light enough to carry.

I was scrolling through an app when I saw a headline: “Why Seeking Joy is Better than Seeking Happiness.”

I figured anyone who clicked on it was clinically depressed. The author likely spent years turning this into a PhD thesis, meticulously dissecting and ranking two things most people don’t even bother to tell apart.

Imagine the resentment after years of this nonsense. The writer probably cringes at the words joy or happiness, now doomed to repeat the same talk at every regional TED event until they latch onto their next big distinction, like the difference between canary and lemon yellow.

I showed my daughter my old journal so she’d see that friend drama fades. With time, it becomes just another entry, and without writing it down, it would have vanished forever. I wrote it to offload pain, but thirty years later, it gave us a good laugh. Joy or happiness? I don’t know, I wasn’t sad enough to read the article. It felt good, and that’s what matters.

Gentle Wake Up Calls

 

I gently wake my daughter up in the morning before school, and she turns off the light and goes back to sleep. I continue doing this, and after a while, she screams, “Why are you yelling at me?”

I never yell at her to get ready, but I probably should since she thinks I am.

I did yell at the kids after an automated text message from their school informed me they were missing a ton of assignments. I tutor in the afternoon a couple of days a week, and the kids tell me before I leave that they are all done with homework, so they grab snacks and turn on the TV. Lies. I felt bad after I yelled at them and went to bed, hoping I didn’t hurt their self-esteem, but laziness is despicable, and I think it's worth the trade-off.

Geoffrey and I started taking care of his make-up work. He refused to make a change on one of his assignments, where the teacher commented, “Who is he?” About his summary of an article on a prehistoric man. I told him to change “he” to “the prehistoric man.” He refused and said, “She knows exactly who I am talking about,” and he pushed submit as I was screaming, “Nooooo!” In slow motion, lunging for the laptop.

It’s like he doesn’t care about getting an A in the class.

When G was little, maybe six years ago, I took him and Kiki to my work. We were in the photocopy room when another instructor came in. She saw the kids and wanted to talk to them, so she leaned over and gave the usual greetings. I am not even kidding here. Geoffrey looked at this woman and asked, “Why do you look like a man?”

I think I left my body. I blacked out what happened next, but I probably apologized and told G he was not funny. 

This story makes Kiki laugh, and it is funny even though I was traumatized. Kiki asked, “Did you hit him?”

Like Puff Daddy, I said, “You can't hit your kids in public.”

I wasn’t going to hit my kids. G loves the shock value. He tells me he is an atheist, and I am in denial and tell him, “No… that’s not true.”

He told me he won’t start the confirmation classes next year, but I have my ways to convince him, like a new Nintendo Switch. I’m explaining to him, this is fundamental, while he takes care of this, he is free to explore his beliefs, but my Grandparents expect this of me.

I’ve been talking religion a lot, but it’s because of these classes I attend as part of Kiki’s confirmation process. It will move to the back of my mind next week after our last class for the school year.

I love going to the parent classes because it’s a fun hang. Religion might bring us all to the room, but sometimes we just talk about the Real Housewives. We also feel free to say the things we don’t like about the religion, like the belief that unbaptized babies go to hell. Yes, that is a freaking thing people believe, but it is obviously malarky. 

Kiki has questions after the classes. Things I’ve had to tell her: 1) we can’t be mad at the people who say bad things about gays and divorces, they don’t know that they are being assholes, 2) It is fine to believe abortion is ending a life, but it’s not okay to judge a woman for making that decision, and 3) the fixation with virginity is disgusting and manifests itself in violent ways.

I’ve watched every cult docuseries made, and one evening in class, the teacher explained it is a sin not to give money to the church. I was struck by the similarities between the church and the cults. My heart dropped. It was a moment of such intense panic and fear. For the first time, I had the thought, “What if this is all a lie?”

I don’t care about the rules of the religion being a lie. I’m driven by familial obligation, and I disregard rules that go against the ultimate belief that God is nonviolent and loving. The fear was more about God and my son being right.

The moment passed. Too many weird things have happened for me to believe there isn’t an afterlife. I think there’s evidence all around and within; inexplicable dreams, premonitions, feelings, and spontaneous thoughts.

This week, I had a dream about my kids’ dad. I was mad at him over $80, and since I've got my mind on my money and money on my mind, I wouldn't let it go. I dreamed I stuck two nails into his eyes, but his head was filled with dirt and looked like a potato. I said, “You owe me $80,” as I drove the nails in, like a psycho mob boss. But then he turned into an old Hollywood actress standing in the doorway in a silk gown, and a tear streamed down his face. I woke up and decided to drop the $80. 

I get messages in dreams, through the way my children respond to their responsibilities, or in the wild, unexpected words of a four-year-old. God - except for the case of the ladder - speaks to me gently, like a mother waking her daughter with a soft whisper. Then it’s up to me: do I get up and listen, or hit life’s snooze button and pretend none of it happened?

February is Over

 

We watched the movie Premonition last night. Sandra Bullock jumps through time to days leading up to and after her husband dying in a car accident. Sandra learns her husband was planning to have an affair, but because she can go back in time, she rekindles their love. The love scene starts with Sandra kneeling in front of him. I’m watching with the kids and dreaded having to explain what a BJ is, but the intimate scene was her removing his shoes, like a servant.

My kids were dual-screening, playing games on their iPads while watching, so they weren’t as invested in the story, but they didn’t mind that I spent the last fifteen minutes screaming at Sandra, giving her great advice she couldn’t hear.

While deciding on the movie, I suggested Last of the Mohicans. We watched the trailer, and Geoffrey immediately said no because it looked too old, and my gosh, he was right. The movie looked like it was filmed in the 1950’s.

Shutterfly sent me an email with a picture from eight years ago. It was Geoffrey drinking a milkshake, and I remember that day very well because it was the day after his dad came home from a work trip and dumped my ass like a bitch. I couldn’t believe how much time passed. The picture didn’t look Last of the Mohicans old; it looked like it just happened.

I was having a “You’ve come a long way, baby” moment without the Virginia Slim, thinking about the last eight years. There are stages to post-divorce life. The first stage is fun and games. I’ll call this the return to party girl. A woman unleashed, all of a sudden having two days off a week, and dives into slutting and drinking. 

Once that ended, because a mid-thirties party girl isn’t sustainable, I entered the second stage, where I became delusional and said things like, my ex is my best friend.

This is quite common, and I hear plenty of celebrities regurgitate this garbage in post-divorce interviews. It is said with the best intentions to help the kids, but it most likely leads to confusion. What do kids think when the two people raising them reiterate how they are great friends? They’re probably like, “Oh great, best friends, perfect, now you both can stop making me pack up my life every three days to go back and forth from houses.”

I don’t think I should have said something extremely negative, like, “We're divorced because I find him to be a dishonest you-know-what-sucker. But that’s just me.”

When my daughter was in therapy, her therapist told her, “Your parents don’t like each other.” I think that was the first time she heard that. I know now I should have straight-up said this to my daughter early on. I’ll make better choices during my second divorce.

After hearing me argue with his dad, Geoffrey asked me if I hated his dad. I told him, “Your dad gave me the most beautiful life. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have my kids, so I don’t hate him and never could hate him. He’s just grouchy, and I’m not here for it.”

Some honesty. I didn’t say grouchy you-know-what-sucker, just grouchy.

I don’t know what to call the next stage, commit to the life I dreamed up as an eight-year-old but was derailed from teenage psychosis. Life goals are great, but they are tested by the brutal relentlessness of February. 

Poor G had the worst flu; it lasted two weeks. He lost ten pounds, going from skinny to emaciated. Stressed out by his loss of appetite, I fixed him snacks all day long. He’d be repulsed by the sight, so I’d eat it, sitting in front of him and describing the flavors trying to entice him.

Needless to say, all my clothes shrunk because of eating all the snacks I was making G. If I had Sandra Bullock’s time jumping powers, I’d go back to advise my slimmer self to size up when buying cute clothes.

After G rejected a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I presented it to Kiki, she waved it off and said, “I won’t eat peasant food.”

A thirteen-year-old is going to come at you with some crazy shit, but I was thinking this might be evidence of reincarnation. I asked her, “Where on earth did you hear such a thing because around here, we don’t call a PBandJ peasant food, it’s just called food?”

She said, “It was in Ratatouille.”

I must have been dual-screening because I missed that line.

Kiki stays with me more lately; maybe it's the 13-year-old energy not vibing with the grouchy energy. We get lots of girl time; she plays me Taylor Swift songs, explaining the back stories and how they're intertwined. Sometimes, she tears up from the songs. Then I tear up because I’m loving the moment.

Every other week, we go to Kingsley’s confirmation class. She goes to her class, and the parents have a separate class. I like it, I’m learning more about the church than I ever did, and the ladies I sit with are hilarious.

In the class, we learn about mass, catholicism, and prayers. I’ve been Catholic my entire life and did all the things, but I don’t know much. Sometimes, our teacher gives us a lesson standing at the podium,  but other times, she plays YouTube videos. 

My jaw dropped the first time she played one; the priest was smoking hot. There’s a slew of videos with these hot priests. I told my table during the group discussion, “I’ve never seen a priest that looks like that.”

My little sister knew of the hot priest, she has his app and listens to his homilies. I described the distinction between the video priests and the ones I’ve seen in real life. Most priests I’ve seen in real life sound like contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race. I told Becky how last year I went to my church on a weekday to drop off paperwork; our priest was walking the grounds holding a parasol above his head and carrying a small wicker basket in the other hand. He wasn’t skipping and swinging the basket like one might expect a contest would on Queen of the Universe, but it was still a sight to behold.

My sister covered her mouth and gasped. Her face reddened, she did the sign of the cross and said, “I don’t think you should say that.”

Lent kicked off, and I did my usual Lenten sacrifice: I gave up alcohol. This irritated my older sister, who said, “You’re sober, you can’t do that.”

I told her to stop being so jealous of how pious I am, sacrificing all year round.

That’s the phase I’m in now: choosy about my sacrifices. Thank God my daughter schools me on music, my son is healthy, and for hot priests because February is over, and it’s time to take in the sunshine.