Cruising

 

The kids and I went cruising at the end of July. In the end, cruising is about swimming, sun, and food, so now I know, it is not necessary to fly halfway around the world to go on one.  A solo backpacker traveling through a foreign country may be able to envision themself as a sort of culture pirate, but when you are on a cruise, these delusions do not even cross your mind, as it feels more like a six-day field trip with an adult preschool.

Our trip started in Venice, a city exploding with tanned, shirtless men in jeans carting things about on a dolly with a cigarette hanging from their lips. Thousands of Streetcar-Named-Desire-Marlon-Brandos are busily moving about this city, making it gorgeous and functional. 

My kids were confused by the prevalence of cigarette smoking. They come from a generation where they’ve been conditioned to think smoking is as bad as shooting a rhinoceros. It was effectively nonexistent on TV for the last fifteen years, and if it weren't for vaping, it could have been wiped from young people’s lives.

After Venice, we got on the cruise, and it was fun in the Mediterranean sun. We’d go on exciting excursions, hot-tub at night, and have meals in the restaurant with our two exotic waiters. One of them loved Miami, Florida, and he’d loom around our table like a new kid at school wanting to pull up a chair. I’d feel him looking at me, and then when I’d look up, his eyes would dart away. I couldn’t tell if he was socially awkward or if it was me.

Around the fourth day into a vacation, I have to suppress the desire to say, “That was fun, I’m ready to go home now.” Because I don’t want to flip a switch where everything goes from exciting and new to old and dull, I prefer the gradual change of a dimmer knob.

I don’t drink, and my companions are twelve and thirteen years old, who will climb into a game and start talking about Bomb-bomb-bombing-goose and Tee-tee-tee-gas-whore, where I have no idea what's going on.

I’d go to the gym in the morning and walk around in the afternoon. Sometimes I’d sit in a chair on a deck that was in the middle of the boat. It looked out to the endless ocean. I’d drink coffee and feel like I was getting in touch with God, sending him a mental email that wasn’t about much more than the awe of vast nothingness.

I’d come back into the boat, and the exact opposite state of mind would take over. The ship, like an ant farm, appears choreographed. Walking on the pool deck in the evening, the swimming pool was the same color as a clogged toilet. The tanned, bloated bodies fanning out from the pool, splayed like gunned-down soldiers. A No Doubt cover band is taking care of the five-gun salute. This is humanity, I thought. This boat could sink, and it would make no difference in the world.

The trip home was an epic disaster. I will spare the play-by-play, but eighteen hours of flying was stretched into forty-eight. I didn’t get any sleep and looked like I hadn’t seen a shower in days. When we set out on this journey, I put on my cleanest clothes, but they were clean for a reason. My Jorts, oversized low-rise jean shorts that go below the knee, are something Gwen Stefani wore in the year 2000. I find them fashion-forward; my daughter finds them nauseating. 

When we were back in the States, I could call my sisters again. They tether me from a complete collapse of self, and they make me laugh. I told Lacey I was looking like a cactus-faced bum, and she told me to send her a picture. Kiki took a full-length shot of me, and the response was immediate. “Oh bitch, you’re wearing Asics!”

My older sister is a brain surgery nurse (I don’t know the technical term, but some high-pressure bad ass shit) and the only TV she watches is Disney Plus with her three kids, but for some reason, she has the banter of a seasoned RuPaul contestant. She saves this hilarious part of herself for her family. Sometimes our phone conversations are like finding buried treasure. I greedily cram as much of it into my memory as possible, knowing no one else will get to enjoy this.

My younger sister and her family went on a cruise out of San Francisco, and jealousy pulsated through my veins because they didn’t need to get on an airplane. When she came home, we compared our notes, and she commented on the number of people who were rascal-fat, incapable of walking, but zipping into that buffet room. I told her it sounded like the Steve Jobs movie, Wall-E, where they make fun of fat people for an hour and a half.

My cruise didn’t have that. Maybe it is just an American thing, and the flight would certainly kill anyone that size. There are a lot of people still smoking in Europe. Not vapes, but good-ol ciggies. Maybe the obesity epidemic in the US is correlated with the decline of cigarette smoking. It seems more likely to me than fast food because fast food isn’t just an American thing; it’s available all around the world.

This will all start to change with GLP-1s, and to be honest, I’m fucking jealous. I wish I could get on one; it would be amazing to have no appetite, one less thing to think about. I don’t care if I become terrifyingly thin like Karen Carpenter, so fragile I’d need to use a rascal for fear my bones would snap when I swat a fly away from my decaying body.

After we came home from our trip, I had a month before my summer vacation ended. I’m working on multiple writing projects that I planned to tackle, but without a deadline, I flailed. I watched eight hours of TV a day, read ten books, and snacked like there was no end to my appetite. I chew my stupid nicotine gum with such ferocity, I’ll probably end up with the jawline of a pit bull. 

On a cruise ship, it is an effort not to dwell on the thought that the ship could sink. I fell asleep each night thinking about it. My plane route home resembled a bulletin board in a CSI room. I had no control, and after a while, I succumbed to the thought that this could all be leading up to my plane crashing. This all makes smoking a cigarette very appealing. 

I spent the last month lying on my couch like a sunbaked sea lion. I never truly enjoyed it, afraid I was making myself more and more creatively stunted with every minute I delayed writing. However, like a switch being flipped, I woke up this morning in a different state of mind. I go back to work tomorrow, and there’s so much for me to get done. 

Dead Bird

 

When I came home from visiting my parents, my house was like a sauna. Three days of no AC in the hundred-degree heat will make inanimate objects look like they’re fighting for their life.

After I turned on the air, I walked into the kitchen and saw bird feathers scattered about like a pillow exploded. I knew it wasn’t a pillow, but the work of my savage cat, Midnight. Bird poop was speckled about the floor like a Jackson Pollock, but I didn’t find the bird.

I cleaned up the crime scene and assumed the cat took the bird back outside after she used my kitchen as a canvas for a kindergartener’s art project.

Right as I peeled off my yellow kitchen gloves, the power went out. This is common when it gets hot, and I used the last bit of daylight to get myself sorted. Most of the time, when the power goes out, my phone battery is at 15% so I can’t watch Netflix. I read by flashlight, nodding in and out of sleep, while sweat beads on my forehead. It looks like I’m fighting Malaria, but it’s just a night without modern amenities.

The next morning, with power restored, I drank my coffee and googled “What does it mean to find a dead bird in a house?” Even though I didn’t find the dead bird. I’m superstitious, and I hoped this was a sign of good fortune.

I ended up on Reddit, the last place on the internet that isn’t taken over by robots. There are conflicting opinions on the dead bird, so I skipped over the “bad omens” comments and read the “new beginnings” comments.

After being validated by unqualified whack-a-doos, I moved on to my favorite subreddit,  /witches. I am not a witch, nor have I tried witchy practices, but it’s wildly entertaining; them witches be crazy.

If I were a witch, I’d sleep on a bed made of gold bars, look like Margot Robbie, and pay off everyone’s houses. These witches are struggling to make ends meet and are devastated by some asshole in their lives. It’s a lot like the old soap opera Passions.

It’s not all entertainment. Sometimes I pick up a piece of useful information. When my daughter goes off on someone, I stop her before she goes full-Midnight and say, “Don’t wish anything bad on someone because it can come back on you times three.”

The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, because she believed me.

My daughter likes Reddit too, and uses my phone to leave comments on American Dad and Taylor Swift subs. This type of activity is immediately disqualifying me from any serious corporate position, but I probably already did that with the Witch sub. Take that, Big Brother.

The most treasured app of my children is YouTube. After they came home from their dad’s, they were laughing about a song. They played it for me, and I took it in like a media analyst. I said, “That is very funny… but it seems preeeetty racist. I guess it all depends on what the guy looks like who made it.”

They don’t see it that way. Like true free-speechers, they weren’t going to let a good look in the horse’s mouth legitimize its humor. 

I repeated one line from the lyrics as an example of questionable intent, but the way I said it sounded more like I agreed. They laughed at me, and G said, “I’m going to tell my dad.”

“Go ahead.” I added, “Your dad is the most racist person I know… that’s why I married him.”

While we all giggled, my attention was pulled to a white drop of paint, like Jackson Pollock, on top of a couch cushion. I looked around and saw a few more. I leaned my head over the side of the couch, and there lay a dead bird.

“Oh my God! There’s a dead bird! This is fantastic!”

They rushed over to get a good look. I picked it up with an old Amazon package to put it in the outside trash, and said, “Do you know what this means? It’s a sign from the spirit world. We can expect new beginnings.”

Geoffrey shook his head, no, and my daughter asked to use my phone.

As I steam-cleaned the couch, I was quite impressed at how spotless my house was looking because of this dead bird. Then it dawned on me, “Is this the new beginning? A clean house!”

I heard the flap of our tiny dog door. My familiar, Midnight, coming back from God knows where.

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?