Reading and Chickens

I get asked this question a whole lot: how do you read so much?

I answered in my vlog (vlog!), but it took me six minutes and it was just me talking and…boring. I don’t know anything about video, but that can’t be interesting. So, how do I read so much?

First, I don’t read nearly as much as, say, Janssen or Elizabeth. They make me look quite slow.

Second, the actual answer is super boring. It’s that I don’t have a lot of other hobbies. I don’t like to go out with friends too much. I am not a big talker. I like to bake, but there’s only so much baking I can do without making myself sick. I don’t like much television–I can’t take dramas or anything where anyone is in danger of any kind without feeling high amounts of anxiety (Gregg is the same way, and so are my kids), so that pretty much leaves documentaries (snoooooze) or shows like Community, which constantly get cancelled or turn terrible when Dan Harmon gets fired.

So. I read.

The more complex answer is: reading is a muscle. The more you read, the faster you get, and the easier your brain processes the information. This is not to say that slow readers are dumb. This is to say that it’s like running, or weight-lifting, or anything else. You wouldn’t expect someone who had been running every single day to be in the same shape as someone who only ran twice a week, no matter what. The more you run, the easier it is for your body to run (well, unless you injure yourself), and the more you want to run. Reading is the same way. I always have a book with me. (This is one of the reasons I love e-readers–then I can have MULTIPLE books in one purse.)

The first year I started reading for fun (I was not a reader growing up–I was a TV and movie lover) was in 2002, I think. I read 30 books and felt like a GENIUS. 30! The next year I read a few more, and the year after, a few more. I can’t remember what I read last year, but it hovered around 100. I think I’ll make it past that mark by September or October this year.

I say all of this with a caveat: I do not think reading is a morally superior pastime. Sometimes it’s really not a very good one (like when I’m reading many, many trashy things). I don’t think it’s better than movies or TV or talking on the phone or hanging out with friends. It’s simply better for me. Reading and writing have saved me, but that doesn’t mean they are good for everyone. Just like I’d really like to high-five Jesus, but I can see how you might not want to. (I do not have an evangelizing bone in my body. SORRY JESUS.) Jesus isn’t for everyone. Books aren’t for everyone. Blogs aren’t for everyone. It turns out people are individuals, and we have to find the right things for ourselves.

It’s just that I can connect with words on a page better than I can connect when people are talking, and I just feel better when I watch less TV. My anxiety is at a low simmer when I don’t have to worry about those victims on CSI: Indianapolis, or wherever. AND there are a bunch of books I cannot POSSIBLY delve into (mystery, Stieg Larrrrsssssonnn books, Tana French, anything where a child goes missing or is murdered as a key plot point).

***

So, a very large part of the Internet gave me many gifts, and I feel overwhelmed by love, and totally undeserving. It is not the gifts, because your emails and DMs and comments also make me feel undeserving. Your kindness and understanding and heartfelt LIKE of me makes me feel undeserving.

And I realized that I simply CANNOT deserve you people. There is no way. I am going to try my best to be a good person, and I think that’s all I can do, or be. I need to listen to the overwhelmingly large portion of humanity that is good, always, and see the smaller, less wonderful parts as just that: small. It’s easier to overcome darkness and hate when love and light are much bigger.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The hardest part of this depression is that it has taken away my A) desire to write and B) my ability to do so anyway. I’ve written four posts this morning, all complete garbage with nonsensical thoughts. I wrote a card to a friend and I’m pretty sure it made less sense than a cryptic, wordless XKCD cartoon. (I’m sorry, Shani of five days from now, for the weird card.)

I want to WANT to write, but when I try, it’s garbage. And seeing as some of my hate mail is, “you’re just not very good at writing,” I don’t want to add fuel to the fire. I KNOW IT ALREADY, HATE MAILER. I am starting to come around, though, because I’m starting to feel sorry for the hate mailers. Like, “Oh, well, if they’re sending me hate mail, things must be pretty, pretty bad. They don’t even want to send someone big and famous hate mail? That’s a self-esteem problem right there.”

Hate mailers: aim for the stars! But not the ones on Dancing with the Stars, because those people have enough problems as it is. (Did seeing Melissa Joan Hart on Kickstarter make anyone else do an internal sad trombone?)

It is really this that’s pulling me through: everyone is doing his or her best. Everyone is thinking almost exclusively of themselves (myself included), and empathy and compassion are not as natural as we expect them to be. The only thing to do is fight darkness with light, hate with love. I am fighting my self-hate with self-love (oh hush, not that). I am trying to exercise and take in all your kind words without crumpling or rejecting them. I am trying to relax and enjoy life and people and the universe, even if the sun will explode one day so why bother.

So, I’m getting better, but it doesn’t help with the backspace-delete-backspace-select-all-delete disease that’s going on, or with my internal monologue that tells me to WRITE SOMETHING BRILLIANT. You guys, I don’t have brilliance in me. I have a lot of Melissa Joan Hart-ism in me.

Still: food is tasting foodier. I can sleep a normal amount at night. I want to do projects and things again (See that specificity there? Projects AND things.) Not everything is sad and depressing. I don’t constantly despair that WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE WHY DOES IT MATTER EVEN MELISSA JOAN CAN’T MAKE IT WORK ON KICKSTARTER.

But: my sweatpants are still the best clothing, exercise is dumb, books and writing are dumb, and I would like to live in a warm water bathtub for all of eternity. So, I’m getting there, but I’m not there. I honestly haven’t been this bad in so many years that I thought I was just making up my chronic depression before. Ha HA, self. That’s what YOU get for overestimating things.

The worst thing is that I don’t want to write about depression. (This is actually not the worst thing, Shalini. You just started this entry with “the hardest part of depression” and now we’re talking about the worst thing? *inserts rolling eyes here* The worst thing is the depression itself, dur, self.) I want to write about…I don’t know. I don’t even remember what I wrote about before that was funny and life-giving and great and non-boring. I don’t have that in me right now. But I also don’t want to abandon this place completely until I feel better, like you’re all fair weather friends. I know from the outpouring of love that it’s not true, that you’re all lovely, dear individuals, many of whom are struggling too. So, I want to WANT to write for you. I am not backspace-delete-backspacing this post for you, and for me, and for everyone struggling.

In group therapy (second stint, 2001-2004, thank you very much), there was a woman who said she was always afraid, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. To which I would say to her, “What if there is no other shoe? What if it turns out this whole time you were a one-footed woman with an extra shoe?”

And that’s why I’m not a Tibetan lama.

On Saturday I went to not one but THREE social functions. Yesterday I cleaned out my purse and cooked dinner (the dinner was eggs and toast and strawberries, but it was served at dinnertime and people ate it, so it counts). Today I went for a very, very short run, and I even wrote a little bit. I recorded a video blog and I only cried a tiny little bit when my video editing software ate it.

I know I said I was “better” in the last post, but “better” is relative. I made it to 6:45pm before crawling into bed the night I wrote that post. Today my goal is to make it until 8:30, when the boys go to sleep. It is better. I am better, but I am not whole.

I’m doing things mechanically right now in the hopes that it won’t be mechanical one day soon. I’m wearing nicer clothes and putting on makeup. I’m at least opening my Word document every day. I’m parenting my kids, not YouTubing them to death. I’m exercising and writing and cleaning and hoping.

I’m getting there, but I’m not there. Thank you for all your kindnesses. I feel completely undeserving of every kind thing you do for me, and I want to send it back to you and explain that you have it all wrong. This is ME. ME? Me. See? ME. I have sobbed a whole lot at your emails and cards and presents, and I don’t know what to do with all the love.

But I’m trying to open up and, as I read someone write on facebook (I knoooow), “I choose to receive every blessing the universe wants to give me.” I feel like a turtle (a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle) deflecting everything off my shell (or with my ninja stars), but I’m trying. Thank you. I hope to be back soon.

I’m doing better. Some things are working, like

1. A medication that my friend Sarah recommended and I talked with a professional about. (Thank you, Sarah.) And sorry I ended that in a preposition…on.

It wasn’t working at first. It was MAKING EVERYBODY SEEM LIKE THIS AND WHY ARE YOU TALKING SO LOUDLY AND ALSO I CANNOT SLEEP BECAUSE THE PEOPLE ACROSS THE STREET ARE TALKING AT TWO AM AND WHY AREN’T THEY ASLEEP AND WHY DOES MY DOG WALK SO LOUDLY AND I CAN FEEL MY GUMS IS IT WEIRD THAT I CAN FEEL MY GUMS? And then I halved the dose and felt a whole, whole lot better. So much better that I haven’t even *attempted* to take a nap today, and it’s already 10AM on the West Coast. World record? Perhaps.

2. Not being on my computer so much. I went to the drugstore and bought a bunch of notebooks and have been trying not to look at my phone or my laptop as much. I don’t know WHY that helps, but it does.

Also these new shoes help.

3. You. Oh, you. (Why wasn’t this my number one? Rearrange in your head!)

My inbox is filled with love and concern and virtual hugs and intelligent remarks and I will never, ever doubt the goodness of people because of your concern for me. You are absolutely one of the best parts of my life.  Thank you. Every kind word has helped me heal.

4. Therapy, but more specifically: realizing that I am a worthwhile human being with a purpose.

I was floundering. Sachin is starting kindergarten soon; I’ve given up on freelancing as a career path; I’m applying to librarian positions but the market is really tough for someone who hasn’t worked in a few years and my hopes were dim, low-watt bulbs on the best days; my book(s) may never be finished/well-written/liked/published.

Then I had an epiphany. I realized that I could always do something else and that (here’s the clincher) I’m intelligent.

It has been a long, hard road to write the words “I’m intelligent,” but here they are. TWICE! It’s difficult because there is the idea of humility in religion (and life), that we must lower ourselves to the ground, and there is the idea that there is always, always going to be someone smarter than I am, and who am I anyway. And there are MILLIONS of people smarter than me. (I’d say billions, but a lot of those people are babies and George W. Bush likers, so, you know, I’ve got a little edge.) Pair that with some awful personal history, and my self-esteem was not so great.

So I thought of myself as a know-nothing, an idiot, someone who would never really amount to much. I’ve been thinking this since the fifth grade, when I got a B on a math test. “Welp, that seals the deal,” I told myself. And of course it made my decisions AWFUL. I made decisions based on a lack, on an absence that wasn’t even there.

Because, you know what? I’m not dumb. I can be humble and say: I’m not dumb. I can also say that I am not a genius, not that smart at so, so many things (like knowing which side to open a mailer without getting that weird asbestos-y filling all over my living rug) (argh! did it again! darn you, mailer!), but I can also hold onto the idea that things that I really care about, that I want to get better at (I mean, besides ending clauses in prepositions or writing without parenthetical asides because that ain’t ever gonna happen, clearly), I can.

That opened everything up for me. I was full of woe because I thought I could only do a few things, because I thought I wasn’t intelligent. It was protecting me from failure and heartbreak at a certain point, but it became my albatross. I was limiting myself and…well, and dying. Plus, I had to go to all those weddings and tell that stupid story and it was totally getting in the way of my social calendar.

And after a lot of work, I’ve come to the conclusion that I like to be challenged, that I like to do hard things, that I want to get smarter and better and so on. So if I’m not feeling challenged, I guess it’s time to do something different. It doesn’t mean that I’m useless or aimless or purposeless. It means it’s time to move on. That’s it.

And I want to try something different. I’ve been watching vlogs for a while, and I love them, but I’m intimidated. I don’t know how to shoot video or edit or record or have a personality, and yet! Now I am not afraid to fail. I’m going to make a vlog (about something that has yet to be determined) and, make no mistake, it may suck. It’s probably going to suck. But I’m going to fail SPECTACULARLY. Also, you can make fun of me just by saying “vlog!”

So I need your help to fail spectacularly. (Did you just say “vlog”? I heard that.) I want to practice cutting and pasting video (is there a fancier term for that? PROBABLY) and so I want you to give me a few topics to talk about, so I can cut different videos together.

Will you ask me some questions in the comments? Pretty please? It’s for my mental health. I’m going to answer them on video for practice. I’ll hug you on camera.

This is how I’ve been blogging lately

“That man over there is looking at…”

The girl with the shiny black hair leaned in and the ends of her hair swept across the reference desk. She was me in another life, in a parallel dimension where I did something differently and ended up on the other side.

“He’s looking at porn,” she said in an embarrassed whisper, her eyes not meeting mine. She pointed very slightly to the corner of the Information Commons. I should have looked where she pointed and clucked in sympathy an, “Oh dear.” I knew the man in the filthy shirt, pants too low, scruff on his face in the most unattractive way, his dirty fingernails on the keyboard. He was always here, so I didn’t have to look.

Instead I thought about what brought me to this side of the desk, the one where the Other Me staring across the desk was the one who didn’t get it. I thought I’d go to library school to defend the First Amendment like Angela Chase in that My So-Called Life episode where she distributed the school literary magazine to everyone even though it had been censored by the principal. That was me! I was the Angela Chase of libraries!

I went to grad school when the federal government was still taking computers from libraries and scanning their contents. We, Defenders of the First Amendment, were outraged. We had plans of attack and signs if the government ever came in and took our information, or scared people from looking up what they wanted to look up. That was Superhero Librarianship, the stuff that Brooke Gladstone reported on On The Media.

But that isn’t who I was defending right then. I wasn’t defending fighters of freedom against The Man. I wasn’t even defending the poor girl in the porn video against objectification and a terrible life. I wasn’t defending my feminist beliefs. I could barely stand to watch fourteen-year-olds in miniskirts who didn’t understand the power of their sexuality yet, and yet I was defending a filthy man watching two people doing it in a library.

That is what it came down to.

So I leaned forward to this Other Me and I asked, “Was he doing anything illegal?”

“Yes! Porn!” she hissed.

“No, I mean, was it kiddie porn or, uh, anything else like that? Was he touching himself?” I looked over. The guy always kept his hands on the keyboard, in plain view, as if to tell me, “I know the rules, ma’am.”

“No. It’s just–” She reared her head back and looked at me, and then at the man. “There are children here!”

***

I’ve been trying to stay out of my bed, away from naps and anything that numbs me out. It’s difficult because the medicine I’m taking makes me wake up at 1 AM, and 2AM, and 4AM, and pace the house. I worry and I worry, so obviously, this medicine is not working like it should.

I don’t want to turn on the computer, so I pull out a notebook and write this, how un-Angela Chase it all is, how I keep thinking I’m going to wake up with a date with Jordan Catalano one day. But I’m not even asleep, so I can’t wake up.

Then I give up and I go to my laptop. I watch a lot of vlogbrothers videos. John Green says, “The truth resists simplicity.” I nod in agreement. I tell myself I should not post this. I go back to bed and don’t sleep.

***

“They have to be supervised by an adult if they’re in here,” I told her. “I can ask them to move if you’re concerned.”

“You’re going to ask the children to move? HE’S LOOKING AT PORN!”

My eyes flicked over to the man again, briefly. “Porn is information. He–he might not have a computer at home,” I whispered to her. I didn’t want to embarrass him.

***

I listened to a story on the KKK being denied the ability to do roadside cleanup in the Georgia Adopt-A-Highway program. I told Gregg, “The KKK probably wants to kill me and they don’t believe we’re married and would harm our kids.”

“Yep,” he said, always verbose.

“So why am I on their side?”

***

“I want the name of your supervisor,” the girl said, her cheeks coloring from anger or embarrassment or hatred of me. I scribbled down Monica’s information and my own, glad that I wasn’t my boss. I looked again at the pathetic man in the corner. His glasses slid down his nose and he pushed them up with his forefinger, then went back to his screen. All I could think of was how grateful I was to be privileged. I had my own computer, my own access to the Internet and information from anywhere in the world, without censorship, where I could hide my animal self away from scrutiny.

But I didn’t know why it was I was hiding or how that was a privilege, so today I hit “publish.”

I am not doing that well. This is not a pity post for you. Please don’t write me telling me I am pathetic or dramatic or lame or awful. Just stop reading if you think that of me. I don’t know why you’re here if it’s just for Schadenfreude, but go the fuck away. Right now.

This is me, marking my progress for myself, and for you, too, if you’ve ever felt like this. A lot of you have emailed me that you have, and that hearing about others struggling helps, so: I’m struggling. This is me saying I’m probably not going to answer your email or favorite your tweet or post any photos at all because I can barely (and I mean, really: BARELY) parent my children right now. It is an effort to make mac and cheese or rinse strawberries for them to eat, or sit down and do homework. I know I’m being an awful mom and I cannot stop it.

Sachin and I were reading a Richard Scarry book (I can’t remember which one–something about cars or trucks or thieves or apples or worms or letters) and at a particularly odd picture of Lowly, Sachin yelled out, “What the hell!” and I reared back and looked at my little five-year-old and realized what a mess I am. Gregg had to start a swear jar for him..

The boys have been watching YouTube videos a lot, because I barely have the energy to do anything. This is what Sachin wants to do, and I don’t have it in me to fight. So he watches, and he says things like “what the hell!” in odd juxtaposition to a children’s book with an anthropomorphic worm. What the hell, indeed, Sachin.

So he’s been watching a lot of YouTube, and also TV, and also we’ve been eating a lot of pizza. I’m getting by, kind of. My husband is being amazing, but everything feels on the surface, like any minute I could dissolve. I have to do whatever I can to keep my insides from jumping out of me.

A man honked at me aggressively for at least a minute the other day for turning right on a green light while he was turning left from the opposite direction, like I was in the wrong. Then he passed by me and gave me the bird. Because, you know, he broke the law so I was in the wrong. I felt like sobbing for two days because he honked. I live in a major American city. I should be used to this. I mean, obviously, I can internalize all this or I can let it bounce off of me, but I don’t have the bounce right now, so I internalize.

Honk = destruction of self.

Flipping the bird = self-loathing.

The color gold = hope and wealth. Oh, wait, that’s The Great Gatsby.

Sachin finished swimming lessons today sobbing because he couldn’t do what his instructor asked. She turned her back and I held him, dripping wet, as he soaked me and sobbed against my chest.

“What’s wrong?’ I asked him finally.

“Nothing!” he yelled, crying some more. I towel-dried his hair and held him in my lap and let the chlorine water drip all over both of us.

Then later he said, “It’s too hard.”

“I know,” I said. “I get it.”

People don’t necessarily understand a metaphorical thin skin, but I’m not making it up that I walk around with a tight ball of anxiety, that every little thing slips into my mental reserves, that when anything at all goes wrong (“I spelled anthropomorphic wrong! Obviously I’m an idiot! I hate me!”) it is a very great effort to do basic things like take out the trash lately.

All the Internet hoopla was terribly ill-timed last week. Depression, get with the program! Stop being so sensitive! I don’t have time for you! Et cetera. I’m trying. It’s worse.

I’m writing this because I keep getting emails saying, “I’m worried about you,” and I just don’t have it in me to lie any longer. I’m worried about me too. I’m being a bad mom and a lazy person and a glutton and letting everything get to me. This is not professional. I do not want to tell this to you. I want to work and run and wear fun clothes and BE HAPPY DAMMIT. I don’t want to be at the bottom, admitting it, but I am.

I am trying to snap out of it. I am trying to be awesome. I am utterly failing. I always want a nap and I am trying my best to be resilient and it is just not working. Not even a little bit. I don’t know exactly when I’ll be back, but probably after I have the energy to get my kid to stop swearing.

So last month I read an incredible book, The Marriage Plot by some guy who won the Pulitzer (for Middlesex, a book I totally haven’t read yet because I’m still on the library waiting list because libraries are chronically underfunded, even in cities like Seattle where more people read than, like, blink) (FACT*).

In The Marriage Plot there’s a scene in where a character says, “Books aren’t about real life. Books are about other books.” And ever since I thought that, my tiny, vitamin-addled (I don’t do recreational drugs) (ANYMORE**) brain has been going, “Is that true?”

Well, is it?

On the one hand, yes, books reference other books. Books like The Marriage Plot reference a ton of other books, like Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch and On Deconstruction and apparently 46 others. The whole book is about how books can’t have a “marriage plot” any longer (by which Eugenides means that books can no longer center around the stress of the main character finding a suitable marriage which includes romantic love, financial stability, social status, et cetera***) and so in a sense, this book is about other books.

But the book is also about a love triangle, about bipolar disorder, about graduating college, about aimlessness, and so the book is about books, but it’s also not about other books. It’s about real life, or at least real life through the filter of fictional characters that can have any situation happen because they’re not bound by conventions of time or space. So, you know, not really real, but kind of real.

To give another example, I heard Maria Semple speak, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette? (which you should totally read if you haven’t already and everybody I’ve recommended it to has loved with the exception of my dad, who stopped right in the middle of the book because he couldn’t accurately foreshadow the ending) (I mean, WHO DOES THAT?****). She said she wrote the novel as she was processing how her first novel was a total and complete flop, and she was dealing with her failure, so she wrote Bernadette as an artist also dealing with a failure.

So, in that way, Bernadette is about real life, too, about Semple’s life, through the filter of a character who is likely very much like Semple, but not. And that novel’s not nearly as referential to other books as The Marriage Plot, so it’s not so much about other books.

EXCEPT.

Except that Bernadette is a book within a book. The format is a bunch of letters and emails and memos and grocery receipts and (YOU TOTALLY ARE GOING TO WANT TO SKIP THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK BECAUSE I’M ABOUT TO SPOIL SOMETHING) Bernadette’s daughter is compiling all these documents with her observations into a book to try and solve her mother’s disappearance. So it’s not about books, but it’s about making a book, so….it is about books.

You could argue that a lot of other books are set up this way. Off the top of my head, Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Outsiders are also books “written” as book within books.

But then you have nonfiction. And essays. Those are obviously about real life. Aren’t they?

But then? There are also romance novels and thrillers and sci-fi and fantasy that never reference another book but also don’t reference real life, unless you live in some world where all available men are uber-rich, chiseled, V-shaped specimens who want to save you from all your problems and then give you multiple orgasms, and in which case, what’s your address?

So, tell me, are books really about other books?

*This is not a fact, but libraries are chronically underfunded and if you ever have some spare change and want to direct it some charitable way, think about all the nerdy kids in want and donate to a library, but don’t, like, just donate your extra paperbacks without checking with your library first. Sometimes it costs more money to process and catalog and make room for donated books than it does to buy the books themselves. But I’m pretty sure they’ll always take cash.

**I am the most boring individual alive that’s never done a single drug. Even my straight-laced husband has at least smoked and huffed a paint can like a well-adjusted American. (Just kidding, Grammy. He’s never done any of that.)

***This is actually one of my problems with The Marriage Plot because it ignores THE WHOLE GENRE of books in which there is a marriage plot, romance, and particularly historical romance, but we’ll let it slide, Jeffrey, because you’re so cunning in saying these books don’t exist any longer and then you go and WRITE ONE, you sly dog.

****You can probably understand everything about my father by this statement. He owns a lot of suits, no surprise to YOU.

*****Thank you infinity minus one (Sachin’s term) times for your emails and tweets and DMs and comments to me. You are a wonderful slice of humanity.

My mom was standing at the stove making rotiyan for everyone. I winced as I watched her. She put the rolled out dough straight on the flames, ignored the tongs, and flipped it over with her fingers. My grandmother stood at another burner doing the same.

They handed me a plate of them, hot and buttered. “Careful! You might burn your fingers. They’re very hot!” Nani told me in Hindi.

“You were just putting your hand in fire. I think I’ll be fine.” I carried the plate to the table and touched one, pulling my hand back immediately to suck on my burnt finger. “Why can you do that and I can’t even touch the roti?”

“You’ve always been sensitive. And you’re young,” my mom said. “You don’t have callouses like me.”

“I don’t think I ever will,” I said to her.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so either.”

****

I went on a hike to Discovery Park and stopped in front of a gigantic tree as tall as an apartment building. It was broken but together at the base, growing five separate, gigantic trees out of one. I said to my dog, because sometimes I talk to him, “I wonder if it was five trees that grew into one, or one tree that was split into five?”

He looked up at me with his cloudy brown eyes and then lifted his leg to pee on it.

“Right,” I said to him. I took a photo and kept on walking.

****

“Remember I have Mariners tickets for tomorrow,” Gregg told me this morning.

“But I was going out with a friend tomorrow! I told you! I don’t ask for much and I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” I said. I was trying to keep hot angry tears off of my face. I felt betrayed and Gregg looked remorseful.

I went to the bathroom to wash my face and then came back. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I had those dates in email, and I didn’t double-check them. My fault. Sorry. Sorry.” He kissed my hair. “I’m sorry, too,” he said.

****

I burst into tears when the news of Hurricane Katrina came on NPR. That was the last time I really listened to the news. I couldn’t. I felt like an open wound, walking around and festering. I needed to close it off. I needed to control everything that came in, so I could go on with living. I was wounded by the people closest to me over and over, and I just wanted some control. I wanted some distance from life. It was a miracle to make it through each day, somehow unharmed. I did it, I said, even if I did end up in bed by seven. I did it.

****

“I wish I didn’t write. I wish I could be an engineer like you,” I said mournfully into my coffee. “I hate writing. Hate it.” I hate that I have no control over it. I hate that to write is to open up, to have no calluses on me. “I want to stop,” I said.

“You’ve tried that before. It doesn’t work. It’s who you are.”

“I know. I just wish it wasn’t. I want to be someone else. Someone braver.”

****

My last post offended some people. I am truly sorry, and I never had malicious intentions, or to make people feel marginalized or alone. I know how that is, and I would never do that to someone else purposely. I am very, very sorry.

****

I burst open on Thursday. It still feels like I’m walking around with no skin. My control over things slipped and I couldn’t get it back. I tried, but I couldn’t. I don’t know where to go from here. I wish I had more calluses, that I was braver, that I was someone else, but thank you for sharing your hurt with me. I didn’t even know you were reading. I always think no one is, or only those who know exactly what I mean even if I don’t get it across quite the right way. That’s how I maintain the mirage of control, the control that’s not really there.

But I’m trying. I don’t want to walk around wishing I could live a smaller life. So I’m trying.

This is a representation of a homosexual:

This homosexual’s name is Jason Collins. He’s a very talented homosexual.

I am also told he plays for the NBA.  I don’t know anything about sports, so I’m going to take everyone else’s word on that. I do know something about homosexuals, though! And that’s this:

Homosexuals have superpowers, and Jason Collins has LOTS of them.

How do I know this? I know because Fred Phelps, Jr, of Westboro Baptist Church fame, said that Jason Collins caused the Oklahoma tornadoes.

Listen, I’m not one to just go around believing things anybody says, but this Phelps guy is apparently speaking for GOD. And if God is smashing up houses and killing children because of homosexuals, I’m pretty sure the homosexuals know about this. I mean, here all humanity is praying and doing works and shit and God doesn’t cure cancer or make me a lottery winner or solve the world’s hunger problems no matter how much anyone prays. But all Jason Collins has to do is go out and be gay and God responds like “boom! I’m gonna go kill some children you don’t even know in a very loosely connected and improbable way that just so happens to line up with annual weather patterns! In *your* name!” Ergo: Collins has SUPERPOWERS. He can CONTROL God.

This isn’t the first time men of God have pointed out homosexual superpowers. Apparently gay people also caused Hurricane Isaac and Hurricane Katrina and listen. LISTEN. We have to DO SOMETHING ABOUT THESE HOMOSEXUALS.

These homosexuals are like freaking Storm from the X-Men. They can, like, will the weather to change. If it’s a sunny day, maybe it’s because Jason Collins and God were chatting about what they don’t like in the new Sookie Stackhouse and totally agreeing that Charlaine Harris needs to cut it out with the descriptions of banana hair clips and lace jeans and whatnot. No one wears that, they laugh together. But maybe another day they get into a fight over whether Seattle should get a basketball team. “They wouldn’t build the Sonics a new arena! Definitely not!” Collins says, and God is all, “My favorite person lives in Seattle (that would be Shalini, or Dan Savage, but it hasn’t been made clear), and they clearly need to come back to Seattle.” And then they fight and God is all, “I H8 U!” and Jason Collins causes a bunch of people in Thailand to die because he had Thai food yesterday and it was a little too spicy even though he told the server to only make it a three. Whatever, sorry dead little Thai children, but God H8s gay people.

So, what can we do? Well, here’s what we can do: DON’T PISS OFF THE HOMOSEXUALS. BE NICE TO THEM. Like, super duper extra nice.

Listen, if I knew someone who could a) control God and b) control the weather, I’d be extra super special fucking nice to that person, okay? I might compliment him on his sweatbands even though sweatbands are totally lame. Whatever. Lie. Do what you have to, for the safety of Thai children everywhere.