The Day After

Turkey day was good, real good. I decided to go ahead and eat whatever the hell I wanted and just get back on the pony today. I am happy with that decision cuz there was some good eats at my family's. We are about 40-50 deep at our Thanksgiving dinners. It is always fun and there is never enough space for everyone to sit. Last night was the worst I've seen it yet, I mean people were standing eating there Thanksgiving dinner. that is such a faux pas! So I took it into my own hands to uproot those that had already finished there first plate. Thanksgiving at my family is like a contest to see who can eat the most. We call it running with the big dogs. In recent years they have actually introduced a large sized plate for those who need it. i think this is a gross catering to an obesity problem that starts with absolute disregard for health, happiness or well-being, but try to say that to a 300lb cousin who is about to stuff there face with 5lbs of Thanksgiving fare. Not to disrespect anyone, the skinny ones join in the contest by trying to consume there own weight in green bean casserole and stuffing. I took the somewhat moral highroad and only went in for one round. True I didn't move more than three feet from our buffet table the rest of the night and "just picked" myself stuffed silly, but at least I didn't go back for a second round!

So Hugo, told my Jehovah's witness auntie that he was an Afghan refugee and that were not boyfriend and girlfriend but just have sex every once in a while! Yeah, I know, pretty rude. He was insulted, but for the love Christ ya don't have to say that! I kneed him in the back and yelped "that's my aunt" and left the room. That wasn't the only room bolting I did either. Let's see, there was the part of the evening that I tripped over an ice cooler and went flying across the kitchen mid bite of honey baked ham that I had swiped from the food table. This in and of itself is not so embarrassing except for the 40 screaming family members, none of which were actually trying to break my fall but instead watching in half amusement and half horror as I am wiggling through the air and they are all screaming "WHOA" Like that's gonna fuckin' help! Instead I totally did a cat-like land on hands and back paws and jumped up as quickly as possible to bolt into the room and take refuge in my aunt who sells wigs for a living. She just said I would probably bruise. When i recovered from that I switched rooms to go and find Hugo and recount my embarrassment, and then my cousin walked in who JUST GAVE BIRTH YESTERDAY! with the new baby and awesome husband who delivered the baby himself in tow! There was a stampede to get to the new baby in which my 11 year old little sister was literally crushed! But I must say...new life...is beautiful. Happy Holidays people, it's 80 degrees in Atlanta but I don't care, I already put up my Xmas tree today! Here's a pic.



How I Feel About Paris Today

I've heard French turkey is kinda better, not so packed with hormones and therefore juicier than a lot of American turkeys, so If and When I move back to Paris, I will have one of those really sophisticated Thanksgiving dinners for other expat friends and we will eat Turkey and drink really good wine and I am sure that I will be desperately missing my family, but ultimately will be much happier with myself for living the life I want.

Turkey Day

So, I had to go to a work party for my second job and somewhere in the midst of the party someone asked me what Thanksgiving is really about...yeah, you can imagine my response...I will say this, it involved the trail of tears and an awkward, "oh, I see, alright then, thank you" form the questioner. My boss walked by and looked as though she wasn't sure whether or not she should laugh or be horrified by this explanation I was bestowing upon one of our more impressionable clients not from America. I got a good laugh out of it later, but it was more of the "DOH...why couldn't I just say turkey and football" nervous laugh to myself before I went to sleep that night.

I am graduating and over cocktails last night with a friend who is super processing her own graduation journey (she's earned her Mistress of Linguistics), I had an epiphany that it doesn't really mean anything, this graduating thing...or does it? I don't know, I'm confused! I know that when I woke up this morning I just wanted my life back. I wanted to be bale to edit this blog and write the story of my life and not have to worry about the million friggin' papers I have due before I can graduate in 3 WEEKS!!!! flare down baby ulcer, it's okay

So yeah, she's right it means a lot, really, it is all about identity shifting and incorporating this new part of myself into whatever new life is going to follow me out the do' of that college I have begrudgingly but self inflictingly (can I do that?) been attending. My biggest fear, is that if I let it mean too much to me and it really doesn't mean that much in reality...

Pregnant Pause 1...2...3 full seconds...

yeah, I don't know how to finish that sentence, THEREFORE, who gives a shit if it means to much or not enough, whatevah, I'm gradiatin' with a degree in Linguistics, and that means...I can diagram word and sentence trees...wohoo!!

So I have also decided to shake things up a bit on the blog. I am adding a new section, inspired by Someday Syndrome's Daily Someday Lessons and Lunch.
My new thing is this...


How I Feel About Paris Today

(I'll work on making that title bigger)

So today I want to live in Paris so that I can blog about living in Paris.

Très calme

Hello, it’s Sunday and très calme chez moi. I was very very stressed out the past few days and things were starting to get unbearable. I have taken to grunting loudly when I am alone to get the stress out of my body so that I can prevent an impending ulcer. I kinda sound like that really ugly guy from the goonies, or at least the sound I make actually sounds the way that he looks. I got out of my shift at work yesterday and had the whole weekend to recover myself and do homework. Actually I should be studying for an exam right now. It is at exactly 9:00am tomorrow morning. I have barely studied all day even though it is the only thing I have had to do today! But I don’t want to think about that!

I have a screensaver of my dog and myself on my computer. We look really close in the photo and when I look at it, it reminds me of how much I love her. But lately it is reminding me of what a horrible mother I am. I mean she is relegated to sleeping on a dirty (I wash it every once in a while) disc of a doggie bed. I don’t wake up and think of her first and immediately take her out for a walk or even the opportunity to pee. Instead I make her wait for hours, the whole time feeling guilty and ashamed of myself for wanting to just be left the hell alone and do my morning thing without having to walk her first thing in the morning. Every guest is better at this than myself. Every time one of my family members or friends comes to stay they are singing and chirping and off handedly mention that they walked Shaka already. I am always overwhelmed with joy, guilt and relief at not having to do it myself. I profusely thank them which is usually met with “I did it for her, not for you” kind of comment. “Right, yeah, of course, this is about her” – and that is why I suck as a mom! And she knows it! She hates me to, I am sure of it. And the times when I actually try to make up for it, she just manipulates me into feeling worse about all of the times that I don’t walk her enough and I end up making promises to her that she 1.) can’t understand 2.) would immediately forget because of her doggy memory even if she did understand 3.) has no reason to believe at all even if she could understand and remember, because I have only ever done the contrary! Instead she sighs heavily, tucks her foot under her chest, and looks away to the side, leaving me feeling like the ass of a doggy mom that I truly am. Oh well, I just hope she doesn’t die before I can make it up to her by being a really good mom all the time. Maybe I’ll start now, maybe I’ll get dressed, not study for my test in the morning and just go ahead and walk the brat around the block…nahhh, it’s too cold out there!

How I feel about Paris today

I miss Paris so bad it HURTS!!!! Reading posts like this one KILL me. I want to live in Paris, I want to smugly describe my ridiculously typical Parisian Sunday afternoons spent in some of the most famous streets in the world. When my sister came to see me in Paris and we had made all of our bar rounds and were stumbling over to the Seine by Notre Dame to get a good look at the pretty water, in the middle of the night, when she exclaimed, “I understand why you like it so much here, this is kinda nice”. That moment sent me into hysterics and the mere memory of it still makes my heart skip a beat, my breath quicken, and tears well up at my eyelids threatening to spill out. I want Paris, I miss Paris! This is worse than a crush on a boy that I can’t quite shake. This is worse than a full blown affair with a guy that I can’t stop thinking about and wondering if I disrespected myself the night before by offering up my body on a platter to yet another man that will probably never call again, but that I don’t want to have to deal with anyways. This feeling, this particular longing, is worse than that. My shoulders tense and my stomach starts to do little flips in place and I become saturated with a look of quite desperation, feeling as though I am drowning in my overwhelming desire to walk down a street, enter a café (yes, I am being that cliché), spend money I shouldn’t be spending in a boutique, sit by the river and write sad poetry about missing America, my life and family here. I want all of that, everyday. I would rather be there missing here than here missing there! It hurts more to be here missing there. There missing here entails a certain knowledge and nostalgia that is safe in it’s familiarity and my overall understanding that I will always be from here, I will come back here and have family here for as long as I am alive. That makes it okay, but this…this missing, longing, slow disintegration of friendships and feelings is dreadful. I hate this missing. I have often compared Paris to a lover, a lover that I never get sick of for a very long time, a lover that I have fled only to return uselessly begging of forgiveness for my rashness of decision to ‘quit’ them. Paris is a woman, I am sure of that, and I love Paris so much that I am just fine with the concept of falling in love with someone because of who they are regardless of their gender. My enslavement to the emotional desires of Paris has effectually turned me into a lesbian vying for her attention. I love you Paris, you know this, it is not the first time I have exclaimed such folly, announced such obsession and desire to be with you, or to be me in you, for you to live, breath and perpetuate yourself in me forever. I love you and I am trying…so hard…to get back to you.

‘A husband said to his wife, “if one of us dies, I’m going to Paris”’ - Sigmund Froid

Dear November

I am cold and I want carbs…damn it! There, I’ve admitted it to myself, I feel much better now. The tip of my nose feels like ice, my hands and feet are freezing and I have to keep rubbing them together to warm them up a little. I am determined not to turn my heat on for a while longer. We’ll see how long that can last. This feels similar to refusing to get student loans for my first year of college. Once I started getting them I was all like, “what the hell was I thinking! I don’t care if I go into debt when all of this is over, I can go shopping”. Turning on the heat this winter, when I finally do, will be just like that but it will be “I can dance around the house naked” instead.

I am now going to compose a letter to the month of November, enjoy:

Dear November (06),

Interesting month you’re turning out to be. I am seeing that you are kind of teetering between bearable and unbearable cold. Just so you know, I’m fine with you going cold all the way cuz it really is inevitable and I am ready to deal with it. The back and forth stuff just leaves me feeling confused about how to dress for a super cold morning that turns into an afternoon with a high in the 60s. But, this is not really why I wanted to write you, I wanted to say…thank you…November. You are just zipping by and the quicker you finish up the quicker I can get on with my life. I am also excited about the earliness of Thanksgiving because that means I can drag the fake Christmas tree out of my closet and decorate it, that is exciting. I am little worried about the last week of, only because that is when everything in school will be due and since you are moving along so quickly, I haven’t really gotten a lot of (read nothing) work done. So If ya could, please just stretch your last week out as long as you can so I can finish everything up. Thanks.

Oh yeah and one more thing, you are the month that Riley is going to be born, so…congratulations!

Double Luv,
me

Oh yeah and it's red

I feel like getting drunk. I feel like feeling something intense. The momentary absence of need, stress, desperation and anguish has left me in quite a tailspin. I can’t feel bad for myself anymore when I drive to work because most of my students drive nicer cars than me. Instead I feel guilty about the ones that take the bus. Hell, I always felt that way, but tonight it was exaggerated, slightly. I wore a white tee shirt and blue jeans to school. I had on black boots and a black sweater with my little fake-pearl earrings I bought at the market. To some this sounds like a reasonable enough outfit, to me it signified the ability to affect minimalist style, possibly complete lack of. I mean what the hell kind of space was I in to choose such an understated anything. I guess I was dressing my part. I have always silently and sometimes, unconsciously, judged people who wear tee shirts. Especially jeans and tee shirts. I don’t mean that offensively, I mean judge in the way that means I would just never make that fashion choice for myself and I am conscious of that. I have also always judged people who drive SUVs and big ole’ trucks in the city. They waste gas and take up too much room on the streets and in parking spaces. So today, I wore a white tee shirt with jeans and got in my big ole’ truck and drove to school. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my truck, I also love the white tee shirt I was wearing (I bought it the same day I got the truck). I am just going through an identity crisis that is commonly referred to as last semester in college. It is good and I will grow I am sure. But I cannot help but to fear that I will sell-out (whatever that means) and never fulfill my dreams and end up working forever in the job that I am “aggressively searching” for. So, enough wining, enough of the angst. I am happy also, today it rained and it was so cold and I had a brand new dodge Dakota to drive to school and work. The heater works and the headlights are bright enough and I cannot feel the elements while I am inside of it. That might be my issue; I am just not used to be okay, certainly not used to looking forward to my drive home or anywhere for that matter. Yes I miss the weaving in and out of traffic and zipping in and out of way too small parking spaces…but not that much, not enough to not be happy about this truck. Life is truly like box of chocolates.

A little venting never hurt anyone

I’m skipping school today…again! Man, I haven’t been this bad since the 9th grade when I would show up at the waffle house in the morning to meet friends, conspire, bum change and take off before anyone would detect us. College has been different, I have reveled in my education. Some classes I couldn’t wait to show up to in order to discuss the reading or go over homework or have intense discussions about things I really do care about. Yeah, this semester…um, not like that. It’s been more littered with the oh my god WHY am I enrolled in this waste of time, piece of crap class when all I want to do is lay in my bed, surf the net and get busy on evolving into the next stage of my life.

Which leads me to the question…what do I want to be when I grow up? Right now, anything that pays 40k a year is sounding pretty nice. I still want to live in Paris so that hasn’t changed…but that’s all this other thing, what I really want to write about is how I want to feel when I grow up…Respected. Thus my struggle has begun…a long time ago in fact! What’s changed is the role I am willing to play for other people…. I’m not willing to be categorized as the pushy one, the confrontational one, the Carrie one. You know, the one that’s too much, too feeling, too sensitive, too honest. Fuck that, everyone has a process and just as much as it could be said that I infringe on other’s peoples methods of not wanting to deal with emotions in an honest way, it could also be said that other people infringe on MY PROCESS of choosing to deal with my stuff in an honest way. And for the record, yes I argued with my sister at my mother’s birthday dinner, but NO I did not ultra confront nor did I yell or push too hard or do anything to warrant the fall out. In fact, I’ve been thinking about the conversation that we did have, the one that everyone now thinks consisted of me confronting and yelling and being really horrible…it went something like this…

Her: “don’t you respect my decision? Can’t you respect my decision?”
Me: “of course I respect your decision, I have no choice but to respect your decisions you are going to be the mother and your decisions rule”
Her: “then you just don’t understand? Well I’m sorry if you don’t know what it’s like to have such good friends that have been there for you more than anyone else in your life”
Me: “Oh I know what that’s like, I have a friend that I feel way more entitled to have a say in her decision making process than I ever even felt in YOURS. It doesn’t mean I love her more it just means that she and I are there with each other everyday…but I wouldn’t give her my baby…not over my family…”
Her: “Well I want my baby to have a religious upbringing and you don’t understand that”
Me; “You really don’t think that your wishes would be respected and catered to exactly as you express them?”
Her: No
Me: (and, of course, this is the only part of the conversation that anyone actually knows enough about to site to me as proof that I am inappropriate) Well F…YOU!

I existed stage left and she sat stunned…
I cried in the parking lot and realized that that might be the baby’s first memory of me and that I am already the worst aunt in the world!
I waited for her to come out of the restaurant and apologized profusely and told her over and over again how much I love her and didn’t mean to tell her to F off…
So that’s how that went…
However, according to others I was ultra-confrontational, drunk, inappropriate, pushing too hard, making other people deal with what only I wanted to…read the above transcription…we were having a conversation.

So, yes I am skipping school today because I hate it and because I am still depressed from last night’s conversation with the other sister. Although we left it nice and she went out on a limb to call me back and make sure I understood that she loves me, and I do understand that…I just disagree with her that my process is fucked…I like my process. Just like, I like my answering machine messages to be a little different. I am sick and tired of people calling my phone and telling me that I need to change my message or they are glad that I did…PAY MY FUCKING PHONE BILL AND I MIGHT FEEL COMPELLED TO GIVE A SHIT WHAT YOU THINK OF MY MESSAGE!

Sorry…is this me being inappropriate again?