Keep your damned badge to yourself.

Some of you may have noticed by now that I am occasionally prone to 'paranoid delusions'.

When we were stuck in Canada, I developed this crippling, irrational fear of going to prison for...something. I never really figured out what I would go to prison for, but. I've never been one to get caught up in the details. After a year or so, I started thinking that Canadian Immigration was after me - I was terrified of being deported. I would hyperventillate and cry every time I saw someone in a uniform. For a while, I wouldn't watch the news, afraid that they'd be talking about me, and Canada's ongoing efforts to deport me. And. Send me to prison. For...something. The Absolute Worst: There was this house across the street from Tony's. The second story window was always dark but the curtains were never closed. I conviced myself that there was a camera in that window and they [Immigration, I guess] were filming me to prove I was in the country. Any day they would swoop in through the windows and carry me away to the cage in which I would tearfully carry out the rest of my days. It was a sting operation.

I'd never really talked about this.
Until tonight.
Over dinner, I told Tony all about it. He shook his head sympathetically and smiled at me.

Tony: You know, it's funny. Because the guy who lives in that house DOES do sting operation stuff.
Me: WHAT THE FUCKING HELL? WHAT?
Tony: Oh, I mean. He wasn't watching YOU...[watches me choke on pasta] Hey. You know I'm kidding.
Me: OhmygodIamgoingtoKILLYOU.
Tony: But he DOES work for Immigration.
Me: [stabs Tony with salad fork]

She calls her shit poop.

I spent all day at work in tears. At ten thirty this morning, I dropped the Banana off at the vet - she'd been throwing up since 3am approximately every thirty minutes. Tony and I would wake up, clean it up, assume that the excessive vomiting was probably due to the fact that she wouldn't stop eating the lining under our box-spring mattress. Shrug. Go back to sleep.

Repeat every thirty fucking minutes until it's time to get up and drag your bleary-eyed, sick-with-sleepiness ass to work.

Except this morning she was really listless. She wouldn't keep her head up. Also, she wouldn't stop puking.

The vet called me at work around noon to tell me that she needed xrays, bloodwork. Banana didn't have a temperature, but every time anyone would touch her stomach she'd cry. I hung up after the doctor promised to call with xray results. All day all I could think about was that obviously the Banana had stomach cancer and obviously we can't afford chemo-for-dogs and therefore obviously she would have to be put to sleep. I sat outside on a bench in the parking lot, crying and imagining holding her little paw went they gave her the shot, or begging the vet for one more day with her or sleeping with that little pink cow she loves.

Well. Needless to say, she doesn't have a tumor. She still doesn't have a temperature and she hasn't thrown up since 11am. Also: Maybe this isn't related. I mean, I didn't go to vet school. But tonight, when Tony got home from work and took her out, she shit out a pair of goggles.

What is wrong with dogs?
How did she even swallow that?

Eight is enough.

J's therapist asked him if he loves his puppy.

J frowned, stroked his chin. He edged forward in his chair and coughed uncomfortably.

'Well, I don't know. It's hard to say whether or not I feel love for anything when I simply can't feel'

So. This is the inane, melodramatic sentence that got the ball rolling. Tony and the slightly queasy feeling in my gut are both telling me that I am the soon-to-be coerced surrogate mother of an eight-week-old miniature daschund. Which is absolutely lovely. I can't wait until we have two dogs in my 900 sq. foot apartment. 50 lbs of dog, total. I am fairly sure the Banana has somehow already been informed of the coming change to her only-child status. As I write this she is crying and howling and biting my foot and throwing herself against my leg and trying to eat my pie while at the same time jumping up and attempting to balance her four chubby, two-inch legs on the right arm of my chair, failing, wiggling, stuck in the foot of space underneath said chair-arm. She does this thing when she's really upset. Belly and all fur legs on the floor, chin to the floor, she makes this wookie noise that blows her little basset cheeks out. It's the greatest thing I've ever seen.

Probably the Banana will eat the puppy. After I take her outside and she has her I-Just-Ate-a-Bite-of-Something-Twenty-Seconds-Ago-Poop, I will return to having only 48 lbs of dog. Well. Probably not.

I'm sure it will happen to you one day.

I was saying goodbye to my mom in her office tonight. She has a little TV in the corner, it's always turned to CNN. Larry King was talking about Scott Peterson's sentencing tomorrow - information was scrolling across the bottom of the screen while images of the cold, detached, courtroom-Scott flashed, intermingled with shots of his crying in-laws. Where I used to work - six months ago, the bloodless, souless office I escaped from - the women were obsessed with Lacy Peterson. There were two teevees in that office and any time Scott would appear on screen, they'd hush the doctor and the patients and turn the volume all the way up.

'Oh, he's gonna get his.'
'I don't care that he killed HER, really...but. The baby!'
'You know. They're ALL capable of this'
'Sometimes I'm afraid to go home, or even to leave the house.'

Eventually I broke down. I told them. 'YOU DON'T KNOW THEM THIS DOES NOT EFFECT YOU YOU ARE A BUNCH OF CRUEL VULTURES OH MY GOD TURN THAT SHIT OFF FOR TEN MINUTES IT'S DRIVING ME INSANE'. They laughed and made fun of me.

As if I was the one with the problem.

Unrelated: Could someone please stop Sarah Jessica Parker? I live in fear of my television. Helpmeplease.

I think I would make an awesome dictator.

In the words of the great Angela Carter:

'The axe falls. The flesh severs. The head rolls.'

I had to fire my first employee yesterday. I sat down and looked at her and went blank. My legs were shaking. I don't like to rehearse what I'm going to say before I discipline people. I like to think on my feet and just yell out everything that rises to the surface. One motion - right off, like a band-aid. It's worked pretty well for me thus far. For the first ten seconds or so, all I could manage were quiet, drawn-out 'Weeellllll's. She knew it was coming. She wasn't surprised and she didn't cry, which I will always be infinitely thankful for.

I gave my speech, my reasoning, my apologies. I finished. She stood up to go. Awestruck, I said something like, 'You don't have to go out right away... If you need a minute, you can sit back here for a while'. I'm not sure, but I think she laughed at me. She left the room first.

****

Why do those moonie-moms in the Ovaltine commercial call it Ovaltine Hot and not Hot Ovaltine?

Let me count the infec...erm. Ways. Ways.

Our Anniversary:

Between the two of us, Tony and I have one infection for each year we've been married. It's a really awesome way to celebrate - Tony sits on the couch phlegmy and ear-infection-deaf while I slump somewhere near him constantly constantly constantly rubbing and itching and pushing my eyes.

Did I mention the menstruation?

This shit is perfect. Seriously.

I'm in this terribly strange headspace recently - we're averaging around two hours of Millennium a night and I've become hopelessly addicted to Oscar Zeta Acosta. Every waking moment I'm alternately wondering if the person I'm puffing is a serial killer/ whether or not a low-grade explosive in the L.S. Ayers toilet would help/hinder the Chicano movement.

Vive la Cockroach.

Hands off my Prada.

There was a girl in her twenties smiling at my little brother. They were standing next to each other in line for crappy mall chinese food. I, in the middle of my chik-fil-a-and-DQ-blizzards diet, walked up behind him and told him I was going to grab a table. The girl looked up at me like I just knocked her designer purse out of her hands.

My brother came and sat down. 'She was nice. She works at JC Penneys. She asked me where I go to school. She said toodles.' I was horrified. The girl looked older than me. Surely, she must know that it's TOTALLY INAPPROPRIATE to smile at my brother. And. TOODLES? Who the fuck does she think she's kidding? I've a good mind to go to Penneys tomorrow and hunt that statutory-starved-crazygirl down.

Love will tear us apart.

In high school I was passionately in love with Ian Curtis. This mostly sucked, considering the fact that Mr. Ian Curtis hung himself a year before I was born. Although: Unrequited love is always so safe and painfully satisfying. My friend B and I would spend months together in the summer, alternating houses, eating nothing but pasta and butter, ripping all the pictures out of my old Art in America magazines and covering our walls. We were fourteen and we were going to go to art school in a big city together. We were going to share an apartment.

B made it to art school. We didn't talk much then. She came home a short time after falling off a cliff [um. she's. okay.] and now she's a nurse, which is a million miles away from artist but - admittedly - much more useful and a thousand times less irritating.

I haven't picked up a paintbrush since I was sixteen.

[and. speaking of artistic ability, Tony has that. He started a blog. Go say hi.

I prefer the liquigels.

My head is full of something thick and slow and syrupy. I can feel my face swelling, puffing out when I breathe. Dizzy when I walk, shivery and pissed off all the time.

Sick.

Which is awesome, considering the fact that I am supposed to work 58 hours this week.

I caught it from Tony, who's been down for a couple of days now. We dropped the car off at the shop this morning, so we've just been wandering around the apartment all day, confused and sick and high on generic non-drowsy sinus medication. I played solitaire for two hours. Later, my mom took us to pick up our car and we went out for pizza. CNN was on. The screen said, 'DEMOCRACY VS. TERRORISM'. W was spouting some muted bullshit that I would have been unable to follow even if the volume had been turned up. 'LOOK AT HIS CRAZY WRINKLE FACE', I remember yelling, most likely spitting cheap, buffet pizza all over my brother sitting across the table.

I was almost too tired to chew.

Thankgod I only have two.

Last night, in my dream, I was blind. I was blind and my eye sockets were hollow; they'd never been filled with anything. I saw someone once who was missing an eye. She didn't have a glass one, so the skin just grew over the cavity. The skin was pink and rippled. A giant scar. So. I had no eyes, I couldn't see. For my birthday a friend gave me a present in a tiny box - her dog's eyes. She had taken them out herself for me. Just so I could see. I was supposed to put them into my own sockets. When I did, I could see the dog's world superimposed over my own vision.

***

So. Maybe...considering the fact that I work for an eye doctor...maybe getting a part time job in a lab making glasses was a bad idea. I'm probably going to come out of this overworked, overtired and continually dreaming about eyes - muttering things about eyes under my breath.

I'll do anything for dairy.

T and I are sitting at the dinner table. He's made gnocci with a thousand cloves of garlic and sun-dried tomatoes.

'Listen', he says. 'You know that mental problem you have. I think I know what your deal is. You have all these loose ends...All these loose ends in your life and you don't know how to tie them up - you don't know how to deal with them' I glared at him, but only for a second because I know he's right.

Tonight I sat on hold for an hour with three different companies. Even though we use Earthlink, I was paying every month for AOL and NetZero. I signed us up for all of them, frantically, last year when I couldn't get the internet to work in our new apartment. The third company was some stupid credit check service. I signed up for the sixty free days and would up paying for it for nine months. I never used any of these things - 'You never even signed IN! the AOL lady told me - I just couldn't bring myself to pick up the phone to call and cancel. I would look up the numbers I needed and wind up shaking, confused, deciding instead to just go to bed at 8pm, to just avoid it all.

It seems so stupid, my inability to do these trivial, meaningless things until I've spent at least a good six months coaxing and bribing myself. 'Okay. If you go to the bank and fill out a change of address form, we can go to the grocery store and buy ourselves some ice cream! Oh, won't that be nice? No? Okay. Well. Let's just sit here and reorganize this desk drawer four times. That's fine. We'll go to the bank next week. Well. Maybe after our birthday. That's good.'

BUT: Today was different. Today I called all three companies that had been charging me for their unused, neglected services. I feel light and airy. I feel like a girl who's credit card isn't going to be pushed over-limit by the credit-report fees [OHtheirony] this month.

...feels pretty good.
Especially since I promised myself a freezer-full of ice cream.

I can't quite get used to these...titles.

I woke up in a cold sweat this morning realizing that I don't have a physical copy of my 2003 taxes. Tony and I have to register to have the conditions removed from his permanent residence status on March 2nd, and we have done nothing to prepare [I thought].

I crawled out of bed and got on the immigration website to print out the forms we need. I was so panicked that they were going to want tax information for the last three years [as they did when we filed for his conditional permanent residency]. All I could think about was having to call the IRS and ask for a copy and how much would that cost? How long would it take? Would they audit me on the spot? Surely this would all end in me being sent straight to prison. Oh my god. I'd better go take a shower, they'll be here any minute. All my tax woes dissipated, however, when I noticed the forms we need to file cost $1,300. Oh. Tears and panic. Tony rushed out of bed - What happened? Didn't you sleep well? and I just pointed at the screen.

But then we scrolled down.
And we found the real forms we are supposed to file.
The ones that cost under $300 and don't even demand one year's worth of tax information, let alone three.

This immigration stuff will be the end of me, I'm sure. It will cause my Final Meltdown which will inevitably result in my Final Hospitalization. I had never known fear and paranoia in such terrifying and pure forms before we started this whole process. And. No matter what we have to do, no matter what we have to file with them - be it adjustment of status or something stupid and simple, like changing our address - it all comes back. I'm a mess. I'm shaky. I'm snippy. The world's immigration offices and customs officials are out to get me. They want to catch me. Nothing would make them happier than my sadness. See? Fuck. Didn't you just see that guy with the camera? He had a badge, didn't he?? He took my picture, didn't he??

Oh dear.