Some good news for once.

People are always telling me things I don't want to hear. Like:

Yeah, my whole family died in a house fire a year ago. This dog is the only friend I have left. [cries for ten minutes]

Or
This tastes really good, but every time I chew my mouth sore REALLY HURTS.

And

That stupid fucking dog ate my anal beads.

Yeah. I think that last one is the best, too. Even though I washed my hands for about three days straight after she said that to me.

The worst thing that anyone has EVER said to me [EVER!] was when Tony and I were on our way home after the three days we'd spent at his parents house in Toronto. I'd never met them before, and my mom had surprised us with the plane tickets the previous week. Going through customs, we were stopped by a sour, soulless man with a thick French accent who told us that while I was free to go home, Tony had no business in the United States. We didn't have the proper paperwork. But we're married! I said and held out our brand-new marriage certificate. He took it from me. This? People get married all the time. THIS HAS NO MEANING AT ALL. IT'S NOTHING! In my confused and tearful panic, I was suddenly sure that he was going to pull out a giant VOID stamp and declare us Not Married.

So. Three hours in the customs office, a year and a half in my in-laws' basement in Toronto, countless nightmares about Gestapo-like immigration officers grilling us under hot lights, thousands of dollars, at least thirty passport photos with the three-quarter frontal view showing the ENTIRE EAR - NO SMILES, seventeen TRILLION pages of paperwork, and approximately twenty-four refills of lexapro later, WE ARE DONE.

No more fucking paperwork. No waiting. No sweating at the border [are they going to let us through this time?] No carrying around temporary visas and calling service centers so robotic voices can tell us that they are sixteen months behind processing paperwork. DONE. Tony is a PERMANENT permanent resident. Soon, he will get his greencard that will NEVER EXPIRE.

We're done.
And it only took four years.
And roughly one-third of my sanity.

[I think I made you up inside my head]

Tony and I have a tiny little bit of extra money and we've decided to buy ourselves a present. I've been running through the mile-long list of Things That I Want all day, trying to figure out what the perfect present would be. First, I wanted a PSP but had to deal with the realization that I can't have one right now because I would hide it from Tony and never let him touch it and that would be UNFAIR. Tony wants an Xbox [he swears he didn't say actually say this - probably because I threatened his life the second it escaped his lips]. We thought about a television that would be large enough to allow us to read subtitles and see facial expressions, but.
Christ that's dull.

Since our less-than-ordinary courtship, we've both been really attached to a certain Plath poem, Mad Girl's Love Song. Melodramatic as it is, I think it's beautiful. In one of my crackhead-manic-I-CAN-DO-ANYTHING phases, I'd decided to teach myself latin and I started by trying to translate that poem. I'd mail him little snippets of it scrawled inside Brian Andreas greeting cards. God knows why he continued to correspond to - let alone marry me - after that, but he did. And now every time we come across a little Plath, we both get a little misty eyed.

So that's it! I thought. Tattoos! OHMYGOD Plath tattoos!

I know it's terribly cheesy. But I only want the first verse and I'll probably do it in another language so nobody can read it and make fun of me. Us. Because I'm gonna make him get one, too.

I have fear.

Seriously.

Today was an early day for me. Left work early. Cleaned apartment. Got everything I've been putting off done. Stared at hole in my face. Baked some sypathy cookies for myself.

Now. Maybe it's because I've had one cookie and two glasses of wine for dinner. OR, maybe it's because I have Supernaught on repeat at a deafeningly high volume [Take THAT, Mr-I-Like-to-Cook-Sausage-And-Cabbage-All-Day-So-it-Permeates-Every-FIBER-OF-
YOUR-BEING-Man-Across-The-Hall] .

But. This shit is seriously messing with me:

This, and
This, and
This, and
This.

What the fuck is this? Is this robot-generated? Is it a code? AM I SUPPOSED TO READ IT BACKWARDS?

I just don't know anymore.

Little Germans. Germen.

The dermatologist office was okay. It was full of old people: I shared the waiting room with the woman who owned the first building I ever lived in [she was a thousand!] and half of a famous duo from a popular syndicated radio show.

It took forever. Mostly, I spent my ENTIRE HOUR WAIT in the waiting room looking at this picture:

You can't really tell, but there's a little speech bubble right above the girl's head that says TIMMAH!.

Once in, the four-foot-tall doctor explained that while she wouldn't necessarily worry...if it was HER, SHE wouldn't want to walk around with 'A thing on her face'. So she cut it off. And burned my skin. And gave me a bandaid.

And. The End.

[I didn't even humiliate myself this time!]

So I'm a little emotional.

I am a fearful person; I am afraid of many things. The quasi-comprehensive list of the things I am afraid of is as follows [listed from minimal to incapacitating]: using someone else's bathroom -> spiders -> being punched in public -> large manila envelopes -> immigration officers -> being sent to prison for a crime I didn't commit -> cancer.

Cancer beats everything. It's like rock paper scissors. Paper beats rock. Cancer beats the whole fucking world. It's completely terrifying to me that my body could right now at this very moment be slowly turning against me.

My brother-in-law went to the dentist three years ago to have his wisdom teeth removed and walked out of the building with gum, jaw, and sinus cancer. Inoperable. They tested him and found out it was in his lymph nodes. They gave him two weeks to live. He wound up making it through those two weeks, so they started him on chemo after they removed half of his jaw and the roof of his mouth. He's still alive and -from what I hear- doing well, but neither he nor my sister will answer/ return any calls. They're in hiding. I don't blame them.

Last week the side of my face swelled up for no reason. It went on for days. I was having trouble eating and sleeping because my face and jaw hurt so much. It hurt to talk. Finally, we decided to go to the ER in the middle of the night because it had gone on long enough. I was terrified that it was cancer and the doctor would walk in, disheveled and sad, to tell me that they were going to have to remove my entire face. Or something. I cried the whole time. The nurses and doctors looked at me like I was crazy. I couldn't stop crying. At least three people filed in, looked at the inside of my mouth, left the room. A resident, a sweet, pimply boy who couldn't have been much older than me walked in with a serious look on his face and handed me something they'd just printed for me to read. It was headed: Treating cold sores.

I'd never had one before! How was I supposed to know they could be so painful?

So. Today at 2pm I have an appointment with a dermatologist to have something biopsied, which is a terrible, despicable word. But I am trying to keep the image of myself hysterically crying in my hospital gown, hunched over on the examining table in some storage closet in the ER, looking incredulously at the chubby resident and half-shouting 'COLD SORE?'. Maybe this will keep me from making a spectacle of myself. Again.

Zepplin is totally fucking deep.

I'm trying to grow my hair long. I was driving towards the promise of Chinese food at my mom's house after work tonight, staring at the Tennessee license plates on the car in front of me, wondering how long my hair will be by the time I actually manage to have a baby. No warning, Stairway to Heaven came on the radio and I had an epiphany. I work for a doctor and Tony works at a bookstore. We have no education, no trade experience. We're buying a house. Having a baby. There's going to be no time left for college or trade school. I can brag about my childhood all I want - the Good Jobs will not accept the fact that I was doing pre-calc at eight years old and reading Les Miserables in fifth grade in lieu of a diploma. We are screwed. Panic! What kind of vitamins can I take to make my baby's brain super-healthy? I need to give birth to a super-genius - one who will invent the new Internet/ cure for cancer/ home-hair-cutting-device that actually works at the age of twenty or younger in order to support her uneducated, underpaid parents. And then: Shit! When am I going to lose weight? If I have a baby now, I will never be thin again! I've missed my chance! Everything is fucked! Why does this baby want to destroy me?

Stairway ended. And then Taking Care of Business came on. I remembered that I am NOT pregnant and I'm NOT quite painted all the way into the corner yet. Mostly, I started thinking about Sesame chicken. Then I felt fine.

Also: No, we did not make an offer on the White Trash House. We made an offer on a nicer house a couple of miles down the road. And they've accepted. And we move in mid-December. I want to have a party, but I am afraid nobody will come. But. Some of the best parties I've ever been to only had me in attendance. So we shall see.