Am I repeating myself yet?

I started having panic attacks when I was four. We lived in this little suburban ranch house in a wealthy, coke-infested neighborhood and our well dried up. Someone had to come dig us a new one. Since it was going to take a while and at this time in my life my family was apparently shitting money, we stayed here while everything was going down:




I was so excited. I've always loved hotels. It's that fake-air smell when you first walk in and it's so cold and comfy - I don't even care that all the blankets are undoubtedly coated with ten years' worth of semen and blood.

Anyways. I remember a little restaurant in this center courtyard. We would have breakfast there and I would drink orange juice and try to come up with ways to make my dad's face turn purple and his voice get REALLY LOUD and I would watch the elevators go up and down. I think they were glass. Like little spaceships.

There was cable and a pool and an ARCADE, which is where it happened:




RAMPAGE! Where you're a giant ape [are you? I never played it] and you DESTROY SKYSCRAPERS AND HOTELS and you KILL INNOCENT SMALL BLONDE GIRLS WHO ONLY WANT TO SIT IN THEIR HOTEL ROOMS WITH THEIR MOM AND WATCH SESAME STREET ALL DAY.

When I saw that stupid pixelated ape, that's when the big panic attacks started. I couldn't eat. Or breathe. Or sleep. Or stop crying. Any second, the monkey was going to break through the wall of the hotel and EAT me. I was SURE of it.

And. While, eventually we went home to our house [ONE story! Nothing for the ape to climb! Nothing to fear from the monkey!], I forgot about the game. But I kept the panic attacks. Because my mom was going to die. The planet was going to explode. We were slipping into nuclear war. Dinosaurs were going to come back to life. Someone was going to kidnap me and I'd learned from Oprah that with every passing hour, the chances of my survival became slimmer and slimmer.

After my parents got divorced, my mom took me to this therapist who wanted to try biofeedback to calm me down. She sat me down in this dark little office and attached these little things to my fingertips. She turned it on and there was this superloud BUZZZZZZZZ and then the machine STOPPED.

Because I BROKE it.
With my superhuman TENSION.

I hate that fucking monkey.

I can hear my pot pie boiling.

I would like someone to explain some things to me:


∙ Why does Anna Banana try to eat my cat's fur while it is still attached to the cat?

∙ Why does Anna Banana crave poop?

∙ Why can't I manage to eat more than 17 saltines a day?

∙ Why does everyone laugh at me when I cry now?

∙ How did this pot pie get so beautifully-crusty-golden-brown in my microwave?


I love you, Marie Callendar. Really, I do.
Now. Find a way for the baby to let me KEEP this damn pie.

...baby is trying to kill me...

Days are spent sleeping/ gagging/ sitting down/ making a face like I just saw someone kick an old lady/ breaking into coldsweats/ panic attacks.

My doctor [not the one who will be delivering the baby] suggested that I go off my anxiety/ depression medicine last week. So I did. Yeah, that lasted four whole days. I'm still waiting for it to kick back in, curled up in a fetal position on the couch grimacing and shouting 'WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME' over and over again at Poor, Dear Tony.

So! Doctor Number Two [the one who IS delivering the baby] told me on Sunday afternoon after I paged her hystericaly crying and begging to JUST BE ALLOWED TO TAKE HALF A PILL...she told me, 'Hun, you're going to be okay. I think you should probably take a whole one.' The GOOD thing is that there are no side effects for the baby...apparently, I was supposed to stop taking it this month ANYWAYS...pregnancy or no.

The BAD thing is that it hasn't kicked in all the way yet and I'm pretty sure the girls at work are sick of seeing me hugging myself and sobbing in the file room.

Ugh. I wish she'd told me to take two.

Cheetos is not in the dictionary!

Okay, so maybe writing break up letters to half of my friends was an act of those legendary Crazy Pregnancy Emotional Outburst Hormones, but what the hell. My life is kind of cluttered, anyways. Less time for friends means more time for blog. And sleeping. And cheetos, currently the most important of all three.

Oh god, I love cheetos now.

A non-broken-up-with friend of mine is studying to be a midwife AS WE SPEAK, and she does...doula...stuff [what is the verb form of 'doula'?!]. She wrote me today, offering her services to me. She promised me that she won't touch me a lot or be 'all up in my junk' [I'm so fucking classy it's UNREAL], and I'm thinking of taking her up on it. Might be nice to have someone who's just a friend [I mean...not my husband and not my mother] around towards the end. She's done it a few times already, and I think she'd totally barter with me...possibly accept sweaters and knitgoods for services rendered. You know. Instead of money. Because today I found out that cribs cost about seven hundred thousand dollars and - as it is - I barely have the extra money to keep myself in cheetos from week to week.

Man, cheetos are awesome.

Breaking up is hard to do.

I'm six weeks pregnant, due September 23rd. Tony and I had tried for months, so it came as a total shock a couple of weeks ago when I found out. I thought I just had the flu, but I took a test anyway. The line was so tiny and faint - barely visible. We took three more tests, two with the same result and one digital one that just flashed PREGNANT. So, I've been to the doctor but my first real, pregnant-lady visit is in February, two days before my birthday. It's amazing how excited my family is. This baby is going to be the first grandchild/ great grandchild in all the American families, so I keep getting tearful phone calls from grandmothers hundreds of miles away, demanding to be told the EXACT MOMENT labor starts, because they're driving to the hospital. Oh, and I now have roughly eight people planning my baby shower.

...at six weeks.

It's funny, though, how major life changes like this can bring the worst out in your friends. I've decided that if you can't even PRETEND to be happy for me, then I don't need you around. This is going to be hard enough without worrying what YOUR problem is. Seriously.

That being said, OHMYGODIAMSOEXCITED.

Dear My Inlaws,

First of all, I would like to thank you for leading my husband on. For every time he's gotten off the phone, smiling, eyes shining and said, 'They say they can't wait to see the house!' or 'She says that they can come down this spring!' I thank you. I commend your Amazing Powers of Manipulation and your Thousands of Empty Promises.

Now. Maybe I am a LITTLE offended that you don't give enough of a shit to come see where we've lived for the last three years. Maybe it does annoy me a LITTLE bit that every time Tony wants to see you, I have to take unpaid time off work, have week-long anxiety attacks and nightmares about mean customs officers and drug my dog...all to spend a fun-filled week perched on that old couch next to the Man, watching televised horse racing in Italian, fighting the urge to bash my head in with that nasty-as-shit espresso maker you keep on the stove.

But, please. Please. When I invite you to my home to surprise your son for his thirtieth birthday party...MAYBE you shouldn't talk about what a HARD trip is it and how IMPOSSIBLE it seems and it just WOULDN'T BE FAIR TO THE DOG.

Fuck your dog.
Seriously.
She's old.
And irritating.
She could kick it any minute.

Do you think that if she DIES before Tony's birthday you could make it down for a visit?

Yeah.
I didn't think so.

Love,
K

P.S. Maybe next time you could come up with a halfway decent excuse? Yeah. Work on it.

I am a genius.

Last night, I decided to paint my bedroom at 10pm. BUT. I had to leave the doors closed to keep the Banana from eating all the paint [paint is expensive!] and I forgot to crack windows. End Result: Stumbling through WalMart at 12:30 last night, tripping over every step, dizzy and knocking things off racks everywhere...on a desperate mission for drinking water [we've been out for two days. I am parched.], but instead winding up in front of the Nintendo DS games case. God knows how long I spent in front of that infernal display.

I woke up this morning with the inability to make a fist, a terrible, nauseating, splitting headache, and...surprisingly...no video games. Oh, and a bedroom which wound up looking like some sort of undersea cave, which is fucking. awesome.

I need to take some pictures of this shit.

Been a while...

We moved into our new house this week. Only took 18 hours of painting to cover up the Clubbed-Seal-Sickeningly-Violent-Red they'd painted the living room and the foyer. Also, even though all our friends stood us up and we had to move ALL BY OURSELVES [you guys are DOLLS, SERIOUSLY], it was supereasy.

Considering I threw all of our stuff away.

This makes for a wonderfully organized house, but there isn't really anywhere to sit.

The last two weeks of my life have been spent in a continuous Oh-My-God-I-Am-Now-Three-Trillion-Dollars-in-Debt-WE-BOUGHT-A-HOUSE-IN-FUCKING-INDIANA-WHAT-ARE-WE-THINKING state of total panic. So. Instead of writing, I've been very busy crying because I cut that skinny girl off in the mall parking lot and screaming at my mom on the phone because I can't find my goddamn cookie sheets. Coincidentally, things don't cook evenly on cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil.

So. I will take my medicine and write again.
Eventually. Soon as I find my fucking cookie sheets.