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The Question
What makes you cry?
Everything makes me cry these days. There's this commercial where a little boy makes a peanut butter sandwich for his mom. Yep, makes me cry. Last night we watched the Iron Chef "Final Battle" from 1999. Sakai won. Yep, made me cry. Heck, the Welch's grape juice girl is so cute that I cry. My tears aren't particularly meaningful these days.
In a grander, cosmic sense, I cry about the state of foreign policy in this country, because I think we are doing serious damage to global cooperation. If we model the bully and refuse to sign environmental and human rights treaties, why shouldn't other smaller, poorer, dictatorial countries do the same? I cry to think about what is happening in our country, too, all the parents who are unable to provide for their children, all the children who grow up without books in their homes, all the people who think their only option is violent behavior. And on and on.
And in a more personal sense, I cry that I can't seem to get ahead financially with the high cost of living here. I cry that I can't provide for my makeshift family except in the barest sense. I cry that my car won't start. I cry that in two or three months we will have to pack everything up and move AGAIN. I cry that I am not responsible enough to get myself to the doctor and dentist on a regular basis. I cry that I don't have enough free time to pursue all my interests to the extent that I'd like. I cry that my kids will have to deal with all of this too. Cry, cry, cry.
What makes you laugh?
Royce makes me laugh, often in spite of myself. I make myself laugh, too. Earl makes me laugh when he gets all miffed about something and acts stiff and like he is not enjoying all the petting he's getting, even if he's purring loud enough to wake the dead. Littlekitty makes me laugh every day when she tries to burrow under the covers. She only wants to be between us, and if there's not enough room, or if we roll over onto her, she'll push against us with her little feet and miaou until she gets her way. Maggie and Molly make me laugh when they steal treats from one another, and when they make long tunnels under their bedding to reach the water bottle. And when they stick their little noses in my ear.
I laugh easily. Even the things that make me cry, make me laugh too. I laugh and cry about this list, how mundane and unspecial it is, how suburban I've become and will undoubtedly continue to be. I laugh and cry that I can appreciate sentimentality and nostalgia now. I think I'm growing up.
I know it's not exactly like you get an accurate picture of my everyday life from this journal. I don't post every second of every day. I try to keep that in mind when I'm reading other people's blogs, too. Some people only post the good stuff. Others use their online journals to rant and rave and vent. Most of us use it for both, a place to put things that don't exactly fit into real life conversation. For example, sometimes I use mine to brag. Like right now.
I think that most couples, after they have been together for some length of time, start to have fights. At least, that's how my serious relationships have gone. Derek and I fought about politics (he was a Republican then, which you'd never guess meeting him now) and who we had kissed at college parties (it was a long distance relationship) and then as things were degenerating, we fought about how I didn't support him while he was going through a nervous breakdown (true--I was 18 and selfish). Michael and I fought about our difference in age (14 years), my extreme jealousy (founded--he eventually cheated on me), his depressive nature, and a whole lot of other things. Tal and I fought about weird things at first, like me leaving the tea bag in the tea for too long, or me forgetting to order lettuce on his deli sandwich, or me not picking up the styrofoam peanuts that spilled out of a delivery box. Then we started fighting about big issues, like whether or not to get the cat declawed, and our future together, and how I wanted him to stay home more and he wanted me to go out more. Those fights were big yelling screaming fights, the worst fights I've ever had, probably because we did have a connection and really wanted to make things work and were frustrated when they didn't.
But Royce and I don't fight. This is about the closest we come:
Royce (innocent) drops a jar of peanut butter as we are putting away groceries.
Me (cranky): What are you DOING?!
Royce: I was just taking this out of the bag. (Wanders off to the office to play chess.)
[Five minutes later...]
Me (remorseful): I'm sorry I yelled at you for dropping the peanut butter. I know you didn't mean to. I'm just cranky because I'm hungry.
Royce: That's okay. Thanks for apologizing.
Another example:
Royce stomps around.
Me: Are you mad at me?
Royce: No.
Me: Because you are acting all grouchy and ignoring me when I talk.
Royce: Oh. I can't find my wallet and I'm looking for it.
Me: Oh.
Maybe at some point we will encounter our real issues and fight about them, but for now it's almost laughable. I think that if I wasn't one of those low blood sugar = cranky people, we wouldn't even have these kinds of encounters. It's really nice. And I am through bragging, except to say that I couldn't dream up a relationship more ideal than this one. And if it's any indication of my level of happiness, I'm going to have to quote The Sound of Music here (picture me spinning on Alpine hilltops): Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.
I was not a cute baby. I was appropriately sized, and arrived quickly, on time, with a full head of hair. All admirable traits in an infant. However, the first thing I did upon arrival was spend three days screaming. Not cute. I was red and froggy. I didn't smile for three months. My baby hair never fell out and instead grew into a shaggy, androgynous bowl cut. I had a double chin and no neck. I cried all the time and had projectile vomit. I would scream if my mother left the room. Like I said, I was not a cute baby. I had a brief period of cuteness from ages 6-8, which quickly degenerated into pre-adolescent awkwardness, then adolescent awkwardness, and now a watered-down adult version of the same.
My little sister was different. She was huge when she was born, more than ten pounds, with not one or two but three rolls of fat on her thighs, and big dents in her forehead from being squished in the birth canal. She was, however, cute. She smiled in a week and laughed not long after. She had big blue eyes and pouty lips and ringlets. She stayed big (My parents said to each other, "At least she has a good personality"). She started walking and talking and teething before her brain caught up to her body. Her body caught up with me, too, and for about thirty glorious seconds people thought we were twins, and then they started thinking she was older. When I was 13 and she was ten, they'd hand me the kid's menu. When she was 13 and I was 16, she snuck out of the condo on vacation in Mexico and went to a bar...I hadn't even conceived of trying. When I graduated from high school the superintendent walked up and congratulated her. She grew up into a long-limbed, graceful teenager whose lead I followed when it came to music, fashion, politics. We shoplifted together and traded fishnet stockings so we'd have equal numbers of rips and safety pins, and glued spitcurls to our faces with fingernail polish to look cool and different. We smoked clove cigarettes that I bought because she wasn't old enough. We did everything together. And now she's an adult I hardly know.
We were best friends until we went off to college and we both got friends and boyfriends and apartments et cetera. Somehow we both graduated with real degrees, and somehow we are both employed with real jobs and living real lives that aren't what we dreamed about exactly. Not that our lives are bad, but they aren't what we thought they would be when we were scrambling to get out of Drain, OR--we aren't saving the world, with me getting kids into Stanford and her being promoted to assistant pizza chef. We aren't glamorous anymore. Somehow I metamorphosed into this quasi-housewife, getting all excited about cleverly packaged cleaning products and finding nice pants on sale at the Gap. She stopped bathing and started hitchhiking and lives an enviable bohemian lifestyle that involves digging stuff out of the trash and not using dishsoap.
I don't really understand how this happened, how we were born in the exact same place, down to the same mattress, with the same parents and toys and bedroom, how we had the same friends and same teachers and same fishnet stockings and smoked the same cigarettes for chrissakes...and yet ended up living such different lives, lives that would never touch except that we share some genetic material and both have telephones. I don't understand how at one point I wrote poems about how we shared more than blood, how we were more than sisters, and now I don't even know if she likes me. We started our lives as opposites and now it seems like they might end that way, too, the big sister little and the little sister big.
Snapshot
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