The Doctor Will See You Now

D always falls asleep first. Which is really not ever a bad thing, because 1. he is much more of a morning person than I have ever been (even when I convince myself I am one) which means he gets me out of bed even when I hate doing it and 2. since he is a morning person, the two hours of daylight he has on me, I translate into the night time computer dawdling I've done since I was a little kid, while he ZzzZz's away. It usually works great. However, on the rare occasion that I'm really tangled up in the brain and I can't unravel the giant yarn ball that is my head, all I can do is sit next to him and wonder what he's dreaming about and listen to the steady in, out of his breathing, and feel very very jealous that he can drift off so quickly.

As D mentioned, we have a tendency to discuss fate. Fate which I often interpret as chance, or luck. I've heard that happy little phrase, "luck is just where preparation and opportunity meet." But, I've gotta say, that little blurb really doesn't sum anything up when your luck is pretty deep in the shitter. In the bitterly early morning hours today, as "luck" would have it, my mother threw open the door to my room and said, "I need you to take me to the hospital," in a far less dramatic fashion than you would expect so late at night, but with just enough gusto to scare the living hell out of me -- though I was completely drugged out on Tylenol PM. Now, aside from the fact that the word "hospital" at 4a.m. will freak any sane person out, my immediate mental associations to any phrase using that word are the rough equivalent of a mushroom cloud in the brain. But only one that occurs in under 15 seconds. Every year for three + years, I received a frantic phone call in the middle of the night telling me someone was in the hospital, or someone's test at the hospital came back reallll bad, or someone was being sent to the hospital because they had to get tests done cause they were maybe not quite so good. And for those three years any phone call I received past 1 a.m. EST would immediately set off alarm bells in my head. (Suffice to say, my mother's "I don't get why the computer screen won't turn on!" at 2 a.m. EST were a huge annoyance to me). Every hospital visit, with the exception of my own senior year of college, ended in death. Is that fate? That I should end up carrying bundles of flowers to the graveyard bigger than any I've carried to a happy occasion? Or is that luck? Because luck would imply that somehow the random chance and opportunity of all these unfortunate incidents, and all the environmental factors which conflated in such a way as to cause the deaths, is in some way benefiting me and make me happy/rich/amazing beyond my wildest dreams. Is that really what the deal is? Fate likes to take a nicely shined toe box and jam it up your butt hole? I'm digressing, though.

So this morning, as I struggled back to consciousness from the murky depths of Acetaminophen and Diphenhydramine HCl, I was trying to prevent myself from having the usual chest constricting panic attack that typically happens in these situations.

I hate sending family members to the hospital. Even worse, I hate leaving them there. You are the most helpless, useless person when suddenly the only people capable of aiding someone you would give your life for, are those who realistically have no ties to this nearest, dearest person in your life. Your best bet is to either piss off the staff by asking for the nine million blankets you think your loved one needs to stay warm, and yet another cup of that chicken bouillon soup since they can't eat any solid food, or to sit quietly in the corner of the room and stare at the red call button hanging from the bed post while you wait for yet another hour to hear from the Physician on call. This is bad, of course, without even mentioning the number of medical mishaps that happen on a daily basis. Because then there's always the latent fear that anything and everything will go wrong as soon as you step out the door of aforementioned loved one's pallid fluorescent lit room.

I realized today as I was driving home from the hospital, that even at the tender-ish age of 24, the time for me to care for my parents is quickly rounding the bend. My mother, who I have always regarded as unbeatably strong and indomitable in every way, was suddenly facing the realities of age and stress. I understand that my eventual fate, my eventual destiny, will be to care for my mother and send her into whatever next life she'll lead -- but it doesn't mean that I enjoy the idea of it. And it sure as hell doesn't mean I think it's fair in any way, or that I want to have anything to do with it. I feel like I'm in some sort of collusion with Annubis, so he can collect my mother's soul to weigh and then I can be on my way to figure out my own soul's lightness.

I feel like I barely know anything, and that I know only a fraction of what my parents both know/knew, and that being left here without both of them is the most terrifying prospect to me of all. I know it has to happen eventually, but I would much rather push that moment off for as long as possible by pretending that it will never come, than having to face the reality of a pathetically small room in an emergency ward at a dinky hospital.

This post didn't make any sense other than that I'm scared, and I'm sad, and I am utterly exhausted. And I wish I could fall asleep as fast as D can every night, because then I could just snore blissfully and never be left to pondering or making loud noises on my keyboard in the middle of the night while he slept so peacefully next to me.

Fate and Free Will

There's a few key conversations we keep circling back to, which run through the whole span of our relationship like subplots or seasonal weather patterns. All of the conversations are a weird mixture of intellectual curiosity, personal experience, theoretical debate, and confessional lecture.

One of the conversations is a hyperanalytical back-and-forth panel discussion about contemporary gender roles; we both went to single-sex schools, and we're both eerily stereotypical in some ways (she likes fashion, I like Clint Eastwood) and completely anti-stereotypical in other ways (she's a gadget freak, I cry regularly at movies and watching television), and we're endlessly fascinated by the interplay of primordial and classical and contemporary gender roles in this utterly deconstructed era. Another key conversation, which regularly reached a fever pitch during 2008, is political, and although it manifests itself in a number of conflicting viewpoints (she supported Hillary, I supported Obama; she thinks we need to fix the mess in Iraq, I think we need to get out right away), it's really a complex, bilateral exploration of the ends and means of the American government, and how much they justify each other.

The conversation that we've been having a lot lately is about destiny, and free will, and to what extent we believe in them. Here again, neither one of us really necessarily believes completely one way or the other. I think that, at a certain level, we were meant to be together - that some higher force slowly and slyly guided us into place, so that we two people could somehow meet at the exact time and place that would be perfect to form a relationship. On the other hand, I believe strongly in free will - like all lapsed Catholics, I think there is a higher power, but I don't think that higher power is necessarily something I want to obey, or something that has all of our best interests at heart.

Then again, there was no reason for either of us to be here in San Francisco when we were. After college, we both wanted to work on the East Coast; we both had plans, and we both had no intention of living in SF, which seemed to me to be a tiny little imitation of bigger, better cities, a playground for Google kids and aging hippies and people not brave enough to make it somewhere cooler. When I got here, I wanted to leave. When my roommate and I signed the lease, I told him I'd be gone in five months, and we'd need to find someone to sublet.

Then we met, me and her, and we practically fell in love with each other over how badly we didn't want to fall in love with each other. We both didn't like San Francisco, and we both wanted to be in New York, and we both wanted to be independent, and everything we were doing was just to build up our resumé for New York, and somehow we accidentally built a life here in San Francisco.

We both knew that it would be hard - this whole months-long period, between jobs, between the old life and the new. Or at least she knew that it would be hard. I have a tendency to race into difficult situations with what appears to be bravery but is actually complete foolishness. I figured May would fly by, and instead it's barely crawling. Every day, some element of my life here in San Francisco seems to disappear - yesterday, I brought my desk home, and tomorrow it's my chair, my TV set, then my bed and my clothes. The worst thing is knowing that the same thing is happening for her, and knowing that the only thing I can say is that it will all be better in just a few weeks. Because it's our fate. Which we chose. With our free will.

Tony Soprano, in the middle of the really epic and depressing and wonderful final season, said,  "You make your own luck in life," and that's what I think whenever we experience a transcendent moment together. This relationship feels too good to be accidental; yet, it feels so good because of all the work we've put into it. We've always refused to give up on each other; Free Will. But we don't give up on each other because we know there's something wonderful within our relationship, something bigger than the both of us, something pointing us forward; Fate.

High School: Round 2

What's painful about a past is usually nothing to do with what actually happened then. There were things you did, things you wish you'd done, things you really really wish you hadn't done. But any decisive action you took, or heart breaking decision you made then has disappeared into the ether never to be seen again. The hard part is figuring out how to bring it all forward. The hard part is figuring out how to bring everything that existed then into your present day life.

Memories are often so potent they can overpower your vision of a situation at hand. In my case, that means that this entire post-work pre-school period since March has been a strange re-telling of my senior year in high school. (It hasn't helped to watch a show about the lavish, hyper-aggrandized high school experience on the Upper East Side of New York. Or that they just aired their big prom episode tonight). I've spent two years in San Francisco, neither of which I thought would even happen. I had every intention of passing through before I began the less traumatic, and significantly more enjoyable days of post-college life. And then suddenly I found myself here for a year, moving into an apartment in San Francisco proper with two high school friends, and falling into the trappings of a relationship that supposedly came with a self-imposed expiration date. Flash forward another year, I'm just home from a whirlwind Eurotrip, planning for the last type of Grad School I expected to attend, and moving to a city of curiosity, but which I've been ambivalent about for the a long time. Somehow, while I was trying my damnedest to disentangle myself from a city I was terrified of, I managed to unfold the exact existence I'd hoped for years ago. All out of a situation which, at the time, seemed abysmally unfavorable.

There's no picture perfect prom this time, there's no high school boyfriend to ask me in just the right way, or a beautiful stairway to walk down. Not that those existed the first time around. In fact, none of them did -- maybe the perfect dress, but everything else was light years away. Which was almost the reason I was angry in the first place. However, there's also none of the unfortunate realities of the time that left me bitter, heartbroken and determined to leave behind anything remotely related in the first place. There's a wonderful family, some amazing irreplaceable friends, and an incredible unexpected love. Though this may be one of the happiest times of my life and I can feel it the end of a wonderful (but difficult) era coming soon, I couldn't be more grateful for the people and the place that has taught me so much.

Did it really only happen because I opened myself to it? Or was it all bound to happen in the first place? Even more, did it happen because I expected absolutely nothing, so have been caught off guard?

Maybe it totally pays to have nothing expected, to smash all pre-conceptions and just fly totally blind. And maybe it pays to read more books.

Pwing! 

The first post.