When Steph’s mom called me on Sunday morning (right after I’d posted that chippy post about sleeping through the night that I’d really wanted to take down, because it then seemed so wildly inappropriate) to tell me that her daughter was dead, she asked me to call all of the old crew and let them know what happened.

One of the guys I called (and one of my best friends) said something that I haven’t been able to shake no matter how hard I try. He said that he only wished that he were surprised.

Because I was surprised. I was shocked.

Last I’d heard from Steph, she’d been going into rehab and had been attempting to turn her life around.

I knew that she hadn’t been doing exactly well in the last couple of years, and that was the reason that all of us had distanced ourselves from her. Alcohol seemed innocuous until she drank it, and when she did, she became a different person. The type who makes you somewhat nervous because you never knew what she’d do next. That sort of volatility is more fun and freeing when you are much younger, and when you deal with it first hand as more of an adult, it makes you somewhat embarrassed.

But, like Kristin, I wanted to believe that she would come around. I wanted to believe that she would eventually see that she was worth something, even without the alcohol, and that she would take steps in that direction.

I knew that there was nothing I could really do for her until she decided to do something for herself. That’s the kicker about addicts: you can watch them spiral downward and you can try to throw them a lifeboat, but it’s completely up to them whether or not they choose to climb aboard. It’s heartbreaking.
But I believed in my heart of hearts that she would come around.

She never did.

She died in her sleep after popping her prescriptions and washing them down with alcohol. I’m choosing to believe that it was accidental (there was nothing to say otherwise), and I’m choosing to believe that she died just as she was gearing up to fight her demons. Her mom told me that she’d been planning to call me this week or next so that we could spend some much-needed catch up over a cup of coffee or thirteen.

God, how I wished she’d called me.

Maybe, just maybe then we wouldn’t be hatching plans to carpool to her funeral together on Friday.

Just maybe I wouldn’t have to spend hours and hours pouring over floral arrangements to send to her parents, because what precisely says “I’m sorry that your daughter is dead. I loved her very much.” Is it the roses? Or the tulips? Or the multitude of hideously arranged flowers with such stupid names as “Forever Yours” or “A Loving Wish?”

I know that if Steph were here with me, she’d totally make fun of the traditional funeral arrangements, calling them tacky and ugly. We’d probably make fun of the names that the flower people came up with because seriously, what a crappy job that must be. I’d have named them something goofy like “To My Concubine” or “It Sucks That You’re Dead,” and not something so drab and ineffectual. I mean, death is sad enough without having to thumb through stupidly named floral arrangements (I am putting it in my will that only beautiful flowers be allowed at my funeral. And absolutely no plastic ones.).

I can’t seem to make a decision about the flowers, though, no matter that I’ve memorized the layout of the page with my scrutiny. I’ve been looking since Sunday, and have gotten no closer to ordering a thing.

What the hell sort of flowers are you supposed to order for someone who isn’t supposed to be dead yet?

During my first clinical rotation, I got stuck on a Med/Surg floor of an area hospital staffed by some of the nastiest and unpleasant nurses on the planet. I’ll never forget the day I came on shift to hear a nurse give report about a patient who had come on the floor with obvious drug-seeking behaviors.

The disdain in her voice was both palpable and obvious.

Anyone who knows an addict can sort of see where the distrust comes from, it’s hard to trust anyone who will beg, borrow, or steal to get what they want. You want to believe the promises, no matter how many times they’ve reneged on them, you want to hope for the best, no matter what the facts say.

But underneath all of the lies and half-truths, beyond the addict and the drug, lies a person. A person who loves and is loved, someone who has goals and dreams, talents and shortcomings, a person who has likes and dislikes.

It’s easy to forget this, especially when the drug has obscured the ability to touch these parts, as the drug screams infinitely louder and more gratingly. You can hate the disease, but not the person underneath.

Underneath the use and abuse is the person you once laughed with. The person who shared cup after cup of coffee with you. The person who made you smile when you were at the lowest point of your life and reminded you of what was important when you needed to hear it. The person who brought you a card when you had your wisdom teeth out, but delivered it to a house on the block over from your house, but amazingly had another girl named Becky who lived here. The person who, when your boyfriend cheated on you with another girl, and you were pregnant, wrote this girl a scathing email on your behalf.

The person that you wish you’d sent flowers to before she died, and not to her funeral.

I love who she was underneath all of it. And I miss that person very much.

I’m sure I always will.

One of my oldest friends died last night.

She died and I am angry.

I want to kick the dog. I want to scream at the baby. I want to pull out my hair and punch holes in the walls. I want to ram my car into something, anything. I want to choke the birds who are singing and tell the Universe to fuck off because how dare it be a sunny and beautiful day today. How dare the world keep spinning now that two little boys are to grow up without a mother. I have this untapped chasm of rage that I didn’t know I could possibly feel.

I’ve never felt so angry in my entire life.

My oldest friend died last night.

She was 26.

Last night, after many months of hemming and hawing (what the hell does that mean, anyway?), for the first time in the history of his existence, Alex slept through the night.

Attachment parents everywhere are now gathering slings and breast pump parts to lob at me viciously, but I do not care. Last I checked, none of them had offered to come over and love him back to sleep for me, which leaves my sympathy at approximately zero.

It took about 15 minutes of my Benevolent Dictator screaming in his crib for him to realize that neither of his slaves were rushing to his aid, and he promptly stopped screaming and eventually went to sleep (at least, I am assuming that he went to sleep. He could have been translating the collective works of Aristotle for all that I know. Or care.).

(Did you see The Exorcist? Do you remember the part when the possessed little girl is alone in her bedroom and her eyes pop open and she starts being really demonic? I always used to imagine that this is precisely what Alex looked like when he woke up overnight to beckon me to his side. And I am telling you that the minute you start comparing your child to the kid in The Exorcist is when you know once and for all that you are very.not.happy.)

I know better than to pat myself on the back too much, as I know full well that this is just one night in a string of behavior changing nights, but you see, I don’t care. I’m fucking happy as fuck and I am proud of us for doing what we’d needed to do for so long.

Makes me a little ashamed that we haven’t tried it sooner, as it really went much more smoothly than I’d imagined (although, I’m pleased enough that my skin is not shredded into baby nail sized ribbons and hanging off my frame disgustingly, which is really part of how I envisioned my first night of Crying it Out. Alex is cute because he can be so brutal. The cuteness is a defense mechanism on his part so that I don’t “accidentally” “forget him” “at” “the store”).

*ahem*

I feel as though a weight has been lifted off my back (a 20 pound weight, if I must specify, and genuinely not the weight of the world. Even I am not that melodramatic. Shut up. I am not.) and I can not recall a time in recent history when I have felt so incredibly positive. I’m still tired (extra sleep that I’m not accustomed to gives me a odd sleep hangover. Does that happen to anyone else?) but I’m happy.

One of the side effects of my Vitamin Z that I’m experiencing is these crippling headaches, and NOT the ejaculation problems that are warned against with a shrieking frequency all over the bottle (mayhap it’s because I DON’T HAVE A PENIS. Or do I? Mwahahahaha).

They’re the sort that have left me forgetting even the simplest of things (such as what am I actually writing about now that I have a post halfway written? And what the hell is my middle name again?) and raging against the sunlight that is gleefully reflecting off of the eleventy-hundred pounds of snow on the ground.

As a divine gift from God for someone who is currently struggling with an ugly case of Writer’s Block (hey, better than genital herpes, right?), I was tagged for a meme by my friend KT over at When Did I Become A Grown-Up?. As a rule, I only do them if I like them, but this one happens to be a favorite. I’m going to call it The Seven Odder Things About Me Meme (I’ve done this one before. To make certain I don’t repeat myself, I’ll linky-poo here.)

1. It should come as no shock to anyone who has seen me dress myself that I am actually color blind. I’ll take a moment here to let those of you who have seen my fashion sense (or lack thereof) collect yourself from the gut-busting laughter. Try not to pull a muscle, mmkay?

…

…

…

Done, now?

Fuckers.

See, it’s actually pretty rare for women to be color blind as it’s an X-linked disorder (meaning both of my chromosomes must have it). I’ll avoid going into further details so that you are not forced to gnaw your arm off with boredom.

It has been the cause for many a (stupid) marital dispute over the shade of a particular color. In the end, I’ve learned to rely on Dave’s opinion (smart as that may not be) about certain shades.

My kids are going to have to get used to looking as though hobo’s have dressed them, eh?

2. I have an intense phobia of canned fruits, in spite of my unrequited love of fruits in general. There’s something about canned anything, floating happily in a goo sauce that completely freaks me out. Ditto for Jello molds.

I think this may be a throw back to the dissection craze of my 5th grade teacher, who, in all of her glory, decided to spend a large portion of the year showcasing the various creepy jars full of deceased animals suspended in Formalin (or the famous carcinogenic Formaldehyde, it was the 80’s, after all) to us. Now, I loves me my dissections (seriously), but seeing floating suspended baby chicks in glass jars was enough to give me nightmares.

I think this is where the phobia stems from (that, and my hippie mother would likely rather have eaten her own feces than served us something suspended in SUGAR.), but I can’t seem to shake it, EVEN IF I LIKE THE FRUIT IN QUESTION.

3. When I was in my first semester in college, I took an introductory biology class and one of the tasks that we were required to learn was all of the organ systems of the fetal pig (which are similar to the layout of a human). While half of my class was left gagging into their Bunsen burners, I took to the task like a pig in, well, shit. The instructor insisted that we learn this inside and out (oh pun, pu-pun, pun, PUN), and suggested that we take ours home to study (due to limited laboratory time).

Well, I took it a step further and named mine. It’s the same name as my former heating pad boyfriend: Stu.

To maximize the shock value to my mother (and to ensure that the dogs did NOT have a tasty snack while I wasn’t looking), I decided to casually slip Stu into the meat drawer and then leave the house, knowing full well that she’d discover him in my absence.

She was underwhelmed.

4. Because in the academic realm, I am 110% An Annoying Overachiever, I became a TA for both Inorganic and Organic chemistry as well as a tutor for Anatomy and Physiology I and II.

It was only then that I developed a complete and total appreciation for teachers. Wow. Some of those students were not the brightest bulbs in the sconces.

5. Despite the fact that I blog like it’s going out of style (isn’t it?), I have never in my whole life written for fun. Ever. This includes journaling of any sort. Mainly because, what the fuck would I ever journal about?

In high school, I would occasionally try to write in a journal but it always ended up something like,

“I really like Shawn X. He sat next to me in Brit Lit and I swear he smiled at me. Oh, I don’t know WHAT I’ll do if he doesn’t ask me to Homecoming!”

And then I would look back on it and be embarrassed FOR myself.

6. One of the things I hate most about being a grown-up is that the older we get, the more PC we have to become. As someone who has never NOT laughed at a dick-n-fart joke, and whose all time favorite word is fuck (I actually gave it up for Lent one year DESPITE the fact that I am not Catholic. Maybe it’s better that I’m not Catholic, because I didn’t do a very good job of it.), I hate having to be all conscious of what I say in public and to other people.

I hate having to worry about offending people if I tell them what I think, and I hate offending people even when I’m not trying to. I use certain words to be humorous, not to be offensive (because I promise The Internet that if I am actively trying to offend someone, I will do so), and I hate having to censor myself in order to maintain the peace.

7. I genuinely believe that everything tastes better with bacon.

Now, here’s the catch: see, I’m supposed to tag a couple of people to do this meme, but I’m pretty sure everyone who has a blog has done it and is probably not as full of weird things to do it over and over again.

So I am tagging anyone (this means YOU! LURKER!) who reads this to give me a weird fact about themselves in the comments (use a fake name if you must). Because seriously, the comments are high-freaking-larious and might just help with poor, OH POOR Aunt Becky’s blinding headache.

Laughter IS the best medicine, after all (or so Reader’s Digest tells me, AND WHY WOULD THEY LIE TO ME?).

I stole this from Niobe, who stole it from here.

The goal? Six words, your life story.

Very famously started by Ernest Hemmingway while telling the saddest story ever written, “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”

Your turn.

(I admit, I’m phoning it in today.)

The first snow around here is always a magical time in my head. It reminds me of childhood excitement (maybe, just MAYBE school will be cancelled tomorrow!) and of the holidays and it makes even the homeless people look pretty.

That said, the older I get, the more winter seems to drag the fuck on.

If it’s not butt-assed cold, it’s icy, if it’s not icy, it’s snowing, if it’s not snowing, then the yellow snow and grime are making the world look to be an ugly place. And the boogies STILL freeze in your nose when you pop outside (and even clad in Burberry’s finest, how dignified can you look with a nose full of frozen boogers?).

Mr. Yucks.

The Weather Man is calling for another 12 inches today (but we all know how wrong HE can be), and as far as I’m concerned, he can kiss my flabby white butt. Winter sucks.

So what’s winter like where YOU live?

I say “Screw all those freaking feel-good meme’s out there” and in that vein, I am completing one that allows me to complain about things (more than usual), which I was mass tagged for by my friend Sara.

In no particular order, I present to you my current shit list.

1. The Month Of January. Is it just me or does this month suck? The only holiday (holidays tend to be what can make or break a month for me, because I am 12.) I can think of is New Years Day, which I believe Hugh Hefner referred to as “ameteur night” and I agree with him. I’ve never had much good come out of this month aside from surviving it which does not a glowing recommendation make.

2. My Thyroid Gland. Although I have been undergoing testing and dosage increases (since October), it is still underactive and my hair is still falling out with alarming frequency. If this doesn’t get resolved soon, I am going to have to invest in some wigs. Which sounds a lot cooler than it is.

3. Morning People. Although I have hoped, wished, and possibly even prayed that I would somehow turn into this morning person that people claimed I could become, I have yet to see any results. My internal clock is set to be a night owl, and although the world doesn’t function on my time table, I have learned to cope. Until some asshole cheerful morning person gets all high and mighty on my ass, and then I want to regulate.

4. Election Year. Although I’m as happy as a pig in shit that GW will soon be out of office, I am really damn sick and tired of having to field phone calls/watch commercials/get mail all telling me that I should vote for XYZ Candidate. Just stop talking about WHO I should vote for, please?

5. People Who Live In My House But Shall Remain Nameless Who Are Unable To Reload The Toilet Paper. I mean, it’s not rocket science, and yet, I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO MANAGES TO DO IT.

6. Drivers Who Tailgate Through A Heavily Patrolled Neighborhood When I Am Going Slightly Over The Speed Limit. I mean, COME ON. I know you want to get wherever you are going, but I assure you that I do, too. But I want to do this WITHOUT paying a $75 ticket.

7. People Who Take Everything Personally. I have a friend who does this (no, not any of you.) and is convinced that I hate her if I haven’t called her back immediately, like I am somehow sitting at home and plotting AGAINST returning her call. While I appreciate that she gives me this much credit for being so scheming, it’s just not that complicated. I haven’t called her back because I have forgotten. Period.

(and trust me, if you read something on my blog, ever, that makes you think I am somehow knocking YOU personally, I’d like to remind you to reconsider. I assure you I am neither that smart or that cunning.)

8. Spandex Leggings. I know that the 80’s is making a comeback (Hello, American Gladiators!) and I’m pretty much okay with that, save for part of the fashion. The part that convinces women to wear spandex leggings underneath their dresses/oversized shirts. Why? BECAUSE IT LOOKS FUCKING STUPID. It did then, and it does now.

9. PPD. It’s not enough for women who have just had babies to be overtired, ridiculously hormonal, and disgusted that their asses got pregnant, too, but now we get to add depression into the mix. I mean, how fun is it to finally get something you’ve wanted for a long, long time and then find yourself weeping into the couch cushions BECAUSE THE PATERNITY RESULTS ON MAURY WEREN’T ON TODAY.

10. Blackberry’s. Now, I like to be as connected as the next person, and maybe it’s because I have no real need to be as connected as someone with a paid job (oooh! A comment for me to moderate!QUICK! MODERATE IT!), but I just can’t get behind a piece of technology that has made it socially acceptable to interrupt a conversation with a real, live person sitting in front of you to read an email. Color it any way you’d like, but it’s fucking rude and it’s tacky. There is nothing that cannot wait 30 seconds until the real live conversation is done. And if it’s genuinely so bloody important, the phone will ring.

Amazingly enough, this took me a long time to complete. I guess I’m not as angry as I thought that I was.

So tell your Aunt Becky, who is on YOUR current shit list? Who (or what) peed in YOUR cheerios today?

When I was in early high school, I once had a song stuck in my head for about 3 weeks straight. It was Rancid’s “Ruby SoHo” and what added insult to injury is that I didn’t even like the song in the first place.

Eventually, either after heavy drug use OR listening to it on repeat (flooding, anyone?), it got out, and I would be lying if I told you that I didn’t involuntarily shudder when I typed it. My aversion is that strong.

I’m relatively new to the world of insomnia, and if you’d told me three years ago (when I was “studying” to get my Master’s degree in sleep. Shit, I know my stronger points.) that I would ever struggle with it, I would have promptly laughed at you. And then laid down for a nap.

Some people use movies or drinking for escapeism. I used sleep. Having a bad day? Take a nap. Stressed about something? Study the back of my eyelids until I felt better.

And it worked better than any drug or hilarious romantic comedy starring some wacky British man ever did.

When I was diagnosed (and subsequently treated) for my hypothyroidism, I lost this ability to sleep well or nap at all, and I am telling you that I miss it terribly.

One hideously annoying side effect of this insomnia is that when I trundle off to bed each night, the moment my head makes contact with the pillow, it’s like some annoying song floodgate is opened, and the chorus’s from each and every commercial jingle floods my brain.

Just fucking try to sleep while your mind loops “Free Credit Report DOT Com!” over and over ad infinitium, ad nauseum. It succeeds in making me want to stick sharp pointy objects into my ear drums in hopes that it might hit the part of the brain responsible for annoyingly repetitious songs and/or phrases and kill it permanently off (who needs to remember every irritating commercials jingle, besides ad agencies? No one. It serves no purpose), but sleep, oh glorious sleep eludes me.

Eventually I do fall asleep and my internal loop of songs is silenced until Alex (or my bladder) rouses me, and I’ll get through part of my nocturnal rituals, start patting myself on the back for successfully getting that song out of my head, and just as I’m being all self-congratulatory, “Do-do-do-do, Do a Dollop Of Daisy” starts ringing through my head. And I begin contemplating lobotomies.

Again.

Oddly enough, when I wake up in the morning, yet another song is going through my head, but typically not a commercial jingle. It’s usually a fraction of some song that I do actually like and listen to, but it’s only a small snippet of this song. Like a phrase or two.

Were I about 10 or 12 years younger, I would attribute this particular part of the song to something infinitely more deep and meaningful than it warranted, and assume that this was some sort of message (ah, teenage melodramatic magical thinking), and subsequently analyze and overanalyze the hell out of it.

Blissfully, though, I am now older and have learned that sometimes a phrase stuck in your head is nothing more than that, and that it’s unimportant to attach meaning where there likely is none.

But it doesn’t answer the question of why, why now, while I am the most sleep deprived and addled I have ever been, why do these songs keep getting stuck in my head so annoyingly?

And what the hell can I do about it?

Today is the Superbowl (if you’ve been living under a rock or something), and although I don’t give a flying fuck about the game itself, but it’s annual celebration marks a sort-of anniversary of sorts.

After you’ve been together long enough, there are all sorts of stupid dates to remember (birthdays, wedding dates, children’s birthdays, and the infamous Day We Decided To Buy A New Fridge), and I don’t usually recall most of them until they’ve passed.

But because Superbowl reminders have been vomited every which way, I can’t help but think back to the day that The Daver sweetly invited me to a party thrown by his buddies, auspiciously for the Superbowl, but really more about the foodstuff.

It was when we’d first started dating, and everything was all new and weird and exciting and we didn’t know each other’s bathroom habits or middle names or weird hangups. I was strangely flattered by the request, as we’d just spent our first weekend together (and I had been stuck in Boyville without a hairbrush to tame my mangled mess of hair) and I had figured that my unbrushed teeth would have frightened him away, but no, not The Daver.

The first part of his invitation was sweet,

“Would you like to come to my friend’s Superbowl party? Here, I’ll print you some directions.”

And had he left well enough alone, I might have considered attending.

But as men are wont to do, he continued with,

“Man, if you come, my friend Rob is going to laugh. Every time he sees me I am with a new woman.”

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

Gee, sweetheart, thanks.

Thanks, but no thanks.

It was the first in a long relationship riddled with Foot In Mouth-Itits (a tragic disease so far without a cure), and miraculously, I still married him.

(And possibly even stranger, after learning of my obsession with all things pink and heart-shaped (BUT NOT DIAMONDS. NEVER DIAMONDS) and the fact that I use an insane amount of toilet paper, he still married me.)

So dish, what’s your favorite open-mouth-insert-foot story?