First Responder

I work for a civil litigator. She emails me, on average, fifty times per day, and expects an immediate response to each one, even if it is just the word, "confirmed" to which she usually replies, "tnx". If I don't respond quickly enough to let her know I have read and understood one of her emails, she yells out from her office, "Did you understand that?!" because as someone who is operating under 100+ deadlines at any given time, she needs to know that I am paying attention to everything as much as she is. I have become conditioned by working for her into thinking that this is normal, that when someone texts me, they want a response as quickly, no quicker than that, as my fingers can type it out on a virtual screen. It's hard to switch it on and off all the time. I have to be hyper-vigilant for eight-ten hours of the day and then go back to acting like I give zero fucks the rest of the time. It's transferred over into how I react when someone takes too long to reply to me. I was talking to my dear friend Gabriel about this. We are similar in terms of how quickly we respond to people. Turnaround time for me on a message is usually within 1-5 minutes. Gabriel is just as prompt, usually. Any longer than that feels rude. It's partially due to my job, but I have always been pretty prompt. I asked him why his wife, my best friend, who I love more than anything (no lesbo) hadn't yet answered a text I sent her days before. "It's been two days!" I said
"She is in New York," he offered, "Working."
I knew that she was in New York on a buying trip, but I was still indignant about it. "No excuse," I said, because I don't see why she can't Swype me a quick LOL while checking out accessories.
Most people are not this way. I asked my co-worker why it occasionally takes boys a full 24 hours to respond to a text, and he said, "Guys don't do it to hurt anyone- we just start watching Games of Thrones or playing Angry Birds or something and we forget that literally anything else exists."
I think I'm just too used to multi-tasking. I'm not actually just sitting by my phone, staring at it and waiting for a reply, I'm knitting something, watching an episode of Community, making dinner, possibly reading an article on Jezebel, AND checking my phone every few minutes. When I finally get a reply, I respond too quickly, and I know I probably come off like this:


And then the other person is probably all, "BITCHES BE CRAZY!!!!!".
I try to lock down my neuroses- if I can. When I was seeing Mike, I would leave my phone in my car when I was at work because if it was near my desk, I would text him just out of habit or if I was bored or if I thought of something funny, and nobody needs all that noise. Once it was clear that I had changed from a cute girl to a buzzing irritation to him, I didn't want to give him the motherfucking satisfaction of getting annoyed with me. I still sometimes just turn my phone off because I will keep checking it and not even realize how many times I have. It's the modern-day nervous tic, checking your screen to see if anything new has happened, if you have a reason to keep smiling today.
It's especially hard to not look like an overeager puppy when it comes to someone I think I like but can't see in person because they don't live near me. It's trying to build something on the fragile foundation of Facebook messages and Instagram likes, even if it's a friendship. I keep trying to be a really cool girl and pretend I have better things to do than respond to every message they send me as quickly as I can, but I'm not, not if I like someone and I don't care if they know it. I'm not subtle, and I'm not good at hiding how I feel. I know I come off as overenthusiastic because I am overenthusiastic. I do have more important things to do than send someone a video of baby sloths while I am also typing up a cover letter to the court and responding to one of my boss's emails, but I will send it while I am in the middle of this and probably fifteen other things, because I just want them to see it. And because everyone needs baby sloths.

When You Decide To Love Your Curves

Before:
1. Your journey will start when you are eleven years old. The 34-C's that you will appreciate eventually will sprout up on your chest in sixth grade like unwelcome guests. You will spend most of the year trying to force a grown woman's breasts into a little girl's training bra, watching them spill over the tops and sides like marshmallows expanding in the microwave. Your flat-chested friends will hate you a little. Boys will always be trying to put their hands under and over and inside of your shirt just to say that they got there first, and this will never be about you. It will be about tits you still don't even think of as being yours. And when you tell on the ringleader, like you have been trained to, you will be called a liar. And a troublemaker. And, somehow, worst of all, a tease. You will not own your body yet. You have barely even been introduced to it.
2. Men like you-for a little while. Up until they realize that this is the way you always look, that this isn't just your going-out body, that you cannot just get rid of these hips, these thighs, this everything that was made to be held onto for dear life. You are an adventure. You are a bouncy castle at a kid's birthday party. He knows he will have a really fun time with you but he isn't sure if he wants anyone to see him do it. You are vacation sex. Men will come at you hard just because they have to see what it is like, especially if their last girlfriend was skinny and not very nice. They will think they can hide inside of your curves, use them as a flotation device to keep themselves from drowning, and then realize they don't need you when they sink their fingers into dry sand and know they are safe now. You're not for wearing out in public. You're a secret garment- the silk kimono he wears when he is alone in his house.
After:
3. The world still might not love your curves even if you do. Your husband will show you Amazonian plus-size models in an attempt to make you feel better about your 5 foot one frame that can still hold all of this body. You will try not to point out that this is not the same thing at all. He will be able to deal only with very specific parts of you, and he will barely touch you while you are trying to enjoy the sex that only happens once a week now, and he won't look at you, and he won't forgive you for gaining more weight and giving him even more of you to ignore. You will need to wait until after he separates from you and your problem areas to realize that he was wrong. You will believe it because you will tell yourself that it's true.
4. You will be so amazed at how good you look in that one pencil skirt, you will want to cry. You will be asked the question, "How do you fit all that ass inside your jeans?" You will be told that the song, "Ms. Fat Booty" is about you. You will be told you have the perfect waist-to-hip ratio. You will see a picture of your mother from 1977, her silhouette outlined against the sky, and for a split second think it is a picture of you. You will pretend to double-dutch jump-rope in front of a room full of people while wearing shorts and give zero fucks about it. You will realize that you are a silk kimono, and a bouncy castle, and an adventure. And you will understand what it means to be all of those things.

Eliza Pilgrim Vs. No One

One of my favorite comic book series, just after Sandman, is Scott Pilgrim. I found the series, as well as the movie, really comforting when I was at my lowest point. Maybe it's because I identify so much with Scott Pilgrim as a character. He's kind of a nice guy but he's kind of a dick to the girls he dates, he's not really that good at anything, he has friends but they don't really like him, he falls ass over teakettle in love with a girl he sees in a dream and then finds out is a real person. I haven't been there on every single one of those instances, but you get my point. I have literally told someone,"I'm going to leave you alone forever now," just like Scott does the first time he actually speaks to the girl of his dreams.
I read Sandman again, particularly the book The Kindly Ones, when I know something terrible is about to happen and I want to revisit something I know like the back of my hand, but I read Scott Pilgrim again when I need to be reassured that even the least remarkable person can learn, and I've spent a lot of time feeling pretty unremarkable.
When I first read it, I really wanted to be Scott's love interest, Ramona Flowers. I have concluded that I will never be a Ramona Flowers. I will never get that many people to fall in love with me and then hate me that much. I kind of still wish I was a Ramona Flowers. Ramona is mysterious. She does not give much away. I give too much away. I dominate a conversation with so much information, all of it about me, or I try to impress someone with how many trivial facts I know about one specific thing to try to get them to like me. I wish I was guarded and unattainable, but I'm not. I will fall hopelessly in lesbians with someone I have only just met and I will always go too far trying to prove it. I will always be Scott Pilgrim.
It might be better to not strive to be a Ramona. Ramona is kind of a jerk. Almost all of her relationships end with her cheating on someone and she's kind of a coward. It would also be really annoying to be her. She tries to have a relationship with this charismatic, mysterious guy who wears awesome glasses and he pays her back for trying to leave when it gets to be too much by inflicting her with the Glow and pushing her around until she vanishes into Subspace. Then he forms a League of Evil Exes to control her love life? And every time she wants to date someone new, even someone as basically harmless as Scott, she has to see all of them again? Jeez. I don't have evil exes. My exes just kind of don't like me anymore. My exes are like Scott's exes. I have my Kim Pines, my one Knives Chau somewhere back there, and my one Envy Adams still fucking things up for me. The difference is, my ex isn't even some slinky, sexy rock star girl with a crazy awesome Evangalion hairstyle. He's just a guy who gave up, who runs into my stepmother and doesn't even ask how I'm doing. He has no interest in sabotaging my future happiness, but that is all due to the fact that he has no interest in me. And I still ask his mother how he is doing when I run into her even though I really want to not care.
There is something to be learned from how much Scott is willing to do for Ramona. It makes me wish I had that kind of pull with anyone. He is so obsessed with her that he is willing to fight everything and everyone that gets in his way. He mans up so completely, and so almost needlessly, that it holds up a dark mirror to my own past. Every time Scott does something in the name of all of that need, just to impress this really cool girl, I just want to reach into the book, pluck him out by the scruff of his neck and tell him, "Ssh, stop it. Just stop it," because I want to be able to do that to myself. I wish I could have pulled myself out of so many situations that arose over someone who didn't really warrant that kind of shit. I will never run out of Ramonas to fight over or new ways to look foolish.
I keep forgetting the point of all of it, or at least what I see the point as being. Ramona doesn't even end up being the reason for Scott becoming a better person. She's the impetus, but not the reason. The best fight, of course, is between Scott and Ramona's evilest ex, Gideon Graves, but before that, Scott has to battle himself. The most important fight is between Scott and Nega-Scott, who was created out of Scott's inability to see his own flaws, and the point is that Scott isn't meant to actually fight him, he is supposed to merge with him, and thereby accept all of his faults that he has ignored up to that point. I keep thinking about all of that negative, black energy I manifested when I got my heart broken, how it felt like carrying around a whole other person who hated me. I wonder where it actually went, or if it's still following me. I'm still trying to figure out if I did it right, if I actually zeroed in on what is wrong with me or if I've just spent the past year and a half identifying what is wrong with every person who has ever hurt me. Every time I get depressed, I feel like I am still just fighting the meanest, darkest version of myself, the side of me that wants to watch me drown. And I am still not sure I can even trust my own memories. I don't even have the luxury of blaming my one-sided recollection of things on someone implanting false memories in my head, the way Scott Pilgrim does. This is entirely my own doing. The ultimate enemy is always going to be me, but it's not even an enemy I can fight, it's an enemy I need to learn from. More to the point, this isn't a fight at all, so there is no chance of winning. Maybe the upside of that is that there is therefore no chance of losing. The game is rigged-you cannot lose if you do not play. Oh, shit, never mind, that's from The Wire. Fuck it, I'm going to go watch The Wire in its entirety from beginning to end for the fourth time and get Lance Reddick's face tattooed on my chest. And try to be a little less like Scott Pilgrim and be more like Deputy Cedric Daniels.

I Learned It From Watching You

"I can't believe it-every time I look at you, you look more like your mother," my aunt said to me a few weeks ago.
I said thanks, whatever, and tried to fight against the shameful blush that takes over every time this happens. My knee-jerk reaction, every time someone tells me I look like my mother, is still to say, "No, I don't," like they have just made a mistake.
It still feels like it can't be true. Everyone, or maybe just me, has one picture of their mother where she just looks so beautiful, you cannot even fathom how you came out of this person, how you were made out of the same materials they were made from. It's like a biological experiment gone wrong-a sow's ear that was made from a silk purse. It wasn't until very recently, when I started to really see the resemblance, not just in the shape of my eyes and my cheekbones but in the shape of my body, which is the same as the shape she hated so much and fought against, that I realized what this negativity actually puts out into the world. All I am doing by hating this body I have been given is feeding into the self-hatred she carried on her back like a thousand extra pounds until she died, and I learned it from watching her.
It is hard to undo the years of learned self-loathing that I learned from my mother, because it did not come just from her. I used to have friends who encouraged my bad behavior, who congratulated me for weight loss that was usually brought on by just being too fucking sad to eat. My family, to a degree, has encouraged my past self-abuse, by only remarking on my weight when I was that sick. When I gained it back because I was happy, they were not so thrilled. In my family, skinny equals pretty, so I've only been pretty on and off to them, and only when I've been sad. This negative thinking is starting to go away, little by little, just by surrounding myself with the right people, but it's a very slow process. Now I have better friends. No one is trying to feed me diet pills or telling me it was better when I was "bulimic-looking".
This tendency I have always had, to hate everything about me that is like my mother-the shape of my face, my curves that will never flatten out, needs to end with me. All I am doing by hating the very things that made my mother beautiful is proving her assertions right. I don't want to prove her right. I also don't want to have a daughter someday who learns to hate herself from me. It's going to be hard because it is so much easier to be self-deprecating. It's funnier and people like hearing it more. No one likes someone who is too pleased with their own self. Still, this is a pattern that I am tired of carrying on. I am trying, every day, to not look at my body only in terms of what is wrong with it, with the relief map of areas that need to be changed or altered or made different. It's so much harder than it needs to be.
Trying to see myself differently has changed the way I feel about my ex, and how he dealt with my body. I have made a lot of accusations about my ex in terms of how he wanted me to change, but to be fair, how could I expect him to love the way I looked if I couldn't even like it? He couldn't, and I can't expect anyone else to. My father told me, years after my mother was gone, how he tried to give her what he thought she needed by telling her how beautiful she was, and how frustrating that was because she would counter-point with something she hated about herself too often. You could throw compliments at this woman all day and nothing would stick. I remember looking at her yearbook photos when I was little, telling her she was the prettiest girl on the homecoming court, and she replied, "I only got nominated because I was popular, not because I was pretty. I was never pretty."
I think back to when, exactly, my ex stopped telling me I was anything other than flawed, and it must have been when he figured out that there was no point. I pushed back against anything nice the same way my mother did, and he just got exhausted. So, I'm giving up on it. I'm giving up because I'm tired of this. I can't carry my mother's self-hatred anymore. Of all the ways that I see that I do resemble her, this is the one that has to change, and I am the only one who can change it.

Different Names For The Same Thing

I was caught off-guard this past week in the dumbest way when I was bored and playing Bejeweled on my Kindle. When the little window popped up with my "high score" (ridiculous, as I am, essentially, playing against myself), I saw that when I first installed this stupid time-waster, I put in my name as "Liza Pretzel Bits". Long story, inside joke, suffice it to say it's something my ex-husband used to call me, and of course I got a little weepy and stupid over it. I miss things I shouldn't miss. Even though I feel like I am in a better place, and of course I prefer living by myself to living with four other people (in fact just the thought of my ex's shit taking up 3/4ths of the space in my tiny apartment gets me feeling claustrophobic), I can't let go of these silly little things. No one calls me by any of the nicknames my ex made up for me. No one calls me Munchkin. No one calls me Hey, Bitch. No one calls me Liza Pretzel Bits.
I doubt anyone ever looks over at their spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend/other and thinks, while they are doing something thoroughly annoying, "God, I am going to miss this when it's not happening all the time."
Not even the most insightful among us thinks of that. But now that I'm just alone all the time and have a significant, I would say, lack of things annoying me about my home life, it's created a vacuum. I don't have my ex beckoning me over to the computer to watch a forty-minute-long video on Youtube about chem-trails or following me into the bathroom just to tell me a story, and now I kind of miss being annoyed.
I was walking around in this melancholy state, just being nostalgic, poking at that still-open sore that won't heal, feeling lonely, until I saw that the little fucker defriended me on Facebook. I have never overreacted so quickly to something so trivial. This is the new passive-aggressive way to hurt someone-you symbolically remove them from your life. I wanted, so badly, above all, to not care. I wanted to not feel wounded and embarrassed and, once again, like I was just being informed that I was an idiot. I raged out just a little, roping my best friends into it, making them parrot back the same emotions I was feeling just to justify them. It wasn't until the tenth time that I pointed out that I had more reason to cut this last invisible social media thread than he did that I realized why I never scrolled all the way down that little drop-box next to his Facebook cover photo and clicked the "Unfriend" option, not even when I thought I really hated him. I kept the lines open, remained civil, listened to him talk about girls he liked even when it went so against my nature that I wanted to rip my hair out, all because, I think, I just wanted to look like the bigger, better person. I'm not more grown-up or well-adjusted, I'm just better at faking it.
I miss his friendship, really, and the nicknames, and feeling like I had someone in my life who knew me better than anyone ever had, but it's not healthy for me to miss someone who responds to me standing up for myself just a little bit with something like this. I could have stayed friends with him forever, I know, if I had just given him everything he wanted. Things were cool as shit between us when we were broken up, but still having sex, and before I told my attorney to move this thing forward.  I could be wrong about all of this, of course. He could have unfriended me by accident, but that sounds like a lie a girl tells herself when a boy doesn't call. I thought, that even after he changed from someone I knew best to someone I don't know, that he would still be someone to me. I knew he wasn't going to call me Munchkin anymore, but I thought we would at least keep liking each other's status updates and stuff. That was more than he could deal with, I guess, and I think I've learned by now not to push it and never attempt to find out why. Why doesn't matter. I have hundreds of other people who not only like my status updates and stupid links, they also like me.

The Bitter End

This week turned out to be one of those weeks where nearly everyone who is in a relationship was putting something about how in love they are on Facebook, and needless to say I was annoyed. It started when my sister and her fiance came upon their first anniversary and I told her she was grossing me out with how much she loves him and then it kept going all the way up to Thursday, when my best friend's husband put yet another thoughtful, lovely observation about how beautiful she is and though I resisted, I really wanted to make fun of him for it. I told a friend from work about both of these incidences and she said, in this little baby-voice of hers, "Yeah, that probably won't last. Just look at what the divorce rate is."
I surprised myself by leaping to defend both of them. My sister who I had just inferred was making me ill with her sentimental posts about how much she loves her husband-to-be and my best friend's husband who I really wanted to mock for how gay he is for his wife. This friend of mine from work has been divorced twice, and she thinks that makes her an expert on marriage. That might make her an expert on failing at marriage, but she is not really a person I would go to for her opinion on what makes them work, or whether or not one is destined to be a success or a failure. Plus, it just kind of pissed me off that she could say something sassy like that about people she doesn't even know. It was hurtful and oddly pointed- like she was hoping their relationships would end badly. It reminded me a little too much of something my former mother-in-law did once while my ex and I were living in her house. I was in the kitchen with her and when my ex walked in the door from work I said, as I always did when I saw him, as most normal-ass wives do, "Hi, honey."
"Hi, honey," his mother said in a terrible imitation of my voice, albeit my voice if I had severe head trauma and a speech impediment, "That shit won't last," she said, walking out of the room.
What really bothered me was the way she said it, like she hoped the lovey-dovey nonsense wouldn't last, like she hoped we would stop loving each other. I attribute this to the fact that her marriage had not exactly worked out the way she wanted it to. Legally, she and her husband were still married and living together, but emotionally, they were divorced. It was enough to make anyone bitter. I don't believe she was happy about it when her son broke our marriage off, but I imagine that a part of her couldn't help but think, "I told ya so."
My co-worker expressing the same type of sentiment rubbed me the wrong way. "Umm, kind of a reductive statement," I told her, "Just because my marriage and your marriage(s) didn't work out doesn't mean everyone else is going to get divorced."
I said this because I am fighting against this bitterness trap that is so easy to fall into. No matter how much going through my own divorce changes me, I will not let it sour me. I will not become some jaded, flippant divorcee who wishes ill upon other people's relationships and quotes this bullshit about divorce rates. Why should I? Everyone else should be happy, I think, and I still believe in marriage. Even if I don't think getting married again is for me, I will continue to have faith in it. On top of that, I can't bear the thought, even though I know it's possible, of my friends' relationships ending. Joking about it is tantamount to joking about any of them dying. It just isn't acceptable. I will make fun of them all day and all night for it, but that is only because I'm jealous. My ex never put something up for all the world to look at about how much he loved me. Maybe if he was the type of person who did, we wouldn't be in this position, both of us alone, neither of us happy but maybe thinking we have an okay shot at figuring out how to be. And maybe if I was more worthy of that kind of thing, he wouldn't have asked me for a divorce. It's hard to say either way. What I do know is that I'm going to continue to be happy for other people, even when I'm annoyed and rolling my eyes and wanting to tell them to cut it out, because I will not shame anyone I love for being in love. I'll leave that to all of the other divorcees.

Stop, Just Stop

I got all cranky the other night because my man-crush was talking to a girl who I arbitrarily decided is my nemesis a few years ago. She said something kind of annoying once and I thought, "Okay, lady, someday I will destroy you."
After that, I didn't see her around, so I basically forgot about it. I guess I didn't really need a nemesis as badly as I thought I did. The part of it that makes it funnier is that I don't even know her name, or anything about her, other than that she's prettier than me and people like her. Oh, and one time she said to her group of friends that they should all learn the dance to Thriller like that was something that had never been done before. And now that the guy I think is really hot was talking to her, I must destroy her and make a lampshade out of her skin. Or I'll just, you know, not do that and move on to something else because I'm not an actual psychopath, and I doubt that would impress him.
My dad asked me, because he is trying to show that he has an interest in my social life, if I have even talked to this guy more than once. "Nope," I said, "Too intimidated. He's too handsome."
"You talked to him that one time, and you weren't too intimidated then, right?" he asked.
"I didn't realize how good-looking he was the first time I talked to him," I said.
"C'mon, he's alright," my dad said, because I had pointed him out to my dad one time when he was in the same place as us, like the pocket-sized stalker I am, "He's not that good-looking."
This felt a little too similar to my ex-husband trying to convince me that the next guy I dated wasn't that attractive. "Not really your area of expertise, Daddy, and whatever, he so is. And I've given up on that anyway. He was talking to my nemesis, so that's a no-go for me," I said.
My dad was not following, as I didn't really expect him to. My father is totally confused by me most of the time. I like it, because I think I kind of amuse him, but sometimes he must find it exhausting, and he looks at me as if he is thinking, "Jesus Christ, just be normal for one fucking second."
After explaining how it is possible to have a nemesis I don't really know, and why I even decided I needed a nemesis in the first place, and my dad just sort of making that dad face that he makes when he realizes he can't argue with his daughter because she is not making a lick of sense, he asked me why that meant that now I had to give up. "I think I've learned by now how to be practical about when I should give up on something, Dad," I said.
"That may be, but you haven't really tried yet, have you?"
This is my father's nice way of pointing out that I am being a total pussy. I hate it when my father says something so obvious, that I want to argue with, but I can't, because he's right. Again. I've convinced myself that I already know the end result, and it won't go my way, so I let that go and move on. I'm not as tenacious as I used to be, and I can't tell if it's a sign of growth or if I'm just being a wimp. I think I know what most people would say, and it wouldn't surprise me to find out that yes, I am just being a wimp.
It should not be this hard to do any of this. I think what is guiding me is a reluctance to look like such a big, dumb asshole ever again. I looked like a big, dumb asshole over my ex-husband, because I focused so hard on him for years and he repaid me for that by asking for a divorce, and I looked like a big, dumb asshole over the next guy I dated because he was seeing someone else the whole time and never told either of us. Trying to kick it with this guy who is too good-looking for me and has prettier girls interested in him would be just another opportunity to look like an even bigger, dumber asshole. That's why I gave up before I even tried.
I also gave up a little too easily when my ex told me he wanted a divorce, I see now. I saw how hard it would be to repair it, how I would never be able to unknow that for a good portion of the year before, he was convinced that he didn't love me. The unfairness of it was too much because I never, even when I thought I hated him, never for a second thought that I didn't love him. Not fighting for it was kind of a weak move, but again, sometimes a weak move is also a practical one. It is impossible to make someone care, or, at least, it is for me. I know it's not the same for everyone. I see couples who have come this close to breaking up but have stayed together because they both realized they loved each other too much to end it. I have also seen couples who have stayed together because one out of the two people just wanted the other to stay so much, and the one who wanted to leave can barely hide their contempt for the other person. I can't imagine living with the knowledge that my spouse wants to leave, and I did not want to spend all of that time convincing my ex that we should stay together because I knew it would just make him hate me.
I was not bound and determined to keep my marriage going because I knew there was no convincing someone as stubborn as my ex that he did love me, and he did want to stay married to me, and what we had was good. I didn't try because I had already been trying, in so many ways, for months, to convince him, and I knew it was not worth it any more. You can only hold something like that together by sheer force of will for so long before it just crumbles.
I've just come around to the conclusion that being single is not the worst thing in the world, but it's going to take me a while to figure out how to stop being so cautious all the time, and just take risks. And maybe wait until my nemesis is not around to try talking to my man-crush, or just try not to notice how handsome he is and how his horrible fashion sense somehow makes him more attractive and wait for someone else to come along, because one person is not the answer to everything. No one can argue with me on that.