Anxiety shmanxiety

I was wide awake at 4 a.m. this morning anxious about my anxiety. The Klonopin just wasn’t cutting it last night.

I started thinking about my anxiety and how it all started for me as child: Fear of being abducted, never to return home again. (I often daydreamed as a child about being adopted, and that my kind, loving birth mother would come and take me away one day. Yeah, I know I’m fucked up. And that’s a different kind of abduction than the one I’m about to talk about.)

Anyway, I digress. It was 1981, and Adam Walsh had been abducted and killed in south Florida (not too far from where I lived at the time). His decapitated head was found floating down a river or canal or something. I was 8. I was terrified. Even in my young (crazy) mind, I wondered — with bile frothing in my throat — whether the kidnapper had cut off his head before or after his was dead.

And so started the first shades of anxiety in my life. I did not want to walk to school alone, fearful that I would end up chopped to bits and distributed into individual Ziploc baggies. Yet my mother insisted I walk, deeming the car riders “lazy.” It was not a long journey in retrospect: when I go home to visit, I chuckle at how close my old elementary school is to my house. A third of mile, perhaps? But in the mind of a kidnapper-phobic 8-year-old, it was a 25-mile hike through dark alleys filled with leering men.

Prior to leaving for school each morning, my mother insisted on a good, hearty breakfast. “You can’t have a good day without a good breakfast” was her motto, force-feeding me eggs and cream of wheat, which would end up in piles of barf on the floor. That’s how upsetting my walks to school were: I literally made myself sick in anticipation.

Disturbed by my daily breakfast regurgitation, she took me to several doctors to determine the physical cause.

Crazypants – Part 2

**Continued from Crazypants Part 1.

Just one month ago, the first sentence on Bea’s first page of a new life was punctuated with happiness. After three years of dating, she and Sam were getting married in just 11 days, on a farm in Vermont. The invitations had been mailed, her organic-farm-appropriate wedding gown altered. Everything was set. They just had to show up and say I do.

Before she met Sam, her friends and family had pretty much written her off as either a lesbian or a spinster.

In the dark ages, Bea’s mother would remind her, an unmarried 35-year-old woman would’ve been burned at the stake by now. Unmarried people at your age were considered to be witches. Or insane.

Bea wasn’t sure what high school her mother had attended, but apparently they used Grimm’s Fairy Tales as history textbooks.

At the urging of a friend, she signed up for one of those online 42,000-points-of-compatibility dating sites and met Sam. He courted her with precision and pursued her relentlessly. She silently swooned but played hard to get. They fell in love, and dated long distance for the course of the entire relationship. Sure, they both brought Samsonite-sized baggage to the table, but Bea was confident that, with time, they could condense the issues into a simple carry-on bag.

He eventually proposed. She said yes, maybe not because it was what she wanted to do but because it was what she was supposed to do. The prospect of being tied to a pile of sticks and set aflame scared the crap out of her.

Crazypants – Part 1

It is 9 a.m. on Halloween. Bea’s mind is racing with wild thoughts and neurotic indictments that she has been unable to turn off for years. Bea’s sister calls this phenomenon the elves in her head: Santa’s little helpers that hammer and yammer and build toys day and night, regardless of whether it is December or June.

All the elves have indulged in triple espressos this morning. This is not a good thing.

I’m not crazy, Bea thinks. Okay, maybe I’m crazy. Or wait, maybe I’m not: Are truly crazy people even aware of their craziness? Well, I’m aware, so that makes me not crazy, right?

The group is in a circle, seated on uncomfortable folding chairs. Some people are in varying states of psychotropic-drug-induced stupor, while others are nervously rubbing worry stones or picking at their ragged cuticles with the focused intensity of a neurosurgeon digging into a patient’s cerebral cortex. It is Bea’s first day in the outpatient program. She is terrified.

A skeletal brunette sits directly across the circle from Bea. Her eyes are drooping, and she is drooling on herself. Bea watches as the window-shades of her eyelids close. Saliva oozing from the corners of her mouth quickly turns from bubbling brook to white-river rapids.

Okay, so now it’s time for goal-setting, says our perky group therapist, who has impossibly white teeth and a smiley face button pinned to her Easter-egg colored blouse. Not only what you want to get out of the program today, but what you’re going to do when you go home tonight. For those of you who are new today, we do this every morning when you arrive and every afternoon before you go home. Why don’t we start with you? she says loudly, as her eyes turn toward the salivating skeleton.

She awakes with a start. Um, my goal. Um. My goal for what?

Still insane, but now I’m an insane jobhunter

After a nearly four-month hiatus from this blog, during which I completed a 10-week Fiction Writing course at Brown and have endured a job loss, I am back in the blogging saddle. My writing instructor encouraged me to write for at least 1-2 hours per day. So I figured, blogging would be a perfect way to get some writing hours under my belt.

After getting the pink slip (which is not officially official until late Summer, so thankfully I am still drawing a paycheck/health insurance until then), I began to think about the word “jobhunter.” I feel like I should be going into the forest of jobs with my bow and arrow (a la Katniss Everdeen). Or maybe I’m like a job-hunting lioness, who stalks the innocent, unsuspecting job at the watering hole, or an orange-vested redneck, waiting in the job blind with a scoped rifle in hand?

Is jobseeker any better? “Seeking” sounds so calm, as if one is searching for enlightenment or foraging for mushrooms in the woods. In this economy (arrgh, I hate that phrase, I’ll get to that below), simply seeking ain’t gonna cut it, especially when the state’s maximum monthly unemployment benefit is about $900 dollars. (That will barely cover my rent, let alone my raging espresso habit, or better yet, food and those other pesky necessities called electricity, healthcare and gasoline.) Instead, I need to hunt, beg, barter, prostitute, plead, argue, outwit, bend, break, and do backflips while tap-dancing and juggling sticks of fire simultaneously. Whew, I’m out of breath (and slightly terrified) after typing that.

And I swear, if I hear “in this economy” one more time, I’m going to swallow my fist. It is the reason (and sometimes the excuse) for myriad things. My very very very favorite is this one: “In this economy, you should be glad you have ANY job.” I’m thinking thief, hooker, Bernie Madoff wanabee, mob boss, bank robber, professional pyromaniac and/or hitman are not the ANY jobs I would personally want (but if that’s your preference, I will not judge). I will, however, serve as a barista, muck stalls, walk dogs, model nude, or do backflips while tap-dancing and juggling sticks of fire simultaneously. Any caffeine addicts, horse/dog owners, artists or circuses/traveling carnivals looking for an employee? You know how to contact me.

©Copyright 2012, The Icing on the Crazy Cake, Inc.

COL Letter: The Great East Side Dog Poop War

NOTE FROM AUTHOR: This is part of my series called Crotchety Old Lady (COL) Letters: Complaint letters written from the Crotchety Old Lady that resides deep inside my soul (and she doesn’t take Xanax, although she probably should).

PS – Thanks CS for reading my blog and getting me off my butt to write today, and thanks RK, who has no problem discussing poop with me (the hallmark of a true friend). XO to you both.

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Dear Providence East Siders who Despise Dog Poop:

I understand. Dog poop is gross. In fact, all poop is gross. But it’s a necessary fact of life.

And thank God as inhabitants of the first world, with clean water and modern sewage systems, we can poop in the comfort of our own homes and then flush it out of sight/out of mind. (Unfortunately, approximately 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to clean, proper sanitation and do not “enjoy” the comforts we do.)

But the crotchety old lady digresses.

Unlike humans — at least modern first-world humans living where proper sanitation exists — dogs go outside. That’s another fact of life. And people, especially on the East Side of Providence, are very bitter about dog poop.

I’ve been chased, I’ve been cursed out, I’ve been screamed at by people in passing cars, I’ve been told that “your dog’s fucking pee kills my grass” (shouted from a 4th story window). By the way, a shout-out to the therapist whose office is on Angell Street: Do not stand out in front of your urban building and pontificate to me about the pros and cons of whether my dog should be pooping on your three blades of grass. Just make up your effing mind.

In recent years, a spate of letters have appeared in East Side Monthly magazine (I would post links, but this award-winning rag doesn’t have archives available online), with rants from irate East Side homeowners battling the scourge of dog shit on their perfectly manicured lawns. Here are some of the arguments and COL’s thoughts on the matter:

Argument #1: Use your own (bleeping) yard, not mine! It’s mine! It’s not yours. Nor is it your dog’s public restroom.

COL response: This is an urban neighborhood. Some people, including me, have no yard at all. I must walk down three flights from my rented apartment to the street below, regardless of the weather, and walk two blocks to find anything remotely resembling grass. There’s no shoving the dog out into a fenced yard when it’s 14 degrees. Where should I go, armed with my biodegradable dog poop bag?