2005-07-14
Freestylin'
I could choose to go to a ladies' luncheon today, or I could choose to skip it and go to the gym. My heart is at the gym, even though you'd think I would be the last person to cancel a long lunch with my girlfriends.
Okay, or maybe not.
My best friend pointed out to me that I cancel everything and that if she was dating me, she would have never spoken to me again a long time ago.
*sigh*
She's right. I can't commit to anything the first time I think about it.
Which is why I'm making myself go to lunch with the ladies today. If I am insisting on gym time during the day, then I can go at 3. It's totally not a problem, right?
But instead of thinking of that pretty doable solution to what isn't really a problem in the first place, I have walked around with sad eyes and said, "You guys, I don't think I am going to lunch today. I really need to get a break; I haven't been out of the office at all this week." Which is true - I've been here late and I've taken home work and it's all because I am going to take my glamorous insurance life to the Next Level by actually getting licensed next week.
I won't be in the office at all and it cracks me up that when I am here, I am physically forgotten and bored and have nothing important to do. Within 8 minutes of sending a cursory reminder email that I won't be moping around here next week, I have a shit-ton of work piled up that "has" to be done by Friday.
Please.
It's insurance, not a heart transplant.
While tomorrow is going to suck sweaty privates, today, I'm not going to do too much. Maybe make up a couple of flyers that I owe to clients by tomorrow but whatevs.
I'm going to lunch and to the gym and I'll feel like I'm livin' the dream for about 4 hours there.
Sweet.
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I love my pets. Laugh away all you people with people friends and/or children. My pets are awesome. I won't be all creepy Tucson pet psychic or anything but how cool is it that when I lay down in bed, Maggie and Grace come running. Rosie tries but when I say, "Go to your bed" she sighs and lies down in her own bed. Maggie and Grace, though... how cool is this?
It's pretty dark in the Sarah Cave but I do have an alley and there are neighbors and motion detection lights. Most of the time, unless there's a big drug shoot-out, or a domestic in progress, it's very dark and my room is lit by the dim blue numbers on the clock radio alarm that I've had since I got it from my dad for Hanukkah in the fifth grade.
I know! It still works! But G-Love and Maggie Sauce have knocked it off of the telephone table so many times, the dials are all broken off and I can only use the alarm part. There's a different clock radio for radio.
Duh.
Anyway, in the nighttime, when I get in my bed and my room is kind of glowing, Rosie gets herself settled into bed and Maggie and Grace come to my bed and are my amazing pets. Grace is so big and so snowy white that when she gets in the glow of the alarm clock, she looks like an alien. She sleeps on the right side, so she's in the glow of the alarm. Her white fur gets kind of green-looking and she has a pointy cat-head so her dark eyes make her look alien at night. First she lies down kind of tentatively but it only takes a minute for her to roll onto her back and turn her head to blink at me while I pet her belly. With cats, I've been told that slow blinking means contentment and love. The only time I get that with G-Love and Maggie Sauce is when they come to bed. It's the only time they are so peaceful and such an extension of me - I can't imagine life without them
Maggie sleeps on the left side, in a little ball. She is the kind of cat ball that sleeps on her side but turns her head upside down so that when I rub her belly, she can also blink at me slowly and she won't have to lift her head.
I rarely get a moment with Maggie and I think that's so important. A moment of stillness with a pet is one of the longest and purest moments that you can have. I had a moment with Grace, while she was sitting in the bathroom window, watching me get ready for work and keeping a stealthy eye on Rosie. She was just staring and when I felt her stare and looked up at her, I just felt.... I don't know. Like she wouldn't exist if I didn't exist. I don't mean she would die if I died or something. I mean, if I was never here in the first place, neither would Grace be here.
I had a moment like that with Maggie last night and since moments with Maggie are truly fleeting, it was so special. I was lying on my belly and our faces were maybe 3 inches from one another and just for a second, I felt the infinity of it all. I knew that if I didn't exist and never had existed as me, Maggie would never have existed either. And this time, to add to the "no, it's not a dead thing", it's not that she wouldn't be Maggie or that she would be different because she would live elsewhere. She never would have existed.
At all.
It's the idea of Oneness and I love when I feel that with G-Love and Maggie Sauce. Rosie is too little and I don't know that dogs are at the same level that cats are at. Dogs are more visceral and real. Rosie LOVES me and can't imagine life without me but if I never existed anywhere, Rosie would have existed and served to be devoted elsewhere. I'm not going all creepy Goddess and shit but seriously; dogs are different. They are companions, not soul-mates.
At least they are for me. I can't think of how monotonous life without Rosie would be, and maybe it's because she's just a puppy, but I feel like Maggie and Grace are not exclusive from me whereas Rosie is a whole other thing. Rosie responds and does tricks and runs to me when I call her name. Maggie and Grace just sit and blink and I love them desperately when it is night and it is quiet enough to connect wit them. It's vital to me.
Although I am not 100% sold on birthing babies, I am 100% sold on being a mother to an actual child. Connecting to another human being, in a timeless, boundless way... I think it can only be done completely with your children.
Of course you can connect on intensely spiritual and emotional and well, ground, levels. You can do that with lovers, with parents, with husbands and girlfriends and even strangers once in awhile.
But there is always something stopping you from weeping with the ecstasy of overwhelming love.
I don't think you get those stops with children.
Huh.
Until they're 5 and they go off to kindergarten and come home smoking and swearing and you realize that you have idealized motherhood because you love your fucking CATS and you think to yourself, "Now here is a gigantic, expensive mistake that I can't get rid of for another 13 year, minimum and that's if I'm lucky and the little fucker isn't like me and stays out of trouble and wants to go to college and never see my parental, enemy face again."
Oh wait!
Boarding school.
I am so in to join the expanding club of mothers that I know. Yes. Boarding school.
What?
It's a great education and I get to go back to idealizing motherhood by bragging and sending baked goods to the child, pretending to not know that she is trading my banana bread for joints.
In eighth grade.
Jesus.
Any child of mine would be screwed. I tried, and failed at every trick in the book. My dad once told me, like so many fathers tell their clearly malcontent teens, "Don't even bother trying because I've done it all and I will catch you."
Now with my dad, that's true. He was a partier. He tried to teach me to be cool but I think I had to find my juju for myself because I tried to be a cool partier and failed at it for years. One day, it just clicked and now, I could rock more cool than your cousin's girlfriend's older brother's friend that works with Jayme.
But he often succeeded in getting away with things where I never succeeded. I caught doing things that I wasn't even doing. Like the night I found my mother waiting up for me to smell my breath.
I hadn't been drinking.
Or when I got arrested as being underage at a party and was given a breathalyzer after being hauled down to the puke-smelling holding cell in Springfield, IL.
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My kid would be out of luck. I was taught all the tricks and then failed at all of them. Later, I didn't need to try and wacky hijinks ensued.
I don't know where this writing is going today. It started off with work but I get tired of writing about work and anyway, it's my style that since getting fired for blogging is really popular, right now, it's totally within reason that it would happen to me. I'm a lot of things but lucky is not one of them. Wily, yes. Lucky, no.
I'm so freestylin' over here. If I were Rabbit, in the movie 8 Mile, I would be kicking all kind of rapper ass in parking lots all over Tucson, yo.
arizonasarah at 10:01 a.m.