After the parties over...

So, I realized that after blogging so intensely about all my emotional and sartorial preparations for attending my reunion it might seem odd if I, oh, say skipped ahead to the next topic (the election, Halloween, how for some reason October is always the hottest month of the year in San Francisco) and didn’t mention the actual reunion itself.

So.

My 20 year high school reunion went pretty much exactly how I expected it would go. I think the best thing I can say about it is that after the mad shopping frenzy I went on in anticipation of this even, I now have quite a fabulous autumn/winter wardrobe and a new pair of truly awesome boots. They’re black patent alligator and zip down both sides with little rings that look like they came off hand grenades. I love them.

Actually, the best thing I can say about my reunion doesn’t actually have anything to do with the actual reunion. On my way into town I spotted a pub (I assumed it was a pub) called the Tilted Kilt* and Favorite Twin and I went to dinner there the day after the reunion. We walked in and it was a Scottish Hooters. A Sports Bar with a Pub Menu and SERIOUSLY hot waitresses wearing white knee socks, teeny slit kilts and shirts tied under their uniformly impressive boobs. They looked like they were all wearing really slutty Scottish Halloween costumes from Hot Topic. It was great. I was able to watch part of the Patriots/Chargers game and Favorite Twin was able to watch the scenery. I think I need to get some friends together and open one in the Sacramento area actually.

Other than that… meh.

- Related Link: http://www.tiltedkilt.com/

“There’s a reason they don’t give 15 year olds credit cards” AMEN Sister.

I am a holy terror right now. That insecure 17 year old brat that usually stays quietly tucked away deep inside my head? She is RUNNING the show right now. For the guys reading this: imagine if your woman suddenly came down with a SCREAMING CASE OF PMS two weeks early. Its pretty much like that.

Thank GOD I had a hunch I would be like this and sent John far FAR away. Like JAPAN far away. He needed to go sometime this month and I was like, “for the sake of our marriage, go this week” and he was like, “but you leave the morning I get back… I’ll only miss you by a few hours and I won’t see you for an entire WEEK” and I was like, “I know, and I will miss you but honey, trust me, at least when the week is over you’ll still love me.” He wanted me to wait to leave until he got home so we could at least spend “a little bit of time together” but I was afraid I would try and pack a week’s worth of insanity into an hour so I vetoed that.

So yesterday I got him safely off and onto a plane and he is now somewhere outside of Tokyo where I can’t even call him (say, if I wanted to throw a hissy fit about something or cry about how I really don’t want to go) I have to wait for him to call ME and then he can only talk for two minutes.

Today while I was working out with my trainer I was so thankful it was Shane because I knew if I threw the “I just want to go home this HURTS and I’m tired WAH” tantrum I was feeling he’d have been like “Sure… you can totally go home… in 35 more minutes. Now get that leg back up” I knew it would roll right off him AND do no good. I mean, I could embarrass myself by crying in the gym if I wanted but I was still going to have to work just as hard while I was doing it. And since crying while doing lunges was not an appealing image to me, I just dug in and did the workout.

I miss John a LOT but I am really glad he’s gone because today I already WAY crossed the line with a friend who had the nerve to be BUSY with work commitments after being on VACATION most of last week. Normally I am sensitive to these kinds of things. I am. I’m very good about “hey, I hope work isn’t trying to kill you in revenge for you actually taking a few days off” but today? Today I was just BENT and petulant and bratty. What about ME!? You said you’d have time for ME! It was not attractive.

And it is only Tuesday.

And tomorrow I head to the mall (the one bracketed by Bloomingdales and Nordstrom) with a credit card and sense of entitelment. One of my friends pointed out it was a REALLY good thing I had my inheritance because otherwise I’d be calling all, “Okay, John may divorce me but I got the most FABULOUS dress and maybe four pairs of shoes were too many but I couldn’t decide and… and people don’t actually get divorced over ONE shopping spree do they?” Or as she put it “there’s a reason 15 year olds don’t have credit cards.”

God only KNOWS what I am going to buy. Or the meltdown I will have if I can’t find anything TO buy and I don’t have THE PERFECT OUTFIT for the reunion.

There ARE three things that are making me feel better about my current level of insanity:
1)      That I’m not in danger of putting us into ACTUAL debt.
2)      That when I talked to him today My Favorite Twin sounded almost as nervous and stressed as me.
3)      That there are women who get LIPOSUCTION and have FACE LIFTS (and certainly Botox… Botox is probably happening somewhere right now for MY reunion) before their reunions. My needing to put together the perfect outfit and have my hair professionally blown out seems comparatively retrained.

So tomorrow I shop… and before I shop I will be putting on the CRUEL UNDERWEAR… which leads to the next section which was supposed to be a separate blog but fuck it.

IMTERMISSION

The Cruel Underwear and the Freaky Boot – Adventures in Macy's.

After working out diligently and being fairly good about my diet (Sunday night we had garlic bread with dinner and I only ate ONE slice) for the last month I have lost some weight and parts of my body are looking better and tighter. They are not, however, looking anything like they did in high school. So yesterday I went shopping for the official (and aforementioned) CRUEL UNDERWEAR for my much cursed HS reunion.

It was truly a memorable experience. The entire thing probably would have been much less traumatic if I hadn’t forgotten my cell phone flask. That wonderful little gadget has allowed my friends and I to try on and purchase bathing suits without even a single outburst of tears. Sadly, I went into this both sober and solo. You might think it is a good thing that when you literally trip, get one leg stuck and fall over in the changing room there’s no one to see it but it actually makes it worse. With someone else there, that’s funny. Especially if they’re handing you a drink while they laugh at you. By yourself you just feel that much more tragic, uncoordinated and fat.

I spent a good hour wriggling into and out of many MANY incarnations of the tastefully named “shaping garments" (Fat Squishers, while more accurate, wouldn’t look as nice up on the wall I suppose). I spent quite a bit of that time trying to figure out why the makers of said shapewear were under the impression that, along with squishing down my tummy I also wanted to squish down my boobs. I’m barely a 36C with the help of a good underwire! At one point I was actually considering cutting the bra cups OUT of the one that squished the rest of me the best and wearing a regular bra underneath that.

After much struggling and cursing I found a couple items that seemed (when I put my dress on over them) to make me look thinner. I SO was waiting for the shoplifting police to bust in because I was trying underwear on and then putting my clothes on over it. I looked like a shoplifter even to myself. But apparently the cameras weren’t on or they watched long enough to see me take all the evil stretchy garments with HUGE TAGS boasting things like “Look thinner instantly!” off my body and carry them out of the changing room.

So after handing over close to $200 (one more motivation to lose weight – never need to spend that kind of money on something that UNFUN and uncomfortable ever again) I decided I had earned a trip to the shoe department... and was excited because the dark brown color of my beloved (seriously I don’t think anyone is supposed to love an inanimate object that much) Coach bag is apparently very IN this season so I picked out several pairs of matching shoes and boots to try on. I went for the boots first, of course. They were really cute and fit really well but…

Okay... you know how sometimes a zipper on your clothes will get stuck on the cloth part of the zipper? Well the zipper on these BOOTS got stuck on that part (which was made of thin leather) about, oh, 3 inches below my KNEE so leg was completely stuck in the left boot. I wrestled with it on my own until I was sweaty (literally) and finally conceded defeat and YELLED across the department to the guy behind the counter that when he had a chance I needed some help. In the meantime I tried on ONE of all the other shoes with my bare unimpirsoned foot. Then I just gave up and waited, which gave me some time to contemplate my situation. I was like, "wow, that's the worst zipper jam I have ever seen... he's going to have to cut me out of these… I don’t have to buy them anyway do I? Does the you break it you buy it rule apply here? I hope not…How much are these anyway. CRAP! $285… I wonder how long it will take HIM to come to terms with the fact that the only way out of these is with a pair of scissors?"

The answer was a WHILE.  And it was a GREAT day to be wearing a short dress since he was like, between my legs yanking on that boot for a good 15 minutes. Luckily for me the whole stuck-boot-zipper-thing happens “every year” and as far as I could tell according to the Macy’s rulebook it was THEIR fault for providing me a faulty boot to try on. The sales guy was incredibly apologetic about the entire thing. His biggest concern was that he didn’t have another pair in my size to replace the one he’d cut off me. But that was okay because by then I really didn’t like the boots nearly as much as I had when I’d first put them on.

After I was freed I tried on both of the one shoe I’d taken a shine to during my captivity and ended up purchasing those. And then I decided that I should probably go home before something else happened. So I did.

A Plea: Please Vote for Obama on Tuesday. Please.

I’m usually pretty good at being able to capture feelings and put them into words. I love words and have always found joy in nailing down the exact language to capture something. It is possible my single favorite piece of writing is “The Literary Offenses of James Fennimore Cooper” by Mark Twain. In that short essay Twain conveys the difference between getting it exactly right and settling for close enough. The difference between writing in perfect pitch and being off key. I try very hard to write on key. Maybe too much metaphorical vibrato but in tune.

But on this issue I feel like all I can muster, both literally and linguistically, are sounds, not words. A high pitched wail. A low moan. The sound of teeth grinding. A pencil tapping nervously. An almost inaubible whimper. And the something that makes no sound at all: a tiny flicker of hope So many things rise up in my throat at once that it seems impossible to give voice to them.

But I am going to try. I’m not going to worry about this being well written because it won’t be. I’m going to sharp and flat all over the place but if I can get my feelings across in an intelligible manor I will be more than satisfied.

I think of all the things boiling inside of me the biggest one is just fear. Fear that John McCain is going to win. The thought of it makes my stomach hurt. Our country is in SUCH a mess right now. The world isn’t doing so great either. I think most of the world would happily watch us burn to the ground if it didn’t negatively effect their economy as well. We’re the playground bullies who are finally getting their due.

I always loathed George Bush. I was crushed and bewildered when Gore didn’t win. I was flummoxed that the Supreme Court could just decide it would take too long to count all the votes. That they could just declare Bush the winner. I was frustrated that we couldn’t find anyone better than Kerry to run up against him the next time. I opposed the war Bush so gleefully plunged us into but I didn’t really start to be afraid of him until Katrina. I always thought, “Well, yeah, he’s a dumb jackass but he isn’t the devil” until I saw footage (not on our networks of course, but on the BBC) of what was being allowed to happen in New Orleans. Our government just let those people die. American citizens were referred to as refugees. Years later I still can’t believe that happened. Chris Rock says George Bush doesn’t give a fuck and he’s right. He REALLY doesn’t. If it doesn’t affect him personally he doesn’t even want to know.

So a few years ago I stopped believing that if there was some awful catastrophe the government would come and save me. If there’s a horrible earthquake here I fully expect to die slowly trapped under my own bookcase.

To me John McCain is just more George Bush. When he finally got OUT of that prison camp the first thing he did was divorce his crippled wife, you know, the one who had waited for him all those years, and marry a rich blond beer heiress. I don’t think John McCain gives any more of a fuck than Bush does. He’s rich and old. He wants to be president. He spent years standing up to the Bush administration about torture, the acts being perpetrated at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and why it was so important not to break the Geneva convention. Until he decided he wanted to be president. Then he signed off on the, “Oh waterboarding isn’t really THAT bad” bill because he didn’t want to be on Bush’s bad side. To me this says everything you could ever need to know about his character. If he was willing to stand down on THAT issue than there is nothing he won’t compromise on. No value he won’t concede. No promise he won’t blithely break.

Sarah Palin to me is just the embodiment of your basic proudly ignorant American. She terrifies me. I’m not alone in this. The online community if filled with essays by better women writers than me who have written at length about having full on wake-up-screaming nightmares about her. She shoots Moose for fun. She shoots wolves from helicopters. She thinks a 13 year old girl raped by her own father should have to carry the fetus to term. She’s going to make her daughter marry that tool that knocked her up. She thinks she’s actually qualified for the job. She’s terrifying.

And then there’s Obama. That’s where the little flicker of hope comes in. I think he’s for real. I really want him to win. Every few weeks, when my dread reaches a certain level, I throw more money at his campaign. If he loses I don’t want it to be my fault. Which is also why I am writing this even though it may offend some of my friends. This is one of those times when you have to stand up for, and speak out about, what you believe. I think if he wins we might just have a chance. I think things are still going to be bad for a while but I think we might pull out of it in one piece. If he wins maybe my gay friends won’t be made illegal. If he wins maybe Roe V. Wade won’t be overturned. If he wins all the people who have united behind him might realize there are more good things we can accomplish.

Thinking about it right now I my stomach is clenching and I am so scared. So scared of what the future may hold. Almost too scared to hope. Almost, but not quite.

So I guess it comes down to this:

If you have gay friends vote for Obama.

If you think you or someone you love might need medical attention vote for Obama.

If you think freedom of speech and freedom of the press are important vote for Obama.

And most importantly if you or your daughter or your wife or one of your friends could ever conceivably end up in a situation where they need an abortion, vote for Obama. Don’t think about this in the abstract. Think about your wife or teenage daughter being raped one night and becoming pregnant from it. Think about all the trauma and fear and damage and then think about her then having to carry that fetus to term and what that pregnancy would do to you and your family. Make it personal. REALLY THINK ABOUT IT.

Please. If John McCain wins I think we are going to lose so much more of who we are that, as a people, we may never recover. Please.