Anne Nahm

Anxiety is having its way with me lately. My nails are bitten down to horrifying depths.  I can’t seem to sleep well.  I sweat stinky sweat.  I’m cranky.

This bout seems to have been caused a trifecta of small changes.  Only instead of three things, my life is one of those dork cubes you roll in D& D games with infinite and rather mundane but unsettling points.

My little sister called to tell me she is engaged.  My mom promptly told me Little is having no bride entourage, small wedding, butt out.  I was bummed.  Not in my sister’s wedding!  Anxiety!  Did I do something wrong?!

By the time my husband talked me down, (illustrating at great length what a huge pain in the ass bridesmaiding entails if you don’t live in the same city and you have small children and the bride only has an intellectual understanding of how that limits a bridesmaid’s ability to test taste local bakeries, etc.)

(And also reminding me of how Middle’s wedding prep went – brief pictorial here)

Well, by that time, Little called, said she had decided to have a big wedding, and would I be a bridesmaid after all.

So wheeeee!  Bridesmaiding!

Other anxiety points:
Kids went back to school
it’s been too hot lately
I’m channeling the characters in this new story I’ve been writing and they’re all freaks
I’ve been listening to Death Cab for Cutie
I’ve decided I’m going to try to go Vegan for a month after the great Fishstick debacle of last week.  My head says, “Oooh, pick up The Kind Diet!  Make Miso Soup for breakfast!”  And I’m totally nodding my head and psyched in the grocery store.  But when I come home, I find I’ve purchased bacon, lambchops, and ice cream.  Whyyyyy?  I didn’t even want any of those things.  Nom nom nom.

Aren’t you glad you stopped by here today!  Here, have some music:

While reading another blog a few days ago, I spied a comment signed with a person’s first and last name.  Guess what?  I know that person in real life!*  Toodling around the internet nigh on 10+ years,  this has never happened.  Oh small internet world!

When I realized it was really her, I slipped out of my chair and hid under the computer desk out of instinct.  Once I figured out (again!**) that her comment could probably not actually see me, I scrambled back up,  clicked on her link, and read the front page of her blog.

It was fairly bizarre,  to read the private thoughts of this person I had previously only had access to on a social niceties level.  Without knowing her traffic info, I didn’t want to linger and perhaps alert her to any future peeking I might do, so I only read every single thing on her front page.  Twice.

As I was doing this, I had this big internal debate about reading/lurking, because is it right to read private thoughts of someone if you know them but you don’t announce yourself?  It must be, right?  Because  public blog.  But also?  Felt rather dirty afterward.

Really, though, I had no intention of revealing myself, because the whole experience  felt pretty close to recognizing a long lost acquaintance… while she is showering in the public swimming pool bathrooms.  Naked, wet and prone to get shampoo in her eye if you disturb her.  You can’t say, “Hellllloooooooo, Sandy!” and then run up and air kiss.  At least, not without considering the likelihood of a) scaring the crap out of poor Sandy, b) slipping on wet tiles as you run over there and breaking something more than your dignity, and/or c) ending up being escorted out of public bathrooms by beefy security personnel for scaring shampoo-blinded naked chicks who don’t recognize you/might actually not be the person you thought they were.  So I quietly bookmarked, and now her blog is like some toasty pastry in my Favorites folder, waiting until it cools down enough for me to slink over there and look again.

Not surprisingly, I am suddenly super concerned about where people who read my blog come from.  The hometown of my ex-best-friend from 15 years ago?! Aghhh! My mom’s sister’s summer home IP address?!  Delete! Delete! Delete! It’s completely freaking me out.  Although, to be fair, I may have had an excess of anxiety already when this thought occurred to me, but it has become my second favorite can’t-sleep-anxiety-rush question.  See, in my own way, I am an adrenaline junkie.  Except, I don’t jump out of airplanes or punch sharks.  I lie in bed at 1:00 in the morning alternately speed thinking Go to sleep! Go to sleep! It’s 1:00! and You have written something that confirms you are Bad! Kid!, and while you are lying here in bed, someone you know is reading it.  And forwarding it. And all privately agreeing that you are embarrassing yourself horribly. And now, since I have spied on and identified a real person on the internet, isn’t it super likely that someone has spied me?  ISN”T IT?!?!?

I could totally make you a very intricate little anxiety decision tree with that as a main branch with a hundred little deviations to get me continually stoked out on anxiety, but my kids have to go to school today.  SCHOOL!

* Pretty much confirmed by clicking to her blog. Which, by the way, doesn’t use her real name at all.

** Large portions of my internet life are me acting like one of those dogs in front of a mirror – yeah, that one who never actually figures out that the mirror is a reflective device and not a window to show another dog behind the mirror.  Constantly!  I’m like holyshitanotherdog! only to bounce around to the back of the mirror and go all sad faced where’dhego?

I should know by this point that it is never OK to post about how I’m getting extra sleep and I don’t know what to do with myself.

Because now it’s four days later and I’ve had two hours of sleep total.  I’m sitting here after the baby is finally done marathon nursing, examining my poor marbles-in-an-old-tube-sock boobs and seriously considering posting macros of nipple blisters.  For artistic/scientific purposes.  The skin of nipples is so thin, and when it is in blister form, it is translucent – almost beautiful.  They kind of look  like if rock candy, hemorrhoids and a piece of chewed bubblegum went to an orgy and nine months later one of them had a baby, and the father was so undeterminable as to require some kind of genetic testing.

Anyway, after three days of 102 fever and me starting to wonder what the hell was going on, the baby woke up covered in spots this morning.  Signaling she is either a red-headed, red-spotted cheetah shape-shifter OR she has Roseola.

Lately, it feels like these boulders of emotional issues are shifting around inside of me, leaving me off kilter.  My parents left for Texas a few days ago.  My dad turns 70 next year, which means he has to divest retirement money for legal reasons I don’t understand.  Anyway, he ran the numbers on how much the state of California is going to tax him, and suddenly he is dragging my mom around all the various tax shelter states in the country with great enthusiasm.

Every time I have seen him in the last month, he has been pushing TEXAS!  Wouldn’t You Like To Move To TEXAS?!  Have you seen the size of home you could buy in TEXAS?  Also, he has been muttering unpleasant things about California under his breath.

From the time I was ages 6 to 12, I lived in 4 different states.  Hell, since I’ve been 12, I’ve lived in 4 more.  I do not ever want to move again.  I certainly don’t want to uproot my kids and do to them what was done to me.  It is hard to express how much I do not even want to discuss moving without backing up and unloading a dump truck of Childhood Grievances on my dad with a loud Beep-Beep-Beep sound as I do so.  I am old enough to be over those injuries now.

The shiny hook in the shit-bait of moving is that when I was 14, my parents sent me to boarding school.  Of all the moves we made, that was the one in which they jettisoned me personally away from the rest of the family.  And then, for whatever reason, after I was gone, they stopped moving.  It was true/it was untrue that something was wrong with the way our family worked, and when they got rid of me, that chaos evaporated and they became stable.

During that time I was away at boarding school, the movie for Joy Luck Club came out.  I remember watching it on video with my family over the Winter Holiday.  At the end, there is a scene where a mom leaves two babies alone because she believes she is going to die.  My little sister was watching with us.  She did not understand, and she asked what the lady was doing.  After my mom explained, she said, “I would never do that.  We would all live or die together.”

As a teenager, I only remember feeling gut punched.  It took a long time to reconcile the idea that my mom, who loved me, was saying she would never let her kids go, even though she had let me go.  It was true/it was untrue, if you get what I mean.

I’m trying to be cool as my dad looks at all his finances and thrashes about 10%.  I told him to use my part of the inheritance – I would rather my kids have grandparents around than money at the end.  I make sure to say these things in a calm voice and not like some clingy, weepy child.  I try not to point out that for the first time in 15 years, all my dad’s relatives are in the same state, and all he can talk about is leaving.

I don’t even want to think about the idea that maybe this is not the money at all.  My dad gets aggravated I don’t want to consider the idea of moving.  I don’t want to tell him how it feels like there is a caged kindergartner living inside of me, and how when he talks about uprooting my family and going somewhere new, it rattles the bars of the cage until the kid freaks the eff out.  I don’t hardly want to open my mouth, because that kid will scream and sob her way to the surface, and holy shit.  I’m not 5 anymore.  I’m 35.   It gets so old to have the same stupid issues.  It would be nice to wake up one morning and have someone push that button and find out it didn’t work anymore.

Earlier last week, I had some free time, and I found myself staring at curtains blowing in the breeze. For like 20 minutes.  Some small part of my brain was all, “Dude, this is a complete waste of time.”

But most of my brain was whispering, very quietly, “wheeeeeeeeeee!”

Twenty. Minutes.

Also:

Waste of a Fight
Last night my husband and I got in a fight because I thought he said, “OBEY ME”.  But after much ruckus, it turned out he said “eBay Me!”  Which, somehow, also made perfect sense within the context of the conversation.

Also: You guys have the funniest assed smackdown anywhere.  Have been whispering to myself all morning:  I AM VOLDERMORT!  and giggling.

Hi!  I’m feeling a small bit insane lately.  Like when you are in a pizza place about an hour after you normally eat dinner, and the whole restaurant is hot and yeasty, and beerish.  And everything you touch is kind of greasy.  And then your stomach grumbles like an angry bear.  Half a century goes by as you sit there, waiting for the waitress to show up and take your order.  And you get all surly just thinking about it, because it’s a pizza place, what else would you possibly order?  They should just bring out pizza the minute a person sits down.  Also?  Hunnnnngry.

You look around, and everyone else is enjoying cheesy, cheesy pizza.  Everyone except you.  A kid in a high chair is dropping pizza on the ground, and you look down, and there are so many pizza remnants on the floor that you could assemble some FrankenPizza if you got desperate.  You are feeling a little desperate.  Must stay in seat.

Trying to occupy your hands, you reach over to fiddle with the red pepper shaker at your table.  Naturally, it is completely covered in someone else’s pizza grease.  Which is ewewewewewew, and you go for the napkin dispenser to get it off, but you have a hard time getting a napkin out because the dispenser itself is like a greased pig.  And you are covered in pizza grease now with no actual food.  You are being made love to by the pizza of persons past.  And OMIGOD, you are equally starving and totally disgusted.  Unclean! Unclean! And also where’s my mutherfucking pizza?! At which point, you slither out of your booth seat under the table, and the waitress finally comes by, but she brings a defibrillator with her because I guess she thinks you’ve had a heart attack, and when you try to place an order from the floor, she zaps you with the thing out of spite.  And you can hardly defend yourself, because damn, you are weak from lack of food.  And then you smell like burnt hair and rancid pepperonis, and you really have no choice but to cry a little and suck old pizza grease from your fingertips.

Yeah, it’s like that over here.  Only with mushroom and extra cheese sanity.  I am working on another book. It is becoming all consuming, and half the time I think it is awesome and half the time it looks like word salad. Trying to explain further makes me feel like one of those black turtleneck wearing, clove smoking pseudo artists that I usually want to punch right in the butt, so I’ve been trying real hard not to talk all artisty about bendy reality and stuff.    But, there it is.