1. The ticking time bomb of vacationing with my mother has entered the T-Minus-8 Days And Counting, and all lo, the past nine months of buoying thoughts (This is the best therapeutic intervention holiday ever conceived! We will have a GREAT TIME! This will be such a massive success, we will do it NEXT YEAR TOO! And if not, At Least There Will Be Alcohol!) have soured as departure becomes A Real Thing, leaving me with a more-or-less thoughtless tummy ache (that, being thoughtless, cannot be argued,) and a long droning, Tiny Belcher-esque Nooooooooooooooooooo that permeates the background of my every thought on the matter. Supercut of my week so far:

2. I’ve been planning this vacation for ten months, beginning back when my mom started saying she thought Dad had less than a year to live. The pressure of his dementia, their marriage, and his life coming to an end was at once unbearable and unbelievable. At the time, I had these angry thoughts of, “If he dies the week we are supposed to go on this Thanksgiving trip, and I have to choose missing this vacation or going to his funeral, I will be SO PISSED.” Instead, he died shortly thereafter, and in a surprise twist, we still haven’t had his funeral. It is a strange little time capsule of how I thought the world might be, versus how it played out. Especially weird to think I once imagined he’d be alive now, when he has been dead for what currently feels like a lifetime.

3. I have been compulsively adding to the MIDDLE RAGE story on Wattpad. It’s giving me nightmares to write/plan it, and ever since I asked my husband if he’d crawl in the back seat of our car so I could see how easy it would be to stab him in the neck, he’s politely declined to both assist or read further chapters, and has, with the greatest kindness and respect, asked to be entirely left out of it. The latest update is a bit triggerish for assault and premeditated murder, but if you’ve read any of the story, I can’t imagine that turn would take you by surprise. Enjoy!

4. I’ve been studiously avoiding the news because after obsessively following the drama of democrats deciding to follow through with impeachment, I suddenly have zero interest in actual impeachment proceedings. Is it because now that somebody’s taking charge of things, I am no longer compelled to stand witness, screaming about someone to Do. Something.? Is it because if I can’t take witnessing it if they fuck this up? All I know is I opened twitter once, saw nothing but school shooting news, and noped the fuck out of the burning hellhole of current events. Byyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

5. I was chosen for a writing mentorship! Under one of my other names! Ah, lookit me and my constant chicken-or-egg personality in which I can only step out of my secret identity closet if I have first build another closet around the closet I’m stepping out of, so that it always seems like I’m getting braver about being my true self, but in reality I’m just stuck in a closet gif loop.

6. Middle called last week to tell me she’d been on her way to be a guest lecturer in an afternoon seminar for smartypants, and prior to her time, had stopped by a busy sandwich place where the guy behind the counter was unexpectedly so rude and cutting, my little sister was caught by surprise. So she did nothing. Except wait patiently and then pay for the sandwich he passive-aggressively slow-made, which she didn’t exactly order.

And, as I’m sure some of you can relate, later cried not only about the rudeness, but her inability to react in real time, and about whether she had done something to cause the bad interaction. I can’t stop thinking about this from time to time; my little sister, at the top of her game professionally, crying in her car over a social slight. I feel like I’m trying to understand something about it that’s not yet clear to me.

Maybe it’s about the bonds of society, and how anyone can hurt anyone else, even if they’re perfect strangers who may never meet again. Maybe it’s about how no matter how grown-up you get, and how confident you become in most aspects of your life, some part of you is still a kid who wonders if they did something wrong. Maybe it’s how sandwich slights are so small in the scope of the grand scheme of your life, but they can still fuck you up proper, and how stupid and true that fact remains.

I was not much help when she called last week, as my pep talk entirely centered upon plans for vengeance and begging her to name the shop so I could drive 4 hours to Speak With The Manager, and could she please give me a physical description of the guy, because if he was acting like this to her, you could bet your ass he was doing it all over the place, and dollars to donuts they’d know exactly who the guy was and probably had other complaints. By God, he was going to Rue The Day, and he had Slighted The WRONG sister.

As you might guess, she hurried off the phone without giving me any further information, and I began to suspect maybe I’d taken the wrong tact.

When she called last night, I was able to apologize for maybe being slightly over dramatic. We talked a little about her struggle to real-time verbalize a retort to all sorts of snide remarks, and our mutual fear that if we respond to painful but generic assholish behavior in any way, we will shoot immediately to Volume 11, inappropriately angry and disproportional to the offense (see me, re: last week’s phone call). Fear of becoming That Angry Woman leads us to silence, and sometimes even an over-expression of politeness, rather than risk expressing emotions in the form of FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKER! AGHHHHHHH!

Last night, I even managed to be helpful! I remembered a trick Little had tried to teach me (but which I have never successfully used). She brought it up as the way she was able to continue interacting with The Exes when they would say things she didn’t like or do things she felt violated her boundaries. “I just say, ‘Not. Cool’” Little had advised. “It works in any situation. Look them dead in the eye if you can, and let them know in a flat, factual tone, ‘Hey. Not. Cool.’”

Of course, I was never able to say, “Not. Cool,” to either Ex, and instead of risking the entanglement of expressing my complicated and festering anger with them, ghosted completely. But to be fair, in the years since, I may have been able to use Not Cool once in real time, to a foster dog who kept pulling on the leash. But Middle immediately embraced it. I mean, it is pretty awesome in that you only have to remember those two words, and they’re fairly universally applicable to asshole behavior, and depending on how much scorn you imply, gives you a variety of social shade. So now, I pass it on to you.