April 29, 2004

I am not adjusting well to my little vacation/hiatus in Seattle. Apparently I'm not as keen on stuck-up people and studio apartments as I had hoped. And somehow stewing and bitching about it day and night hasn't made it any better. Fancy that. I keep trying to substitute wining for whining, as My Friend Alcohol brightens the dullest situation, but I get sleepy after a glass or two and never get to enjoy the fun of being a happy drunk.

In Seattle's favor, the weather is reasonably glorious today. Maybe I'll buy a six pack and some roller skates and knit myself a shameful bikini (I learned to knit!) and bake a fuckload of cupcakes and skate door to door, passing them out to all the surly tenants (and the three nice ones). If no one is going to be nice to me, I may as well be creepy and annoying. In fact, rollerskates and cupcakes aside, I should quit being friendly and polite. I'm going to start scowling at everyone. I'll fit right in. Maybe that's my problem: I need to adopt the local customs. Besides, these people don't deserve my cupcakes, especially not my recently-perfected chocolate cheesecake cupcakes, the fakers.

Today I learned that one of my fellow apartment dwellers complained about my dog, suggesting that either I do not take her out enough (I was taking her out, literally, every two hours, barely sleeping, frantic--I imagine this was a tiny taste of what parenting would be like) and/or that I should diaper her.

In fact, she is not incontinent, but she did suffer a kidney infection that put her in the dog hospital for 2 nights and would like to have killed her. She was on Prednisone, which makes them pee more, and both the vet and I mistook her urgent peeing (she barely made it out the door; hence the complaint) as a side effect of the Pred and not a symptom of her terrible infection. They say that dogs and people start to look alike, but I find it a little freaky that Kiki got pretty much the same ailment that put me in the hospital back in November. Weird, huh?

Of course, I can't explain the whole situation to the other tenant, as he complained via the landlord, instead of to me directly. If he had complained to me, I would have apologized profusely and baked him a pie. After all, it was a legitmate concern; but everyone hates a tattle-tale. So instead of baking pie, now I'll have to cast hateful glances and whisper muffled curses at all of the men in the building (I know only that it was a man). Honestly, I would much rather bake than nurture unfocused resentment, but he left me no choice. Besides, the way most of the people around here act, hateful glances and muffled curses will probably go completely unnoticed. Mostly I feel shitty for putting my old man in a bad position w/ his neighbors and landlord.

Plus I'm annoyed that my whole grand epiphany-based life plan didn't work out as neatly as I'd hoped. The problem is that I really don't want to live in Kansas, and the most direct path to my epiphany-based life plan involved a great big exciting upheaval to Kansas. The exciting part was the upheaval part, not the Kansas part. It's hard to maintain a lather about Kansas. There's nothing there but sky (and don't get me wrong, I truly appreciate sky), and it's fucking cold. That's the main deal-breaker. Being a Texas girl, I'm not real keen on the cold as anything more than an occasional novelty. Plus it's hard to reconcile my lifeaftertheoilcrash.net paranoia with such a cold and distant place. It would have been a perfect fit for my Y2K paranoia, but that ship has sailed.

Actually, I could probably swing the weather w/ a big solar investment, but the places in question were actually much farther from civilization that I had been lead to believe (civilization = reasonable air service, Wichita or Kansas City, MO, 4 and 5+ hours away, respectively). I haven't totally written off the Kansas angle, but I figure I should invest a little more time in sniffing around before narrowing my search so much.

Oh! So, yes, I had that big epiphany I've been waiting on forever. It was very exciting, and while I realize now I can't possibly effect the lickety-split implementation I initially craved, I still feel entirely enthusiastic and dancing on the cusp of a delightful new non-holding-pattern sort of life.

Which is funny, because in the short term, I'm in the midst a month-long holding pattern also known as my vacation. On the way here, I got to see three whole new states, two of which (Idaho and Montana) totally surprised me. Wyoming was about what I expected. I also had the pleasure of a brief visit and yummy dinner in a Lynchian sort of twilight in Ritzville, a charming small town with which I was briefly obsessed. But my dislike of Seattle has sort of soured me on the rest of Washington, at least for now. Once my period's over I'll have a better sense of things. (Since I got off the pill a couple of years ago, my span of hormonal volatility seems to cover an ever-expanding range of time....)

I'll be here in Seattle with the boy and the doggies for the next couple of weeks, then Kristi is flying up and we're driving back to Texas via a different route, hopefully covering Yellowstone and/or the Grand Canyon. I'm worried it's going to be too cold at night for me and Kristi to take. We're warm-weather sissies and our sleeping bags are more suited to slumber parties than serious weather. But I figure I've got a couple weeks to knit us up a bunch of snug woolly hats.

03.22.04