TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

I am not so many handticks from thirty years old and my hourly wage is only Canadian pennies more than it was when I worked at Taco Bell a decade ago. My current place of employment isn’t as pastel as the Gap or refried as Applebees or money as Wall Street and I have to wear a headset and pretend that Christmas carols don’t make my inner Jew bristle. It hasn’t actually been that bad so far, although I’ve only worked for five hours and that includes the nap I took during a PowerPoint on how to greet people today. This particular big box bookstore might actually be kind of fun—it’s quintessential stoner work, and even though I’m not a stoner, I like working with them because they make me look smart. Regardless, I’m still looking for someone to blame this employment situation on. I should be entering my last semester of graduate school, studying for comprehensive exams, working on my thesis, and wavering between spending my graduation money on a gold tooth or a power suit. But I’m not sending out CVs or introducing myself as Dr. Herzog in my bathroom mirror just to get used to the feel of the words on my tongue. Nope, instead of entering the professional world, I’m cashiering my way through seasonal employment and wondering if lo mein or pizza is more appropriate for Christmas take-out.

I suppose this job thing is another no-one-to-blame-but-yourself-situation, but I prefer to attribute my minimum wage earnings on my particular blend of nucleic acids. Some people are planners: some of us innately prefer to wait for situations to self-correct, like the rotting banana in your fruit bowl that will decompose and disappear in just seven short years, saving you a trip to the compost pile. As fundamentally as I’m not blond or diabetic or under four feet tall, I’m also not a five-year-plan-planner, or, for that matter, a five-minutes-from-now-planner. If you asked me if I’d like to get dinner at the end of this sentence, I’d be like, “Huh? Why don’t you ask me when I get to the period? I can’t think that far ahead.” This obviously flawed practice has infiltrated all parts of my decision-making process. You want to see if I can fit inside that mailbox even though I’m supposed to be on the bus in forty-five seconds? Sure! Forty-five seconds or an hour? It’s all the future!

There is one part of my life, however, that is immune from this type of juvenile thinking: I have been preparing for disaster my entire life, be it nuclear winter, vegan jihad, a neighborhood takeover by Steve the Mailman. I can barely get through the morning without peeing on myself because by the time I’ve realized that my bladder is full it’s already empty, but I am ready for far-reaching disasters, especially the ones that will probably never occur in my lifetime and/or zip code. When I’m in a particularly stressful yoga pose, for instance, I don’t try to achieve a state of meditation or mindfulness; I think about how much better shape I’ll be in than the other detainees at Gitmo. When I bathe, I ask whoever I’m living with to hold my head under water so I’ll be ready in case of a water-boarding party. No matter how much I struggle, I say, Don’t let me up. I need this. I know this is crazy. I’ve never thought that burning every employment bridge I’ve had might be problematic for my long term ability to have a cell phone and/or health insurance, and now I have all the earning power of a seven-year-old Cambodia with missing pinkies. And yet, I’ve been mentally preparing for disease and disaster since I was a child. As a five-year-old, when my twin sister asked for Barbies and Cabbage Patch dolls for Christmas, I wanted a fire extinguisher and a hacksaw. Other kids wanted to swing, I wanted to learn CPR. While most of friends would rather watch indie films that not only challenge your cultural assumptions but also make you look intelligent, I prefer to watch Bruce Willis and take notes while he dismantles bombs.

I can’t plan a dinner party, but I have disaster contingency plans locked in a fireproof safe. I like to think this is the mark of the truly pragmatic, but it might be less about survival and more about anxiety. When I lived in Portland, what started as slight and totally reasonable fear that any bridge I was on was about to wave like a homecoming queen on the back of a convertible and flip my unprepared ass into the water below turned into full-blown panics attack anytime I saw an elevated roadway. If I spotted a ten-foot-high dam in the distance, I would pull the car over and stick my head between my knees and hyperventilate until my girlfriend agreed to switch seats with me so I’d stop getting snot on the upholstery. The bridge anxiety abated with cognitive behavioral therapy and a prescription for Valium, but when I stopped stressing about bridge collapse, I became paranoid about earthquakes and other natural disasters. Over dinner, I made my girlfriend recite our plan in case of the second coming. We’ll meet under the Burnside Bridge. But what if the river is flooding over the bridges? Shit. Once I realized that there was no way to plan a meeting spot without knowing what the nature of the disaster would be, I bought us matching Walkie Talkies, insisting that even if they seemed impractical, this simple technology would be our salvation when the phone lines went out.

This fear lives inside me like a blood-borne illness but the symptoms come and go in waves. Living in a small North Carolina town has greatly reduced my fear of terrorist attack, volcanic eruption, and killer bees. Because it’s almost impossible to be afraid when you live in a town where the most terrifying sight is a group of moms hula-hooping on the co-op lawn to a high school jam band, it’s cancer that has replaced natural disaster in the dark hole of my mind. I see it everywhere. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a healthy young woman who rarely gets sick even when those around cough and wheeze, I see disease. On nights when everyone else is playing bingo or working late, I put on the bald cap I bought for my Howie Mandel costume a few years ago and stare at myself in the mirror, preparing for the day when it’s not a five dollar piece of latex that I’ll see but my actual bald head, soft and vulnerable and slightly flat from not being held enough as a child. I cover my eyebrows in concealer and suck in my cheeks. Better get used to it, I think. I look at my face and wonder if my friends will buy Livestrong bracelets and wear pink ribbons, if anyone will offer to shave their head in solidarity, a gesture I will appreciate while insisting that there’s no reason to cut that beautiful hair. I think about the ways I’ll have to change my lifestyle. Might as well buy some heavy sweaters and take up a comforting hobby; give up coffee now so I don’t have to deal with caffeine headaches on top of chemo. There goes the occasional cigarette and hamburger.

Worrying about myself, about my own disease and dismemberment and death, is far easier than worrying about other peoples’. When you love someone, the world is beautiful and terrifying at once. This is the world that made the person you love, that brought her into your space and you into hers. But it is also that world that could swallow her as easily and thoughtlessly as a piece of dust floating in the wind. With enough preparation, I can survive it all—lymphoma, nuclear wind, meteors falling from space and crushing everything but my underground bunker. I will survive just fine, my concrete walls intact, my air filtered, my water supply clear, alive and glad to have spent the energy I could have used finishing school or finding work on more practical things like stockpiling food and Geiger counters. But if she doesn’t show up at our meeting place, if the Walk Talkie doesn’t beep, if I never know what happens, I will wish for the poison to drift through a crack in my bunker, causing my skin to slough off like sheets of filo dough and my eyes to turned upward and inward before falling out and rolling across the sterile floor. I will wish that I had let the cancer take me instead of fighting to survive because there is no survival without her, without you, without the people who will hold ice cubes to my lips when the radiation that will save me feels like it is killing me; the people who will say that I look better even though I will see their fear as clearly as the hair falling from my scalp; the people who make me want to live when breathing itself hurts. There is no contingency for this, no plan b, no mental preparation, just the hope that if it does happen, if she dies with the rest, I won’t be far behind, wishing that I hadn’t fought so hard, that I let the cancer take me when it could have, knowing that this final wish is the most selfish: that she, that all of you, would have outlasted me, that you would have to mourn my death so that I wouldn’t have to mourn yours; wishing that I had spent my time planning for the future that approaches rather than the one that ends it all.

You are not the most well-behaved Crayola in the box. On the good people palette, you’re maybe a cerulean blue or a burnt umber or one of those grays nobody ever talks about. Most of your bad behavior has been the easy, good-in-nature brand. Lots of skinny-dipping and peeing in sinks and being towed on a skateboard behind a 1984 12-beer-brown Ford 150 by a drunk with a rope. Easy, right? No harm done.

But not all of your bad behavior has been quite so innocent. The one person who was fool enough to be in a real girlfriend/girlfriend romance with you—the kind in which you hold hands not just at night when you’ve somehow convinced her to go home with you, but during the day when sidewalkers can easily peep you and your gay hands; the kind of relationship where the two of you have your own words, like, for instance, refering to breakfast as food pile,—was treated to several massive lies and maybe even a sort of double life. There were, of course, the standard girlfriend/girlfriend lies, like still being an actual smoker two years after your quit date and even switching from Bali Shag to Camel Lights because that’s what your housemate smoked and it’s a lot easier to hide if there’s only one brand in the ashtray. And there was, of course, the hypocrisy, particularly in regards to smoking, like your tsk tsk on the rare occasion she bummed a fag at a smoky bar where even if you’re not smoking you’re smoking, which made your heart shiver, not just because you were contracting osmosistic cancer but also because you loved her so much that you sometimes had thoughts like, “if a pig with a taser made me choose between my mother and my girlfriend, who would I choose?,” and then felt sorry for your mother.

Bad behavior may also have involved petty theft, academic dishonesty, and manipulating kind and good-hearted gayelles and sometimes straights into thinking that you are also kind and good-hearted, when actually you’re going to pretend to be asleep when they leave in the morning so you don’t have to face the truth, your truth, that you are an asshole and threw away the only girlfriend who was fool enough to be your girlfriend, and for what? For this? For not having had sober sex since you left two years ago because you wanted to be free?

Do you believe that you are fundamentally golden despite the evidence? That all it takes to be good is growing patio tomatoes and shopping at the co-op and riding your bike to work? That the bad behavior has all just been kid stuff, life lessons, learning experience? Maybe so. Maybe you think that you are still good despite it all, despite the friendships dead and the letters returned and the universe-shaped scar on your shoulder from the time you fell off your bike and onto your head and then lied to the EMTs and the nurses and the doctors who were just trying to make sure you didn’t die of head trauma and/or stupidity. You lied, you told them that your name wasn’t your name but that is was, in fact, the name, the only name, the name of the only girlfriend who was fool enough to be your girlfriend and who you tossed away like that bottle you could have recycled but didn’t because the trash can was right there.

And then maybe late one night a month or three weeks ago you are slapped with the evidence. You wake up in the middle of the night to a loud and insistent banging first on your door and then on your bedroom window, at which point you stop breathing and hide under you covers because the door-banger could be any of three possible candidates, two of whom deserve to restructure your guilty face. And then when the banging stops and the breathing starts you literally crawl from you bed to your living room to get your phone, the same phone that you turned off a week before because you could no longer deal with the calls and the texts from people who know that you are an asshole. And then you are awake, very awake, at 3 o’clock on Friday night/Saturday morning and are kharma-slapped again when your neighbor upstairs starts having the kind of sex that isn’t just about speaking springs but also about sounds, human sounds, the very the thing you hate to hear above all other things you hate to hear, more even than the saxophone.

The next day as you muse the events of the night before, you suddenly have the aha realization that the door-banging and sex-hearing were punishment from that Santa-like god you don’t actually believe in, punishment for being an asshole. At this point you not only feel sorry for yourself, you also feel sorry for everyone else, everyone you have tossed and everyone you would have tossed. And this is maybe when you start to reconsider the of-course-I’m-good way of thinking and realize that it’s time to actually be good.

You mop your kitchen floor and clean your fridge and contribute to the NPR fund drive. You get library books and re-pot your basil and buy running shoes. And you stop drinking. And this is where the bad behavior starts to maybe dissipate a little bit. Yes, you are a little bored of Netflix, but when you wake up you feel good, very good. You look at your plants and you are happy. You start to resemble Nick Jonas more than ever. It’s not just the mouth and the chin anymore. It’s the virginity, a virginity he has and which you, a non-drinker, are re-growing. Will it last through summer? Maybe, although your will power is small and your thirst great and sangria at the pool makes adulthood, makes buying gas and setting your alarm, almost worth it. But before you lose your virginity once again, you hope that the memories you lost, the little things, the girlfriend/girlfriend language, knowing someone else’s life lines and thumbnails, remembering if she liked sweet tea, which you think she probably did because she is Southern and good, but which you cannot remember—maybe it will all come back as you and Nick Jonas fade into each each other. You, you and Nick Jonas, you will one and you will be good.

Part of my current movement towards Adulthood involves actually attending the yoga classes I pay for every month. Sweating in an old meat locker with a fluorescent blue AEROBICS! sign burning through my eyelids as I downward dog is kind of definitely not something I look forward to, but shivasna provides me with a few still minutes to think about Really Important Shit, like lunch.  Today, however, I used nap time to ponder Things That Displease Me

• When you’re getting your diaphoresis on in the sauna at the creepy gym down the street that used to be a grocery store and a woman walks in with her junk in the wind because she’s just showered and wants to dress in the warmth of the herpes-ridden sauna. As A Box To The Left, this generally doesn’t bother me unless the woman also does her hair in said sauna. Meaning, she fucking hairsprays her fucking bangs in the fucking hot box.

• When you pee with a tampon in and, upon pulling up your britches, realize that you’ve basically just pissed yourself because the string betwixt your legs has a fresh sheen of urine and it’s stuck to your thigh. This really isn’t a problem when you wear underwear, of course—the contaminated string being neatly contained in that nice cotton habitat—but because of your No Underwear After Dinner Or Ever On Sundays rule, there’s nothing to be done except wipe better.

• When you go to the career center to discuss possible job opportunities, assuming the career lady will be like, Hmm.  Information science.  Here’s a network administration job you’d be perfect for!, and that afterward you’ll swing by Ann Taylor for some power suits and some casual Friday and go collect your first paycheck, but instead, she looks at your resume, pauses, and says, Cheesecake Factory’s hiring.  They love students over there.  You’d be perfect!

• Start a small business (AKA get a prescription for Adderall).
• Not shit myself while reading at the Queer Art/Queer Action Conference (March 26-28 in Asheville.  Keynote Speaker = John Cameron Mitchell = Shortbus = awesome.  Mark your calendars!).  This is only my second public reading (sober) and the last one was pretty disastrous.  I was reading a “non-fiction” piece about coming out that made my folks looks less generous than they actually were.  Their only concern about being there was that someone would point them out, which I assured them would never happen.  But then the man introducing me pointed to the back of the room and said something about having known my parents for 15 years.  Also, when I finished a bunch of people were crying, which was okay because making people cry is kind of a hobby.
• If my small business fails (and I doubt it will.  There’s nothing risky about dispensing prescription medication, especially in this economy.), I’m going into sex work.   Not the kind of sex work where you have to actually touch people (Ick.  Germs.), but the kind on the phone.  What’s it called again?   Ah, phone sex.  A friend recently told me about living with her boyfriend while he was a phone sex operator.  She would wake up in the middle of the night and hear him pouring glasses of water in the toilet so it sounded like he was peeing.  Also, he apparently had to make farting sounds on his arm.
• Not fail out of school.  Figure out what the term “information science” actually means.  Attend all presentations, especially when I’m supposed to be giving them.
• Get involved in a fruitful relationship.  If that fails, cable.
• Limited drunken trips to Time Out to twice a month.   Ok, three times.
• Revive the best fake band you’ve never heard of, Snail Trail.
• Turn 26.  Act like it.  Time to start paying your own phone bill, you lazy fuck.  Also, I’m not going to ask my sister to answer my emails any more.
• I should probably spend less time sitting in smokey bars telling lies and more time working out and hugging orphans, but c’mon.  Let’s be real, people.  This sounds like plenty to me. Let me know if you can think of any vital, life-changing plans you think I should implement next year.  I can always use help with this growing up stuff.  I’m also willing to give you suggestions.  I may not take advice, but I’m good at dispensing it.