TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

Big problems, ya’ll.

If you’ve read not just between the lines but on top of or under the lines, you’ve maybe realized that going to graduate school was the biggest mistake of my life, bigger even than the time with the neighbor’s housesitter on Christmas Eve when my girlfriend was attending Midnight Mass with a gaggle of orphans (see the Broken Heart, Broken Hymen single, “Why Did I Fuck That Painter Who Was Housesitting For My Upstairs Neighbor”).

Why did I bother taking the GRE and writing the essay and paying for the transcripts and begging for recommendation letters to attend a program that makes me want to go into roof tarring? Because I quit my full time job in a fit of drunk and figured that I’d already burned through the employment tunnel so I might as well study instead of making lattes for the entitled. Also, the strip club were I worked made us feed the juke box ourselves and I was running out of quarters. And why apply to this particular program, the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina? Because my sister said it was easy and the SILS students seemed to attend a far more happy hours than the bio-chem PhDs and I already live in Chapel Hill so the commute’s easy.

Terrible decision. I convinced myself that I’d be able to turn this degree into something that sounds fun and impressive, like maybe web design or programming. Turns out I not only hate web design and programming, I am terrible at it, like worse even than I am at dancing on my fists, which I’m actually kind of good at. And though it’s incredibly easy to get good grades in this program (see semester one, when I didn’t attend my own final presentation and got the highest grade possible), actually learning and caring about the material is another issue entirely.

Every semester I think this is it. I’m finally going to put that belt on and harness my creative energy (i.e. adult onset ADD.) and do the work and learn the material and get a job and not create fake gmail accounts at three a.m. to tell my professor that my “roommate” was in a “bike wreck” and will not be attending class tomorrow due to a “head injury.”

This semester is even more painful. I’ve taken all the bullshit classes and now I’m entering the technical phase, which, apparently, is like totes important when you’re getting a master’s degree in information science, which I wish someone had told me so I could have gone into women’s studies. Web design, programming, information security, database? Do these seem like classes you can charm your way through? No they do not. I survived undergraduate by making my professors laugh (and once crying in an instructor’s office), which was easy because I was stoned for most of college and I’m funny when I’m stoned. No more. My professors don’t even know my name, much less my story about the time five minutes ago when I trolled Manhunt with Boutros Bourtos Ghali.

The main reason I haven’t dropped out of the program yet is that I really enjoy not working. It’s not that I’m lazy—it’s that I’m a Gemini. I can live off my student loans and government checks easily enough. I’m a little more taco truck than truffle oil these days, but I can handle that as long as people think I’m a starving artist. More importantly, I get cheap health insurance as a student and I’ve become more than a little dependent on the drugs that keep my feet on the ground instead of atop an 11 story crane. Even though going off my meds would certainly be an interesting little experiment, I’ve reached the point in my life where getting high off my own brain chemistry is counter-productive to my principal goal—finding a girlfriend—because retrieving loved ones from the ER and/or police station is only fun once.

It gets worse. I just found out that I’m not receiving a stipend this year. I went to pick up my refund and the cashier looked sympathetic but still called security when I tried to climb over her desk and grab as many checks as I could.

What to do? I’m pretty much fucked. Unless you count the 30 seconds each Monday it takes to submit my unemployment claim, I have no job even though I actually applied for more than one and even did call backs and sent coupons for low-fat Trader Joe’s yogurt to the whole HR department of several companies. The only things I own are a washer/dryer and the silver vagina and an empty bank account. I need that check.

But, I have a plan.

I heard a story about a server/artist who was given a check for $40,000 after telling some dude she was waiting on that she was a painter after she did her side work and counted her tips. YOU CAN BE THAT DUDE!!!

Think of this as an NPR fund drive, but with better prizes and less news. Here’s the deal: you give me $10,000 (or more or less. Every little bit, you know…) and I will do any and all of the following:

1.) Go to your high school reunion with you and tell the cheerleader who laughed in your face and called you a dyke when you asked her to the prom how genuinely happy you are in your life and your gayness, happy in a way that she and her husband Chip will never be because they, like R. Kelly, are stuck in the closet.

2.) Make every one of my Facebook status updates about you for a year (which, incidentally, is actually happening to me at this very moment because Virtual Girlfriend underestimated my mad skillz on the shuffleboard board and agreed not only to blow me up via status update but also to name her first born children Rocket and Panda. The best update so far: “Fact: Katie’s ass is getting me into heaven.”)

3.) I’ll use my ass to get you into heaven.

4.) Get your face and/or name and/or anything else you want tattooed anywhere on my body below the neck.

5.) Name Broken Hearts, Broken Hymen’s debut album after you.

6.) Love whales? Hate forrest fires? Mormon? I’ll canvas for your cause. Even better, I’ll do it in a romper with a blond weave and inch and half long acrylic nails. And I’ll make my Malibu Barbie twin go with me. (See below.)

7.) Speaking of Malibu Barbie, all of my friends are attractive. And I’m not just saying that because I’ve slept with all of them (KIDDING. Only half.). Small boobs, big boobs, short, tall, male, female—they are just flat out hotties. I’m sure I could convince at least one of them to go out with you. No promises on the b.j.s, but I’m sure a couple would be your Facebook friend and super poke you and tag you in promotional photos of Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag and write inside jokes on your wall.

8.) Got your eye on the hottie with pretty ideas and chocolate rack who won’t make eye contact with you? I can fix this. Along with being a master texter, I am a pen pal extraordinaire. Poetry, post cards, leaving plants on her porch, I can school you in the art of the woo. Believe.

9.) Au pair your babies. KIDDING. I wouldn’t do that to you. I will, however, sell you my eggs, which are only slightly damaged. I mean, fuck, I just found eight dollars on the floor and I lose weight just by thinking skinny thoughts. Talk about good genes!

10.) Write a book that you will love because not only will it be dedicated to you, it will include all the things you want to hear that I am too discrete to write about on the Internet. You think the shit I’ve disclosed is stupid and/or indecent? HA! I’ve done way dumber/crazier shit. I’ll even write about that time with the cop and the nurse and also about the time with the midget in the locker.

You think I’m kidding about this. I get that. Why not just be a grown up and find a way to survive this program and get a nine-to-five and some casual Friday and move to New Jersey? Because I am so untalented at this information shit that even if I did graduate, I’d still be looking at third shift at Taco Bell. But I am serious about the book. The only thing I’m fully motivated to do other than find a girl who’ll scratch my back and make me grilled cheese is write for you. That’s right—just for you. But I can’t do that sitting in this over-conditioned classroom trying to make it look like I’m paying attention but really calculating how to fake my death for Sally Mae. I will seriously do any of the above or whatever else you want (with the exception of b.j.s, which you probably wouldn’t want anyway as my mouth is somewhat of a vagina dentata where 50 percent of the population in concerned). We’ll get it in writing and shit.

C’mon people. Think of this as a non-traditional grant application. At least one of you must must want to put “patron/benefactor” on your resume. Or maybe you’re as broke as me but still appreciate the art of the lie. You’ve got a rich uncle, don’t you? Tell him I’ve overcome great difficulties like bad posture and a heart murmur and, against all odds, still manage to sleep around and fanger tap on the regular. All I ask is that you think on it while I’m over here stealing copper from model homes.

Oh, dang.

I wanted to hate San Francisco.  I wanted my Southern blood to turn to cherry-flavored freeze pops in the summer fog.  I wanted to be stuck at the fat kid table, intimidated by all the cool kids with their tattoos and popular side-swept bangs.  I wanted to eat bad fish tacos.  I wanted to get a swirly in a public bathroom.  Anything to hate the city and return to my sweet and easy life in Historic Downtown Carrboro (population 17, 931), with my balcony and my bucket garden and a roommate who will jazzercise to Jewel with me before breakfast.  Alas, I spent the week trying to lose my driver’s license so I’d have a legitimate reason to stay and send home for my silver vagina and my body pillow.

How could you not love a city that is so packed with gays that the sky over the Castro is rainbow colored?  A city where sitting in a park means watching polite black market entrepreneurs whispering ganja treats, ganja treats as they skateboard past you?  A city where Sean Penn knocks on your door to invite you to sled down the hill and into the Pacific to make underwater sand castles and tell whale jokes to bi-valves?

One of the highlights was Nightlife, a 21 and up event at the California Academy of Sciences.  Imagine this: drinking wine in an aquarium lit by phosphorescent sea things with eyes like lightening bugs and bodies you can’t see in the dark water and fish that look like screen savers and other fish that look like the sweetest high tops ever.  Walking in a spiral around an indoor rain forest with poison dart frogs that may be plastic but look so convincing and seem so polite for keeping still while you take their picture.  Brushing the butterflies off your shoulder before getting in the elevator.  A rooftop garden.  A planetarium that makes you dizzy in the best way.  Djs.  And all without the children who normally ruin culture and learning and self-improvement.  It was too good to joke about.

Of course, it wasn’t all sweet tea and swizzle sticks   One of my bigger issues when I lived in Portland was how lesbian sensitive everyone was.  I inadvertently (mostly) offended both friends and strangers with casual observations like, Look at that twink. I wonder how many herpes he collected on Vaseline Alley last night. What do you think, pitcher or catcher?  I bet he’s a bottom cause he’s walking like his asshole hurts. San Francisco also has a bit of the sensitive lesbian about it.  When a girl at the Lexington—the only actual dyke bar in SF, weirdly—asked me if I was Jewish, I was a little confused.  I have reddish hair and blue eyes and freckles.  Granted, I tell people I’m part Jew all the time, but I’m actually a plain old mix of Mick and Kraut.  Boring, I know.  Anyway, when recounting this incident to a new friend a moment later, I said, “I wonder if she thinks I’m Jewish because of all the 100 dollar bills sticking out of my pocket,” at which point my new friend looked at me like I’m Fred Phelps and revoked my invitation to share her blanket at the Michigan Womyns’ Music Festival.  The same thing happened when I referred to someone’s gay wedding in air quotes and said something about how I got married in kindergarten and the ring pops were delicious.

Another incident: I was talking to my Virtual Girlfriend (more on this later) and she said something about how her parents, who are older, went at a gathering of some sort.  Not exactly a party, she said, but something that old people go to.  And, not giving my brain time to catch up with my mouth, I said, “A funeral?”  Thankfully, VG has a sense of humor and didn’t cancel our avatars’ one-deminsional gay wedding right then.

A woman at a dance party a few days later wasn’t quite so amused when I pretended to be deaf.  It sounds more fucked up than it is.  Here’s the thing: although I have commanding virtual balls on this here series of tubes, I’m actually totes shy and soft-spoken in public, at least until we take shots and you laugh at my story about the teenage mime.  Anyway, I get kind of annoyed when people I don’t know are all, Why aren’t you talking?  Puma got your taste organ? This particular dance party gayelle was also bothering me because she was tall enough to smoosh me and I think she would have done so to pocket “Clare,” the friend I was visiting, so after she commented on what she perceived was my inability to converse, I told her that I was deaf and pretended to read her lips. I may also have done the only signs I know (beautiful, thank you, and cookie) and maybe even vogued for a minute before admitting that I’m a liar.  A hearing liar, at that.  She was not amused.  But, whatev.  Everyone else giggles at us fags and faggettes.  Why not join the party?

Only one mildly bad thing happened, and it was, as usual, my fault. “Clare” and I went to a daytime dance party called Mango on Saturday.  It was wall-to-wall queer women.  Like overwhelmingly gay.  Like the only men these women know are sperm donors.  There were so many women that the line for the bathroom was a year long (which I bypassed by using the urinal, which made my shoes smell like piss but at least my underwear stayed dry.).  After the party, “Clare” split to take her whiskey- and cigarette-smelling self home and I stayed for a bit.  Later, when I was trying to get a cab, a black Town Car stopped across the street and the driver yelled to ask if I was looking for a taxi and I ran over and jumped in.  Unlike most professional car services, however, the back seat was covered in Arby’s bags and there was a woman and a pit bull in the front seat.  I didn’t want to be judgmental of the guy’s taste in food/dogs/women, so I crossed my phalanges and gave him “Clare’s” address.  But when he asked me how to get there, I realized that cabbies should probably know their way around town and that he was going to sell me into white slavery. I waited until the next stop light and jumped out.  Not exactly fun, yes, but a learning experience—one I should probably have remembered from the golden rule of kindergarten: don’t talk to strangers.

Coming next: Stranger From The Internet

I was nine years old when I found out that Santa Clause doesn’t exist.  I don’t know why my father chose the moment he did to drop the first real disillusionment bomb in his twin daughters’ lives, but he told Betsy and I on a summer day that was so hot and far removed from Christmas that the words coming out of his mouth hurt not just for the truth but for the shock.  Not quite to the part of the summer when malaise takes over and even the community pool offers refreshment but little else, we weren’t even thinking about Christmas yet, much less evaluating our behavior over the past twelve months to assess our chances of seeing matching black and neon green Rollerblades under the tree. There we were, fresh from fighting a battle in a neighborhood where alliances were as flexible and ever-changing as governments—one day you’re fighting alongside the Taliban/girl next door and the next you’re allied with Poland/the boy up the street—and in a single moment we entered the adult world of the disillusioned.  Our dad softened the blow, There’s no Santa, with the caveat, And there’s no Jesus! which we already knew.  A guy born in a barn to a woman so ashamed of her own sexuality that she tells her husband she got knocked up by a dude with a heavenly zip code?  Right.  Her baby daddy was part human and part celestial but obviously an above-average lover if he  impregnated her from the moon.  And Jesus’s step daddy was probably gay if he was willing to accept that Mary didn’t have a thing with the papyrus man but was actually knocked up by a wispy dude who lived on a cloud.  Not exactly plausible.  But Santa?  Now that was a shock.

My parents are not the churchy sort. The combination of two fairly traditional religious backgrounds—she was raised Catholic, he was raised Baptist—ensured that their children would have only a cursory awareness of religion. If not for the prevalence of religion in our conservative hometown—warnings of eternal damnation are broadcast from billboards on I-40 with statements like, What if she had aborted Jesus?—I suspect I would have started college wondering why so many people wear ts around their necks. As it was, however, our brother Adam, Betsy, and I could not be shielded from the Christians around us. I learned about baptism the same day I learned that I had a one-way ticket to Hell that could only be refunded if I let a preacher dunk me in a river in a white dress in front of people holding snakes and convulsing. As unappealing as dresses and getting water in my nose was, learning that Betsy and I would be the sole third graders to spend eternity in that underground hotbox was seriously depressing. I became convinced that my only way off the heathen cafeteria table was to be re-born, the mere idea of which was confusing because even if my mom wanted to go through childbirth again, there’s no way I could fit in her womb. When I approached my mom about my fear of forever sunburned isolation, she quietly told me that it was fine if someday I wanted to join the church, but there was plenty of time to think about it. She made salvation seem like drinking or sex—adult things that I was free to choose but shouldn’t until my gray matter stopped growing. I imagine my dad saying something like, “Don’t worry. There’s no such thing as hell.” but I suspect his response was more like, “The only reason to go to church is for gospel music and cornbread,” before reminding me about our family mascot, the HMS Beagle.

Our rejection of religion in a religious town made us different. My parents didn’t teach us the Golden Rule; they taught us Kant’s categorical imperative. When my dad and I took walks in the evening, we talked about the history of human evolution: australopithecine, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapien. I knew who that our short and furry ancestor Lucy was named after a Beatles’ song before I knew long division.

But even though our parents rejected religion in their own lives and never made it a part of our lives, they realized that banning us from attending church was not a battle they should invest a great deal of ammunition on. So their son wanted to go to youth group because all his friends did? Fine. At least that was be a couple of hours the local cops wouldn’t harass him for skateboarding. So Adam went to a church basement every Wednesday evening, surely less interested in Jesus than in the youth groupies. Adam’s Christian education included watching a film that claimed that rock ‘n roll music can boil an egg. The intention of broadcasting this dubious fact was supposed to scare impressionable youngsters that if the Rolling Stones can turn raw eggs into brunch, it can likely do the same to your brain. Adam saw through Christly claim, and decided to prove the invalidity of the movie through his eight grade science fair project, Can Rock Music Boil An Egg? Despite blowing out the stereo during the scientific process, our parents were proud when Adam not only disproved the Christian right but won bronze prize in the science fair.

Although we may have been self-conscious that our parents let us play silent shepherds in bathrobes in the Methodist Church Christmas pageant but only attended a single performance and didn’t stay for the actual preaching part, while the other parents went to each painful rehearsal during the weeks leading up to Jesus’s birthday (we waited outside the church after the play ended and the preaching began with the boys whose parents were followers of Meher Baba, a 20th century guru who inspired the Bobby McFarin song, Don’t Worry, Be Happy), their refusal to be part of an establishment so fundamentally silly was later a source of pride. When I was in tenth grade, my mom had Christian Heritage Week, five days in which the school principal or a member of one of the school’s multitude of Christian clubs read a prayer during morning announcements, canceled with a call to the ACLU. This defense of civil liberties was not surprising by a woman who dressed her second grade daughter as her hero, Harvey Gant, a black man running for North Carolina senate against the arch conservative Jesse Helms, for Halloween, and who encouraged her daughters to sing and dance to the Neville Brothers Sister Rosa at a fourth grade school talent show.

There was a brief time when religion was the cause of a mildly strange family dynamic. As a junior in high school, Betsy attended a protest at the School of the Americas, a Georgia military operation that trains Latin American soldiers and police to violate human rights in support of American interests. Betsy spent much of the protest with Jesuit priests and nuns who risked their lives working for justice in Latin America. They were married to God, yes, but they also fought the corrupt establishment. Betsy was inspired. When she returned home, she said she had something to tell us. I braced myself for her confession of lesbianism, sure that she was going to stop shaving her legs and start saying things like, fuck patriarchy before spitting on the sidewalk, but next words out of her mouth were far more shocking: I’ve found Jesus. No one knew how to respond to this. It was the ultimate rebellion. Indeed, years later, when I was gently prodded out of the closet, it was essentially a non-issue. When I asked my mom who told her, she said, “No one. Your father has gaydar.”

Betsy lost Jesus after a few days, but there were, of course, other acts of rebellion: staying out late, underage drinking, smoking weed out of homemade bongs after our parents were asleep. But one thing has never changed: we have never forsaken our parents’ values—their beliefs in freedom and equality, their respect of science and reason, their suspicion of authority, their interest in the world. My parents gave up the dogma they were raised with. My mom left Catholic school after she was kicked out of her senior prom for bringing a black date. My dad’s teenage involvement in the Baptist Church ended after a summer working in a kitchen at a Jesus camp. He talks more about the butter sculptures he built in the slow hours than then any religious element of his summer job. I have friends who have rejected the gods they were raised to believe in and others who found religion later in life. But I have nothing to rebel against. I agree so fundamentally with my parents on the things that comprise my sense of right and wrong that the rejection of the values instilled in me is as likely getting pregnant by my girlfriend. Why rebel against reason, against justice, against equality? They raised us differently, yes, but they raised us well.

1.) School clothes are far less fun when purchasing them means sacrificing a night at the bar and/or eating beans and rice rather than ordering pizza and eating it alone cross-legged on one’s floor before drinking four or five cups of laxative tea, which may limit your movement (ha!) the next day but takes care of the bloating without the side-effects of MiniThins or Yellow Jackets.

2.) Appearances ain’t shit compared to the words leaking from your word hole. Meaning, if you are reading Esquire (don’t judge) in the Salt Lake airport and a seriously adorable (not red dwarf/sun spot hot but adorable) baby dyke with a baby dyke haircut sits near you and smiles at you every time you lift your eyes from a riveting article on houndstooth versus argyle, she is could still be not just dumb but dumb and straight, as exhibited by her concourse phone call conversation that includes the phrase, “Tri Delts are way less cokey, but are still kind of sluts. Not that there’s anything wrong with sleeping with basketball players. I mean, sleeping with a Tarheel is serious social capital.”

3.) Despite surviving on student loans and government handouts and the unfounded belief that as long as I don’t know my bank balance it can never get any lower, born middle class, die middle class. The following image corroborates this observation: four girls who drink PBR because it’s cheaper than food and has a high enough water content for semi-adequate hydration with four of the most New Yorker-reading, NPR-listening, Prius-driving tattoos imaginable. That’s right: brunch

From left, Fish Fry, Small Fry, Stormy Pants, and Hotdog

Sorry for the long delay in twentytwentyishm (Actually, before we get started, I want to worn you that I’m on my friend “Clare’s” bobo laptop and her backspace doesn’t work and I’m not good with first round grammar so if I spell warn with an o, that’s wihy. SOrry.)

Anyway. I’m in San Francisco and part of me wants to gay marry this city and part of me wants to move to Kansas and join on of those churchs that hate fags. Even the dogs here are gay. I saw a Labrardor driving a Subaru yesterday.

I’ll explain more about this west coast reconicense mission later this week when classes start and I have hours to blow, but I want you to know that I met someone from the internet and almost got abducted. The two are unrelated.

I hope everyone in the virtual world is feeling babycakes and making sexy eyes at the table next to you.

I collect diagnoses. First, I had a bouncing case of adult onset ADD. Then I was half bi-polar and half anti-social. Next it was hypersensitivity disorder and then I was compulsively obsessive. At this point, I nod and fill prescriptions in anticipation of the apocalypse, when I’ll trade SSRIs and mood stabilizers and the antibiotics I’ve been collecting for “sore throats” and “severe yeast infections” for fresh water and pastries. There is one diagnosis, however, that I cannot fix with big pharma, as anyone who’s observed me on public transit, my face scuba, my paws latex, can probably tell.

I am afraid of upholstered furniture. That’s right. Furniture. And though I’ve heard that Billy Bob Thorton has some issues with antique furniture (and harpsichords) as well, this particular phobia is rare, not even as common as Coprastasophobia, or the fear of constipation, which is at least popular enough to have a name and easy enough to cure with a breakfast of coffee and a cigarette. Indeed, there are only 1540 hits for “upholstered furniture phobia” on Google, which is only sightly more than the number of hits for “I want a lobotomy.” And, yet, I devote a fair square of brain space to this matter. I stand up on buses. I would rather sleep on a pile of dirt than a hotel bed. My ideal house is furnished only with tree stumps.

Other phobias are irrational, but this one is not. Think about it. The train seat on your evening commute that seems such a reprieve from your swivel chair would probably spit Folger’s in your eye just for putting your feet on the seat back in front of you. And have you never considered the possibility of contracting lice from leaning against the headrest in your rental car? Think about that next time you Greyhound. The potential for physical and emotional harm from contaminated fabric is endless.

Unfortunately, when I say “I have a fear of upholstered furniture,” what I really mean is “I have a fear of anything that anyone else has ever touched or maybe even looked at, especially upholstered furniture.” Now this is a problem. I am basically a welfare mom with a taste for truffle oil instead of children. I can’t afford new clothes but I’d have to be running naked down 15-501 after an acid spill before I’d walk through the doors of Goodwill. That thrift store smell—a nose of dandruff and bleach with a finish of scabies—gives me mouth vomit enough to ruin enamel.

And then there’s the shit that gets hidden among the drop-offs. I know a dude who worked at the Bins, a Goodwill that sells other peoples’ throwaways by the pound. You have to dig through mounds of shit to find that vintage Calvin Klein windbreaker. This guy told me that he once found a giant double-headed dildo in the bins. Somebody else’s dildo. And you know anyone who’d throw a sex toy in the give-away pile doesn’t boil that shit first.

The biggest problem is my own furniture. When A—, the only girlfriend who was fool enough to be my girlfriend, and I moved across the country, we had to set up any entirely new household as her Saturn wagon had room for her clothes and my protective plastic sheeting but not much else. But because we could barely afford the gas to Ikea, much less anything actually in the store, we had to turn to used goods if we weren’t going to eat Indian-style on the floor, which actually would have been fine with me. A—, however, didn’t want to sleep side-by-side on matching yoga mats, despite my argument that the harder the surface, the stronger your back, so off we were to consignment shops.

After sleeping on an air mattress for the six months before we moved, A— was desperate to sleep on a bed, a real bed, and ignored my panic attack when paying for a used mattress, which, incidentally, is illegal in North Carolina but not in Oregon, where they don’t realize you can get pregnant from a toilet seat. Because I was not about to sleep under the bed when our only source of heat was each other, I got over it through meditation and reminding myself that as soon as A— finished law school I’d be wiping with velvet toilet paper. By Christmas, I was able to fall asleep without the aid of thirteen PBRs and seven Tylenol PM. Changing the sheets, however, meant actually touching the mattress, so A— got that chore. I scrubbed the toilet.

There were more danger zones in that house. I could deal with our used dresser as long as the drawer liners where in place, but the living room furniture made me pull out my application to the most spartan monastery I could find with wireless. Actually, the couch was napable. It came from family friends and had a washable cover. It was an old hotel chair that really shuddered me. At first, I could barely look at that chair unless my inhaler was nearby. I soon decided, however, that the chair was safe when fully covered with an old fleece blanket that Mazog gave me after my power got turned off one winter. The blanket made it okay. I spent our first winter in Portland in that hotel chair, feet propped on the radiator in wool Christmas socks. But once the blue fleece was designated to the chair, I couldn’t bring it to bed. It was the chair blanket, not the bed blanket. We couldn’t possibly sleep under a blanket that had touched the hotel chair. A— disagreed, but I bought her a hot water bottle and a sleeping bag and she forgave my neuroses. (The funny thing about this particular phobia is that when I really care about someone—like love her so hard I would rather kick a puppy then beat her at kickball—her DNA becomes precious like a kilo of hard drugs is precious. A— could have pissed on my feet and I wouldn’t change my socks, blown her nose in the sheets and I wouldn’t have washed them, painted the front step with her menses and I would laugh and step over it.)

This problem hasn’t exactly gotten better with time. My current home was furnished entirely by friends and family. Things that are used by people I care about generally get a free pass from my neuroses. A four poster bed from a pal moving to San Francisco? A well-loved sake set from a former drinking buddy fresh from rehab? A spare colostomy bag from a doctor friend who knows how I feel about public bathrooms? Thanks, guys! My mattress was donated by my sister before she moved to Aspen, Colorado, the Land of Milk and Money, but I told myself it was cool cause we share DNA.

Once again, however, I have couch issues. After realizing that you catch more honeys with pillows than with folding chairs, I gratefully accepted a friend’s couch. Considering that said friend wears shoes from Goodwill without socks on, I probably should have realized her couch was rescued from Craigslist, but I was too busy trying to move out of my house before my roommates got back from work to think about it. Now I sit on it only because my therapist told me to do one thing that scares me every day. And it does scare me. This is the problem with phobias. It’s not that you can’t shop at Goodwill, it’s that it makes your world very small. It’s starts with a slight annoyance that your neighbor left footprints in your carpet after you’d just vacuumed, but soon you’re thinking about those footprints in the carpet more than you should, dragging the vacuum behind you when you walk around your house. And then you’re avoiding the carpet altogether, jumping from couch to chair to tile, anything to avoid those insidious footprints. Eventually you can’t leave the house, not now and not ever, because everything out there is so terrifying, so toxic, so out of your control. Eventually you are standing in the middle of your living room, not touching anything, waiting for the walls to disappear.

You know how time is distorted sometimes? Like when you’re on drugs? Yeah, we haven’t quite gotten the keep-it-under-five-minutes thing yet. Watch anyway. It’s not you’re not doing anything important. Fuck, you don’t even like your job.