Staycation

"Well, do you have any time off?" said the therapist to his nail-bitten patient, who looked crumpled and harried in the thinly-padded black Ikea chair before him.

"Um, yes.  I suppose-- I think I do.  I do," muttered the $50 co-pay in corduroys.

"Then take it," replied the therapist, who isn't always so direct.

"Oh," the patient replied, tracing the top of his worn and scratched travel coffee tumbler, "okay".

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Monday, the nanny came, and I left.  I was bewildered and stupid, like I was feeling up a girl for the first time and her bra was a combination of barbed wire and a Rubik's Cube.  I wandered out of my house and got behind the wheel of the CR-V.  I turned around and looked in the back and saw only two gigantic, empty car seats.

No babies.  I don't have to drive cautiously.  So I threw the column shifter down three notches and floored it.  As it's a CR-V and it drives like an old mail truck, not much happened, but it was still exciting to me.  I got its oil changed.  My old Israeli mechanic made fun of me.  I didn't care, because it was my week off.  Also, I was there for an hour-and-a-half, while he stopped changing my oil to answer the phone (six times) and to make coffee and to bullshit with random people dropping off keys and cars and was generally absent-minded, or maybe just ambivalent.  He also took time out to scream at some dissatisfied customer whose car was returned to him two days earlier, and died again.

"I TOLD YOU, THEN IT'S A PROBLEM WITH THE RELAY TO THE COMPUTER AND I CANNOT FIX THAT, AARON!"

Then there were some Hebrew epithets that I vaguely remembered my father shouting at slow-moving motorists when I was a boy.

After the oil change, I went to some hipster trendy emo annoying cafe to meet a friend of mine for coffee.  She's a flutist and she has a tattoo (I mean, I only know of one) and earrings made of petrified Alaskan something tusk.  Wolf ribs.  I don't know.  I have no business being friends with somebody this cool, but life's funny that way sometimes.  The flat-chested, nose-ringed crunchy Vermont-wannabee barista got me coffee in my worn and scratched coffee tumbler and it cost me $2.00.  My flutist friend got a for-here mug with endless refills and it cost her $3.00.  She insists she got the better deal.  I said you should be rewarded for bringing your own mug.  We talked about our various and sundry neuroses.  She can't go into a mainstream, big-chain supermarket with its floor-to-ceiling shelves and fluorescent lights without having a panic attack.  I hate myself.  So, it was like that.  She gets her packages delivered to the cafe.  I had half a bagel.  She took the other half home.  I thought that was funny-- it's something that someone who lived through the Depression would do.

Weirdo.

The library was my next stop.  Time to renew my card.  It expired four years ago.

"There's a six dollar and fifty-cent fine, too," the librarian said, "would you like to pay that now?"

Of course, I thought to myself, then I'll gleefully slit my wrists with my newly-renewed library card.  I smiled at her.  My smile is solely meant to creep people out.

Off to the computers downstairs to search for a job.  Soul-deadening-- worse than making a sandwich for tomorrow's lunch-- sifting through the meaningless job descriptions the 4-6 years of experience necessary, the ambiguous non-profit titles that mean absolutely nothing: program manager, program specialist, program assistant, associate program specialist, program coordinator-- they all mean the same thing: you sit on your ass in some rented office, answer phones, write emails and newsletter articles, copy shit and blog and silently wish you and everybody you know would die emphatically and expeditiously.

I applied for three jobs Monday.  God, I hope I get it.  How many boys, how many girls.

Tuesday and Wednesday I was with the babies.  I really like being a father, but I don't really know what it means yet.  I have twins, and they have me.  That's about all I know.  And I make dumb voices and faces a lot, and it seems to do the trick.  They like the nanny better than me, though.  I always knew they would, even before we had a nanny.  Or kids.

Thursday I had the day to myself again, and it was largely a repeat of Monday, only without coffee-with-incongruous friend.  I got my eyes examined.  Got lenses installed into an amazing pair of antique glasses that I got in a dramatically-sniped eBay auction.  No, they're not Warby fucking Parker, they're REAL.  And I love them.  My prescription changed, and I'm still adjusting.  It feels like I'm looking at the world through an astronaut's helmet.

At therapy yesterday, I thought my therapist would congratulate me for taking his advice to skip this week of work, but he didn't, and I was pissed.  It was really hard for me to do, I had to challenge feelings of guilt and obsessiveness and love of routine and a feeling that I don't deserve to do anything nice for myself.  Instead, we talked about me going on anti-depressants because I made the mistake of saying "I don't enjoy anything" and "I don't really want to do anything-- I don't want to stay home, I don't want to call people and I don't want to go out and I don't want to go to work".

Whoops.  Guess that must have sounded off an alarm bell or two in his well-coiffed head.  Thing is: I've always been this way, and I don't know who I'd be if I wasn't, and maybe meds will make me feel better and maybe I don't wanna feel better.  Maybe I'm a big baby.

Waa.

I don't know what I want to do for a job, and I don't know what I want to do when I'm not at my job.  And isn't my life terrible and hard!?  Aren't I just having such a rough time of it!?  Don't you just want run up and give me a big squelch and tell me it's all gonna be okay?  Give my hair a tussle?

Validate me.

Vindicate me.

Valorize me.

Save me.

The fact of the matter is that, a week away from an inpatient crisis psychiatric hospital is no small thing, whether you're taking the babies for a walk or getting new eyeglass lenses in an old frame. I think too much about things-- did you know that?   But it's Friday now and I return to work tomorrow morning for it to all begin again and anew.  I'm already fretting about who's been admitted, who's been discharged, what groups I'm supposed to run, how will it all ever be okay again and how did my babies get to be one year old?

Tomorrow.

I guess I should have written about that instead of this.  There's that judging mind that I can't seem to turn off.

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"You know, a lot of people say that medication helps with that," the therapist said to the $50 co-pay.  He stared at him and crossed his legs tightly.

"Do they?"

Thank God

Thank God I'm back.

I was beginning to run out of ideas!

Actually... I think I have.

Shit.

Okay-- you're up. What should I write about for tomorrow?

I mean, sure, I'll be tempted to regale you with tales of how I got oral herpes from hooking up with The Blarney Stone (I was warned that locals urinate on it-- like I had any intention of kissing the fucking thing in the first place) and how our tour bus murdered four dozen defenseless sheep, but I can't imagine that sitting you down to tell you all about our vacation is going to be endlessly fascinating for you. I mean, it smacks very much of those not-so-distant days when people invited friends over to sit on plaid couches to show them slides of their vacations.

While serving chips and dip.

I mean, I wouldn't do that to you. I'll just put the pictures up on Facebook because, somehow, that's much cooler than a slide-show.

But...That's Not a Vacation

My sister-in-law is a very smart girl.

First of all, she reads "My Masonic Apron," which only goes miles to prove that very point, as well as to illustrate deftly that she is a lady of a most discerning literary palate.

On Friday, she returned from a trip to Morocco with two of her friends. She telephoned her mother to let her know that she had returned and, when she heard that my wife and I were staying at her parent's house from the 25th-28th, she asked to speak to me.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," I said, as one does in these situations.

"What are you doing there?" she asked.

"Well, um, we're... um... on... vacation," I muttered as three dogs collided into each other in a noisy, furry hurricane on the kitchen floor beneath my feet.

"But... that's not a vacation," my sister-in-law observed.

Having now successfully lived through it, I can wholeheartedly agree that, no, it isn't.

We tried to keep it sane. Really, we did. Instead of staying at this house of massive insanity and emotionally stifled instability, we positioned ourselves to stay, with one of our dogs, at "the cottage," which isn't really a cottage at all. It's a crappy two-bedroom house with hollow-core doors and a vom-yellow dishwasher from the Johnson administration that my mother-in-law purchased for, well, I don't know. For some reason. Day One went reasonably well. However, that funny little blizzard came to say "hello" on Day Two, and it necessitated an absolutely terrifying drive from Providence, R.I., to the cottage in Fall River, M.A., to collect our belongings, and our dog, and bring all back to the crazy house so that we wouldn't be stuck at the cottage with nothing to consume but pickles, napkins, and our own feet.

Being a conservative fellow with a preservation instinct carefully honed by years of being attended to by a neurotic Jewish mother, I have only been in precious few circumstances where I truly believed that death could come at any moment. The drive to and from The Cottage was one of those times. The roads were incredibly treacherous, the visibility was, well, who are am I kidding-- there wasn't any visibility, and my wife was, um, close to hyperventilating in the passenger seat. The scariest bit, I have to admit, was the last stop sign before arriving at The Cottage. It's where the road you're on T's into the road that runs directly parallel to the river. The one that was, at that moment, absolutely tempestuously roaring. The one into which, had I not been traveling at 7 miles-per-hour and had our car not been equipped with anti-lock brakes, we would have plunged into, frozen in, and drowned, making for a very un-Christmasy obituary.

But we didn't die.

We didn't go to Heaven, or Hell. Just the Purgatory of my in-laws' house.

The place where you are not permitted to be sad, or angry, or disappointed, or even in a slight funk, where feelings of even the slimmest negativity or reality are mitigated and negated to death. Where the cure for the mopes is baking cookies at 1 a.m.-- for nobody in particular, just because that is what must be done. Where you must be forced to go skiing even though you have just spent half-an-hour digging a two-inch-long splinter out of your toe and can barely walk.

Where you have to be as cute and as quiet as the window curtain fabric.

If we had been having any fun up here, I would have felt inordinately guilty about the fact that my father was lumbered back in Pennsylvania with caring for our other dog that we left behind but, as I told him in a text message, "There is no fun happening up here."

And as he so artfully put it in a text back:

"Think about all the people who had great xmas day only to find out they can't get home... winter is shit... The same every year ...Just b safe."