This Afternoon In Drama

Placenta Doesn't Fall To My Carpet

My musician friend, David, is traveling with a band that's traveling with the band, Live, and he asked me, you know Live or were you too young at the height of their popularity?  And I said, I have a distinct memory of their song about placenta falling to the floor blaring out of someone's car in my high school parking lot because that placenta line always sat very poorly with me.  The song, which I heard just yesterday while running in the gym next to an old man who could barely walk, is about a mother giving birth in one room and an old woman dying in the next.  The old woman's soul-- and, according to the song, problems-- lift out of her and rush into the new baby.  A horrifying idea, I think, although the band chooses to treat the transfer romantically in the song.

I'm four minutes away from turning twenty-eight and behind me my rabbit is lying in her hutch, dying, but I don't know how quickly.  On Tuesday we went to the vet and he turned out the lights and put up her x-ray.  "Do you see this area?" he asked, circling around the image of her upper chest with his finger, indicating a white, glowy area.  "We should be able to see her heart.  The tumor is so big that I can't make out any of it."

"When she stops eating," he said, "you'll know."

I have a very casual relationship with death, particularly personal decisions about one's own death that remain separate from the biological axe and particularly-particularly assisted death for people with terminal or even just debiliating illnesses.  So for the past few days, this morning especially, I've been staring into my rabbit's eyes, trying to figure out how shitty she feels even if she's still eating every carrot and piece of lettuce I put in front of her.  And, as dopey as this sounds, I've been trying to figure out what she wants.  Does she want me to put her down before it all really goes to shit?  Right now her day mostly consists of lying on her stomach, breathing heavier than before, half-sleeping.  Does that count for her as really shitty, or is it just experienced as a change in lifestyle?  Does she want me to wait until she can't take it anymore-- not in any conscious, human way, but in the sense that animals seem to handle their own dying practices and cave into death in their own time?   Is she just wake-dreaming her way through this?  Or can she pretty much take or leave the days from here on out, meaning that I should help her leave?

Now I'm nine minutes into twenty-eight, and she's cleaning her face, eight and a half years into her existence.  "Grooming is a good sign," said the vet.  "She won't groom when she's ready to go."  Ready to go implies something totally different from about to die.

Once when my dad and I were visiting my grandfather toward the end of his life and staring into the depths of a full bag of urine, which he'd defeatedly hung on the outside of his clothes, my dad said, "Andrea, if it ever comes to that, I want you to shoot me."

She doesn't make sounds like a dog or a cat would.

She really, really, really likes lettuce.

I look at her, and I don't know what to do because I have zero understanding if or how she senses there's anything to be done.  Taken a half-hour ago (what the fuck is that eye saying?):

I Still Don't Feel Like Blogging

But I feel like candy corn, and I feel like those squat little pumpkins that taste just like candy corn only denser.

Marthalloween

Earlier this year Martha Stewart's boyfriend went into space, and Martha went to Kazakhstan to send him off (with some duck breast confit.  Seriously).  People magazine ran photos from the trip and among these was one of Martha, standing in front of the launch pad, wearing a fur hat-- the very portrait of mind-blowing charisma, self assurance, and joie de vivre.   And I ripped out the page, promptly made it into my laptop wallpaper, and filed it away in an Ikea faux-leather box for later use.

Initially I thought I was going to carve one of the pumpkin ideas from Martha's magazine, but then on Friday I said to myself, "No.  I'm going to carve Martha."  Hat included.  Which I did.  Right now Martha is having viewers submit their pumpkins to her message board; on the past few shows she's been showing some of her favorites.  I just uploaded my carving to her website, and if she were to make me one of her favorites, I think I would have to change the answer I just gave for "your biggest accomplishment since high school" on my reunion questionnaire.

The pumpkin in the daytime:

The pumpkin at night (turns out I am not very skilled at digital photography in the dark):

The inspiration:

Coming Back

So far three out of the three people who've read my new book say it's the best thing I've ever done, but you need to take into account that those three people are me, my mom, and my closest friend.   The aforementioned friend said that my posture was visibly different after I closed the book down.   And why this book became so overwhelmingly important to me, aside from the fact that I felt an undeniable compulsion to attempt to explain the experience of introversion because the world increasingly seems to be producing not only extroverts (I have no actual data on this, just a sense), but extroverts who have embraced an incorrect and sort of accusatory definition of introversion (after reading the book, my mom said, "But I don't think the narrator's really an introvert?" to which I yelled, "She's a textbook introvert!   Introversion isn't shyness, which is precisely one of the points of the book!" (so maybe I failed in illuminating the definition, if not in portraying the actual experience-- we'll see)), I can't especially say.   But, and I cringe to write this because I so hate the treatment of writing as some kind of precious, fetishized torture, some weird things happened to me during the making of this novel and I guess I went into a little bit of a trance.   In the course of writing the book I developed an eating disorder, which seems to have evaporated the second I mailed off the manuscript to my agents (again, we'll see), and launched a significant sleeping problem, which had me, for awhile, operating on about two hours a night, and brought about a few major meltdowns, the likes of which I'd never seen out of myself before.   In the middle of one at four a.m., I texted my ex-boyfriend, Ryan, "Are you up?" because he lives in New York and keeps strange hours and so I thought that I might not be inconveniencing him.   And the next morning he told me that he thought I'd mistakenly tried to booty call him and had meant to reach the name under his in my contacts, when really I had been calling to tell him that I was under the impression I might not make it to five.   In the course of the writing of this book I listened to the family that lived in the bottom portion of this house (we're separated by a locked door) wish death upon each other (I have the grandmother on tape telling the toddler that she wishes he didn't exist-- the novel class I was teaching didn't believe me that the family was exactly as I'd been describing them, so I brought the recording in as proof) from about seven in the morning until nine at night.   Their wailing and moaning got out of hand.   It was incessant.   I took to knocking on the door and yelling, "Enough!" and the family, instead of yelling back at me, which I think is the normal thing to do (a "Sorry!" or a "Fuck you!"-- either one), would drop to whispers and withdraw from the door, pretending as if they weren't there.   It seemed almost uncanny when, upon finishing the book, someone new moved into the bottom part of the house and was so quiet that I didn't even know he was there until I heard a fork clink on a plate at dinnertime.   Yesterday evening he had a few friends over and they sat out at our pool, which is under the window behind my couch, put their feet up on the gate, and threw back some cold ones.   I was upstairs and listened to them chuckle, low and deep, and thought how weird it was that they were there-- like sudden manifestations of my insides, unwinding.   And then just as I finished the book the season started to turn, even though fall was already supposed to be here if you were going by the calendar.   But it wasn't really, and after I put the manuscript in the mail...in came the chill, in came the oranges, in came the feeling-- not imagined-- that the light, air, and trees were undergoing a shift.   While reading the book there were parts I didn't remember writing, and resurfacing now suddenly I'm about to turn twenty-eight (huh?) and my ten year high school reunion is less than a month away.   It's been like Andrea Van Winkle.   So after all this, how am I marking everything that's happened?   By going to buy a pumpkin tomorrow, and I'm going to carve that pumpkin, seriously delight in carving it (maybe using one of Martha Stewart's templates, maybe not), and then I will wash my hair with apple cider shampoo.

Finished