Author: dora random

case history

dora randomLeave a comment

My BFF (the very charitable person) is in love these days. The bad kind. The longing kind before you know whether you’re requited. I told him last night that every day I wake up so happy that I’m not him! Not helpful friend advice. Well. I mean it. Falling in love is one of my least favorite things. Usually I am the one besotted and my BFF is the one who has to listen and be sensible. I love listening and being sensible. I feel terrible for him: he just learned that the object of his affections plays the dulcimer. He overheard him saying: “But now I mostly just play it at Christmas!” What? Christmas dulcimer? I don’t know but I do know that if I were already inclined toward someone, learning that they played the dulcimer would just about kill me.

We’ve been talking about love a lot recently, the two of us, and I’ve been thinking about my romantic life, wondering “was I born crazy or did my life make me this way?” like you do. I remembered my first “romantic” experience: I was in fourth grade and I had a huge crush on a boy who I will call Luke Courville. (It was a lot like that, and I thought it was a very romantic name.) I remember absolutely nothing about why I liked this boy other than his name. I remember what he looked like, but remembering that as an adult doesn’t really help me know whether or not I found him physically attractive, because I’m remembering a 9-year old boy. He looked fine enough, I guess. He had curly brown hair and brown freckles.

I liked him so much that on the day when we had to make construction paper heart-shaped bags to hold our valentines, I snuck into the classroom at recess and tore his up. I don’t know why I did this. I don’t think I knew at the time. That is, I didn’t have any rationale: he hadn’t rejected me. I didn’t want to punish him or prevent him from celebrating Valentine’s Day. I guess I was just overwhelmed with emotion! I had to do something. When we came back to class, Luke discovered that someone had torn up his project, and it was a Big Deal. The teacher gave a menacing speech. I felt like a criminal. I knew I wouldn’t be suspected, because I was good: being good was my entire goal in life and at school I generally achieved it. But I felt hot and guilty and confessed. I remember the teacher was so surprised and I had to make up a story about how Luke had teased me and I wanted to get back at him. I didn’t know what else to say. I certainly didn’t have the words to say that I was overcome with frustrated passion. My teacher was so surprised, I don’t think I was even punished, other than by having to apologize to Luke, which I felt I ought to do anyway. Luke, I’m sure, was just as confused as my teacher was and I was.

This is my first memory of love, I guess. Tearing up a big construction paper heart without any idea why I was doing it. Definitely evidence in favor of the “I was always a crazy one” hypothesis. (Though, I don’t know, maybe that’s not an uncommon way for kids to behave when they have strong adult emotions.) I had a boyfriend in seventh grade and that was completely innocent and uneventful: we passed notes, held hands, and went to a dance together. No one’s property was destroyed. We were just nice suburban kids of approximately the same social standing with skin that was approximately equally bad who both enjoyed not paying attention in class. I think it ended completely organically at the end of the school year when one of us went to camp. So there! Evidence in favor of the “later life made me crazy” hypothesis.  I even remember some mean girls tried to make fun of me for liking this boy, and though I was incredibly shy and afraid of most everyone, I still knew there wasn’t anything shameful about it: I wasn’t reaching for the stars! I had a boyfriend in ninth grade, too, and we went to one dance and we went on one date and I decided he was decidedly creepy (we went to see ‘Pleasantville’ and he claimed that I fell asleep, which I did not, and then he starting chewing on my hair) (we are facebook friends: he is a prosperous and almost staggeringly handsome psychiatrist now! I should’ve tried to work through that creepiness!) and told him that I was not ready for a relationship but we could be friends. Which was true.

I believe these are all of my pre-sexual experiences. Let us therefore mention the fact, for it seems to us worthy of record. I am off to watch football by myself for hours in an empty bar. (Likely).

on the nose.

dora randomLeave a comment

I went to a little Halloween party this weekend. A good friend of mine was dj-ing. I have a lot of affection for this friend: I’ve dated him, had lots of good friendly casual sex with him, made out with him secretly and hotly in bathrooms at funerals, etc. You know. All the good things you do with a good friend. He’s meek practically to the point of Christliness and yet he has the biggest dick I have ever seen. On the Dora list o’ dick, he’s #1, in a comfortable lead, and God was generous to #2. Okay, say no more. I’ve just always thought it was odd that he didn’t have more confidence in life, that’s all.

I should call him something other than “my friend”, I suppose. I’ve actually half-heartedly written a chapter of a novel I am (very!) half-heartedly writing in which I have made him a more glamorous version of himself but given him a comically cumbersome Polish name. I think I’ll call him Meyer Lemon here. For no particular reason. Anyway, Lemon has a history of getting into relationships with rather large women who berate him, giving the casual observer the impression that that’s what he’s into, and yet he denies that he’s into it at all. He claims he just has bad luck. (Claims they weren’t that large or that mean when he met them, etc.)

A strange man. At this particular Halloween party, he and his girlfriend were dressed as Medusa and a man who had been turned to stone.* So creepy and so wonderful. I told my therapist about it and he actually clapped. “Was it intentional?” “Well, uh, I mean, you don’t get assigned Halloween costumes. Somebody had to have made an effort.” My classics student friend was pretty delighted to hear about this too. Well, really, everyone I’ve told. So, in conclusion, if you’re in a horribly dysfunctional relationship, this year tell the world with a creepy couples costume! How else will people outside of your own friends and family understand your deep, deep misery?

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* Without her beside him, Lemon’s costume didn’t actually make that much sense. He looked like a hipster tin man.

an unpopular opinion, but let me be real with you.

dora randomLeave a comment

I love music, but I don’t honestly like going to shows that much. I say that I do and I always say that I “mean to go to more shows” but I do not actually mean to do that because I don’t actually like doing it that much. It somehow makes me embarrassed for other people and for myself to see them communally and reverently enjoying a thing. It’s also a lot of standing and I stand for a living. Like: oh hooray, extra standing. My old bones couldn’t be more delighted. Sort of exactly how I feel about church.

I am taking the night off work tonight to see Of Montreal, though, and I’ve been trying to psych my old flea-bitten bones up for it. I’m sure it will be great. I worry about not being enthusiastic enough. (Again: how I always felt at church.) I like a comfortably aging hipster crowd, though. That’s my milieu.

how to instantly feel really, really bad about yourself.

dora randomLeave a comment

Take your cats (your indoor cats!) to the vet and find out that they have fleas. (Hot tip!)

This is also a way to instantly discover the motivation to vacuum every crevice of your house.

Also a way to instantly feel poor. 19th century style.

Probably also not a bad way to cultivate obsessive-compulsive disorder if you are at all inclined in that direction.

Sorry for a bit of a gap in posting, my dearest and best imaginary reader. And so soon after I started! It really bummed me out to think about Tread-Lightly. So I avoided you. I probably shouldn’t ever write about him. Probably just your classic rumination. Maybe. I don’t know. The other day I was actually going to write something about how (super fun brief backstory) I used to have a Condition that prevented me from having sexual intercourse (a hell of a bummer, if you’re a heterosexual woman) and it wasn’t fixed until I was almost thirty and as a result of this I have a lot less experience with relationships than other people my age and I tend to experience rejection in a more piercing, annulment-of-the-self kind of way than most other people do. It’s so strange to think that it’s still so painful to see someone that you used to love even after you’ve stopped loving them.* I wish I could say that getting fixed four years ago gave me the amazing gift that is being able to fully participate in the mysteries of love and life and to fully live and love! etc.! The miraculous experience of being healed! But falling in adolescent-grade love when you are old just completely sucks and is completely grotesque, really. There’s nothing wonderful or esoteric about it. It taught me nothing but misery and I wouldn’t recommend it. Also the preceding almost-fifteen years of almost total celibacy and being told that I had a mental problem (when in fact I had a trivial, easily-fixable physical condition) gave me a deep bitterness and a deep anger that I will probably never shake. (Though I rarely admit this.)

You would never have been good enough for him: Tread-Lightly’s cats never got fleas. (But he didn’t have cats, Dora.) But if he did—I’m sure they would never have gotten fleas because he would’ve vacuumed every crevice of his house on the regular. Because his good, wholesome, midwestern parents taught him to how to care for himself. (No, you went to his house many times, it was messier than yours. And you know he didn’t take care of himself, whether he knew how to or not: he had a heart attack at 39.) Touché, brain!

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* Tread-Lightly explained to his coworker: “She and I have some familiarity with each other.” Inadvertently poetic, I thought. Because isn’t that all anyone can have with anyone: “some familiarity”? Oh so poetic. Now let’s never speak of him again!

hearty nourishing soups.

dora randomLeave a comment

I work in a small neighborhood bar. I’ve worked there for three years! But I don’t work there as often or at the the same times or with the same people as I used to. Yesterday, a random Wednesday afternoon, I was walking to work, feeling the fall in the afternoon, and it got my nostalgia going. I remembered people. I remembered that glorious summer two years ago when I fucked everyone in South Baltimore (it felt like). I remembered how much fun I used to have flirting with a certain man. We drew it out for months before he finally asked me out. It was delicious. It was a delicious memory because that man doesn’t live in the neighborhood anymore and it’s been a long time since I ran into him. Tra-la. Dora with her happy horny memories.

I open the bar. I put on some Incredible String Band, like you do. (Like you do when you aren’t expecting people to show up for a while.) Customers appear. I tend to them. And then I see that man sitting in front of me. God damn it. Why. Playing it super cool, I say: “Holy shit!” And he replies: “I didn’t think you worked here anymore.”

The last person on earth that I want to see.* Oh reader, I loved him. Loved loved loved loved loved. A weird insane love. I can’t explain it. It was chemical. It was torture. It had been so long since I had felt anything, I was like a starving stray you bring home that can’t learn to regulate its appetite, I was just gorging on my own emotions. We dated for a while, my love was semi-requited, I suppose, but Tread-Lightly couldn’t requite me enough. I don’t really know what he wanted, and I’m not sure that he knew, but probably mostly what he wanted was to bang the bartender and did not expect her to fall madly in love with him. She did not expect it either. Her friends laughed at the man and officially she maintained the position that the man was preposterous. A degree in folklore.** Who once texted that he was swimming in a “mountain stream” and it made him feel like a Viking. Who once said that he wanted to be a blacksmith because then he wouldn’t feel self-conscious about having a big gut. I never did understand that logic. “Uh….well….you don’t have to feel self-conscious now.” I wanted to live in a cabin with him, daily plunging through pure mountain streams, listening to nothing but the purest most austere folk records, ladling out hearty nourishing soups while he wrote his masterpiece about storytelling traditions or whatever the fuck it was. I was gone, man, gone. Here is a good example of the depths to which I sunk: I used to have a hard time getting to sleep at his house for some reason but I didn’t even mind because I was happy to lie awake staring at him. Like a big creepy creep. Terribly conscious of my creepiness, I used to strategically arrange the pillows so he couldn’t see what I was doing if he happened to wake up.

I’m not usually like that. I swear. I have actually never been like that with any other man. Here is a quote from Jackson C. Frank: “It’s very hard to admit to your own failings in a love affair that is ended, and thereby retain perspective, and this work says so, very plainly. Just as we seek to blame anything other than ourselves it turns to a somewhat bitter-sweet ending that is more compromise than truth—’You never wanted me, and now I feel the same…’ A hopeless self-justification with your ‘back against the wall’.” That is what he had to say about his wonderful song You Never Wanted Me. Sing it, Mr. Frank. You know a certain bartender listened to the song about fifty times on repeat last night as she was cleaning up. Singing along while mopping up beer. Mmm. Deliciously sad. I enjoyed it, I admit. You know he felt what he wrote. Jackson C. Frank was the real deal—if you ever need to really bum yourself out for some reason, go have a look at his Wikipedia page. Spoiler alert he “was plagued by a series of personal issues.”

In any case. There I was, yesterday afternoon, with this dude in front of me. Completely unable to play it cool. “How have you been?” “Well. I had a heart attack in January.” “Yeah, you look great!” Not exactly the right thing to say. (He obviously had had to lose a lot of weight because of the heart attack.) Then he texted me as he was leaving and in my reply I had to remind him of the time when I got chlamydia. (By that point, I had just accepted that I had already made and was going to further make an ass of myself.)

For a long time, the most painful thing about this relationship, to me, was what a spectacular ass I made of myself. Worse than the heartbreak was the loss of all dignity! I wrote Tread-Lightly a letter—an honest-to-God, pen-and-ink letter—when we were breaking up in which I wrote, honest to God, the line about how I wanted to make him hearty nourishing soups. Hearty nourishing soups. I think the actual line was something a little more perverted, something like: “I want to make you hearty nourishing soups and then stuff you with sweet things until you groan.” The phrase “hearty nourishing soups” has become kind of my shorthand for making an ass of myself. My BFF, a very charitable person, recently told me: “You sacrificed your dignity to make literary history! You weren’t just being sad, it was a stylistic coup!”

That would be a nice thing to believe. I’ll work on it. Meanwhile, I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t mind making an ass of myself, and that is plenty.

________

* This, now that I think about it, is not actually true. My old academic advisor would be worse. I guess anyone from my grad program at U Chicago. My father would also be pretty frightening. But of all the people who live in my little universe, Tread-Lightly is the person I would least like to see staring me down of an afternoon.

** Like Comic Book Guy!

in which i wonder whether or not i am losing my mind.

dora randomLeave a comment

And in which I conclude (eventually) that I am not.

I am just having a really hard time writing a 10-12 page paper and I haven’t been able to figure out why. “You did this all the time, in college!” I tell myself. “You must’ve. You don’t remember much about it, for some reason, but you know that you wrote papers about all kinds of things: science, linguistics, literature, critical theory…you know you did that! You know you wrote papers in graduate school: big long ones! And they said you were a good writer! And you had to read some of them out loud, in public! That was all pretty hard, presumably! And you did all that. So you can do this.”

I can, I suppose. I just haven’t yet. I have done nothing this week except go to work and work on this paper. I have pages and pages of outlines and notes and half-baked ideas and sentences that end in ALL CAPS CURSING. I quote: “In this study, McClelland and Liebold found that SUCK MY BALLS  WHY CAN’T I DO THIS WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME HAS THIS ALWAYS BEEN WRONG WITH ME I NEVER COULD MAKE OUTLINES WHEN I WAS A KID AND I NEVER UNDERSTOOD HOW TO WRITE A FUCKING HYPOTHESIS STATEMENT EITHER.”

I don’t know what the problem is. If I knew, I could fix it. I chose a topic I was interested in. I’ve given myself ample time and about a thousand pep talks. I have written an outline. I’ve written several! But my thoughts won’t do as they’re told. I can’t organize my thoughts! I seriously have felt like I have some kind of disorder and I’ve wondered if my brain has somehow been destroyed in the intervening years. I’ve wondered if I’m losing my mind. I’ve never lost my mind completely, but I have definitely mislaid it, let’s say, and let’s say at least twice. (Years ago.) I know what that feels like and this isn’t that. Not even close.

Whatever this is, though, it’s pretty unpleasant. Losing your mind can be sort of a relief. This has been a week of needless misery and I don’t know why and I don’t know what to do or how to avoid it in the future.

I need to live with someone. I think living alone just sends me right off the rails. You’re not really supposed to say that, you’re supposed to be able to live by yourself and be a self-actualized adult, complete unto yourself, but I have to admit that’s becoming harder and harder for me as I get older. I don’t feel like myself unless there’s someone around.

Dora, alone or not, you just wrote 450 words without even thinking about it! I believe that you can write a little something for an online psychology course.

I believe that you believe in me, brain, but I counter with this screenshot:

derailed

In which I write a movie review that isn’t even a movie review that no one will care about and no one should care about.

dora randomLeave a comment

In which I am also slightly drunk and very definitely procrastinating writing an undergraduate paper because/in spite of the fact that I am old and have fancy degrees and have done this shit before. It seems an impossible task.

(I am however amused to see the omega on the WordPress toolbar. Apparently it represents ‘Special Characters’!)

My favorite childhood book was recently made into a big Hollywood movie. The House with a Clock in its Walls. I was excited slash horrified to see that this was going to happen. I should say that this book is not really my favorite childhood book: honestly, my favorite John Bellairs book was probably The Curse of the Blue Figurine, and I give all the love to Little Women, Snuggle Piggy and the Magic Blanket, The Picture of Dorian Gray, People, I Had Trouble In Getting to Solla Sollew. Etc.

There have been several excellent film adaptations of Little Women. I would argue that the 1933 Cukor film is one of the best pictures ever made! Just the theme song is enough to make me cry. Katharine Hepburn is so young and so weird and Paul Lukas tells her “You cannot be Shakespeare but you can be Jo March and I assure you that is plenty” in such a tender fatherly yet somehow hott way. And Laurie, as handsome as he is, was and never will be right for her. And we get that.

Little Women is unarguably a classic of American literature. I don’t need to defend or recommend it.

I would argue that The House With a Clock in its Walls is also. I wouldn’t argue that confidently, but I would argue it. I read it many times as a child. I read it many times as an adult. I have made other adults read it: both those I was sleeping with and those I was not. I have never heard anyone say anything less than: “damn, what a great book that was!” I know the prose can stand alone but I have always read and forced it in the old edition with all the Gorey pictures. Spare gothic perfection. It’s scary and it isn’t.

[Here I delete a passage in which I describe how, as a 33-year-old lady, I wouldn’t at all mind having sex with Jonathan Barnavelt. The book version, not the movie version. THE LESS SAID ABOUT THIS THE BETTER]

I also have a very sentimental feeling toward this book, as I do with all Bellairs books, because he and I are both U Chicago PhD dropouts. He dropped out of English, I dropped out of Sanskrit. Both of us at an advanced stage. Maybe I will write my own young adult novel one day. (One day, one day, but today is not that day!*) I certainly didn’t know about this when I was a child but when I re-read his books as an adult it made me cry to know that someone else that I loved so much had experienced anything like the same pain I did.

I know he was a very kind man. I remember reading about that when I had to look him up in the Big Book of Children’s Authors when I had to write a report about my favorite author in fourth grade. I remember that the book told me how he used to write back to everyone who wrote to him and he kept a museum of all the drawings children sent to him and I got very excited and then it told me that oh also he was dead. So I could not write to him and there would be no more books.

I don’t know his particular circumstances, but I can imagine why the University of Chicago might have been too much for such a gentle soul. And/or I think he just got sick of writing about Elizabethan plays. Happens to the best of us.

In any case. Probably no one on earth loves The House With a Clock in its Walls more than I do? And now people will think of the worse than mediocre movie before they think of the perfect book. And I’m angry about that. I don’t expect that movies will or should be “faithful” to the book: otherwise how would we have Blade Runner? But if you’re not going to replace the book aesthetic with an aesthetic that is equally beautiful or content-ful, then why can’t you stick to the original? Why replace Gothic and spare with hideous CGI excess? Why do you need to invent bland predictable Hollywood backstories for characters who don’t need backstories? Why do you relentlessly need to make something worse? Why toilet humor? Why…any of it? What is this in aid of, as Edward Gorey used to say? I expected the worst but it was even worse than I expected.

Though I did love that they kept the line about how Mrs. Zimmermann got her magic degree at the University of Göttingen. I was waiting for that. And…the cemetery design was great. THE TRUMPET SHALL SOUND AND THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED.

I guess people who read comic books as kids have to be angry about movie adaptations all the time but this is a new experience for me.

___________

* This is an inside joke with myself. I will probably explain this eventually.