Jen Larsen's Blog, page 7

Wow, what has it been, four years since the last leap? What have you done for the past four years? What are you going to do with the next four years? And what are you going to do with this extra day we have had handed to us? An extra day inserted into your life, that shouldn’t be spent the way other days are spent, the way you should spend gift money on things that you ordinarily wouldn’t buy, like a parrot or a go-kart or an entire wheel of cheese.

This event, my inspiration, encourages you to “Finish a project, phone a long-lost friend or relative, investigate something you’ve been meaning to investigate, take an alternate route, sign up, commit, cancel, change.” I can do that! There is SO MUCH I haven’t done! There are SO MANY things I can change.

So many, in fact, that I got dizzy and had to go lie down for awhile because I am weak and kittenish and easily distracted and I got hungry. I made a list of all the projects and goals and to-dos and haven’t-dones that have fallen off my list lately, and then I realized that I wasn’t actually going to repaint the entire house or write a comic gothic horror novel or plant an entire corn field in the space of the day.

So for my bonus extra super day, I thought I’d start small. I thought I’d go emblematic. Something that signals my intent to continue the way I’ve started, to begin as the way I intend to go on. I’ve been whining about how I’m dying to try hot yoga for years and years. I lived two blocks from a studio when I lived in San Francisco; when I moved to Utah, I lived next door to one. NEXT DOOR. And somehow I’ve never managed to put some pants on and go sweat and fart and probably pass out from heat stroke and fatigue in the company of strangers.

How could I have waited so long to publicly humiliate myself? There is no way of knowing. But the day’s finally come where I’m going to go for it. Today I’m going to go do hot yoga. And if it is a horrible nightmare from outer space I can pretend it never happened, because today is the day that doesn’t actually exist in the normal scheme of things. And if I die, I will respawn on March 1 because February 29 wasn’t real!

That sounds reasonable to me.

And if I don’t die, or have to spend the rest of the day floating in a bathtub full of cold water and ice, I’m going to take a nap.

My brother and his wife are world travelers. They went to Thailand on their honeymoon, have been to Istanbul and Mexico and South America and all over Europe, and Carrie even spent a month in Africa. The two of them, they love to travel, and they have beautiful photos to show when they come back. When I flip through them it’s almost enough to make me wish that I loved to travel too.

In theory, I love to travel. In theory, I would like to see the world. I want to meet people and do things and have adventures and taste foods and marvel at the beauty and the wonder that there is to experience on this big spinning globe we all travel on together through space etc. etc. But I only want to do it if I can stay home. If there were some way to make a day trip to Morocco I’d do it. If I could spend an afternoon in Paris, I’d spend every afternoon in Paris. If I could drop by Tokyo, it would be my favorite lunch-time destination.

It’s not the traveling—I don’t mind the traveling. It is possible I even like the traveling part. I like airports, because I always feel like they’re an excuse to not think about how much things cost because otherwise you’ll have an aneurism and here is twelve dollars for that packet of peanuts. I like planes. There is something very contained and peaceful about a plane ride. There’s something about a plane ride that makes it very easy to focus—on writing or work or reading, and then you order a couple of tiny bottles of wine and a little snack box and you feel like you’ve just splurged and you have because now you can no longer afford to send your imaginary children to college.

I like to land and then go look at things and Experience Life and eat delicious things and enjoy the strangeness of it all, but then I am done. Then I want to go home. Foreign Place is not home. Foreign Place is too far away from home. Foreign Place is not safe. Foreign Place does not have an adequate supply of Diet Pepsi or a change of shoes or my fluffy pillows.

Foreign Place feels like a mistake I can’t fix—it’s too late now. I am stuck. I think it’s that feeling of having no recourse, of having set off without an easy way back, of having to follow through whether or not you want to. There’s no inexpensive, simple way to say “Sorry! Not really feeling very ‘Marrakesh-y’ today. I’ll try again tomorrow!” You are there and you are staying there unless you can afford to pay a steep Stupid Tax to change your tickets and flee.

I definitely don’t like being told I have no other choice. I panic like a little rabbit, and my little rabbit heart thumps to bursting and then it does.

But I’ll move anywhere. I don’t want to visit London—I want to live in London. I don’t want to sightsee in Tuscany, I want to own a villa. I am not interested in vacationing on the beach in Mexico—I want a little cottage by the ocean, with satellite Internet and a hot tub. In my imagination I have settled all over the world—most of the coastal Americas, much of Canada, the majority of Europe, and select places in Asia because I am a little chicken. I would settle down in Istanbul and make a life in Prague and live in three square feet in Tokyo and own a mountain goat in Peru.

There are spots for me all over the world, and I like to think that someday I’ll claim them, but that is unlikely. It’s also unlikely that I’ll ever become a world traveler like my brother and his wife, not while I’m crazy—a state that is also unlikely to change. I don’t like it when my dreams are unlikely.

Right now, I’m broke. Brokety-broke. Broke-diggity. I mean like, dust in my bank account, holy shit how am I going to pay my half of the mortgage kind of broke.

It’s my own fault—obviously the money fairies didn’t come nibble away at the pile of coins that used to glimmer so charmingly in the middle of one of Wells Fargo’s finest vaults. I had money; I spent money. I neglected to set aside enough of a cushion to get me through the drought I saw coming, but how bad could that drought be? This year it was pretty bad for a whole host of reasons I just backspaced, because my temporary poverty is not very interesting.

What I think is more interesting is the fact that I have let myself fall into this state of benign neglect that I am having really an astonishing amount of difficulty shaking myself out of. It’s a cycle of the type you might call vicious, and it’s starting to feel actually malignant.

I am too poor to leave the house, so I don’t put on real clothes (EVER. Yay, freelancing!), and I don’t fix my hair and I haven’t worn makeup in—well, it’s been a long time. This slides down to the point where I rarely shower, which coincides with the fact that I haven’t looked at myself in the mirror which means that my eyebrows—I can only imagine—are taking up most of the real estate of my forehead and I have a handlebar mustache that does not suit me and my hair has become a bird’s nest in eight different shades (sadly none of them are silver yet) and my fingernails look like they belong to an eight-year-old girl who plays Guerilla Soldiers in her backyard which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that I am a little bit vain about my hands because they are, like Jo’s hair, My One Beauty.

So I feel like a hot mess. Despite the fact that my worth as a human has nothing to do with the state of my eyebrows. There is something about the inability to maintain a personal grooming standard that goes beyond physical attractiveness and strikes right at the heart of my sense of self. And I dislike it.

Unfortunately I am helpless and hopeless at addressing my hot-messitude on my own, because that’s one of the problems I generally throw money at to fix and—well, you know. So I can’t leave the house. And I can’t open up my own home-based escort service to pull in a little extra cash. So I sink lower and lower in my decrepitude but who cares, because my dogs love me even when I look worse than they do after a mud-puddle adventure and E almost never wrinkles his nose or looks away, aghast at what he’s shackled himself to.

I keep swearing that the very first thing I’m going to do when I get a bucket of money is laser my name into the side of the moon. And THEN I am going to spend an ENTIRE DAY at a salon being told I am the most beautiful girl in the world both inside and out, in my soul and over every inch of my skin while they polish me to a high-gloss shine. But since I hate that shit, probably I will just go get my eyebrows fixed and my cuticles weed-wacked and try to pretend this never happened. Come soon, money. Come before someone actually sees me looking like this. I will wait for you in the shower.

My very first tattoo was a lie.

When you lie, you are reshaping the world in the image that burns bright in your head. And the version of yourself that you present is so much better than the Universe’s version. In the Universe’s version, you are not nearly as interesting as you wish you were, and so much more flawed.

When you lie to someone, when you tell someone exactly what they want to hear, you are making the world a better place for them. You are smoothing down a red carpet and ushering them forward into a brighter reality, a happier one in which you are the person they expect you to be. In which you are exactly as cool as they think you are, before they know any better. Before they catch you in a lie.

My body felt like a lie—I was thirty years old, and I was fat. I don’t remember what size I was, I don’t remember how many pounds, but it was somewhere between 200 and 300, which is what I can say about my body for the majority of my adult life—somewhere between 200 and 300 pounds.

But in my head, I wasn’t fat. In my head, I was lovely and bright and sprightly and confident and I could be a happy person. In my body I was trapped by gravity, earth-bound, sure that anyone who saw me believed in all the clichés about fat people—slovenly, lonely, bad-smelling, alone.

And one day, I couldn’t stand it any more. I told everyone I was celebrating being close to finished with graduate school—all I had to do was finish my thesis, write a book and it was done, and I was celebrating turning thirty years old. But really, getting my first tattoo was my attempt at making a deliberate, conscious, permanent change to my body. And more than that, it was an attempt to make my body beautiful. The white flag I waved at the world. If you are forced to look at me, at least now you have something beautiful to look at. Here’s a reason to think I am interesting, beautiful, amazing, lovable. Not a liar.

It was the Valentine’s Day directly after I broke up with my long-term boyfriend, just two months after we had ended it. Actually, he broke up with me. At Christmas. But that summer I had moved all the way to San Francisco to get away from him, so I suppose it was my fault to start with, and—it’s a long story.

Anyway. I was still depressed as hell and wondering what had happened because it was supposed to be my idea and I was all alone and miserable and lonely, walking down Turk street on my way to class. The fountain at the Blood Center had been dyed an unfortunate shade of pink to celebrate the holiday and it was the most terrible thing I had ever seen. I stood at the corner waiting for the light to change, trying not to cry so I didn’t worry the international students standing at corner with me and staring at me and then I had this great idea.

I wasn’t actually alone. I didn’t have a boyfriend—especially not a stupid one—but I had people who loved and adored me. I had amazing friends and an incredible family and I was abundant with, overwhelmed by, smothered in all the love I was lucky to have in my life.

Valentine’s Day didn’t have to be about pressure and romantic love and whining because I didn’t have anyone to buy me flowers and candy like I was some kind of fucking cliché. I loved and I was loved. Love was so much bigger than romance.

I pulled out my phone and I called my grandmother. I said, “I love you, grandma! Happy Valentine’s Day!”

“What?” she said. “Your mother said you don’t have that boyfriend anymore.”

“No, grandma, we broke up,” I said, slowing down as the sidewalk started to get steep.

“I bet you’re sad he broke up with you today,” my grandmother said.

I stopped at the bottom of the stairs leading up to campus. “I don’t care about boyfriends,” I yelled over the sound of the 31 pulling away from the bus stop, about to launch into my Grand Unified Theory of All the Love We Actually Have in Our Lives. The international students, who had all followed me up the sidewalk, also on their way to class, all looked at me with what I imagined was pity.

“You should get another one,” my grandma said, and then she put my mother on the phone.

Eventually I got another one, and I’ve got one right now, and I am very lucky in romantic love. I also still believe in my Grand Unified Theory of All the Love We Actually Have in Our Lives. I am very, very lucky to be loved the way I am. I am lucky in the friends I have and the family I’ve got and the people who let me love them and the people who love me back even when I’m a messed-up pile of junk. You’re very lucky in the people who love you, and the people you get to love too, you know.

Happy Valentine’s Day Eve, you guys, and Happy Valentine’s Day tomorrow. I hope it overflows with an abundance of cake and chocolate and cheese and happiness and all kinds of love.

So Stephenie Meyer, she had a dream about a sparkly vampire lying in a field with her, and there was some love and shit, and she wrote it all down. Then, something about her vision, her deeply troubling psychological issues that she left heaving and bloody all over the page, it struck people with the kind of magic that we haven’t seen since, say, Harry Potter.

But you knew that. We all know that! I bet most of us have read the series. Most of the time when I think of the series, I think of how unbelievably hilariously maddening it is, because it is. Troublingly so in light of the psychologies of all the vulnerable people who don’t realize it is hilariously maddening. But that is not important right now! Or my point.

What I think about only sometimes, but what makes me kind of love Stephenie Meyer (outside of her worrisomely loose grasp on how the world and relationships actually work), is the fact that she dreamed the idea for the book. No: the fact that she dreamed the book, and then she went–maybe she still goes!–around telling every body about how she saw a field and some twinkling and it really was the most magical thing ever and don’t you understand true love? She woke up from that dream knowing that vampires were actually dangerously unchecked superior beings who for some reason will never overwhelm the helpless human beings who are actually entirely defenseless against them, seeing as all traditional weaknesses of the vampire have been carelessly discarded by Ms. Meyer in her Eternal Love Story.

I’m sorry, I wrote that last bit in a rage-fugue. What was my point. Right. She dreamed it! It is kind of dopey to dream about twinkly vampires, but look at how she made the dream come true. So I am going to tell you a secret about the dream I have, and about how I want it to come true.

I mean, it’s not literally an asleep-dream. It was a daydream. And I was driving along in my car, listening to Utah’s Top Hits. And at the time, Taylor Swift had a Top Hit, and that was “You Belong with Me.” And it’s all about how the narrator loves a boy very much–they’ve been best friends for ages. But he’s been dating some OTHER girl, some girl who isn’t right for him. Who is right for him? WHY LET ME TELL YOU. (Hint: It’s her.)

First I was thinking about how I like the fact that Taylor Swift writes these stories in her songs–she’s an accomplished songwriter, she really is, and I admire the hell out of her. But then I started thinking about how much that little story enraged me. No, then I started singing along. But THEN, then it struck me that you’re supposed to be on the narrator’s side, obviously, but how terrible the whole situation actually was.

This girl is just mooning around, wishfully wishing that this boy would suddenly wake up and go, “oh! check it out! you’re awesome!” and bitching about how this other girl he’s in love with, she’s one of those lame girly-girls with the short skirts and the cheerleading as if that is shortcut for “she sucks.” You wear sneakers, so that makes you morally superior? You laugh at his jokes, and you think you understand him with no visible evidence whatsoever, so he should just figure out that you guys are Soul Mates? HOW DO YOU KNOW HE DOESN’T TALK TO HER ABOUT HIS DREAMS? Are you spying on him? Shut up, you little brat. Either go tell him you like him, or quit whining about the fact that he likes someone else for alllll the wroooooong reeeeeasons and deal with it.

Pant, pant, pant.

And then I thought, oh my god, I have the GREATEST IDEA FOR A YOUNG ADULT NOVEL.

It’s about a vampire that twinkles! His breath smells like roses and candy bars! Also, he’s a manipulative abusive dickweed!

That idea–the book based on the song, not my rage-fugue pretend idea–was, uh, two years ago maybe? I guess. I tabled it until I finished writing the memoir I was writing. I started noodling on it for awhile, unsure of where I was going. And then I made Writing Deals (I WANT TO SEE X PAGES BY Y DAY) with amazing people, and suddenly, we’ve all got manuscripts. While I’m typing this, mine is about 80,000 words, and so, so close to being a final first draft I CAN TASTE IT. I can actually lean over and lick the screen anyway.

It has been such a relief and pleasure to write something that isn’t a book entirely about me. It’s about magic! And danger! And making difficult choices! And friendship and secrets and bravery! The actual germ of the idea, it’s still in there, but it’s much less important than I thought it was. But I like to dream that someday I will thank Taylor Swift in the Acknowledgements, because she really is a pretty awesome songwriter.

My dream is further refined: that I actually get an Acknowledgments page, by which I mean that after I throw the book in a drawer and ignore it and then take a whack at revising it and then send it to smart people who will tell me what’s wrong with it and then try to revise it again, that I will send the manuscript to my agent and she’ll love it and she’ll sell it to an editor who loves it and who will say IT’S GOING TO BE BIGGER THAN TWILIGHT and then I will be FAMOUS and RICH and OWN A FLYING PONY and then give ALL THE POOR CHILDREN IN THE WORLD THEIR OWN FLYING PONIES AND BOTTOMLESS GIFT CARDS TO AMAZON.

That is my dream. Suck it, Stephenie Meyer.

Every day I look at the class schedule at my gym—my gym, I say, as if I have some kind of claim on it, having been there so often and really marking it with my sweat glands—and I fantasize about what it would be like to go to a class. A class! Me in comfortable clothes, my sneakers unearthed from the back of my closet, filled with endorphins and joy and joyful endorphins and FITNESS.

Tomorrow, I say. Tomorrow I’ll just—I’ll go to a class! It will be so good for me! It will be good for me emotionally, and spiritually, and for my heart and for all my powerful muscles and all my strong bones. I’ll go to one of those lifting classes, where you lift things up and then you put them back down, all in unison with the rest of the class, who are lifting things up and also putting them back down, and no one will notice what amount of weight you are lifting and putting down! Because we’re all in it together, you, and me, and our classmates and our teacher and the techno music that thumps as loud as our hearts in our chests!

Or I could go to yoga, where the Official Gold’s Gym Yogi can fix all my back problems and my front problems and my middle problems and also put me in a soothing state of being soothed, where my body is relaxed and wrung out and my soul is so at peace you’d think someone had injected me right in the earhole with a turkey baster full of liquid morphine.

Or forget the class, because someone’s always looking at your butt in class. I will load up my phone with many delightful audiobooks and I will while away an hour on the treadmill, lost in a story, my mind exercised at the same my butt is.

But if I’m going to walk/jog/run/lurch/limp/stagger, speaking of butts, I should just take the dog, and we should walk briskly through the crisp mountain air, strengthening our bond and our love for each other even as we strengthen our cardiovascular systems and our senses of self-worth!

Except it’s cold out. So I’ll just go to the 4:30 Body Pump thingum. Or is there a yoga class? I could get on the treadmill any time I want. But I should just take Crommy out—it would be rude and selfish to not take Crommy, to kill two birds with one stone! But it’s so cold, and it’s icy too. The gym makes the most sense. But I hate what time the class. When’s yoga again?

And thus, my fitness routine. Mix it up however you like! But please remember to make sure you consult with your doctor before attempting any physical activity.

Okay. So first, you taper the dose of Effexor you’re taking. You do this slowly, because there are physical side effects that occur, among them the “brain zap,” as it’s called. Jennette has a very good explanation of why that is here.

You begin to experience the withdrawal effects, but you’re also experiencing a lessening of the actual benefits of being on an antidepressant. You’re remembering why you went on antidepressants in the first place. You’re remembering that the world is a difficult place, and you are the WORST.

But! Once you’re on a low-enough dose of effexor to not cause Dangerous Side Effects like Trypo-trippin’ or Sera-WHOA-nin Zoomies or whatever the fuck it is you’re supposed to be afraid of (I wrote it down; I simply cannot remember any more. Is it too much effort to remember or does my brain now have tiny pinholes where smart things used to be? I am going to forget I wondered about that), you add in the antidepressant you’re switching over to. It is, in my case, Celexa.

So you’re going off one, but you’re going right on another! That’s super-great! You’ll be fine! But before you get there to that promised land, you reach a sweet spot where you’re totally off the Effexor but you still have not begun to experience the helpful antidepressant effects of your new drug.

I call this The Killing Time. At least now I do, and I think I’m allowed to. This is the time when you may have once thought you had it all together but honey, you are about to get torn apart. This is the time of wanting to kill everyone around you and since you’re not feeling very logical you’re thinking about starting with yourself. This is the time where everything goes to hell, including your basic handle on hygiene and your ability to not cry a lot at the drop of the hat or avoid cliches.

This is when I cry while I’m proofreading. Just steady, quiet crying and steady, salty proofreading. Work has to get done. Cry and proof, honey, cry and proof. This is when I try to hang up some new curtains and I scream when I drill the hole wrong and throw the drill on the floor and lose my shit because my life is over and I am worthless. This is when I need to be encased in carbonite and left alone until my brain chemistry straightens the fuck out, because no one needs to deal with this—the cat, the dogs, E, me. Nobody needs to see this. It is unnecessary! I am writing a strongly worded letter.

It’s chemical, pure, awful, 100 percent chemical misery. That doesn’t help a lot. I have so much good stuff going on in my life. I have so much to be happy and grateful and thrilled about.

I WANT TO BE HAPPY AND GRATEFUL AND THRILLED, DO YOU HEAR ME, BRAIN?

And that is this week’s Effexoreport. Stay tuned for next week, when someone with my blog admin password logs in to shut the place down and post the explanatory police report.